Belmont County

 

 

            BELMONT COUNTY was established September 7, 1801, by proclamation of Gov. St. Clair, being the ninth county formed in the Northwestern Territory.

 

            The name is derived from two French words signifying a fine mountain.  It is a very hilly, picturesque tract and contains much excellent land.  Area 500 square miles.  In 1885 the acres cultivated were 112,269; pasture, 136,301; woodland, 81,396; lying waste, 8,684; produced in wheat, 83,141 bushels; corn, 1,905,664; tobacco, 1,425,866 pounds; butter 743,059; sheep, 158,121; coal, 573,770 tons.  School census 1886, 18,236; teachers, 275.  It has 113 miles of railroad.

 

 

Township

And Census

1840

1880

Township

And Census

1840

1880

Colerain,

1,389

  1,499

Smith,

1,956

1,977

Flushing,

1,683

  1,705

Somerset,

1,932

2,241

Goshen,

1,882

  2,208

Union,

2,127

1,686

Kirkwood,

2,280

  2,028

Warren,

2,410

4,531

Mead,

1,496

  1,970

Washington,

1,388

1,633

Pease,

2,449

  8,819

Wayne,

1,734

1,719

Pultney,

1,747

10,492

Wheeling,

1,389

1,349

Richland,

3,735

  4,361

York,

   129

1,420

 



 

Population in 1820 was 20,329; in 1840, 30,902; in 1860, 36,398; in 1880, 49,638, of whom 38,233 were Ohio-born.

 

            Belmont county was one of the earliest settled within the State of Ohio, and the scene of several desperate encounters with the Indians.  About 1790, or perhaps two or three years later, a fort called Dillie’s fort was erected on the west side of the Ohio, opposite Grave creek.

 

            About 250 yards below this fort an old man named Tate was shot down by the


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Indians very early in the morning as he was opening his door.  His daughter-in-law and grandson pulled him in and barred the door.  The Indians, endeavoring to force it open, were kept out for some time by the exertions of the boy and woman.  They at length fired through and wounded the boy.  The woman was shot from the outside as she endeavored to escape up chimney, and fell into the fire.  The boy, who had hid behind some barrels, ran and pulled her out, and returned again to his hiding-place.  The Indians now effected an entrance, killed a girl as they came in, and scalped the three they had shot.  They then went out behind that side of the house from the fort.  The boy, who had been wounded in the mouth, embraced the opportunity and escaped to the fort.  The Indians, twelve or thirteen in number, went off unmolested, although the men in the fort had witnessed the transaction and had sufficient force to engage with them.

 

            Captina creek is a considerable stream entering the Ohio, near the southeast angle of Belmont.  On its banks at an early day a sanguinary contest took place known as “the battle of Captina.”  Its incidents have often and variously been given.  We here relate them as they fell from the lips of Martin BAKER, of Monroe, who was at that time a lad of about twelve years of age in Baker’s fort:

 

                The Battle of Captina.—One mile below the mouth of Captina on the Virginia shore, was Baker’s fort, so named from my father.  One morning in May, 1794, four men were sent over according to the custom, to the Ohio side to reconnoitre.  They were Adam MILLER, John DANIELS, Isaac M’COWAN, and John SHOPTAW.  MILLER and DANIELS took up stream, the other two down.  The upper scout were soon attacked by Indians, and MILLER killed; DANIELS ran up Captina about three miles, but being weak from the loss of blood issuing from a wound in his arm was taken prisoner, carried into captivity, and subsequently released at the treaty of Greenville.  The lower scout having discovered signs of the enemy, SHOPTAW swam across the Ohio and escaped, but M’COWAN going up towards the canoe, was shot by Indians in ambush.  Upon this he ran down to the bank and sprang into the water, pursued by the enemy, who overtook and scalped him.  The firing being heard at the fort, they beat up for volunteers.  There were about fifty men in the fort.  There being much reluctance among them to volunteer, my sister exclaimed, “She wouldn’t be a coward.”  This aroused the pride of my brother, John BAKER, who before had determined not to go.  He joined the others, fourteen in number, including Capt. Abram ENOCHS.  They soon crossed the river, and went up Captina in single file, a distance of a mile and a half, following the Indian trail.  The enemy had come back on their trails, and were in ambush on the hill-side awaiting their approach.  When sufficiently near they fired upon our people, but being on an elevated position, their balls passed harmless over them.  The whites then treed.  Some of the Indians came behind, and shot Capt. ENOCHS and Mr. HOFFMAN.  Our people soon retreated, and the Indians pursued but a short distance.  On their retreat my brother was shot in the hip.  Determined to sell his life as dearly as possible, he drew off one side and secreted himself in a hollow with a rock at his back, offering no chance for the enemy to approach but in front.  Shortly after two guns were heard in quick succession; doubtless one of them was fired by my brother, and from the signs afterwards, it was supposed he had killed an Indian.  The next day the men turned and visited the spot.  ENOCHS, HOFFMAN, and John BAKER were found dead and scalped.  Enoch’s bowels were torn out, his eyes and those of HOFFMAN screwed out with a wiping-stick.  The dead were wrapped in white hickory bark, and brought over to the Virginia shore, and buried in their bark coffins.  There were about thirty Indians engaged in this action, and seven skeletons of their slain were found long after secreted in the crevices of rocks.

 

                M’Donald, in his biographical sketch of Governor M’ARTHUR, who was in the action, says that after the death of Capt. ENOCHS, M’ARTHUR, although the youngest man in the company, was unanimously called upon to direct the retreat.  The wounded who were able to walk were placed in front, while M’ARTHUR with his Spartan band covered the retreat.  The moment an Indian showed himself in pursuit he was fired upon, and generally, it is believed, with effect.  The Indians were so severely handled that they gave up the pursuit.  The Indians were commanded by the Shawnee chief, CHARLEY WILKEY.  He told the author (M’Donald) of this narrative that the battle of Captina was the most severe conflict he ever witnessed; that although he had the advantage of the ground and the first fire, he lost the most of his men, half of them having been either killed or wounded.

 

            The celebrated Indian hunter, Lewis Wetzel, was often through this region.  Belmont has been the scene of at least two of the daring adventures of this far-famed borderer, which we here relate.  The scene of the first was on Dunkard


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creek, and that of the second on the site of the National road, two and one-half miles east of St. Clairsville, on the farm of Jno. B. MECHAN, in whose family the place has been in the possession of since 1810:

 

                Fight at Dunkard’s Creek.—While hunting Wetzel fell in with a young hunter who lived on Dunkard’s creek, and was persuaded to accompany him to his home.  On their arrival they found the house in ruins and all the family murdered, except a young woman who had been bred with them, and to whom the young man was ardently attached.  She was taken alive, as was found by examining the trail of the enemy, who were three Indians and a white renegado.  Burning with

 

 

 

John Ferren, Photo, St. Clarisville, 1888.
The Lewis Wetzel Spring.revenge, they followed the trail until opposite the mouth of Captina, where the enemy had crossed.  They swam the stream and discovered the Indians’ camp, around the fires of which lay the enemy in careless repose.  The young woman was apparently unhurt, but was making much moaning and lamentation.  The young man, hardly able to restrain his range, was for firing and rushing instantly upon them.  Wetzel, more cautious, told him to wait until daylight, when there was a better chance of success in killing the whole party.  At dawn the Indians prepared to depart.  The young man selecting the white renegado and Wetzel the Indian, they both fired simultaneously with fatal effect.  The young man rushed forward, knife in hand, to relieve the mistress of his affections, while Wetzel reloaded and pursued the two surviving Indians, who had taken to the woods, until they could ascertain the number of their enemies.  Wetzel, as soon as he was discovered, discharged his rifle at random, in order to draw them from their covert.  The ruse took effect, and, taking to his heels, he loaded as he ran, and suddenly wheeling about, discharged his rifle through the body of his nearest and unsuspecting enemy.  The remaining Indian seeing the fate of his companion, and that his enemy’s rifle was unloaded, rushed forward with all energy, the prospect of prompt revenge being fairly before him.  Wetzel led him on, dodging from tree to tree, until his rifle was again ready, when suddenly turning he fired, and his remaining enemy fell dead at his feet.  After taking their scalps, Wetzel and his friend, with their rescued captive, returned in safety to the settlement.

 

                Fight at the Indian Springs.—A short time after Crawford’s defeat in 1782, Wetzel accompanied Thomas Mills, a soldier in that action to obtain his horse, which he had left near the site of St. Clairsville.  They were met by a party of about forty Indians at the Indian springs, two miles from St. Clairsville, on the road to Wheeling.  Both parties discovered each other at the same moment, when Lewis instantly fired and killed an Indian, while the Indians wounded his companion in the heel, overtook and killed him.  Four Indians pursued Wetzel.  About half a mile beyond, one of the Indians having got in the pursuit with a few steps, Wetzel wheeled and shot him, and then continued the retreat.  In less than a mile farther a second one came so close to him that, as he turned to fire, he caught the muzzle of his gun, when, after a severe struggle, Wetzel brought it to his chest, and, discharging it, his opponent fell dead.  Wetzel still continued on his course, pursued by the two Indians.  All three were pretty well fatigued, and often stopped and treed.  After going something more than a mile Wetzel took advantage of an open ground, over which the Indians were passing, stopped suddenly to shoot the foremost, who thereupon sprang behind a small sapling.  Wetzel fired and wounded him mortally.  The remaining Indian then gave a little yell, exclaiming, “No catch that man; gun always loaded.”  After the peace of 1795 Wetzel pushed for the frontier, on the Mississippi, where he could trap the beaver, hunt the buffalo and deer, and occasionally shoot an Indian, the object of his mortal hatred.  He finally died, as he had lived, a free man of the forest.

