38 - HISTORY OF LORAIN COUNTY

CHAPTER IX.

PIONEER LIFE.*

It would seem that the good old state of Connecticut never attempted, perhaps never intended, to exercise empire over her possessions in the west. She contented herself with more ownership; was not very loth to part with her property, which she made haste to dispose of without any expenditure to develop or enhance its market value. The Connecticut Land Company purchased only to sell again. For the purpose of division, it was obliged to survey its domain. This accomplished, the Company was immediately dissolved, and each with his allotment at once sought purchasers, and they, without concert, pushed off singly to their acquisitions. Colonizing in America has been pursued on a somewhat different basis, under a different inspiration from that practiced in Europe. The state undertakes nothing. It is rare that there is organization or combination with us to effect this

*By A. G. Riddle.

HISTORY OF LORAIN COUNTY, OHIO - 39

purpose. It comes to be known that some new unpeopled region is open or may be opened, and by a common impulse, hardy, enterprising men, with their wives and families, or without them, push off, undeterred by difficulties, and unappalled by obstacles Or dangers even, and the next that the world hears, a new and thriving community, perhaps a lusty young state, demands recognition.

Perhaps no section of the country, of such an extent, had then been so rapidly peopled as the Connecticut Reserve. With not a score of occupants in 1800, twenty years saw it well settled, and those years cover all there was of pioneer life proper, although for twenty years more, the region was sought by men in search of new homes.

Planted mainly from Connecticut and Massachusetts, with a little sprinkle from the rest of New England, New York and Western Pennsylvania, most of immigrants had to traverse over six hundred miles, two-thirds or three-fourths of which was through a wilderness and over the roughest of roads. The whole was generally by land carriage, and usually by ox teams. Not until the construction of the Erie canal, did Lake Erie and water carriage make any considerable figure in the transit. Some of the earlier pioneers ventured up the lake in small open boats, landing each night, while many found its wave-beaten beach a smooth and level highway.

The crushing defeat of the western tribes of Indians by Wayne, in 1794, freed the Reserve from the fear of savage hostilities, and although many small bands found homes and hunting grounds by her beautiful streams and splendid forests, they were not even a source of annoyance till the dark days of 1812. Save a few from western New York and Pennsylvania, most of the settlers were from older New England, where the hatreds and enmities against the Indians had died ont, and where the memories of the Pequots of the Narragansetts, and of King Phillip, had become traditions. Her children carried no border animosities into the Ohio woods, and very few of them had any skill as hunters, or much knowledge of woodcraft. No American of that time but bad the memory at least of a hunter's and soldier's life; and men in a single day revert to the ways of barbarism if not savagery. Each man and woman from the old organized states of civilization, as their journeys led them deeper and deeper into the western forests, by so much plunged into the heart of primitive life, bearing all their civilized needs and wants with them, which could alone be supplied by the skill of the hunter, and of men who could draw all the elements of subsistence, at first hand, from unchanged nature. The great wave of pioneer life, which slowly rolled from the east to the west, followed by the fixed foot-prints of ever equally advancing refinement and civilization, gave birth, as it went, to a mode of life, manners and customs of a pioneer type, consisting of a few well marked peculiarities, of plainness, almost coarseness, in a stimulating atmosphere, in that fullness of unconventional freedom, which left individuals to develope, in a striking way, the diverse peculiarities and characteristics of their natures. On the Reserve, this phase of pioneer life, with its manners and customs, was of but a few years duration, and affected not more than two generations. There is scarcely a vestige of it now remaining. A cherished, a regretful memory: it is fast fading into a tradition, which genius, art, enthusiasm and the warmest imagination can never reproduce.

In the peopling of the Lorain woods, no state, nor powerful corporation, no strong combination of individuals had any hand. Few persons of wealth took any personal part in it. No well constructed highway led from the old to the new, with convenient resting places. No common starting place, and no common point of arrival and settlement, where supplies were gathered, and around and from which the new homes would be built. A hundred different points, remote from each other, were occupied at the same time, and the sufferings, privations and hardships of the first settler were repeated a thousand times, when by care and tact they might have been avoided.

The silence of the Lorain forests remained unbroken a few years longer than some of her neighboring regions. The incidents of their first occupation will be detailed, under the names of the different townships; only a slight general reference can here be made to them. As a general rule, the pioneers were men of courage and enterprise. Few others would have the hardihood to run the risk, and take upon themselves the labor and privation incident to a removal into the woods.

