We Want Land

    THOMAS JEFFERSON estimated in 1803 that it would take a thousand years for the region east of the Mississippi to be settled. Henry Clay’s dramatic prediction was closer to the truth. Legend has it that Clay, on one of his trips between Washington and Kentucky, walked to the side of the road and leaned his ear to the ground. When someone asked him what he was doing, he answered: "I am listening for the footsteps of thousands of Americans who will soon travel these roads westward." Clay was right. Farmers who were sick of their rocky and exhausted acres, penniless veterans of the Revolutionary War, fortune hunters and adventurers, young and old poured into Ohio.

    Most emigrants to Muskingum County between 1810 and 1850 were hungry for land. They wanted to dig their fortune out of the land. Zanesville was only a market for Muskingum County farmers. The people of the town made their living by bartering calico, sugar, and coffee for farm produce. Industries did not develop here and offer employment until the coming of the steamboat and railroad. Between 1810 and 1830 the Zanesville population increased from about 1,000 to 3,094 while the Muskingum County population increased from 10,036 to 29,335. Although the percentage of increase in Zanesville was greater, the county contained nine times as many people as the county seat. Before the Civil War this was predominantly an agricultural county.

    Hundreds of Eastern families sat by candlelight after their work was done and debated whether to stay among friends and neighbors or move to the lonely West. They read the land laws of Congress in tattered newspapers. Letters from acquaintances already in Ohio passed from hand to hand. There were excited discussions of the rich soil and abundant game. Of course, it would be hard work for a few years until the land could be cleared. Then plenty for everyone. No more poor harvests. No more empty pantries. Some families lettered "Ohio or Bust" on their covered wagons.

    Sometimes a father or brother started a year earlier and built a cabin for the family. John Green spent the winter of 1799 near Zanesville killing bear and deer and salting the hind quarters. The next spring he brought his family by wagon to a good food supply. George Swingle and his son Nicholas came from Pennsylvania in 1809 and bought 160 acres of land in Brush Creek Township. While the father went back to Pennsylvania to make preparation for moving the following spring, twenty-one-year-old Nicholas lived alone in the woods and chopped trees for a cabin. Bears, panthers, and wolves prowled around his clearing. Nicholas asked men from Putnam to help him haul the logs and lay up the walls of the cabin. When the family arrived, their nearest neighbors were eight miles away to the north and twenty-five miles on the south.

    The members of a typical family, however, traveled together from the older settlements to Muskingum County. After the decision to leave their home, they sold their land, if they owned any, and disposed of most of their furniture. The Devore family packed a few household goods on the backs of two cows and an ox and led them along Zane’s Trace from Virginia to Licking Township in 1801. But most emigrants bought sturdy wagons covered with canvas and drawn by two or three teams. In the wagon they loaded clothing, farming tools, cooking utensils, food for the trip, and a few heirlooms. On the day set for departure, neighbors gathered to bid farewell to friends they probably would never see again.

    For weeks the horses strained to pull the heavy load through deep ruts and over steep hills. The men and boys walked ahead of the wagon, herding the cows and keeping them from straying into the woods. Lucinda Belknap described in her diary the hardships of the trip she made in 1819 from Newburgh, New York, to Springfield Township. The Belknap family was on the road from September 16 to October 14. They encountered fall rains. Lucinda wrote: "Heavy showers caused the canvas roof to leak considerable and we got a little wet." When they came to a Pennsylvania river: "In consequence of the toll being high we forded the river. Was frightened as the saying is ‘half to death.’ The wagon soon began to fill and I trembled with the expectation of being drowned." Another time "we traveled twenty-five miles of which I walked five."

    Many emigrants camped out on the way. At dusk they unhitched the horses and cooked a meal over an open fire before stretching out on bearskins and blankets with their feet to the coals. The Belknaps usually ate and slept at taverns. East of Cambridge, Ohio, "For the first time we met with a cross landlady and were obliged to stay in the barroom with a parcel of drunken men." Meeting a homesick woman on her way back East, Lucinda wrote, "Poor soldier, thinks I."

    Emigrants were always glad when their journey ended at Zanesville. Arrival at the small town meant the end of hardships on the road and the beginning of a new home. Lucinda wrote: "Started very early and arrived at this wonder of the world, this Zanesville," that she had heard so much about. Corning down the steep hill, at the head of Main Street, emigrants cut saplings and tied them behind their wagons to act as brakes. Frederick Betz saw a pile of saplings at the foot of the hill in 1814. Between Fifth and Sixth streets, the wagons descended into Mud Hollow. That ravine was so deep that people on lower Main Street could not see a four-horse wagon in the hollow. Children riding on the wagons remembered to their dying day J. L. Cockran’s three-foot high wooden Negro in Mud Hollow. He had a long cigar in his mouth, a twist of dog-leg tobacco in one hand, and a box of snuff in the other. His name was Congo.