 

            ST. CLAIRSVILLE IN 1846.—St. Clairsville, the county-seat, is situated on an elevated and romantic site, in a rich agricultural region, on the line of the National road, 11 miles wet of Wheeling and 116 east of Columbus.  It contains six places for public worship: 2 Friends, 1 Presbyterian, 1 Episcopal, 1 Methodist, and 1 Union; one female seminary, twelve mercantile stores, two or three news-


Page 309                                                                                                                                                                     

                                                                

paper-offices, H. Anderson’s map-engraving and publishing establishment, and, in 1840, had 829 inhabitants.  Cuming’s tour, published in 1810, states that this town “was laid out in the woods by David Newell in 1801.  On the south side of Newell’s plat is an additional part laid out by William Matthews, which was incorporated with Newell’s plat on the 23d of January, 1807, by the name of St. Clairsville.”  By the act of incorporation the following officers were appointed until the first stated meeting of the inhabitants should be held for an election, viz., John PATTERSON, President; Sterling JOHNSON, Recorder; Samuel SULLIVAN, Marshal; Groves Wm. BROWN, John BROWN, and Josiah DILLON, Trustees; William CONGLITON, Collector; James COLWELL, Treasurer, and Robert GRIFFITH, Town Marshal.  The view given was taken from an elevation west of the town, near the National road and Neiswanger’s old tavern, shown on the extreme right.  The building in the distance, on the left, shaded by poplars, is the Friends’ meeting-house; in the centre is shown the spire of the court-house, and on the right the tower of the Presbyterian church.—Old Edition.

 

            ST. CLAIRSVILLE, the county-seat, is on the St. Clairsville road, a short line connecting on the north with the C. L. & W. R. R., and on the south with the B. & O. R. R.  County officers in 1888: Probate Judge, Isaac H. GASTON Clerk

 

 

Drawn by Henry Howe in 1846.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE.

 

of Court, William B. CASH; Sheriff, Oliver E. FOULKE; Prosecuting Attorney, Jesse W. HOLLINGSWORTH; Auditor, Rodney R. BARRETT; Treasurer, George ROBINSON; Recorder, John M. BECKETT; Surveyor, Chalkley DAWSON; Coroner, Andrew M. F. BOYD; Commissioners, William J. BERRY, John C. ISREAL, Morris Cope.  Newspapers: Belmont Chronicle, Republican, W. A. HUNT, editor; St. Clairsville Gazette, Democratic, Isaac M. RILEY, editor.  Bank: First National Bank, David BROWN, president, J. R. MITCHELL, cashier.  Churches: 1 Methodist Episcopal, 1 Presbyterian, and 1 United Presbyterian.  Population in 1880, 1,128.  School census 1886, 407; L. H. Watters, superintendent.

 

            The village has increased but little in the last forty years.  Recently a magnificent court-house has been erected, at an expense of about $200,000.  In the spring of 1887 St. Clairsville was visited by the most severe tornado known in Eastern Ohio, which did much damage.  Although always small in population, the town has long been regarded, from the eminent characters who have dwelt in the place, as an intellectual centre.

 

            St. Clairsville derives its name from the unfortunate but meritorious Arthur St. Clair.  He was born in Scotland, in 1734, and after receiving a classical education in one of the most celebrated universities of his native country, studied


Page 310

           

medicine; but having a taste for military pursuits, he sought and obtained a subaltern’s appointment, and was with Wolfe in the storming of Quebec.

 

                After the peace of 1763 he was assigned the command of Fort Ligonier, in Pennsylvania, and received there a grant of 1,000 acres.  Prior to the Revolutionary war he held several civil offices.  His military skill and experience, intelligence and integrity were such that, when the revolutionary war commenced, he was appointed Colonel of Continentals.  In August, 1776, he was promoted to the rank of Brigadier, and bore an active part in the battles of Trenton and Princeton.

 

                He was subsequently created a Major-General, and ordered to repair to Ticonderoga, where he commanded the garrison and, on the approach of Burgoyne’s army, abandoned it.  Charges of cowardice, incapacity and treachery were brought against him in consequence.  He was tried by a court-martial, who, with all the facts before them, acquitted him, accompanying their report with the declaration, that “Major-General St. Clair is acquitted, with the highest honor, of the charges against him.”  Congress subsequently, with an unanimous voice, confirmed this sentence.  The facts were, that the works were incomplete and incapable of being defended against the whole British army, and although St. Clair might have gained great applause by a brave attempt at defence, yet it would have resulted in the death of many of his men and probably the capture of the remainder; a loss which, it was afterwards believed in camp, and perhaps foreseen by St. Clair, would have prevented the taking of Burgoyne’s army.  In daring to do an unpopular act, for the public good, St. Clair exhibited a high degree of moral courage, and deserves more honor than he who wins a battle.

 

                St. Clair served, with reputation, until the close of the war.  In 1785, while residing on his farm, at Ligonier, he was appointed a delegate to the Continental Congress, and was soon after chosen president of that august body.  After the passage of the ordinance for the government of the Northwestern Territory he was made governor, and continued in the office until within a few weeks of the termination of the territorial form of government, in the winter of 1802-3, when he was removed by President Jefferson.

 

            The remainder of the sketch of Gov. St. Clair we give in extracts from the Notes of Judge Burnet, who was personally acquainted with him.  Beside being clearly and beautifully written, it contains important facts in the legislative history of Ohio.

 

            During the continuance of the first grade of that imperfect government, he enjoyed the respect and confidence of every class of the people.  He was plain and simple in his dress and equipage, open and frank in his manners, and accessible to persons of every rank.  In these respects he exhibited a striking contrast with the secretary, Col. Sargent; and that contrast, in some measure, increased his popularity, which he retained unimpaired till after the commencement of the first session of the legislature.  During that session he manifested a strong desire to enlarge his own powers and restrict those of the assembly; which was the more noticed, as he had opposed the usurpations of the legislative council, composed of himself, or in his absence, the secretary and the Judges of the General Court; and had taken an early opportunity of submitting his views on that subject to the general assembly. . . . .

 

                The effect of the construction he gave, of his own powers, may be seen in the fact that of the thirty bills passed by the two houses during the first session, and sent to him for his approval, he refused to assent to eleven; some of which were supposed to be of much importance, and all of them calculated, more or less, to advance the public interest.  Some of them he rejected because they related to the establishment of new counties; others, because he thought they were unnecessary or inexpedient.  Thus more than a third of the fruits of the labor of that entire session was lost, by the exercise of the arbitrary discretion of one man.

 

                This, and some other occurrences of a similar character which were manifest deviations from his usual course not easily accounted for, multiplied his opponents very rapidly, and rendered it more difficult for his friends to defend and sustain him.  They also created a state of bad feeling between the legislative and executive branches, and eventually terminated in his removal from office, before the expiration of the territorial government.

 

                The governor was unquestionably a man of superior talents, of extensive information and of great uprightness of purpose, as well as suavity of manners.  His general course, though in the main correct, was in some respects injurious to his own popularity; but it was the result of an honest exercise of his judgment.  He not only believed that the power he claimed belonged legitimately to the executive, but was convinced that the manner in which he exercised it was imposed on him as a duty by the ordinance, and was calculated to advance the best interests of the Territory. . . .

 

                Soon after the governor was removed from office he returned to the Ligonier valley, poor and destitute of the means of subsistence, and unfortunately too much disabled by age and infirmity to embark in any kind of active business.  During his administration of the territorial government he was induced to make himself personally liable for the


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purchase of a number of pack-horses and other articles necessary to fit out an expedition against the Indians, to an amount of some two or three thousand dollars, which he was afterwards compelled to pay.  Having no use for the money at the time, he did not present his claim to the government.  After he was removed from office, he looked to that fund as his dependence for future subsistence, and, under a full expectation of receiving it, he repaired to Washington City, and presented his account to the proper officer of the treasury.  To his utter surprise and disappointment it was rejected, on the mortifying ground that, admitting it to have been originally correct, it was barred by the statute; and that the time which had elapsed afforded the highest presumption that it had been settled, although no voucher or memorandum to that effect could be found in the department.  To counteract the alleged presumption of payment, the original vouchers, showing the purchase, the purpose to which the property was applied, and the payment of the money, were exhibited.  It was, however, still insisted that, as the transaction was an old one, and had taken place before the burning of the war office in Philadelphia, the lapse of time furnished satisfactory evidence that the claim must have been settled, and the vouchers destroyed in that conflagration.

 

                The pride of the old veteran was deeply wounded by the ground on which his claim was refused, and he was induced from that consideration, as well as by the pressure of poverty and want, to persevere in his efforts to maintain the justice and equity of his demand, still hoping that presumption would give way to truth.  For the purpose of getting rid of his solicitations Congress passed an act, purporting to be an act for his relief, but which merely removed the technical objection, founded on lapse of time, by authorizing a settlement of his demands, regardless of the limitation.  This step seemed necessary, to preserve their own character; but it left the worn out veteran still at the mercy of the accounting officers of the department, from whom he had nothing to expect but disappointment.  During the same session a bill was introduced into the House of Representatives, granting him an annuity, which was rejected, on the third reading, by a vote of 48 to 50.

 

                After spending the principal part of two sessions in useless efforts, subsisting during the time on the bounty of his friends, he abandoned the pursuit in despair and returned to the Ligonier valley, where he lived several years in the most abject poverty, in the family of a widowed daughter, as destitute as himself.  At length Pennsylvania, his adopted State, from considerations of personal respect and gratitude for past services, as well as from a laudable feeling of State pride, settled on him an annuity of $300, which was soon after raised to $650.  That act of beneficence gave to the gallant old soldier a comfortable subsistence for the little remnant of his days which then remained.  The honor resulting to the State from that step was very much enhanced by the fact that the individual on whom their bounty was bestowed was a foreigner, and was known to be a warm opponent, in politics, to the great majority of the legislature and their constituents.

 

                He lived, however, but a short time to enjoy the bounty.  On the 31st of August, 1818, that venerable officer of the Revolution, after a long, brilliant and useful life, died of an injury occasioned by the running away of his horse, near Greensburgh, in the eighty-fourth year of his age.

 

            CHARLES HAMMOND, long an honored member of the county bar, was born in Maryland, and came to Belmont county in 1801 and was appointed prosecuting attorney for the Northwest Territory.  During the war of 1812 he published the Federalist, at St. Clairsville.  In 1824 he removed to Cincinnati and attained a high position as editor of the Cincinnati Gazette.  He was the author of the political essays signed “Hampden,” published in the National Intelligencer in 1820, upon the Federal Constitution, which were highly complimented by Jefferson.  He died in Cincinnati, in 1840, where he was regarded as the ablest man that had wielded the editorial pen known to the history of Ohio.

