OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: Tidbits of Ohio -- Part 63A ************************************************************************ USGENWEB ARCHIVES(tm) NOTICE Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm All documents placed in the USGenWeb Archives remain the property of the contributors, who retain publication rights in accordance with US Copyright Laws and Regulations. In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, these documents may be used by anyone for their personal research. They may be used by non-commercial entities so long as all notices and submitter information is included. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit. Any other use, including copying files to other sites, requires permission from the contributors PRIOR to uploading to the other sites. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. http://www.usgenwebarchives.org ************************************************************************** File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Darlene E. Kelley http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 August 1, 2005 ************************************************************************** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Historical Collections of Ohio And Then They Went West Know Your Ohio Tid Bits- Part 63A notes by S. Kelly +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Tid Bits - part 63A Delaware County The name of the county originated from the Delaware tribe, some who dwelt within its limits, and had extensive corn fields adjacent to its seat of Justice. The true name of this once powerful tribe is " Wa-be-nugh-ka," that is, " the people from the east or the sun rising." The tradition among themselves is, that they originally, at some remote period, emigrated from the West, crossed the Mississippi, ascending the Ohio, fighting their way, until they reached the Delaware river, near where Philadelphia now stands, in which region of country they became fixed. About this time, they were so numerous that no enumeration could be made of the nation of Delawares. They welcomed to the shores of the new world " the great lawgiver," William Penn, and his peaceful followers, and ever since they have entertained a kind and greatful recollection of them; and to this day, speaking of good men would say, " Wa-she-a, E-le-ne, " such a man is a Quaker, i.e., all good men are Quakers. Delaware County was formed from Franklin County Feb. 10, 1808. It lies north of Columbus. The surface is generally level and the soil clay, except the river bottoms. About one-third of the surface is adapted to meadow and pasture, and the remainder to the plough. The first settlement in the county was made May 1, 1801, on the east bank of the Olentangy, five miles below Delaware, by Nathan Carpenter and Avery Powers, from Chenango county, N.Y. Carpenter brought his family with him and built the first cabin near where the farmhouse now stands. The Power's family came towards Fall, but he had been out the year before to explore the country and select a location. In April, 1802, Thomas Celler, with Joseph McKinney, from Franklin County, Pa., moved in and settled two miles lower down, and in the fall of 1803 Henry Perry, from Wales, commenced a clearing and put up a cabin in Radnor, three fourths of a mile south of Delhi. In the spring of 1804, Aaron, John, and Ebnezer Welch [brothers] and Capt Leonard Monroe, from Chenango, N.Y., settled in Carpenter's neighborhood and the next fall Col. Byxbe and his company, from Berkshire, Mass., settled on Alum Creek, and named their township Berkshire. The settlement at Norton, by William Drake and Nathaniel Wyatt; Lewis settled, in Berlin, and the one at Westfield followed soon after. In 1804,Carpenter built the first mill in the county. It was a saw-mill with a small pair of stones attached, made of boulders, " or nigger heads," as they were commonly called. It could only grind a few bushels a day, but still it was a great advantage to the settlers. When the company was organized, in 1803, the following officers were elected; Avery Powers, John Welsh and Ezekiel Brown, commissioners; Rev. Jacob Drake, treasurer; Dr. Rueben Lamb, recorder, and Azariah Root, surveyor. The officers of the court were Judge Belt, of Chillicothe, president; Josiah M'Kinney, Thomas Brown and Moses Byxbe, associate judges; Ralph Osborn, prosecuting attorney; Solomon Smith, sheriff, and Moses Byxbe, Jr., clerk. The first session was held in a little cabin that stood north of the sulphur spring. The grand jury sat under a cherry-tree, and the petit jury in a cluster of bushes on another part of the lot, with their constables at a considerable distance to keep off intruders. This being a border county during the war, danger was apprehanded from the Indians, and a block house was built in 1812 at Norton, and another, still standing on Alum creek, seven miles east from from Delaware, and the present dwelling of L.H. Cowles, Esq., northeast corner of Main and William streets, was