    Parents looked for a place to buy a farm. There were several ways of acquiring land. Veterans of the Revolution received pay in the form of land warrants. To satisfy the warrants Congress provided the United States Military District north of an east and west line through Zanesville. But according to law no patent would be issued for less than 4,000 acres, and that did not help the army private whose warrant entitled him to only 100 acres. Some veterans sold their warrants to speculators in the East, who sold smaller tracts. Colonel George Jackson and Robert Underwood were among the speculators who moved to Muskingum County. Their names are preserved in Jackson Township and Underwood Street.

    South of the Military line through Zanesville lay the Congress Lands, which were sold in smaller tracts as low as two dollars an acre. In 1803 the government opened a land office in Zanesville from which the emigrants could buy farms. General Isaac Van Home came in 1805 to act as Receiver of the Land Office here.  I've put together a sketch describing the land survey system which pertains to the system the national government imposed for surveying and selling land tracts.  The sketch is called Ohio Land for Sale.

    In selecting land for their farms, emigrants naturally wanted tillable and rich soil. At first they rushed to the low, level lands. But Daniel Stilwell and many others moved away from their first homes near Dresden to higher land to escape malaria. The pioneer settlers preferred land close to good roads. Locations on streams that offered water power for mills were also in demand.

    Emigrants who bought land from speculators in the East often found their farms in the midst of trackless forests. George Claypool and his son Levi had to blaze their way from Zanesville to Licking Township with butcher knives in 1801 so that relatives could follow them. When the John Van Zandt family arrived in 1805, there was no road to their farm in Springfield Township. They had to chop their way with axes for five miles to reach their land.

    It is almost impossible to realize the hardships the pioneers endured for the first year on their new farms. A family named Bean lived in a hollow sycamore tree in Harrison township in 1798. When they covered the opening with bearskins, their twelve-foot room was snug. Thomas Blizzard drove his horses through the woods to Licking Township as the cold winds were blowing in November, 1808. The family lived in the wagons until spring. James Wilcox built a hut of bark and brush in Adams Township in 1808 to shelter his family until he could build a log cabin.

    Neighbors usually came with teams of oxen, axes, and boisterous greetings to help build a cabin. While the women exchanged gossip and cooked the dinner in iron kettles, the men hauled the felled logs to the cabin site. Axes swung by strong arms beat a rapid rhythm as the men cut the logs into length. Then, in response to sharp commands, a row of men braced their heels in the ground and heaved their shoulders against a log to roll it up two sloping timbers to the top of the wall. There cornermen notched the ends to fit snugly together. By evening the walls were up. The family could shingle the roof and build the chimney without help.

    The furnishings of these early cabins were primitive. The forest supplied material for furniture. Auger holes bored in corner logs made rests for poles that met in a forked post driven into the earth floor. Slats and blankets covering these poles made a bed. Puncheons, or slabs split from logs, were fashioned into benches and tables with saplings for legs. Resourceful pioneers made splint brooms from elm saplings, whittled mugs and plates from maple, wove baskets out of white oak splints, and hewed axe handles from hickory.

    The pioneers also found their food in the forest. Haunches of venison and bear meat hung from the cabin rafters to smoke. In the iron kettle that swung on the crane in every fireplace, wild turkey or wild pigeon simmered. As late as 1819 flocks of pigeons four miles long darkened the skies of Muskingum County and gave sportsmen a holiday. In the same year squirrels mi. grated across the Muskingum River and hunters standing on the bank killed bushels with clubs as they swam to shore. Honey from bee trees supplied the only sweetening for some pioneers.

    David Lmlay shot a panther in Meigs Township in 1800. Larger animals were killed off before smaller game. Hunters pursued the last buffalo in Muskingum County on Wills Creek in 1803. Wolves killed sheep on the farm of Samuel McCune in Salt Creek Township in the middle of the day. Wolves often chased people carrying meat. The county commissioners paid a bounty of two dollars for wolf scalps. Bears carried away hogs if they were not kept in tight pens. While Robert Boggs and his brother were hoeing corn in Washington Township one day, they heard the squeal of a pig and found a bear eating flesh from its neck. The pig died after they killed the bear. Wolves and bears continued to ravage livestock until they disappeared about 1820.

    Furs were an important forest product that the pioneer could barter for store goods until he received cash from his first crops. An old bill of 1801 contains these items: "Mr. John Clark bot of Increase Mathews and Co. 9 Shea bear Skins @ $2.25; 6 hea do ~ $1.75; 25 racoon and catts ~ $1.50; 1 muskrat @ 25 cents."