 

                “I know of no writer,” writes Mansfield, “who could express an idea so clearly and so briefly.  He wrote the pure old English—the vernacular tongue, unmixed with French or Latin phrases or idioms, and unperverted with any scholastic logic.  His language was like himself—plain, sensible and unaffected.  His force, however, lay not so much in this as in his truth, honesty and courage, those moral qualities which made him distinguished at that day and would distinguish him now.  His opposition to slavery and its influence on the government was firm, consistent and powerful.  Probably no public writer did more than he to form a just and reasonable anti-slavery sentiment.  In fine, as a writer of great ability, and a man of large acquirements and singular integrity, HAMMOND was scarcely equalled by any man of his time.

 

            St. Clairsville is identified with the history of BENJAMIN LUNDY, who has been called the “Father of Abolitionism,” for he first set in motion those moral forces


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which eventually resulted in the overthrow of American slavery.  He was of Quaker parents, and was born on a farm in Hardwick, Sussex county, N. J., January 4, 1789.  When nineteen years old, working as an apprentice to a saddler in Wheeling, his attention was first directed to the horrors of slavery by the constant sight of gangs of slaves driven in chains through the streets on their way to the South, for Wheeling was the great thoroughfare from Virginia for transporting slaves to the cotton plantations.  He entered at this time in his diary: “I heard the wail of the captive; I felt his pang of distress, and the iron entered my soul.”

 

                LUNDY married, settled in St. Clairsville, working at his trade, and soon began his lifework, the abolition of slavery, finally learning in later years the printer’s trade to better effect his purpose.

 

Benjamin LundyHe formed an anti-slavery society here in 1815 when twenty-six years old, called “the Union Humane Society,” which grew from six to near five hundred members, and wrote an appeal to philanthropists throughout the Union to organize similar co-operating societies.  He had written numerous articles for The Philanthropist, a small paper edited at Mt. Pleasant, in Jefferson county, by Charles Osborne, a Friend, and then sold his saddlery stock and business at a ruinous sacrifice to join Osborne and increase the efficiency of his paper.

 

In 1819 he removed to St. Louis where the Missouri question—the admission of Missouri into the Union with or without slavery—was attracting universal attention, and devoted himself to an exposition of the evils of slavery in the newspapers of that State and Illinois.  In 1822 he walked back all the way to Ohio to find that Osborne had sold out his paper, when he started another, a monthly, with six subscribers, which he had printed at Steubenville and called the Genius of Universal Emancipation.  This was soon removed to Jonesboro, East Tennessee, and in 1824 to Baltimore, to which place he walked and held on his way, in the States of South and North Carolina and Virginia, anti-slavery meetings among Quakers and formed abolition societies among them.

 

                In 1828 he visited Boston and by his lectures enlisted Wm. Lloyd Garrison in the abolition cause and engaged him to become his associate editor.  By this time LUNDY had formed by lecturing and correspondence more than one hundred societies for the “gradual though total abolition of slavery.”  In the winter of 1828-29 he was assaulted and nearly killed in Baltimore by Austin Woolfolk, a slave-dealer.  He was driven out of Baltimore and finally established his paper in Philadelphia, where his property was burnt in 1838 by the pro-slavery mob that fired Pennsylvania Hall.  The following winter he died in LaSalle, Illinois, where he was about to re-establish his paper.

 

                In his personal appearance LUNDY gave no indication of the wonderful force of character he possessed.  He was about five feet five inches in stature, very slenderly built, light eyes and light curly hair and hard of hearing.  He was gentle and mild and persuasive with pity, not only for the slave, but he ever treated the slave-holders with the kindliest consideration.

 

                Wm. Lloyd Garrison, his co-laborer, wrote of him:  “Instead of being able to withstand the tide of public opinion it would at first seem doubtful whether he could sustain a temporary conflict with the winds of heaven.  And yet he has explored nineteen of the twenty-four States—from the Green mountains of Vermont to the banks of the Mississippi—multiplied anti-slavery societies in every quarter, put every petition in motion relative to the extinction of slavery in the District of Columbia, everywhere awakened the slumbering sympathies of the people, and begun a work, the completion of which will be the salvation of his country.  His heart is gigantic size.  Every inch of him is alive with power.  He combines the meekness of Howard with the boldness of Luther.

 

                “Within a few months he has travelled about 2,400 miles, of which upwards of 1,600 were performed on foot, during which time he has held nearly fifty public meetings.  Rivers and mountains vanish in his path; midnight finds him wending his solitary way over an unfrequented road; the sun is anticipated in his rising.  Never was moral sublimity of character better illustrated.”


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            This county has the honor of being the first to supply the State with an Ohio-born governor; this was Wilson SHANNON, who was born February 24, 1802, in a cabin at Mount Olivet and the first child born in the township.  He was of Irish descent.

 

                The next January his father, George SHANNON, went out hunting one morning.  Late in the day, while making his way home through the woods, a heavy snow-storm set in; he became bewildered and lost his way; after wandering about in a circle some time that constantly grew less he made unsuccessful efforts to start a fire, and being overpowered by exhaustion he seated himself close to a large sugar tree in the centre of his beaten circle, where he was found in the morning frozen to death.

 

                Wilson was educated at Athens and Transylvania University, and then studied law with Chas. HAMMOND and David Jennings at St. Clairsville, and soon became eminent at the bar.  In 1838 he was elected governor on the Democratic ticket by 5,738 votes over Jos. Vance, the Whig candidate; defeated in 1840 by Mr. Corwin, and in 1843 elected governor the second time.  In 1844 was appointed minister to Mexico.  In 1852 was sent to Congress, where he was one of the four Ohio Democrats who voted for the Kansas and Nebraska bill.  President Pierce later appointed him governor of Kansas, which position he resigned in 1857 and resumed the practice of law.  In 1875, in connection with the Hon. Jeremiah Black, of Pa., he argued the celebrated Osage land case before the Supreme Court and won the case for the settlers.

 

                As a lawyer he was bold, diligent, courteous and ever ready to assist the weak and struggling.  Possessing a noble presence, in his old age he was described as a picture of hardy, hale old gentleman of the olden time.  He died in 1877 and was buried at Lawrence, Kansas, where the last twenty years of his life had been passed.

 

                James M. THOBURN, D. D., elected in 1888 by the Methodists as missionary bishop for India and Malaysia, was born in St. Clairsville, O., March 7, 1836.  He was graduated at Alleghany College at Meadville, Pa., and began preaching in Ohio at the age of twenty-one.  He went to India in 1859 as a missionary, and in conjunction with Bishop TAYLOR did much to build up the church among the native tribes.  He built the largest church in India at Calcutta, and preached for five years at Simyla, the summer capital.  He was editor for a time of the Indian Witness, published at Calcutta, and is the author of “My Missionary Apprenticeship;” “A History of Twenty-five Years’ Experience in India,” and of a volume of “Missionary Sermons.”

 

            BRIDGEPORT lies upon the Ohio river 135 miles easterly from Columbus, on the old National road and exactly opposite Wheeling, W. Va., with which it is connected by a bridge, and on the C. L. & W. and C. & P. Railroads.  It joins the town of Martin’s Ferry; forming with it to the eye but a single city.  Back of it rise very bold hills and the site is highly picturesque.

 

            Bridgeport has 1 Presbyterian, 2 Methodist Episcopal and 1 Colored Baptist church.  First National Bank, W. W. HOLLOWAY, president; J. J. HOLLOWAY, cashier.

 

            Manufactures and Employees.—Standard Iron Co., corrugated iron, 205 hands; Bridgeport Glass Co., fruit jars, 80; Ætna Iron and Steel Co., 610; La Belle Glass Works, cut glass, etc., 335; L. C. Leech, barrels, etc.; Diamond Mills, flour, etc.; R. J. Baggs & Son, doors, sash, etc., 35; Bridgeport Machine Shop.—State Report 1887.

 

            Population in 1840, 329; in 1880, 2,390.  School census 1886, 1,130; T. E. Orr, superintendent.  Bridgeport was laid out in 1806 under the name of Canton by Ebenezer ZANE.

 

            The locality had long been named Kirkwood from Capt. Joseph KIRKWOOD, who in 1789 built a cabin on the south side of Indian Wheeling creek.

 

            Indian Attack on Kirkwood’s Cabin.—In the spring of 1791 the cabin of Captain KIRKWOOD, at this place, was attacked at night by a party of Indians, who, after a severe action, were repulsed.  This Captain KIRKWOOD “was the gallant and unrewarded Captain KIRKWOOD, of the Delaware line, in the war of the revolution, to whom such frequent and honorable allusion is made in Lee’s memoir of the Southern campaigns.  The State of Delaware had but one continental regiment, which, at the defeat at Camden, was reduced to a single company.  It was therefore impossible, under the rules, for KIRKWOOD to be promoted; and he was under the mortification of beholding inferior officers in the regiments of other States, pro-


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moted over him, while he, with all his merit, was compelled to remain a captain, solely in consequence of the small force.  Delaware was enabled to maintain in the service.  He fought with distinguished gallantry through the war, and was in the bloody battles of Camden, Holkirks, Eutaw and Ninety-six.”

 

                Captain KIRKWOOD moved here in 1789, and built his cabin on a knoll.  There was then an unfinished block-house on the highest part of the knoll, near by.  On the night of the attack, fourteen soldiers, under Captain Joseph BIGGS, with Captain KIRKWOOD and family, were in the cabin.  About two hours before daybreak the captain’s little son Joseph had occasion to leave the cabin for a few moments, and requested Captain BIGGS to accompany him.  They were out but a few minutes, and although unknown to them, were surrounded by Indians.  They had returned, and again retired to sleep in the upper loft, when they soon discovered the roof in a blaze, which was the first intimation they had of the presence of an enemy.  Captain KIRKWOOD was instantly awakened, when he and his men commenced pushing off the roof, the Indians at the same time firing upon them, from under cover of the block-house.  Captain BIGGS, on the first alarm, ran down the ladder into the room below to get his rifle, when a ball entered a window and wounded him in the wrist.  Soon the Indians had surrounded the house, and attempted to break in the door with their tomahawks.  Those within braced it with puncheons from the floor.  In the panic of the moment several of the men wished to escape from the cabin, but Captain KIRKWOOD silenced them with the threat of taking the life of the first man who made the attempt, asserting that the Indians would tomahawk them as fast as they left.

