THE country having for its name Ohio was constituted, under General Arthur St. Clair, a territorial government in the year 1788, and he continued as Governor until the adoption of the State Constitution in 1803.
     By this proclamation the county of Fairfield was created Dec. 9th, 1800, and the district of which we now treat was included therein until the month of February, 1808, when it was, by enactment of the Legislature, organized into a separate and distinct county, honored with the name of General Henry Knox, a distinguished officer of the revolutionary army, who was subsequently Secretary of War in Gen. Washington's administration.
     The first white man known to have viewed this section of country was John Stilley who, when a captive among the Indians, traversed the White Woman and Owl Creek from its month in a northwesterly direction, as early as June, 1779, nine years.

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before the name of Ohio had been given to this territory, and when the savages and wild beasts roamed at will throughout its vast extent.
     The first settlers in this district were from Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and its inhabitants, at every period of its history, have been chiefly from the middle States.
     From our research into early statements, we are led to believe that Andrew Craig was the first white man who located within the present county limits.  He was, at a very early day, a sort of Frontier character, fond of rough and tumble life, a stout and rugged man - bold and dare-devil in disposition - who took delight in hunting, wrestling and athletic sports, and was "hail fellow well met" with the Indians then inhabiting the country.  He was from the bleak, broken, mountainous region of Virginia, and as hardy a pine knot as ever that country produced.  He was in this country when Ohio was in its territorial condition, and when this wilderness region was declared to be in the county of Fairfield, the sole denizen in this entire district, whose history is now being written, tabernacled with a woman in a rough log hut close by the little Indian Field, about one-half mile east of where Mount Vernon city now exists, and at the point where Centre Run empties into the Ko-ko-sing.  The Andrew Craig lived when Mount Vernon was laid out in 1805 - there he was upon the organization of Knox county, its oldest inhabitant - and there he continued until 1809.  Such a harumscarum fellow could not rest easy when white men got thick around him, so he left and went to the In-

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dian village - Greentown - and from thence migrated further out upon the frontier, preferring red men for neighbors.
     After many years of solitary residence on the beautiful Ko-ko-sing, the solitude of Craig's retreat is broken by the entrance of a lone Jerseyman, who, in the spring of 1803, penetrates some ten miles further into the wilderness, so as not, by too close proximity, to annoy each other, and there raises a little log cabin and settles down.  This follower of the trade of Vulcan soon gets in readiness to blow and strike, and sets about supplying the sons of the forest with the first axes they had ever seen, and by making for them tomahawks, scalping knives, etc., he acquires the sobriquet of the "axe-maker," which for more than half a century has attached to Nathaniel Mitchel Young.
     A year passes by before any white accession is made to society on Owl Creek.  then a stalwart backwoodsman breaks the silence by the crack of his rifle, and at the spot where James S. Banning now lives, near Clinton, the pioneer, William Douglass, drives his stake.
     The skillful navagator plies his oar, and Robert Thompson ascends Owl Creek to where Mount Vernon now stands, and on the rich bottom land, about one mile west, commences another improvement.  George Dial, of Hampshire county, Virginia, in another pirogue comes up the creek, and, pleased with the beautiful country about where Gambier now flourishes, pitches his tent at the place now occupied by John Troutman.  Old Captain James Walker, from Pennsylvania, settles on the bank of

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the creek where Mount Vernon now is.  John Simpkins wanders from Virginia, with his son Seeley for his capital, and squats about a mile above Douglass, where George Cassel's beautiful farm now exists.  While these plain men from Virginia, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are preparing their cabins for comfortable occupation, and making little clearings, a stray Yankee, solitary and alone, with a speculative eye and money-making disposition, is, with pocket compass, taking his bearings through the forest, soliloquizing about the chance of making a fortune by laying out a town and selling lots to those who may come after him into this charming new country.  Having, as he thought, found the exact spot for his future operations, he blazes a tree, and wends his way to the nearest town - Franklinton - west of the Scioto, then a place of magnificent pretensions, where he gets chain and compass and paper, and returns and lays out the town of Clinton, in section number four, township seven, range four, United States military district, with its large "public green," its north street and south street, its main street, first, second, third and fourth streets, and one hundred and sixty lots, and, taking his town plat in his pocket, he walks to New Lancaster, being the first white person ever known to have made a journey in that direction from this infant settlement, and before Abraham Wright, Justice of the Peace, acknowledges that important instrument, and on the 8th of December, 1804, places it upon record.  Thus Samuel H. Smith, subsequently the first surveyor of Knox county, for many years a resident, its leading business man, and  

