| A view
of the period in which our institutions began
immediately involves a consideration of when and how
and where the land was "taken up," which was the
term of the time that distinguished private tracts
from the public domain. Since in the beginning
the forest covered all, it will be easier to mention
and understand where it was broken. Only those
who attempt to revive the past can realize how
completely the ordinary concern of a life is
submerged by a hundred years. Except it be
written on a trasured leaf or carved on a
mossy stone there is naught to tell a name of those
upon whose knees our infant sires were tossed.
Enough, however, has been gathered from here and
there to mark some lines between what was and what
was not, so that a mind alert for historic hint may
find some unexpected satisfaction.
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While
insisting that the Indian claims to our part of Ohio
depended upon might and not upon right, it is only
fair to add that there is no authentic instance of
any claims whatever upon any land in Brown or
Clermont counties not founded upon the ordinances
and acts of Congress. This condition limits
attention to the occupation of the surveys on which
no settlement was maintained before the Treaty of
Greenville, Aug. 3, 1795, a date to be repeated
until accepted as the base for all peaceful
settlement north of the Ohio. Outside of the
fourteen or fifteen block houses or stations around
Fort Washington and forming a defensive cordon for
the Cincinnati group the first settlement to the
north was under the protection of Fort Hamilton,
where ten families came in 1794. The first on
record to test the value of Wayne’s Treaty was
William Bedle, who, on Sept. 21, 1795,
left Cincinnati with his fortunes in a wagon and
went by one of the old army trails to a point about
five miles west of Lebanon, where, lest the Indians
should forget, he built a block house for safety and
began the first clearing in Warren County. In
the same days, a company, in which Governor St.
Clair was a shareholder, started an exploring party
up the Great Miami. On November 4, that same
party located at Dayton, to which three different
companies went from Cincinnati in 1796 and made the
first start in Montgomery County. The first
settlement in Clark County was made at Chribb’s
Station in 1796, and on Apr. 7, 1796, the first
house was raised in Greene county. In
December, 1794, a
correspondence between Massie and Rev.
Robert W. Finley relative to a settlement of
emancipators from Kentucky resulted in the forming
of a party of sixty men at Manchester for an
exploration of the Scioto Valley. On reaching
Paint Creek they encountered the Indians of that
vicinity, who had refused to take part in Wayne’s
Treaty. In the conflict that followed Joshua
Robinson was mortally wounded, but Armstrong,
a captive, escaped to his friends, while two Indians
were killed and several wounded. The
Kentuckians retreated to Brush Creek, where they
were attacked early the next morning. The
party continued to retreat with Allen
Gilfillan wounded, and, on the next day, reached
Manchester and went to their homes. With this
repulse the efforts for settlement
in that direction for 1795 were closed.
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The
people for whom Manning’s Station was a
refuge were:
William and Jane Abrams
Buchanan with four children; John
Wood and wife with five sons and two daughters;
David Wood and wife with seven sons and four
daughters; Jeriah Wood and wife with one son
and two daughters; John, Elisha and
Nathan Manning, whose wives were sisters
of the Wood brothers and who each had
children— in all seven couples, some of whose
children were born in Kentucky and more in Ohio, but
how many of either cannot be learned.
In building their Ohio home Isaac and
Elizabeth Leedom Ferguson had the help of
ten children, Isaiah, Zachariah,
Hugh, Isaac, Francis, James,
Thomas, Elizabeth, Nancy and
Ruth, who were true pioneers that gave a
multitude of descendants to prove the worth of their
name, and to increase respect for the founders of
our local institutions. The family of
Joseph Clark has been, and that of Dragoo
will be, mentioned.
Absalom, a son of Jeremiah and Sarah
Dod Day, married Elizabeth, a
daughter of George Earhart, at
Columbia, which he left at the age of twenty-three
and came to Williamsburg in 1796 to claim one of the
ten lots donated to the first settlers. Their
oldest child, Mary, was born Jan. 28, 1797.
At this writing, that is the first birth yet noted
in Williamsburg and in Old Clermont. Their second
child, Sarah, was born on Dec. 1, 1798, in
the Williamsburg home, but their third child,
Elizabeth, was born Sept. 25, 1800, on the
Day farm by De La Palma in Sterling
township. They also had four sons and four
more daughters whose progeny forms one of the
extensive relationships that interlink the counties
of Brown and Clermont. It is pleasant to note
that Jeremiah Day came to pass old age with
his son, Abraham, and to enjoy a pension
granted for service in the Revolution. About
the same time with the Days, Widow Mac
Kaslin came and gained a home by building a
cabin on in Lot No. 51, which is still a choice part
of the town. A lot each was given to Polly
Kain and Polly Bunton because
they were the first women to come to the town.
The other two gift lots were taken, but by whom is
not known. For on Dec. 15, 1796, the earliest
sale- known in Williamsburg is attested by a well
kept title bond to Ephraim McAdams for
In Lot No. 121, and Out Lot No. 79, for which the
consideration was twenty-eight
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dollars. This means that the town contained not less
than ten houses by the close of 1796, and probably
more, for McAdams would hardly have paid
scarce money when a lot could have been had for the
asking.
The pioneers of the river side remembered that a
Revolutionary soldier named David
Colclazer had a cabin which some said was built
in 1795, and others in 1796, at the mouth of Indian
Creek. From their account, he was a mighty
hunter after the order of many soldiers who took to
trapping. When game grew scarce, he took the
course of Logston, and he was killed fighting
Indians in the Southwest. His cabin was
probably a mere hut to shelter himself and furs.
Associated with him as a fellow soldier was Larry
Byrns, whose service in the War of ’76, was
recognized by a pension granted Sept. 6, 1819.