 

                The people of Wheeling—one mile distant—hearing the noise of the attack, fired a swivel to encourage the defenders, although fearful of coming to the rescue.  This enraged the Indians the more; they sent forth terrific yells, and brought brush, piled it around the cabin and set it on fire.  Those within in a measure smothered the flames, first with the water and milk in the house, and then the damp earth from the floor of the cabin.  The fight was kept up about two hours, until dawn, when the Indians retreated.  Had they attacked earlier, success would have resulted.  The loss of the Indians, or their number, was unknown—only one was seen.  He was in the act of climbing up the corner of the cabin, when he was discovered, let go his hold and fell.  Seven of those within were wounded, and one, a Mr. WALKER, mortally.  He was a brave man.  As he lay, disabled and helpless, on his back, on the earth, he called out to the Indians in a taunting manner.  He died in a few hours, and was buried the next day, at Wheeling, with military honors.  A party of men, under Gen. Benjamin BIGGS, of West Liberty, went in an unsuccessful pursuit of the Indians.  A niece of Captain KIRKWOOD, during the attack, was on a visit about twenty miles distant, on Buffalo creek.  In the night she dreamed that the cabin was attacked and heard the guns.  So strong an impression did it make, that she arose and rode down with all her speed to Wheeling, where she arrived two hours after sunrise.

 

                After this affair Captain KIRKWOOD moved with his family to Newark, Delaware.  On his route he met with some of St. Clair’s troops, then on their way to Cincinnati.  Exasperated at the Indians for their attack upon his house, he accepted the command of a company of Delaware troops, was with them at the defeat of St. Clair in the November following, "where he fell in a brave attempt to repel the enemy with the bayonet, and thus closed a career as honorable as it was unrewarded."

 

            Elizabeth ZANE, who acted with so much heroism at the siege of Wheeling, in 1782, lived many years since about two miles above Bridgeport, on the Ohio side of the river, near Martinsville.  She was twice married, first to Mr. M’LAUGHLIN, and secondly to Mr. CLARK.  This anecdote of her heroism has been published a thousand times.

 

            Heroism of Elizabeth Zane.—When Lynn, the ranger, gave the alarm that an Indian army was approaching, the fort having been for some time unoccupied by a garrison, and Colonel ZANE’S house having been used for a magazine, those who retired into the fortress had to take with them a supply of ammunition for its defence.  The supply of powder, deemed ample at the time, was now almost exhausted, by reason of the long continuance of the siege, and the repeated endeavors of the savages to take the fort by storm; a few rounds only remained.  In this emergency it became necessary to renew their stock from an abundant store which was deposited in Colonel ZANE’S house.  Accordingly, it was proposed that one of the fleetest men should endeavor to reach the house, obtain a supply of powder, and return with it to the fort.  It was an enterprise full of danger, but many of the heroic spirits shut up in the fort were willing to encounter the hazard.  Among those who volunteered to go on this enterprise was Elizabeth, the sister of Colonel E. ZANE.  She was young, active and athletic, with courage to dare the danger, and fortitude to sustain her through it.  Disdaining to weigh the hazard of her own life against


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that of the others, when told that a man would encounter less danger by reason of his greater fleetness, she replied “and should he fall, his loss will be more severely felt; you have not one man to spare; a woman will not be missed in the defence of the fort.”  Her services were then accepted.  Divesting herself of some of her garments, as tending to impede her progress, she stood prepared for the hazardous adventure; and when the gate was thrown open, bounded forth with the buoyance of hope, and in the confidence of success.  Wrapt in amazement, the Indians beheld her springing forward, and only exclaiming, “a squaw,” “a squaw,” no attempt was made to interrupt her progress; arrived at the door, she proclaimed her errand.  Colonel Silas ZANE fastened a tablecloth around her waist, and emptying into it a keg of power, again she ventured forth.  The Indians were no longer passive.  Ball after ball whizzed by, several of which passed through her clothes; she reached the gate, and entered the fort in safety; and thus was the garrison again saved by female intrepidity.  This heroine had but recently returned from Philadelphia, where she had received her education, and was wholly unused to such scenes as were daily passing on the frontiers.  The distance she had to run was about forty yards.

 

            Among the best sketches of backwoods life is that written by Mr. John S. WILLIAMS, editor of the American Pioneer, and published in October, 1843.  In the spring of 1800 his father’s family removed from Carolina and settled with others on Glenn’s run, about six miles northeast of St. Clairsville.  He was then a lad, as he relates, of seventy-five pounds weight.  From his sketch, “Our Cabin; or Life in the Woods,” we make some extracts.

 

OUR CABIN; OR LIFE IN THE WOODS.

 

                Our Cabin Described.—Emigrants poured in from different parts, cabins were put up in every direction, and women, children and goods tumbled into them.  The tide of emigration flowed like water through a breach in a mill-dam.  Everything was bustle and confusion, and all at work that could work.  In the midst of all this the mumps, and perhaps one or two other diseases, prevailed and gave us a seasoning.  Our cabin had been raised, covered, part of the cracks chinked, and part of the floor laid when we moved in, on Christmas day!  There had not been a stick cut except in building the cabin.  We had intended an inside chimney, for we thought the chimney ought to be in the house.  We had a log put across the whole width of the cabin for a mantel, but when the floor was in we found it so low as not to answer, and removed it.  Here was a great change for my mother and sister, as well as the rest, but particularly my mother.  She was raised in the most delicate manner in and near London, and lived most of her time in affluence, and always comfortable.  She was now in the wilderness, surrounded by wild beasts, in a cabin with about half a floor, no door, no ceiling overhead, not even a tolerable sign for a fireplace, the light of day and the chilling winds of night passing between every two logs in the building, the cabin so high from the ground that a bear, wolf, panther, or any other animal less in size than a cow, could enter without even a squeeze.  Such was our situation on Thursday and Thursday night, December 25, 1800, and which was bettered but by very slow degrees.  We got the rest of the floor laid in a very few days, the chinking of the cracks went on slowly, but the duabing could not proceed till weather more suitable, which happened in a few days; door-ways were sawed out and steps made of the logs, and the back of the chimney was raised up to the mantel, but the funnel of sticks and clay was delayed until spring.

 

                Our family consisted of my mother, a sister, of twenty-two, my brother, near twenty-one and very weakly, and myself, in my eleventh year.  Two years afterwards, Black Jenny followed us in company with my half-brother, Richard, and his family.  She lived two years with us in Ohio, and died in the winter of 1803-4.

 

                In building our cabin it was set to front the north and south, my brother using my father’s pocket compass on the occasion.  We had no idea of living in a house that did not stand square with the earth itself.  This argued our ignorance of the comforts and conveniences of a pioneer life.  The position of the house, end to the hill, necessarily elevated the lower end, and the determination of having both a north and south door added much to the airiness of the domicil, particulary after the green ash puncheons had shrunk so as to have cracks in the floor and doors from one to two inches wide.  At both the doors we had high, unsteady, and sometimes icy steps, made by piling up the logs cut out of the wall.  We had as the reader will see, a window, if it could be called a window, when, perhaps, it was the largest spot in the top, bottom, or sides of the cabin at which the wind could not enter.  It was made by sawing out a log, placing sticks across, and then, by pasting an old newspaper over the hole, and applying some hog’s lard, we had a kind of glazing which shed a most beautiful and mellow light across the cabin when the sun shone on it.  All other light entered at the doors, cracks and chimney.

 

                Our cabin was twenty-four by eighteen.  The west end was occupied by two beds, the centre of each side by a door, and here our symmetry had to stop, for on the opposite side of the window, made of clapboards, sup-


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ported on pins driven into the logs, were our shelves.  Upon these shelves my sister displayed, in ample order, a host of pewter plates, basins, and dishes, and spoons, scoured and bright.  It was none of your new-fangled pewter made of lead, but the best London pewter, which our father himself bought of Townsend, the manufacturer.  These were the plates upon which you could hold your meat so as to cut it without slipping and without dulling your knife.  But, alas! The days of pewter plates and sharp dinner knives have passed away never to return.  To return to our internal arrangements.  A ladder of five rounds occupied the corner near the window.  By this, when we got a floor above, we could ascend.  Our chimney occupied most of the east end; pots and kettles opposite the window under the shelves, a gun on hooks over the north door, four split-bottom chairs, three three-legged stools, and a small eight by ten looking-glass sloped from the wall over a large towel and comb-case.  These, with a clumsy shovel and a pair of tongs, made in Frederick, with one shank straight, as the best manufacture of pinches and blood-blisters, completed our furniture, except a spinning-wheel and such things as were necessary to work with.  It was absolutely necessary to have three-legged stools, as four legs of anything could not all touch the floor at the same time.

 

                The completion of our cabin went on slowly.  The season was inclement, we were weak-handed and weak-pocketed; in fact, laborers were not to be had.  We got our chimney up breast-high as soon as we could, and got our cabin daubed as high as the joists outside.  It never was daubed on the inside, for my sister, who was very nice, could not consent to “live right next to the mud.”  My impression now is, that the window was not constructed till spring, for until the sticks and clay was put on the chimney we could possibly have no need of a window; for the

 

OUR CABIN; OR LIFE IN THE WOODS.

 

flood of light which always poured into the cabin from the fireplace would have extinguished our paper window, and rendered it as useless as the moon at noonday.  We got a floor laid overhead as soon as possible, perhaps in a month; but when it was laid, the reader will readily conceive of its imperviousness to wind or weather, when we mention that it was laid of loose clapboards split from a red oak, the stump of which may be seen beyond the cabin.  That tree grew in the night, and so twisting that each board laid on two diagonally opposite corners, and a cat might have shook every board on our ceiling.

 

                It may be well to inform the unlearned reader that clapboards are such lumber as pioneers split with a frow, and resemble barrel staves before they are shaved, but are split longer, wider and thinner; of such our roof and ceiling were composed.  Puncheons were planks made by splitting logs to about two and a half or three inches in thickness, and hewing them on one or both sides with the broad-axe.  Of such our floor, doors, tables and stools were manufactured.  The eavebearers are those end logs which project over to receive the butting poles, against which the lower tier of clapboards rest in forming the roof.  The trapping is the roof timbers, composing the gable end and the ribs, the ends of which appear in the drawing, being those logs upon which the clapboards lie.  The trap logs are those of unequal length, above the eave bearers, which form the gable ends, and upon which the ribs rest.  The weight poles are those small logs laid on the roof, which weigh down the course of clapboards on which they lie, and against which the next course above is placed.  The knees are pieces of heart timber placed above the butting poles, successively, to prevent the weight poles from rolling off. . . . .

