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CHAPTER VII
MEIGS TOWNSHIP
p. 445
As will be seen
in the chapter devoted to Reorganization of the
Territorial Townships, Meigs Township was formed at the
December session of the Board of County Commissioners,
in the year 1806, and was named for Return Jonathan
Meigs, the second Governor of Ohio. The
elections were ordered to be held at the house of
Peter Wickerham who then conducted a tavern in the
present brick residence of Jacob Wickerham at
Palestine.
Surface and Soil
Villages and Postoffices.
Schools.
The Mineral Springs.
[Picture of Residence of G. P.
Thomas, M. D., Peebles, Ohio.]
REMINISCENCES.
*In
the vicinity of the Sproull bridge over Ohio Brush Creek
in this township was the pioneer home of Peter
Shoemaker, a brother of Simon Shoemaker, a
pioneer, also, of that vicinity. In the summer of
1796y, a daughter of Peter Shoemaker's was stolen
by a band of Indians and carried away to their village
on the Little Miami in the vicinity of the present town
of Xenia. In after years this daughter, who had
grown up and married an Indian, was discovered by some
whites and returned to her kindred on Brush Creek, where
she afterwards married and reared a family.
U. S. Mail Robbed.
In May, 1827,
in the palmy days of the old stage coach line form
Maysville to Chillicothe, the mail was robbed between
West Union and Sinking Springs. As the bag was
never recovered it was supposed that it had been thrown
into Ohio Brush Creek after being rifled of its
contents. Suspicion pointed to a prominent
resident of Jacksonville as being concerned in the
robbery, and who fled the country, and William McColm,
then postmaster at West Union, offered a reward of fifty
dollars for his apprehension and confinement in any jail
in the United States so that he might be brought to
answer to the charge. The robber was never
apprehended.
Anecdote of an old State Driver
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* There is a version of this
incident that Peter Shoemaker was shot in his
cabin door by the Indians and his wife and two children
made captives. The wife becoming fatigued carrying
her infant boy, she was tomahawked, and the child seized
by the ankles and its brains dashed out against a tree.
The girl was adopted by an Indian family and grew up and
married an Indian by whom she had a girl child.
She was afterwards discovered and returned to her
relatives on Brush Creek.
After investigating all the known facts, the writer
concludes that the captivity of the Shoemaker
children must have occurred before the family came to
the Northwest Territory, for Peter Shoemaker, of
Brush Creek, died in 1899 and left a will in Adams
county. His wife may have been the girl captured
by the Indians; but if so it did not occur in Adams
County, for he settled on Brush Creek in 1796. Or,
it is probably that the version of the incident is true
that his daughter was captured in 1796, on Brush Creek
and that she afterwards returned and married Samuel
Bradford, in 1811. It is at least certain that
the individual in question was not captured on Brush
Creek in 1796, when a girl, then returned to her
relatives and married to Peter Shoemaker by whom
she had a daughter who became the wife of Samuel
Bradford in 1811, and who after his death, married
Col. S. R. Wood. See sketch of
Samuel
G. Bradford in this volume.
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