The children of Byrns intermarried with the
Buchanans and Nevilles.
Edward
Salt, an Englishman by birth, has the credit
for making the first permanent settlement in the
Franklin township of Clermont, to which he came
through Kentucky from Virgina with wife, two
sons, Henry and John, and three
daughters, for whom he built a cabin in 1796, and
started a ferry at the mouth of Bullskin.
Thomas
Fee, Jr., came to the same vicinity in the same
year, but two years later made a permanent home in
Washington township. At short intervals, to
adjacent points, he was followed by the remainder of
the family of Thomas Fee, Sr.,
who, with eight sons and two daughters, became the
founder of this notable Clermont family which has
multiplied exceedingly and spread to many parts of
the Union.
Rodham
Morin came into Ohio Township in 1796 and
settled below New Richmond near Isaac
Ferguson, where he was followed in 1797 by his
father, Edward Morin, another soldier
of the Revolution, whose numerous descendants have
so intermarried with other Revolutionary families
that the posterity of the old families form not a
chapter but a brigade of the Sons and Daughters of
the Revolution. James John,
another patriot soldier, came next below the
Fergusons and made a home at the mouth of Nine
Mile for seven children, now mainly represented in
the southern townships.
Francis McCormick of the Revolutionary
service was the
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first to. improve the Clermont side of Milford.
While his large posterity must mostly be sought
elsewhere, his early home has immeasurable fame, for
in his cabin was organized the first Methodist
Episcopal class and church of all the world that is
north and west of the Ohio. The next to make a
clearing about Milford was George Conrad,
who also raised a cabin to which his wife and four
children came the next spring. Their home was
about one mile northeast of where Major
Riggs was killed as told on a previous page.
In the
summer of 1796 the Paxton people gained a large
accession of what they thought near neighbors, three
or four miles away at what has since been famous as
Camp Dennison, but was once called Germany, because
of the origin of the immigrants, a colony of
Germans, who in some degree had repeated a peculiar
phase of England’s religious experience. For,
as those who protested against the formalism of the
Established Church of England and insisted upon a
personal
consecration to a purer life were stigmatized
Puritans, so also did it come to pass a hundred
years later that a portion of the Lutherans began to
notice and then to regret that a mere adoption of
creed was superseding deep religious feeling and
reverential living, and that dogmatic formulas were
usurping the place that belongs only to the Bible;
and, so thinking, they began to insist on the Bible
as the basis of theology, to profess a change of
heart, and to practice a consequent holiness of life
more consistent with their lofty ideals of true
piety. For this they were nicknamed Pietists,
who became so very unpopular that, like many more of
the best in America, they were driven from Europe
with goads and whips.
After much buffeting, both by sea and land, which
included heroic service in the Revolution, a company
of these Pietists or German Puritans, determined to
test the promised freedom of the Northwest, and,
despite their sour belief, proved they were not
insensible to the charms of beauty by choosing “Big
Bottom,” after “Round Bottom,” the finest prospect
on the most lovely Miami. Here, their leader,
Christian Waldschmidt, came in 1796,
and with him then, or within a year or two, came
Ludwig Freiberger, Jacob Moyer,
Jacob Stroup, Johannes Kugler,
George Harner, Andreas Freis,
Wilhelm Landen, Joseph Bohne,
Jacob Lefeber, Hans Leckie,
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Christian Ogg, Friedrick Bichanboch, Kasper
Spaeth, Samuel Ruelhi, Hans Rodecker, Valentine
Weigans, Hans Maddern, Daniel Prisch, Samuel
Backenheim, Andreas Orth and Johannes Mantag.
In the following year Waldschmidt’s Mill was
built. Though across the Miami and in Hamilton
County, the influence on western Clermont was so
quick and lasting, that it became a large part
thereof. If the curious reader should decipher
and trace those German names, he will find that most
of them have figured largely in the history of
Clermont including present days, and always with
credit. While most other early names are of
British origin, it is pleasant to recall the strong
features, the odd speech and the quaint manners of
even the first sons and daughters of those worthy
exiles for conscience sake, whose descendants have
been so thoroughly Americanized that most of them
will scarcely recognize the antique names of their
ancestors. On the same boat down the Ohio with
Waldschmidt, but not as one of the colony,
came William Fitzwater, who, at a
later date, left a large family in Miami township.
Among the many floating down the Ohio in 1796 and
mostly going to Kentucky as the safer side were the
five brothers, Samuel, James,
Hezekiah, Jeremiah and Nathan
Ellis, from Virginia. Nathan chose
to stop within the present limits of Huntington
township, where he was the first permanent settler,
established a ferry, lived an active, useful life,
and twenty years later laid out part of his land for
the town of Aberdeen. He was preceded in the
township by Ellis Palmer, a hunter,
who after clearing lands for others went farther
east in Adams County. Jeremiah and
Hezekiah Ellis settled on Eagle Creek.
James and Samuel took the boat on to
the fine lands where Higginsport was afterward
founded. On these lands bargained for with
Colonel Higgins, the original owner,
before leaving Virginia, Samuel Ellis
laid the plans for an ample fortune which he lived
to possess into his ninety-third year. His old
age was lightened still more by a pension for
Revolutionary service.
Because of the early occupation of Maysville as the
eastern port to the Kentucky settlements and still
more, perhaps, owing to the proximity of Fort
Kenton, the stronghold of the almost fabulous
Simon Kenton, the Ohio side for miles
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all friendly. I would like to have your
permission to open a tavern here.” In that
season alarming rumors of Indian hostilities caused
many out settlers for the Miamis to turn back toward
the forts.
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