    Farm boys collected ginseng and beeswax. In the spring they worked a "sugar bush" for maple syrup and sugar. Some farmers paid for their farms with wagon loads of tan bark peeled from oak trees. As they cleared the forest and burned log heaps, they collected ashes, poured water over them in a vat, and boiled the resulting lye water into black ash and pearl ash for industrial use. A Zanesville merchant advertised that he would accept these articles in trade "and almost everything else we can do anything with."

    At two dollars an acre land was cheap, but labor was scarce and expensive. Clearing a farm took months. and years of axe swinging and log rolling. A farmer was fortunate if he had a large family of children to help with the clearing. Often a settler merely girdled the trees and planted his corn in the deadening. If he felled the frees, the neighbors found another excuse for a social gathering at the log rolling. Neighbors came with their oxen and hauled his logs in rows. Late in the spring the owner burned them. Then he planted his seed around the stumps. Until the Civil War many farms had stump-dotted fields.

    After planting potatoes, beans, squash, and other table vegetables, the pioneers relied on corn rather than wheat as a main crop. Corn grew quickly in the deadenings and produced an abundant yield. It could be ground for mush and bread in a "corncracker" mill, consisting of a hollow stump and a chunk of hickory tied to a nearby sapling. As soon as the farm boy cracked the corn with the chunk, the springy sapling pulled it up for the next blow. If the pioneers had no milk, they ate mush with maple syrup, bear oil, or fried meat grease. Hogs grazed on mast in the woods and needed little care. "Hog and hominy" were the staple pioneer foods. Farmers made hominy by soaking corn in lye made from wood ashes to remove the hard shell.

    Pioneer farming methods were crude. Plowing was done with a wooden moldboard plow. Farmers jerked off the ears of corn and left the stalks standing in the field. They cut wheat with a sickle until the introduction of the cradle in 1815, and they used the flail for threshing. They separated the wheat from the chaff by throwing the grain into the air on a windy day. The wind blew away the lighter chaff and the wheat fell into baskets.

    Early farmers did not have the improved crops and livestock of today. They planted rye because it grew well on new soil and made good whisky. They raised large flax crops for weaving into linen and with wool into "linsey-woolsey." Timothy and Wild Prairie were the varieties of hay used. John Dent introduced Red Chaff bearded wheat into Muskingum County in 1808. Johnny Appleseed probably planted in this county some of the apple trees he raised from seed. "Razorback" hogs grazed on acorns in the woods until they were ready to be driven eastward to Baltimore or were butchered and salted or smoked for floating to New Orleans by flatboat. At his farm near Dresden, Seth Adams introduced Merino sheep into Ohio in 1807.

    "Buckeye" described pioneer methods of sowing and harvesting in the Zanesville Courier on July 9, 1873. He said: "The farmers sowed much more ground in wheat than now, and as the fields were newly cleared and full of stumps, sprouts, and brush, no other implement could be used to as good advantage as the sickle." About twenty hands, including all the men and boys in three or four families, did the harvesting. They ate a breakfast of bread and butter washed down with whisky or tansy bitters at sunup. Then the owner handed the whisky jug to one of the men, who by that sign became leader. At twelve they ate dinner. Cooks carried a "four o’clock piece" to the field, and at sundown the workers ate supper. A man could reap and bind from twenty-five to forty dozen sheaves in a day. When a party finished a field, the owner passed a bucket of eggnog or mint sling.

    Occasionally a farmer who objected to liquor had a hard time to get his harvesting done. Judge Daniel StilwelI called his thirty-two reapers together in Madison Township and told them there would be no liquor. He didn’t use it and he didn’t think it did any one any good. His men started home. Stilwell called them back and offered them five cents a day extra if they would work. They accepted. Then they advanced their nickel a day apiece to send a man to Dresden for a sixteen-gallon keg of whisky. The judge was not happy, but he had to have his wheat Cut.

    "Buckeye" commented on the drinking of whisky: "You might ask if we were not afraid of snakes getting in our boots. Not a bit of it, for we had no boots. Some had shoes," others went barefoot. "But we had to keep a lookout for snakes on the shins . . . The whisky we used was made of rye, was pure, and could be drunk from youth to old age, and such a disease as snakes in the boots be unknown."

    After several good harvests a pioneer farmer saw that food for his family was assured and he built a better home. For their second homes some farmers made two-story hewed log houses. Many constructed frame homes and a few burned brick for the walls. As the farm continued to produce more than the family could eat, the pioneers traded their surplus at Zanesville stores for chests of drawers, beds, chairs, and dishes to replace the primitive articles made of wood.