 

                The evening of the first winter did not pass off as pleasantly as evenings afterwards.  We had raised no tobacco to stem and twist, no corn to shell, no turnips to scrape; we had


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no tow to spin into rope-yarn, nor straw to plait for hats, and we had come so late we could get but few walnuts to crack.  We had, however, the Bible, George Fox’s Journal, Barkley’s Apology, and a number of books, all better than much of the fashionable reading of the present day—from which, after reading, the reader finds he has gained nothing, while his understanding has been made the dupe of the writer’s fancy—that while reading he has given himself up to be led in mazes of fictitious imagination, and losing his taste for solid reading, as frothy luxuries destroy the appetite for wholesome food.  To our stock of books were soon after added a borrowed copy of the Pilgrim’s Progress, which we read twice through without stopping.  The first winter our living was truly scanty and hard; but even this winter had its felicities.  We had part of a barrel of flour which we had brought from Fredericktown.  Besides this, we had part of a jar of hog's lard brought from old Carolina; not the tasteless stuff which now goes by that name, but pure leaf lard, taken from hogs raised on pine roots and fattened on sweet potatoes, and into which, while rendering, were immersed the boughs of the fragrant bay tree, that imparted to the lard a rich flavor.  Of that flour, shortened with this lard, my sister every Sunday morning, and at no other time, made short biscuit for breakfast—not these greasy gum-elastic biscuit we mostly meet with now, rolled out with a pin, or cut out with a cutter; or those that are, perhaps, speckled by or puffed up with refined lye called salæratus, but made out, one by one, in her fair hands, placed in neat juxtaposition in a skillet or spider, pricked with a fork to prevent blistering, and baked before an open fire—not half-baked and half-stewed in a cooking-stove. . . . .

 

                The Woods about us.—In the ordering of a good Providence the winter was open, but windy.  While the wind was of great use in driving the smoke and ashes out of our cabin, it shook terribly the timber standing almost over us.  We were sometimes much and needlessly alarmed.  We had never seen a dangerous looking tree near a dwelling, but here we were surrounded by the tall giants of the forest, waving their boughs and uniting their brows over us, as if in defiance of our disturbing their repose, and usurping their long and uncontested pre-emption rights.  The beech on the left often shook his bushy head over us as if in absolute disapprobation of our settling there, threatening to crush us if we did not pack up and start.  The walnut over the spring branch stood high and straight; no one could tell which way it inclined, but all concluded that if it had a preference it was in favor of quartering on our cabin.  We got assistance to cut it down.  The axeman doubted his ability to control its direction, by reason that he must necessarily cut it almost off before it would fall.  He thought by felling the tree in the direction of the reader, along near the chimney, and thus favor the little lean it seemed to have, would be the means of saving the cabin.  He was successful.  Part of the stump still stands.  These, and all other dangerous trees, were got down without other damage than many frights and frequent desertions of the premises by the family while the trees were being cut.  The ash beyond the house crossed the scarf and fell on the cabin, but without damage. . . . . .

 

                Howling Wolves.—The monotony of the time for several of the first years was broken and enlivened by the howl of wild beasts.  The wolves howling around us seemed to mean their inability to drive us from their long and undisputed domain.  The bears, panthers and deer seemingly got miffed at our approach or the partiality of the hunters, and but seldom troubled us.  One bag of meal would make a whole family rejoicingly happy and thankful then, when a loaded East Indiaman will fail to do it now, and is passed off as a common business transaction without ever once thinking of the giver, so independent have we become in the short space of forty years!  Having got out of the wilderness in less time than the children of Israel we seem to be even more forgetful and unthankful than they.  When spring was fully come and our little patch of corn, three acres, put in among the beech roots, which at every step contended with the shovel-plough for the right of soil, and held it too, we enlarged our stock of conveniences.  As soon as bark would run (peel off) we could make ropes and bark boxes.  These we stood in great need of, as such things as bureaus, stands, wardrobes, or even barrels, were not to be had.  The manner of making ropes of linn bark was to cut the bark in strips of convenient length, and water-rot it in the same manner as rotting flax or hemp.  When this was done the inside bark would peel off and split up so fine as to make a pretty considerably rough and good-for-but-little kind of a rope.  Of this, however, we were very glad, and let no shipowner with his grass ropes laugh at us.  We made two kinds of boxes for furniture.  One kind was of hickory bark with the outside shaved off.  This we would take off all around the tree, the size of which would determine the calibre of our box.  Into one end we would place a flat piece of bark or puncheon cut round to fit in the bark, which stood on end the same as when on the tree.  There was little need of hooping, as the strength of the bark would keep that all right enough.  Its shrinkage would make the top unsightly in a parlor now-a-days, but then they were considered quite an addition to the furniture.  A much finer article was made of slippery-elm bark, shaved smooth and with the inside out, bent round and sewed together where the ends of the hoop or main bark lapped over.  The length of the bark was around the box, and inside out.  A bottom was made of a piece of the same bark dried flat, and a lid, like that of a common band-box, made in the same way.  This was the finest furniture in a lady’s dressing-room, and then, as now, with the finest furniture, the lapped or sewed side was turned to the wall and the

 


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prettiest part to the spectator.  They were usually made oval, and while the bark was green were easily ornamented with drawings of birds, trees, etc., agreeably to the taste and skill of the fair manufacturer.  As we belonged to the Society of Friends, it may be faily presumed that our band-boxes were not thus ornamented. . . . . .

 

                Pioneer Food.—We settled on beech land, which took much labor to clear.  We could do no better than clear out the smaller stuff and burn the brush, etc., around the beeches which in spite of the girdling and burning we could do to them, would leaf out the first year, and often a little the second.  The land, however, was very rich, and would bring better corn than might be expected.  We had to tend it principally with the hoe, that is, to chop down the nettles, the water-weed and the touch-me-not.  Grass, careless, lambs-quarter and Spanish needles were reserved to pester the better prepared farmer.  We cleared a small turnip patch, which we got in about the 10th of August.  We sowed in timothy seed, which took well, and next year we had a little hay besides.  The tops and blades of the corn were also carefully saved for our horse, cow and the two sheep.  The turnips were sweet and good, and in the fall we took care to gather walnuts and hickory nuts, which were very abundant.  These, with the turnips which we scraped, supplied the place of fruit.  I have always been partial to scraped turnips, and could not beat any three dandies at scraping them.  Johnny-cake, also, when we had meal to make it of, helped to make up our evening's repast.  The Sunday morning biscuit had all evaporated, but the loss was partially supplied by the nuts and turnips.  Our regular supper was mush and milk, and by the time we had shelled our corn, stemmed tobacco, and plaited straw to make hats, etc., etc., the mush and milk had seemingly decamped from the neighborhood of our ribs.  To relieve this difficulty my brother and I would bake a thin Johnny-cake, part of which we would eat, and leave the rest till the morning.  At daylight we would eat the balance as we walked from the house to work.

 

                The methods of eating mush and milk were various.  Some would sit around the pot, and every one take therefrom for himself.  Some would set a table and each have his tincup of milk, and with a pewter spoon take just as much mush from the dish or the pot, if it was on the table, as he thought would fill his mouth or throat, then lowering it into the milk would take some to wash it down.  This method kept the milk cool, and by frequent repetitions the pioneers would contract a faculty of correctly estimating the proper amount of each.  Others would mix mush and milk together. . . . . .

 

                To get Grinding done was often a great difficulty, by reason of the scarcity of mills, the freezes in winter and droughts in summer.  We had often to manufacture meal (when we had corn) in anyway we could get the corn to pieces.  We soaked and pounded it, we shaved it, we planed it, and at the proper season, grated it.  When one of our neighbors got a hand-mill it was thought quite an acquisition to the neighborhood.  In after years, when in time of freezing or drought, we could get grinding by waiting for our turn no more than one day and a night at a horse-mill we thought ourselves happy.  To save meal we often made pumpkin bread, in which when meal was scarce the pumpkin would so predominate as to render it next to impossible to tell our bread from that article, either by taste, looks, or the amount of nutriment it contained.  Salt was five dollars a bushel, and we used none in our corn bread, which we soon liked as well without it.  Often has sweat ran into my mouth, which tasted as fresh and flat as distilled water.  What meat we had at first was fresh, and but little of that, for had we been hunters we had no time to practice it.

 

                We had no Candles, and cared but little about them except for summer use.  In Carolina we had the real fat light-wood, not merely pine knots, but the fat straight pine.  This, from the brilliancy of our parlor, or winter evenings, might be supposed to put not only candles, lamps, camphine, Greenough’s chemical oil, but even gas itself, to the blush.  In the West we had not this but my business was to ramble the woods every evening for seasoned sticks, or the bark of the shelly hickory, for light.  "“Tis true that our light was not as good as even candles, but we got along without fretting, for we depended more upon the goodness of our eyes than we did upon the brilliancy of the light."

 

TRAVELLING NOTES.

 

                The Poor Man’s Railroad.—The initial letters of the name of the railway terminating at Bellaire are “B Z. & C.”  Ask people on that line “What B. Z. & C. stand for?”  With a quizzical smile they will often answer “badly zigzag and crooked;” having just come over it I can say that exactly describes it.  Its name, however, is Bellaire, Zanesville & Cincinnati.  Its projector and builder of that part within this county was Col. John H. Sullivan, Bellaire; a calm, dignified gentleman, clear and careful in his statements, whom it did me good to meet.

 

                It was impracticable to build an ordinary railroad through the rough wild country of the Ohio river hills of Belmont and Monroe counties, so the colonel planned a narrow gauge with steep grades and sharp curves, and he called it “The Poor Man’s Railroad.”  From Woodsfield, county-seat of Monroe, to Bellaire, a distance of forty-two miles, on which passenger trains go about sixteen miles an hour, it cost but $11,500 per mile, a miracle of cheapness.  This includes land, grading, bridges, tracks, everything exclusive of rolling stock.  It was finished to Woodsfield in 1877, and all by private subscription.  It is of incalculable benefit to the farmers of the Ohio river hills, for the cost of good wagon roads among them is enormous and a


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serious drawback to the development of the country.