converted into a temporary stockade. During the war this county furnished a company of cavalry, that served several short campaigns as volunteers under Capt. Elias Murray, and several entire companies of infantry were called out from here at different times by Gov. Meigs, but the county was never invaded. Drake's Defeat After Hull's surrender, Capt William Drake formed a company of rangers in the northern part of the county to protect the frontier from maurauding bands of Indians who then had nothing to restrain them, and when Lower Sandusky was threatened with attack, this company, with great alacrity, obeyed the call to march to its defence. They encamped the first night a few miles beyond the outskirts of the settlement. In those days the captain was a great wag, and naturally very fond of sport, and being withal desirious of testing the courage of his men, after they had all got asleep, he slipped into the bushes at some distance, and, discharing his gun, rushed towards camp yelling " Indians ! Indians !" with all his might. The sentinels, supposing the alarm to proceed from one of their number, joined in the cry and ran to quarters; the men spang to their feet in complete confusion, and the courageous attempted to form on the ground designated the night before in case of attack; but the first lieutenant, thinking there was more safety in depending upon his legs than arms, took to his heels and dashed into the woods. Seeing the consernantion and impending disgrace of his company, the captain quickly proclaimed the hoax and ordered a halt, but the frightened Lieutenant's imagination converted every sound into Indian yells and the sanguinary war-whoop, and the louder the captain shouted, the faster he ran, till the sounds sank away in the distance and he supposed the captain and his adherents had succumbed to the tomahawk and the scalping-knife. Supposing he had been asleep a few minutes only, he took the moon for his guide and flew for home, but having had time to gain the western horizon, she led him in the wrong direction, and after breaking down saplings and running through brush some ten miles through the woods, he reached Radnor settlement at just about daybreak, bareheaded with his garments flowing in a thousand streams. The people, roused hurriedly from their slumber and horrified with his report that the whole company was massacred but him alone had escaped, began a general and rapid flight. Each conveyed the tidings to his neighbor, and just after sunrise they came rushing through Delaware, mostly on horse-back, many in wagons and some on foot, presenting all those grotesque appearances that frontier settlers natuarally would, supposing the Indians close in their rear. Many anecdotes are told, amusing now to us who can not realize their feelings, that exihibit the varied hues of courage and trepidation characterizing different persons, and also show that there is no diffence between real and supposed danger, and yet those actuated by the latter seldom receive the sympathy of their fellows. It is claimed that one family, named Perry, drove so fast that they bounced a little boy, two or three years old, out of the wagon, near Delaware, and did not miss him till they had gone approximately six miles on their way to Worthington, and then upon consultation concluded it was to late to recover him amid such imminent danger, and so yielded him up as a painful sacrifice! But the little fellow found protection from others. One woman, in the confusion of hurrying off, forgot her babe till after starting, and ran back to get it, but being particularly absent-minded she caught up a stick of wood from the chimney corner and hastened off, leaving her child sleeping in the cradle! A large portion of the people fled to Worthington and Franklinton, and some kept on to Chillicothe. Meanwhile, in Delaware the men who could be spared from conveying away their families, or who had none, rallied for defence and sent scouts to Norton to reconnoitre, where they found the people quietly engaged in their ordinary avocations, having received a message from the captain; but it was too late to save the other settlements from a precipitate flight. Upon the whole, it was quite an injury to the county, as a large amount of produce was lost from the intrusion of cattle and the want of hands to harvest it; many of the people being slow in returning and some never did. Capt Drake, with his company, marched on to Sandusky to execute the duty assigned him without knowing the effect produced in his rear. He has since been associate judge and filled several other offices in the county, and was still respected by his his neigbors and characterized by hospitality and good humor and his strong penchant for ancedote and fun. As stated before, Delaware was a border town and had considerable trade with the indians. It was common practice at the general stores to set out a bottle on each end of the counter for customers to help themselves gratuitously to enable them to purchase advantageously! Many people suffered