It is said that the Moravians were the first, of European blood, who attempted to make a permanent lodgment on the soil of Lorain, and that in 1787, they gathered a small band of christian Indians at the mouth of Black river, where they intended to establish a mission for the conversion of the natives, but were compelled to depart by the mandate of a chief, who claimed jurisdiction of that region.

One of the first efforts of a settlement, if such it may be called, was in 1807, by Nathan Perry, who established a trading post at the mouth of the same river. Actual clearers of the woods, and cultivators of the soil, first planted themselves at that point in 1810. They were said to have been natives of Vermont. This position was on the lake coast region, and quite central in the present county.

In the autumn of 1807, a strong and seemingly well considered attempt was made to colonize the present township of Columbia, the most eastern of Lorain, from Waterbury, Connecticut. The more prominent men were the three Hoadleys, Williams, Warner, and Bronson, most of whom had families; also, Mrs. Parker and five children. It is said the party were two months in reaching Buffalo, and undertook to navigate Lake Erie, which must have been extra hazardous at that season. They seem to have been wrecked near the present city of Erie, whence they

40 - HISTORY OF LORAIN COUNTY, OHIO.

made their way on foot to Cleveland,—one of the most disastrous of the early attempts to reach the then west. Most of the party spent the residue of the winter in Cleveland. Other immigrants reached Columbia during the winter, and the ensuing season.

Ridgeville also received her first pioneers from Connecticut in 1810, and Amherst her first about the same time. Eaton was also first settled from Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1810.

Three of these points of occupation formed a sort of triangle, not remote from each other, in the eastern central portions of the county, while Black River and Amherst were quite distant to the northwest. The five seem to have been the only settlements in the county, until after the dark days of the war of 1812, although some of them seem to have made accessions during that gloomy period.

Sheffield, adjoining Black River on the east, received her first settlers in 1815, from Massachusetts. They came on strong-handed.

Avon, still east of Sheffield, was settled in 1814.

Brownhelm, west of Black River, and Grafton, adjoining Eaton, on the south, were settled in 1816, as was Elyria, the future county seat, and all three from Massachusetts. Elyria was most fortunate in being selected as the home of the Elys.

Wellington and Huntington, in the southwesterly part, received their first settlers in 1818, and both from Massachusetts.

Carlisle, south of Elyria and west of Eaton, was first occupied in 1819, from Connecticut, and Brighton, adjoining Wellington on the west, in 1820. Russia's first settler came from New York in 1818. Penfield, adjoining Wellington on the east, in 1819, while Henrietta was settled in 1817. The other townships, many of them, were first occupied in the years soon following these older sisters.

These pioneers were of one origin, language, religion, with political and patriotic sentiments mainly identical with a common history and the same traditions. They were of the intelligent working class, having community of purpose, which they pursued by the same methods, and in the same field, with results not widely dissimilar. The journey, arrival, building, mode of life, fortune and career, of almost any one of these, resolute, vigorous, thrifty down- east families, was the counterpart of the histories of all the others.

The leading incidents of these will more properly be mentioned elsewhere. This slight reference to the periods of the first settlements of the older townships and the mention of their origin is merely to show that they were quite contemporaneous, and made by a perfectly homogeneous people and under similar conditions.

The man of our old civilization is astonished at the enumeration of his wants, and perhaps still more at the small number absolutely essential to the comfortable maintenance of human life, with all of its real enjoyments. A removal into the depths of the Ohio woods, where a man was directly placed face to face with primitive conditions, brought him at once to the practical contemplation of the problem, and the solution was in his own hands: Food, shelter, raiment. Here was the earth, whose soil was to furnish bread and clothing, but it was covered with a thick growth of great trees to be removed ere it could be planted. Their trunks and barks must be converted into houses.

The last was the first to be extemporized. A temporary supply of food, was carried by the immigrant with him. On making his way to his purchase he pursued the trail that led nearest to it, and, with his axe, opened the rest of the way. The point gained, the same implement with which a savage continent has been hewn into the rough forms of civilization, cuts down and prepares the tree trunks for the first cabin, which the hands of the whole party, women and children as well, help to place in the low, rude walls of the primitive structure, while the bark of the baswood and elm make the cover. Doorless, floorless, windowless, chimneyless, the pioneer eagerly takes possession of his cheerless cabin. Thousands of them within these seventy years were built and oocupied in the Lorain woods. Men and women lived in them; children—all the elders of the new generation—were born in them. Death came to them there; and there young women became brides and dwelt there—the happy wives of happy husbands. Of all these dwellings in the woods, scarcely the site of one can now be identified. The forest was at once the great foe and benefactor of the new dwellers in its midst. A war of extermination began on the trees. The axe and fire were the agents of their swift destruction, and rapidly the small ring of trees about the cabin enlarged, and the growing, stumpy fields, marked the progress of the struggle. Next to the erection of their own cabin, the most important event was the arrival of another family in the woods, and the erection of their dwelling received the joyous help of every male within ten miles of it. No one born of later years can comprehend the strength and warmth of the bands of sympathy and fellowship which united the first dwellers in the woods in wide neighborhood!