 

                A large part of the road is a succession of curves, trestle work and steep grades.  In places the road rises over 130 feet to the mile, and some of the curves have a radius of but 400 feet; at one spot there is a reverse curve on a trestle.  Where curves are so sharp the outer rail is placed three inches the highest to hold the cars on the track; but the friction occasions a horrid screeching of the wheels.  The Colorado Central, like this, is a narrow gauge.  It leads from the Union Pacific to the mining regions of Colorado.  Its extreme grade is more than twice that of this, 275 feet to the mile.  Some gentlemen riding over it on a platform car to see the country said such was the irregularity of the motion that they were obliged to cling “for dear life” to the sides of the car to prevent being jerked off.  From my experience I think the “Badly Zigzag and Crooked” but a trifle less shaky.  I extract from my note book:

 

                Bellaire, Friday evening, May 28.—Left Woodsfield early this morning and got on the train for Bellaire; only a single passenger car with a few men aboard, but no women!  I felt sorry; I always like to see’em about.  Their presence “sort o’” sanctifies things.  Away we went on this little baby railroad, the “Badly Zigzag and Crooked.”  The town I had left behind, placed high up in the hills, was quite primitive; it had scarcely changed since my first visit, in 1846.  In a few minutes we were zigzagging, twisting down a little run in a winding chasm among the hills wooded to their summits, the scenery very wild, every moment the cars changing their direction and shaking us about with their constant jar and grind, and wabbling now to one side and then to the other.  In twenty minutes I was peeping through charming vistas into a wild valley.  In a few more minutes and we were in it; crossed a little bridge some six rods wide and paused at the farther side, but a little cottage in its aspect domestic and un-railroad-like, notwithstanding its sign “Sunfish Station.”

 

                The Pretty Sunfish.—Yes, this little, romantic stream was the Sunfish.  I looked down the valley, a deep chasm, narrow, tortuous, with its wood-clad hills, the lights and shades on the scene all glorious in the early morning light.  What a pretty name—“Sunfish!” instinctively the mind takes in the little creature that dwells in the freedom of the waters and darts around clad in its beauty spots of crimson and gold, down there where everything is so clean and pure.

 

                How I longed to get out of the cars and follow this winding little stream until it was lost in the Ohio, some twenty miles away; to feast my eyes with its hidden beauties, all unknown to the great outside world—beauties of sparkling cascades and laughing waters, and smooth, silent, dark reaches, where frowning cliffs and dense foliage and summer clouds seem as sleeping down below.

 

                They tell me that the Ohio State Fish Commission in 1885 put into the Sunfish half a million of California trout and salmon; the stream naturally abounds in yellow perch.  At Sunfish Station a woman, humbly clad, with children and bundles, came aboard, when out of respect to the sex out spake the conductor; when out went through the window a vile Wheeling stogie—the poor man’s cigar.  It is said that city turns out annually tens of millions, and all this part of the country smoke them—the millions.

 

                Then up out of the chasm our train went, again twisting, wabbling, squeaking, screeching with the same deafening, infernal grind, the engine one moment poking its nose this way and then that, like Bruno or Snow Flake searching for a bone.  We were going up to the birthplace of a mountain rill that was on its way rejoicing to help along the pretty sunfish.

 

                A Future Jay Gould.—After a little my attention was caught by a living object.  On a cleared space of a quarter of an acre, ten rods away in a cleft in the hillside it was, stood a miserable log-hut without a door or a window in sight.  By it was a single living object; a boy in a single garment, about six years old, gazing upon us.  It would have been worth a plum to have known the mental status of that child as he looked out upon our train.

 

                To be interested in motion is a grand human instinct.  A great divine said to me once, “From my study window I get just a glimpse of the top of the smoke-stack of the locomotive on the railroad thirty rods away; but no matter how absorbing my study, I invariably look up at every passing train.”  This was the late Leonard Bacon, the identical person to whose pungent writing Abraham Lincoln ascribed his first insight of the wrong of slavery.

 

                As I looked upon this child I felt an inward respect for his possibilities; felt like taking off my hat to him; a human being, anyway, is a big thing.  He may be the Jay Gould of 1930.  Certainly to be born poor and among the hills, seems to be no barrier to an eventual grasp of the money bags or, what is better than a grasp simply of externals, the highest, purest, noblest development of one’s self.

 

                Beautiful Belmont.—A little later we went in the open, elevated country of beautiful Belmont county.  It seemed as though we were on the roof of the world.  No forests in sight, but huge, round, grassy hills, on which sheep were grazing, and a vast, boundless prospect stretching like a billowy ocean of green all around, with here and there warm, red-hued patches—ploughed fields.  We could see white farm-houses glistening in the morning sun, miles on miles away.  Henry Stanberry, once riding in a stage-coach on the National road through this region, said: “I should have liked to have been born in Belmont county.”  “Why?” inquired a companion.  “Because people born in a country of marked features have marked features themselves.”

 

                The Valley of the Captina was reached from


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the table-lands by a rapid descent, when we stopped a few moments at a mining point—Captina Station Bridge.  It was just long enough for me to sketch from the car windows a row of miners’ cottages, and from

 

 

Drawn by Henry Howe in 1846
Miners;s Cottages.which the inmates go forth every morning to their work, descending a perpendicular hole in the ground seventy-three feet.  To strike the same vein, “The Pittsburg vein,” at Steubenville, in the county north, they descend from 225 to 261 feet, being about the deepest shafts in the State.

 

A mining experience was mine on the 13th day of July, 1843.  On that day I got into a basket suspended over the Midlothian coal mine near Richmond, Va., and descended perpendicularly, by steam, 625 feet.  Then, being put in charge of the overseer, I went down ladders and slopes so that I attained a depth of about 1,000 feet from the surface.  The overseer took me everywhere, exploring, as he said, about four miles.  It was noon when I entered the pit, and when I came out above ground and got out of the basket what was my astonishment to find the twilight of a summer evening pervading the landscape.  I found the owner had never ventured into his own mine, and I learn it is often the same with owners in Ohio.  I am glad I ventured, yet it was not an experience that I care to repeat; but the music of the sweet singers that evening, at the mansion of the gentleman, the owner, whose guest I was, rested me after my toil, and lingers in memory.

 

                From Captina we soon descended into a narrow valley, passing by some small, neat white cottages with long porches, and poultry trotting around in side yards, and then suddenly burst into view the broad valley of the Ohio and, following the river banks, were soon in that hive of industry and glass—Bellaire.

 

            BELLAIRE, 120 miles east of Columbus and 5 miles below Wheeling, on the Ohio river, is on the B. & O., B. Z. & C., and C. & P. Railroads.  It is an important manufacturing town; its manufactories are supplied with natural gas, and it has ten coal mines, water works, paved streets and street railway.

 

            Newspapers:  Herald, Democratic, E. M. LOCKWOOD, editor; Independent, Republican, J. F. ANDERSON, editor; Tribune, Republican, C. L. POORMAN & Co., editors.  Churches: 2 Methodist Episcopal, 1 Colored Methodist Episcopal, 2 Presbyterian, 1 United Presbyterian, 1 Disciples, 1 Episcopal, 1 German Reformed, 1 Church of God and 1 Catholic.  Bank: First National, J. T. MERCER, president, A. P. TALLMAN, cashier.

 

            Manufactures and Employees.—Lantern Globe Co., 95 hands; Crystal Window Glass Co., 61; Bellaire Steel and Nail Works, 650; Union Window Glass Works, 63; DuBois & McCoy, doors, sash, etc., 27; Bellaire Bottle Co., 130; Belmont Glass Works, 240; Bellarie Barrel Works, 16; James Fitton, gas fitting, 13; Ohio Lantern Co., 83; Bellaire Stamping Co., metal specialties, 210; Bellaire Goblet Co., 285; Enterprise Window Glass Co., 59; Bellaire Window Glass Works, 106; Ohio Valley Foundry Co., stoves, etc., 45; Rodefer Bros., lamp globes, 125; Ætna Foundry & Machine Shop, repair shop, etc., 13; Ætna Glass Manufacturing Co., 245.—State Report 1887.  Population in 1880, 8,205; school census in 1886, 3,381; Benj. T. Jones, superintendent.

 

            The river plateau at Bellaire is about a third of a mile wide; upon it are the industries and most of the residences.  The streets are broad and airy.  The ascent of the river hills is easy, with the homes of the working people pleasantly perched thereon.  The Baltimore and Ohio railroad follows the valley of McMahon’s creek, a stream about six rods wide and entering the Ohio in the southern part of the town.  The road crosses the Ohio by an iron bridge and across the town by a stone arcade of forty-three arches, rising and passing over several of the main streets at a height of thirty-five feet; it is a very picturesque feature of the city.  The two, bridge and arcade unitedly, it is said, are about a mile long and cost over a million and a half dollars.


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            The valley of the Ohio, taking both sides for seven miles, is a great manufacturing region and owes its prosperity primarily to the inexhaustible beds of coal in the valley hills, with limestone, building stone and fire-clay.  On the West Virginia side is the city of Wheeling, with its 35,000 people, and suburb of Benwood directly opposite Bellaire.  On the Ohio side is a line of towns for seven miles, beginning with Bellaire and continuing with Bridgeport and Martin’s Ferry, bringing up the total population to 60,000 souls.  So near are they that one may in a certain sense call it a single city with the Ohio dividing it.

 

            In the hills at Bellaire ten large coal mines are worked.  On the Ohio side the dip of the coal is towards the mouth of the mines, thus giving the advantage of a natural drainage.  At Bellaire the vein, “The Pittsburg,” is 125 feet above the river at low stage and is worked from the surface.  The inclination of the vein is twenty-two feet to the mile.  The coal is discharged over screens into railroad cars drawn by mules.  The dumping places are termed “tipples.”  The mines have two tipples each, one at the mouth of the mine and the other at the river bank; so called because the coal cars are there tipped and emptied.

 

            Lombardy poplars are a feature in the river towns of the upper Ohio, for which the soil and climate appear to be well adapted.  Mingled with the rounding forms

 

T. S. Tappin, Photo, Bellaire, 1887

BELLAIRE.