hardships and endured privations that now would be insupportable. In the fall of 1803, Henry Perry, after getting up his cabin near Delhi, left his two sons and returned to Philadelphia for the remainder of his family, but finding his wife sick, and afterwards being sick himself could not get back till the next June. These two little boys, Levi and Pepper, only eleven and nine years old, remained there alone about eight months, fifteen miles from any white family, and surrounded by Indians, with no food but the rabbits they could catch in the hollow logs; the remains of one deer that the wolves killed near their cabin, and a little corn meal that they occasionally obtained of Thomas Cellar by following down the " Indian trace." The winter was a severe one, and their cabin was open, having neither daubing, fireplace, nor chimney; they had no gun, and were unaccustomed to forest life, being fresh from Wales, and yet these little fellows not only struggled through but actually made a considerable clearing. Jacob Frost, at an early day, when his wife was sick and could obtain nothing to eat that she relished, procured a bushel of wheat, and throwing it upon his shoulders carried it to Zanesville to get it ground, a distance of seventy-five miles, by the tortuous path he had to traverse, and then shouldering his flour retraced his steps home, fording streams and camping out nights. Col. Moses Byxbe Col Byxbe was for several years the most prominent man in the county, being the owner of some 8,000 acrs of valuable land in Berkshire and Berlin, and in joint owner with Judge Baldwin of about thirty thousand acres more, the sale of which he had the entire control. These were military lands which he sold on credit, at prices varying from two and a half to ten dollars an acre. He possessed complete knowledge of human nature, and was an energetic and prompt business man. Upon the organization of the county he was elected one of the associate judges, and continued to hold the office until 1822. He was afflicted with partial insanity before he died, which occurred in 1827, at the age of 67. Solomon Smith, Esq., was born in New Salem, N.H., and came to Delaware with Col Byxbe in 1804. He was the first sheriff in the county, and was the first justice of the peace in the township, which office he held, by repeated elections, more than twenty years. He was also the first postmaster, and continued many years in that capacity. The responsible offices of county treasurer and county auditor, he held also for many years, and discharged the duties of all these stations with an accuracy seldom excelled, and a fidelity never questioned. In him was exhibited an instance of a constant office-holder and an honest man, and for a long time he possessed more personal popularity than any other man in the county. He died of congestive fever, at Sandusky City, on his return from New York, July 10, 1845, in his 58th year, and his remains were brought to Delaware for interment. The Hon. Ezekiel Brown was born in Orange county, N.Y., in 1760, and moved to Northumberland county, Pa., when about ten years old. In 1776, he volunteered and marched to join Washington's army, which he reached just after the battle of Trenton. He participated in four different engagements, and in 1778 joined a company of rangers called out against the Indians. On May 24th when out scouting with two others, they came across a party of fifteen Indians watching a house, and were themselves discovered at the same moment. The Indians fired and killed one man, and Brown and his comrade instantly returned fire, wounding an Indian, and then fled. The other escaped, but he was not fleet enough, and was captured. They were the Delawares and Cuyagas, and first took him to Chemung, an Indian town on Tioga river, where he had to run the gauntlet, being badly beaten, and received a severe wound on his head from a tomahawk, but he suceeded in reaching the council-house without being knocked down. After a few days they resumed their march to the north, and met Col Butler with a large body of British, torries and Indians on their way to attack Wyoming, and he was compelled to run the guantlet again to gratify the savages. This time he did not get through, being felled by a war club and awfully mangled. He recovered and proceeded on to the main town of the Cayugas, where Scipio, N.Y. now stands, and having again passed the gauntlet ordeal successfully he was adopted by a family, in the place of a son killed at Fort Stanwix. Afterwards he was taken to Canada, and kept to the close of the war in 1783, when he received a passport from the British General, M'Clure, and returned, after five years, to his friends in Pennsylvania. In 1800 he moved to Ohio, and in 1808 he settled near Sunbury, and was immediately elected one of the county commissioners. Afterwards he was elected associate judge, and served in several minor offices, and died, leaving the reputation of a fine and upright man. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ to be continued in part 63 B.