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largest land holder, made his entrance into this district.
     Shortly afterwards a large accession was made to the population of the country by the emigration from Ten Mile, Washington county, Pa., of John Mills, Henry Haines, Ebenezer and Abner Brown, and Peter Baxter, who settled a short distance south of Owl Creek, where the Beams, Merrits and Lafevers have since lived.  This settlement, by the increase of the Leonards, was in 1805 and '6 the largest, and best community in the country, and upon the organization of the county, and for several years thereafter, it furnished the leading men.
     Ben. Butler, Peter Coyle, and Thomas Bell Patterson in the spring of 1805, augment the Walker settlement, where Mount Vernon was located shortly thereafter.  William Douglass is joined by James Loveridge, who emigrates from Morris county, New Jersey, and with his wife takes quarters on the 6th day of July upon the clapboards in the garret of his little log cabin, and is mighty glad to get such a shelter as that to spend the year in.  The next year Loveridge starts off, under pretense of hunting a cow, and goes to the land office and enters and pays for the tract of land, where shortly after he erected a dwelling, and has ever since resided.  Upon this land there is an uncommon good spring, which caused him to select it, and he tells with much glee the circumstances under which he obtained it.  The only Yankee then in the country claimed to have located it, and proposed to sell it to him at a higher price than the government rate, which was then $2 per acre.  Concealing his inten-

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tion from all but his wife, Loveridge slipped off and examined into and purchased it himself from the government, and when he returned with his patent, Bill Douglass laughed heartily at the Jersey Blue overreaching the cunning Yankee.  Amoriah Watson, of Wyoming county, Pa., also put up with Douglass, and thus this settlement was made up of Douglass, Smith, Watson and Loveridge, in 1805.  The old axe-maker, in the meantime, is followed up by some of his relations and friends, who start what has ever since been known as the Jersey settlement.  Jacob Young, Abraham Lyon and Simeon Lyon and the first to settle upon the South Fork of Owl Creek, and are succeeded by Eliphalet Lewis, John Lewis, and James Bryant.  The Indians they found very numerous, and through the kind feelings towards the old axe-maker, they were very friendly, and really quite an advantage in ridding the country of wolves, bears, and other varmints.
     In the winter of 1805-6, that settlement entered into a written agreement to give nine bushels of corn for each wolf scalp that might be taken, and three of the men caught forty-one wolves in steel traps and pens!  The description of these pens, and one of the stories told of the operation, we give in the words of an old settler: - "Wolf pens were about six feet long, four wide, and three high, formed like a huge square box, of small logs, and floored with puncheons.  The lid, also of puncheons, was very heavy, and moved by an axle at one end, made of a small, round stick.  The trap was set by a figure 4, with any kind of meat except that of wolf's, the animals being fonder of any other than

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their own.  On gnawing the meat, the lid fell and caught the unamiable native.  To make sport for the dogs, the legs of the wolf were pulled through the crevices between the logs, hamstrung, and then he was let loose, when the dogs soon caught and finished him.  In Delaware county an old man went into a wolf trap to fix the spring, when it sprung upon him, knocking him flat upon his face, and securely caught him as though he were a wolf.  Unable to lift up the lid, and several miles from any house, he lay all one day and night, and would have perished but for a hunter, who passing by beard his groans, and came to his rescue."
     North, west and east of these embryo settlements all was wilderness for many long miles.  A place bearing the name of Newark had been laid out by Gen. W. C. Schenck, but it had not any greater population than these little scattered settlements aforementioned.  The principal towns of note to the early settlers were Lancaster, Chillicothe and Zanesville.  Neither of them were much larger then than our usual X roads villages now are.  The people were exceedingly neighborly, and performed all manner of "kind chores" for each other, in going to mills, laying in goods, dividing what they had with each other, &c.  the nearest mill in 1805, was in Fairfield county.  Our old friend James Loveridge informs us of a trip he made to that mill, which was seven miles up to Loveland & Smith, and was situated in a little crack between some rocks, and he went down into the mill from on top of the roof.  He made the trip there and  

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back, about 125 miles, and brought home with him in his wagon about 900 pounds of flour, one barrel of whisky, and one barrel of salt.  How the settlement must have rejoiced at the arrival of the great staples of frontier life, salt, whisky and flour!

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