 

The view is looking up the Ohio, showing in from “the coal tipple” on the river bank; on the left

some glass-houses, and in the distance the bridge of the B. & O. Railroad.

 

 

of the other trees and projected against the soft curves of distant hills, or standing on their slopes and summits, they dignify and greatly enhance the charms of a landscape.  Their towering forms affect one with the same sombre emotion as the spires and pinnacles of Gothic architecture.  The tree grows with great rapidity; its entire life only about forty years.  The poplar trees shown in the picture of “The House that Jack Built,” twenty-one in number, were slender saplings about fifteen feet long when set out in 1873, by the veteran miner; now are all of sixty or seventy feet.  The worms at certain seasons commit depredations upon them, when they look as scraggy as poultry divested of feathers.  The selfish reason given for not planting trees, that one may not live to see them grow, does not apply to this tree.  Such is the demand hereabouts for poplars that at Moundsville, on the opposite side of the river, the nursery of Mr. Harris makes a specialty of them.

 

TRAVELLING NOTES.

 

                Decoration Day.—Bellaire has much to interest me.  Saturday, May 29th, dawned in beauty.  It was Decoration Day, and the people turned out in force; the veterans of the Grand Army, the children, boys and girls, in white, with music, wound up in long procession Cemetery hill, overlooking the city, bearing flags and flowers.  Beautiful is young life, and never may there be wanting everywhere memorial days of some sort to feed the fires of patriotism in youthful hearts.

 

                A Talk with a Veteran Riverman.—Capt.


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John FINK in his youthful days arose bright and early.  He was smart, and so he got to Bellaire long before the town; indeed, officiated at its birth.  He was born in Pennsylvania in 1805.  Mike FINK, the last and most famous of the now long extinct race of Ohio and Mississippi river boatmen, was a relative, and he knew Mike—knew him as a boy knows a man.  “When I was a lad,” he told me, “about ten years of age, our family lived four miles above Wheeling, on the river.  Mike laid up his boat near us, though he generally had two boats.  This was his last trip, and he went away to the farther West; the country here was getting too civilized, and he was disgusted.  This was about 1815.

 

                Mike Fink.—In the management of his business Mike was a rigid disciplinarian; woe to the man who shirked.  He always had his woman along with him, and would allow no other man to converse with her.  She was sometimes a subject for his wonderful skill in marksmanship with the rifle.  He would compel her to hold on the top of her head a tin cup filled with whiskey, when he would put a bullet through it.  Another of his feats was to make her hold it between her knees, as in a vice, and then shoot.”

 

                Captain Fink’s Own History is a subject more pleasant for contemplation.  He is a thoroughly manly man, and now, at eighty-one years of age, in the full vigor of intellect.  From ten to twelve years of age he was at work on his uncle’s farm, four miles above Wheeling; from twelve to fifteen on the Wheeling ferry.  Next he was cook on a keel-boat, where he learned to “push.”  He followed “pushing” for three years, first at thirty-seven and a half cents a day and then fifty cents.  In 1824 he married, his entire fortune just seventy-five cents.  A few days after he tried to get a calico dress for his wife on credit but failed.

 

                The Early Coal-Trade on the River.—About the year 1830, then twenty-five years of age, his credit having improved, Mr. FINK bought on time a piece of land on McMahon’s creek, Bellaire, and began mining.  He built a flat-boat, and took a load of coal to Maysville, which netted him $200.  This, he tells me, was the first load of coal ever floated any distance on the Ohio.  After a little he began a coal-trade with New Orleans.  He carted it to the river bank, put it on board of flat-boats, and floated it down to New Orleans, a distance of 2,100 miles.  On a good stage of water they went down in about thirty days; once, on a flood, in nineteen days; half the time did not dare to land.  He sold it to the sugar refineries, and it was very useful, for with wood alone they were unable to keep up the regular heat, so necessary for good sugar.

 

                They discharged a cargo by carrying it up on their shoulders in barrels.  The way was to knock the hoops of a flour-barrel together at the ends to strengthen it, bore two holes through the top, through which a piece of rope was put, and tied as a bale; through this was thrust a pole, when two men carried it on their shoulders up the river bank; sometimes the river was higher than the town, then they descended.

 

                Each barrel held two and three-quarter bushels; weight, 220 pounds.  The sugar people paid him $1.50 a barrel.  During a term of years he sold several hundred thousand bushels.  In 1833 he went into the steamboat business as captain and owner, and, amassing a fortune, in 1864, at the age of fifty-nine, he retired from active business.

 

                The Heatheringtons.—In his early mining operations here Capt. FINK found excellent help in the HEATHERINGTONS, a family of English miners.  They consisted of the father, John, and his four boys, Jacob, John Jr., Ralph, Edward, and a John More.  They worked in a coal-bank, in the hill south of McMahon’s creek.  They would get to work about daybreak, bring their coal to the mouth of the pit on wheelbarrows, empty their barrels over a board screen, and down it would go sliding to a lower level with a tremendous rattling noise, which travelled over the cornfields and resounded among the hills around.  At that time Bellaire was only a farming spot, and the farmers complained that the noise disturbed their morning sleep.  After a while they became reconciled to this “eye-opener,” for it brought money and business to the place, and the miners had to be fed—had bouncing appetites.  The family were also musical; and evenings, after their days of toil, they brought out their musical instruments—fife, drum, clarionet, triangle, etc.—and the old man, John, and his four boys, Jake, John, Jr., Ralph, Ed., and John More gave the valley folks the best they had; so if the eye-openers had been a little hard on them, the night-caps made full compensation.

 

                Jacob Heatherington.—When I entered the lower end of Bellaire, in the cars along the river valley, I was struck by the grand appearance of a mansion under the hill, with a row of poplar trees before it.  This, with the huge glass-houses with their big cupolas, and other industrial establishments of the place, the noble bridge across the Ohio, and the grandeur of the hill and river scenery, made an enduring impression.  The owner of this palatial residence is Jacob, or, as he is commonly called, Jake HEATHERINGTON, one of the sons of the John of whom I have spoken.  He is now an old and highly respected man of seventy-three years of age, and with a large estate, but he cannot read nor write.

 

                The Miner and his Mule Partner.—He was born in England in 1814; at seven years of age was put to work down 2,400 feet deep in a coal-mine, and worked sixteen and eighteen hours a day; never went to school a day in his life.  In 1837, when he was twenty-three years of age, he rented a coal-bank from Capt. FINK, and bought eight acres of land on credit.  This was his foundation, and it was solid, was indeed “the everlasting hills.”  At first he wheeled out his coal on a wheelbarrow; his business grew, and he took in a partner.  The firm became known as


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Jake HEATHERINGTON and his mule Jack.  For years he mined his own coal, and drove his faithful, silent, yet active partner, a little fellow, only about three feet and a half high.

 

T. S. Tappan, Photo., Bellaire, 1887

JACOB HEATHERINGTON.

 

Jack.A strong affection grew up between them—a mule and a man—and so great was it that Jack rebelled when any one else attempted to drive him.  From a few bushels per day the business increased to thousands, and Jake’s coal fed the furnaces of scores of steamers.  His possessions enlarged in various ways; his eight acres increased to over 800, he owned some thirty dwellings, shares in glass-works, and possessed steamboats.

 

                He could never read the names of his own boats as he saw them pass along the beautiful river sixty rods from his door; but he didn’t care, for he knew them by sight, and no more required their names on their sides for his use than he wanted painted on the side of his beloved mule, in staring letters, the word  JACK!

 

                The House that Jack Built.—In 1870 he built his imposing residence, at a cost, it is said of $35,000, and dedicated it to the memory of Jack.  He always says it is “The House that Jack Built.”  His good fortune he ascribes to Jack; but for his faithful services he never could have raised it.  Over the doorway is a noble arch, the keystone of which is the projecting head of a mule, a

 

 

T. S. Tappin, Photo, Bellaire, 1887

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT.


additional photos


 

likeness of Jack.  When the house was built Jack was twenty-eight years old, retired from active business, sleek and fat; he did nothing but now and then cut off a few coupons.

 

                Jake Shows Jack his New House.—Then came the eventful day of his life.  Jake brought him out from his retirement to show him the grand mansion he owed to him.  In the presence of the assembled neighbors, Jake led Jack

 

 up the steps under the splendid archway, and he followed him through the house, while he talked to him in the most loving and grateful way and showed him everything; all of which Jack fully understood as a mule understands a man.  Jack lived many years after this in “otium cum dignitate.”  To be


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born is to eventually die; it is a mere question of time; with mules there is no exception.  Then came Jack’s last sickness; the most tender nursing was of no avail.  The grief of Jake at Jack’s demise was indescribable.  To this day he goes with visitors, and points out his grave under an apple tree near his house, and talks of the virtues of the departed.  His age was forty years and ten days; his appearance venerable, for time had whitened his entire body like unto snow.

 

                My Visit to Jake.—It was in the twilight of a Sunday evening that I called upon Jake HEATHERINGTON.  I passed under the poplars and across the lawn to the mansion.  The venerable man and his wife were seated, good Christian people as they are, on the doorstep, enjoying the close of the holy day as it rested in silence over the lovely hill-crowned valley.

 

                When I handed him my card, I happened to look up and saw the mule looking down, as if watching me.  In a moment the old gentleman handed it back, saying; “You will please read it; I am not much of a scholar.”  “No matter,” I replied; “talking was done before printing; I will talk.”  I passed an hour there, during which he gave me some of the incidents of his early life, as related.  He is rather a small man, but fresh-looking and compactly built; just after the war he fell in a coal-boat and broke his hip, from which he still suffers.

 

                Although an unlettered man, he is of the quality that poets are made.  While one’s risibilities are affected by the singular original demonstration of his regard for a brute, the tenderness of the sentiment touches the finer chords.  The highest, the celestial truths are felt through the poetic sense; and true worship is that which demonstrates a yearning desire for the happiness of even the humblest of God’s creatures.  “Love me, love my dog,” was a thought in Paradise before it was a proverb on earth.