What an event was the erection of the first sawmill! The first grist mill! The setting up of the first blacksmith's forge! The advent of the first shoemaker! The purchase of the first cows and sheep! The acquisition of the first cat, dog and hens! The coming of a spinning-wheel in a family and the setting up of a hand loom in a neighborhood were events. The raw material for all fabrics were won from the earth. Men raised flax, rotted, broke and swingled it. Women hatcheled, spun, wove and made it into garments. Wool, shorn from the sheep, was turned into cloth, dyed with bark, and the first fretting mill was a benefaction. 'Then came carding machines. Many men became apt and skillful hnnters, and the pelts of elk and deer were changed by domestic tanners to material for clothing. A great drawback was the scarcity of necessary implements for the household,

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and for the outside war on the savagery of nature-rudely chairs, stools and boxes, gourds, shells sap-troughs, wooden trays and trenchers; poor axes, rude hoes, imperfect scythes, sickles, hand flails, and fans, and wooden plows. Money there was none, and yet money had to be paid for taxes, for leather, and usually for salt. But one product could be exchanged for money. The field and house ashes were carefully saved, rude boiling asheries extemporized, and crude, black salts manufactured which in remote Pittsburgh commanded money.

Not the least of the enemies encountered by the pioneers, were the predaceous wild animals. The bears made war on the swine, considerable flocks of sheep were often devoured by wolves, and the good Wives' poultry found many enemies, while the ripening crops were the spoil of animals and birds of all

The ill condition of their dwellings, the scanty supply of warm clothing, the sometimes lack of food, the general hardship and exposure of their mode of life and labor, the endlessness of that toil, with the constant care and anxiety of the elders of the family, amid the unknown perils of the climate, and diseases incident to pioneer life, rendered the settlers liable to become the victims of sickness, often fatal. More than one epidemic, more malignant than any known to later times, visited the pioneers, and which, in the absence of skilled medical assistance, was left to work its fatal will, often aggravated by the attendance of quacks, who find shelter and victims on the skirts of civilization.

The presence with us, or the memory, of the few pioneers who have reached remarkable age, should not be taken as conclusive that such life is conducive to great length of years. Whoever will consult the tombstones of the pioneers,— men, women and children,—will, I think, be struck by the average shortness of their lives.

Living on the borders of older States and communities, their lives were marked by sharp vicissitudes and well defined and peculiar features. Often the victims of the common human vices and weaknesses, the nobler humane and social virtues were developed among them in a degree never found in well established states of human association. If there was less of what is now called culture, and conventional polish, and refinement, there was an hundred fold more warmth, spontaneous charity, abounding and widely extended sympathy, friendliness, and good neighborhood. Men and women were then spontaneously capable of self devoted, heroic and even great actions.

In the nature of things, pioneer life in the northern Ohio woods, with its habits, manners and customs, was necessarily transitory. The sons and daughters of advanced civilization, bearing all its most precious elements, seeds and principles with them, rushed into the forest, and planted them in the stimulating soil of the west, resolved themselves into the primitive constitutions of human society, only to guard and cherish the new growths the more certainly. And now, in seventy years, their descendants are in advance of the kindred who remain in the old seats from which they all sprung, retaining something of the warmth, much of the elevation of character, many features of the broader and freer natures and lives, developed in their pioneer fathers and mothers, by their sojourn in the wilderness. These are clear gains to the race of man, above and beyond the natural. wealth wrought out and transmitted by their hands. They gave us a broader, deeper and wider system of education, freer and more catholic christian institutions, lived their hard, patient, toilsome lives of fidelity and devotion, and dropped by the wayside, many of them, early, unmentioned, with their worn, patient, unwearied wives, and were buried in the shadow of the near woods; while many more favored, or hardy, endured to near our day, honored and cherished.

Of the real pioneer, the fellers of the first trees, not one remains:

"Each in his narrow cell forever laid,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep."

*            *            *            *            *            *            *

" Oft' did the harvest to their sickles yield,

Their furrows oft' the stubborn glebe has broke,

How jocund did they drive their teams afield,

How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke."

Their fields, their memories, their graves alone remain to us.