    But long into the first half of the nineteenth century farming continued to be a life of toil. While the man worked in the fields from sunrise to sunset, women smoked hams and salted pork, made soap from lye and fat, dipped or poured candles, dried apples, gathered herbs for medicine, spun flax, and wove "linsey-woolsey" clothing for the family.

    To relieve the monotony of these endless tasks, the pioneers met together to do their work at "bees" at the least excuse. They had "bees" for log rolling, raising a house or barn, peeling apples for drying, quilting, husking, and spinning.

    Spelling bees were popular for educational and social reasons. Children attended a three-month term of school taught by a wandering schoolmaster in an abandoned cabin after the fall harvest. Spelling bees and literary societies supplemented this limited schooling. Young people debated questions like this: "If one hen should lay an egg and another hen set on the egg and hatch out the chicken, which hen would be the mother of the chicken?" Chandlersville people organized the Franklin Literary Society in 1825 and a literary society met at Parkinson School in 1836.

    Even the circuit riders supplied a social as well as a religious need. Traveling by horseback on 500-mile circuits, their services were infrequent. Families gathered for miles to hear them. In 1810 Reverend James B. Finley stood on an inverted salt kettle at Dillon’s iron works and delivered a temperance sermon. He persuaded Dillon to give land for a church and supervised the collection of materials. Bishop William McKendree arrived unexpectedly and Reverend Finley induced him to dedicate the church for which not a log was laid. The Bishop spoke on the text, "On this rock I will build my church."

    Muskingum County religious denominations reflected the prevailing tendencies of the state. Quakers built a church in Blue Rock Township and held services for a few years. The families of the Mattingly settlement in Muskingum Township established a Catholic church, and Catholic congregations were started in Harrison and Jefferson townships. Strong German settlements in Brush Creek and Salem townships organized Lutheran churches. Settlers in the southeastern part of the county responded to the emotional appeal of the Baptists. Alexander Campbell did not win as many adherents for his Christian Church in Muskingum County as he did in other parts of the state.

    The Methodists, sending out circuit riders to carry their gospel, assembled the first and largest congregations. When the Methodist Protestants separated from the Methodist Episcopal denomination in 1830, Reverend Cornelius Springer of Springfield Township became an energetic organizer for the new sect. He published a Methodist Protestant newspaper called The Western Recorder on his farm. Since the merger of the Methodist Episcopal and Methodist Protestant denominations in 1939, there are thirty-seven Methodist churches in the townships outside Zanesville. Scotch-Irish settlers from Virginia and Pennsylvania organized Presbyterian congregations. There are fourteen churches of that denomination in the townships today.

    Country towns sometimes grew up around churches. A store, a mill, or a post office could also serve as the nucleus of a town. Most of the villages, however, sprang up along the National Road, Maysville Pike, and other highways. Farmers found it more convenient to patronize the stores in neighboring towns than to make the long trip over bad roads to Zanesville.

    Improved highways encouraged farmers to hold agricultural fairs and exhibits. In 1836 John and Isaac Dillon were the leaders of the Muskingum County Agricultural Society which held an exhibit in the courthouse. In 1846 the legislature passed an act "for the encouragement of agriculture" which authorized the organization of agricultural societies.

    The Courier published this announcement on January 17, 1848: "Agricultural Meeting. The friends of agriculture in the County of Muskingum are urgently requested to meet at the Eagle Hotel, Zanesville, on Friday, 21st of January, at one p.m. for the purpose of organizing an Agricultural Society. The enterprise will be sustained by many farmers." The first fair under the auspices of the new organization was held at the old courthouse on October 19 and 20, 1848. But the present Muskingum County Agricultural Society numbers its fairs from the passage of the legislative act in 1846. The centennial was observed from August 13 to 17, 1946.

    In 1853 the Society bought fifteen acres of land for a fair ground on Dryden Road a quarter of a mile north of the present grounds. This tract soon proved too small. In 1859 the Society bought twenty-five acres from the heirs of Henry Mathews and twenty acres from Edward Sturges, Sr., for the present fair ground.

    It is probable that the new ground was bought for the immediate use of the Ohio State Fair in that year. At that period the State Fair was held in different parts of the state. Unfortunately the weather was rainy during the meeting near Zanesville. Hack drivers increased their rates from 15 to 25 cents for the trip through Putnam to the grounds. The income was $6,000 less than the expenses. During the Civil War the ground was called Camp Goddard.

    By 1860 all the land of the county was occupied. Pioneer farmers robbed the soil of its richness by crude farming methods. Their sons after the Civil War completed the exhaustion of the soil by the use of farm machinery. Now most of this land requires scientific farming methods.