 

            BARNESVILLE,  ninety-seven miles east of Columbus, and twenty miles west of the Ohio river, is on the O. C. R. R., and famous for its culture of strawberries and raspberries.  Newspapers: Enterprise, Independent, George McCLELLAND, publisher; Republican, Republican, Hanlon Bros. & Co., publishers.  Churches: 1 Methodist Episcopal, 1 Presbyterian, 1 Christian, 1 African Methodist Episcopal and 1 Friends.  Banks: First National, Asa GARRETSON, president, G. E. BRADFIELD, cashier; People’s National, J. S. ELY, president, A. E. DENT, cashier.

 

            Large Manufactures.—Barnesville Glass Company, 131 hands; Watt Mining Car-Wheel Company, 42; George Atkinson, woollen-mill, 13; Heed Bros., cigars, 90; George E. Hunt, tailor, 18; Hanlon Bros., printing, 17.—State Report 1887.  Population in 1880, 2,435.  School census in 1886, 823; Henry L. Peck, superintendent.

 

            The distinguishing feature of Barnesville lies in the quantity and quality of its strawberry production.  Twenty-five years ago very few strawberries were grown in this community.  In the spring of 1860 the late William SMITH introduced, and with C. G. SMITH, John SCOLES, and a few others, cultivated in limited quantities for the home market the Wilson Albany Seedling.  The demand was small at first, but steadily increased, until shipments are now 1,000 bushels per day, of which 800 go to Chicago, the balance divided among a number of points East and West; and the fame of the Barnesville strawberry has extended not only over the entire country but into foreign countries, even “so far as Russia.”  The shipping trade opened about 1870; first to Columbus and Wheeling, and later to other near points.  In 1880 James EDGERTON tried the experiment of shipping to Chicago, but not until two years later did that trade assume large proportions.  There are about 275 acres devoted to strawberry culture, the average yield about ninety-four bushels per acre.  The Sharpless, the favorite variety, is a large, sightly fruit well colored, fine flavored, and will stand transportation to distant cities.  Other popular berries are the Cumberland, Charles Downing, Wilson, Crescent, and Jaconda; but the Barnesville growers say, “The Sharpless is our pride.”  The care, commendable rivalry, and pride of the Barnesville growers, which, with a soil and climate specially adapted to the growth of a large, hardy berry, ahs developed this great industry.

 

            The first settlement of Warren, the township in which Barnesville is situated, was made in 1800, the last year of the last century.  The first settlers were George SHANNON (the father of Gov. SHANNON), John GRIER, and John DOUGHTERY; soon others followed.  The great body of the pioneers were nearly all Quakers from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.  In 1804 they built a log meeting-house, and a woman, Ruth BOSWELL, preached there the first sermon ever delivered


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in the township.  This spot where the Stillwater church now stands has been occupied by the Friends from that day to this, and over 7,000 meetings for worship have been held there; and the entire 7,000, we venture to say, breathed nothing but “Peace on earth and good-will to man.”

 

            WILLIAM WINDOM, who was the Secretary of the Treasury under Garfield, and has twice represented Minnesota in the United States Senate, is a native of this county, where he was born May 10, 1827.

 

Meyer & Outland, Photo, Barnesville, 1886.

FRIENDS’ YEARLY MEETING-HOUSE, BARNESVILLE.

 

 


            Antiquities.—In the vicinity of Barnesville are some extraordinary natural and artificial curiosities.  About two miles south of the town, on the summit of a hill on the old RIGGS farm, is a stone called “Goblet Rock” from its general resemblance to a goblet.  Its average height is nine feet, circumference at base fifteen feet nine inches, mid circumference eighteen feet, and top circumference thirty-one feet four inches.  The whole stone can be shaken into a sensible tremble by one standing on the top. 

 

                A few miles west of Barnesville are two ancient works, on the lands of Jesse JARVIS and James NUZZUM.  On that of the latter is one of the largest mounds, it being about 1,800 feet in circumference and 90 feet in height.

 

                Among the most interesting relics of the mound-building race are the “Barnesville track rocks” on the sand rock of the coal measure located on the lands of Robert G. PRICE.  They were discovered in 1856 by a son of Mr. PRICE.  The tracks are those of birds’, animals’ and human feet, and other figures, as shellfish. serpents, earthworms, circles, stars, etc.; these indentations vary from two to over twenty inches in length.  The depths of the impressions are from three-fourths of an inch to a scale hardly perceptible.  These are evidently the work of a mound race sculptor.  The track rocks are described and pictorially shown in the U. S. Centennial Commission Report for Ohio.

 

            MARTIN’S FERRY is on the west bank of the Ohio river opposite Wheeling, W. Va.  The site of the city is a broad river bottom over two miles in length and extending westward to the foot-hills a distance of a mile and a half at the widest point.  The adjacent hills rise gradually and afford many beautiful building sites overlooking the river, giving a view not excelled at any point on the Ohio.  The city is underlaid with an inexhaustible supply of coal.  A bountiful supply of building stone and limestone is found within the corporation limits, and natural gas has been struck in ample quantities for the town’s needs.

 

            The first settlement was made and called Norristown in 1785, but, upon complaint of the Indians that the whites were encroaching on their hunting-grounds, the settlers were dispossessed and driven to the other side of the river by Col. Harmer, acting under the orders of the United States government.  In 1788 the ground upon which the town is built was granted by patent to Absalom Martin, and in 1795 he laid out a town and called it Jefferson.  But, having failed in his efforts to have it made the county-seat, Mr. Martin purchased such town lots as had been already sold and vacated the town, supposing a town could never exist so near Wheeling.


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            In 1835 Ebenezer Martin laid out and platted the town of Martinsville, but afterwards changed the name to Martin’s Ferry, there being another town in the State named Martinsvile.  As no point on the Ohio presented better facilities for manufacturing, it grew and prospered and in 1865 was incorporated as a town.

 

            Martin’s Ferry is on the line of the P. C. & St. L. R. R.  Newspapers: Ohio Valley News, Independent, James H. Drennen, editor and publisher; Church Herald, religious, Rev. Earl D. Holtz, editor and publisher.  Churches: 1 Presbyterian, 1 United Presbyterian, 1 Baptist, 1 Lutheran, 1 Catholic, 2 Methodist Episcopal, 1 African Methodist, 1 Episcopal.  Banks: Commercial, J. A. Gray, president, Geo. H. Smith, cashier; Exchange, John Armstrong, president, W. R. Ratcliff, cashier.

 

            Manufactures and Employees.—Novelty Glass Mould Works, 9 hands; Elson Glass Works, tableware, etc., 330; F. McCord & Bro., brick, 25; Laughlin Nail Co., 375; Martin’s Ferry Stove Works, 27; Spruce, Baggs & Co., stoves, 26; Dithridge Flint Glass Works, tumblers, etc., 194; L. Spence, steam engines, etc., 25; Martin’s Ferry Keg and Barrel Co., 65; Buckeye Glass Works, 200; Branch of Benwood Mills, pig iron, 55; J. Kerr & Sons and B. Exley & Co., doors, sash, etc.; Wm. Mann, machinery, 24.—State Report 1887.

 

A. C. Enochs, Photo Martin’s Ferry, 1887

MARTIN’S FERRY.

 

 

            Population in 1880, 3,819.  School census in 1886, 1,813; Chas. R. Shreve superintendent.

 

            The cultivation of grapes is an important and growing industry of Martin’s Ferry, the warm valley and sunny eastern slopes west of the town being especially adapted to their perfection; not less than 350 acres are devoted to their cultivation.  The grapes are made into wine by the Ohio Wine Co., which has recently erected a large building for this purpose.

 

            The dwellings at Martin’s Ferry are mostly on a second plateau about 600 feet from the Ohio and 100 feet above it.  The river hills on both sides rise to an altitude of about 600 feet, making the site of the town one of grandeur.  On the West Virginia side the hills are very precipitous, leaving between them and the river bank but little more than sufficient space for a road and the line of the P. C. & St. L. Railroad.  The upper plateau at Bellaire is a gravel and sand bed.  The gravel is about eighty feet deep in places, cemented so strongly that the excavation for buildings is very expensive, being impervious to the pick and often from the porous nature of the soil blasting fails; the cost of excavating for the cellar of a building often exceeds the price of the lot.  The west part of the upper plateau is depressed, and it is supposed was once the bed of the Ohio.  The country back is very fertile and rich in coal, iron and limestone.


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                Annexed is a view of the cottage at Martin’s Ferry in which, March 1, 1837, was born WM. DEAN HOWELLS, who is considered “America’s Leading Writer of Fiction.”  The structure was of brick and was destroyed to make way for the track of the Cleveland and Pittsburg railway.  It was drawn at our de-

 

BIRTHPLACE OF WM. DEAN HOWELLS.

 

 

sire from memory by the venerated father of the author, who built it and is now living in a pleasant old age at Jefferson, Ashtabula county.

 

                The Howells away back were of literary tastes, of Welsh stock and Quakers.  When the boy was three years of age the family removed to Butler county, where his father published a newspaper, the Hamilton Intelligencer, and William while a mere child learned to set type.  From thence they removed to Dayton, where the elder Howells purchased the Dayton Transcript and changed it into a daily.  His sons aided him in the type-setting, William often working until near midnight and then rising at four o’clock to distribute the paper.  The enterprise illustrated industry against ill fate.  After a two-years’ struggle Mr. Howells one day announced to his sons the enterprise was a failure, whereupon they all went down to the Big Miami and took a good swim to freshen up for another tug with fate.

 

                In 1851, when fourteen years of age, he got a position as compositor on the Ohio State Journal at Columbus.  His pay was four dollars per week, which was the first money he earned and received as his own.  This he turned into the uses of the family to help fight the wolf from the door.  While there, conjointly with a brother compositor, John J. Piatt, he put forth a volume of poetry.  Later he contributed poems to the Atlantic

 

WM. DEAN HOWELLS.

 

Monthly, was a newspaper correspondent, wrote a campaign life of Lincoln; from 1861 to 1864 was consul at Venice; from 1866 to 1872 was assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and then until 1881 editor-in-chief.  Mr. Howells works in a field which is pre-eminently his own—that of social life.  He has a happy home, wife and children in Beacon St., Boston, where he devotes his mornings to writing, usually completing at a sitting a trifle more than what would make one-and-a-half pages as this in which our printer sets these lines—say 1500 words a day.

 

            Flushing and Morristown are villages, containing each from sixty to eighty dweillings, in this county.


 

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