tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56029979444916119392024-03-05T00:26:12.821-05:00Lower Scioto BlogOhio's Scioto River derives its name from the Wyandot word for "deer." Its waters run south through the city of Chillicothe in Ross county, then bi-sects Pike and Scioto on its way to its confluence with the Ohio River at the City of Portsmouth. Here, on this blog, you will find chapters from southern Ohio's most fascinating history.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-17963883545978694372010-12-12T19:31:00.001-05:002010-12-12T19:49:10.009-05:00Michael Baldwin & the Bloodhounds Mob the Governor: Speculation and the "Ohio Revolution"<i>After a hiatus of nearly a year, I am glad to finally post some “new” material. This and the following post will cover the remainder of my paper, which was presented at a conference hosted by Prof. Matthew Ward of the University of Dundee in July 2009. In my original presentation I argued that land speculation in the Scioto River Valley generated lawlessness and disorder during the frontier stage of the region’s development. Clashes over the location of seats of justice and county boundary lines often illumined partisan divisions in the region, as well as nationally. ~ ALF</i><br />
<br />
<br />
The nearly three-year long struggle over the location of the Adams County seat (1797-1799) helped precipitate what historian Donald J. Ratcliffe has called the “Ohio Revolution of 1800,” wherein a popular surge in Jeffersonian Democracy found its expression in a statehood movement that successfully toppled the regime headed by Federalist Territorial Governor Arthur St. Clair. When Adams County's largest landowner, Nathaniel Massie, battled Governor St. Clair over the location of the county's seat (as discussed in the previous post), Massie’s primary interests were becoming increasingly tied to the development of the town of Chillicothe, which was located in the northeastern corner of the county. St. Clair’s greatest fear was the possibility of the creation of a new state government under the control of Jeffersonian Democrats, with its capital located at Chillicothe. To avert such a development, St. Clair launched a campaign to have Congress divide the North-West Territory, ensuring that Chillicothe would not be located at the center of any future state of Ohio.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcmDqsirTrCX0n2FdOy6sec6UTu2lSqqN2YXwb1AC-FZ4lShqvj9EUpSlEhMCetKUu5y3bjq9U_e1V_HdXnZuKnSBeXw-dblZgfZgSgtlfP1UOwYZnK3Iid4bbB0EzrSriXh9Folr7cBfY/s1600/nathanielMassie-chilli-p8002-02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcmDqsirTrCX0n2FdOy6sec6UTu2lSqqN2YXwb1AC-FZ4lShqvj9EUpSlEhMCetKUu5y3bjq9U_e1V_HdXnZuKnSBeXw-dblZgfZgSgtlfP1UOwYZnK3Iid4bbB0EzrSriXh9Folr7cBfY/s320/nathanielMassie-chilli-p8002-02.jpg" width="263" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nathaniel Massie, founder of Manchester and Chillicothe, Ohio</td></tr>
</tbody></table> While St. Clair worked his network of Federalist members of Congress and Adams administration officials, the Virginians worked their congressional allies. Federal intervention, it now appeared to Massie and others, could be used to secure their investments and larger fortunes. Congress could block St. Clair’s boundary division plans, fix the seat of a new territorial government at Chillicothe, and authorize the formation of the State of Ohio, encompassing the eastern portion of the larger North-West Territory. <br />
<br />
If St. Clair was going to use his federal authority to thwart the interests and fortunes of settlers in the Scioto Valley, Massie and others, having previously benefitted from the actions of the Federal government in the acquisition of their land, would also use their influence at the federal level to forward their interests. The contest would boil over in the streets of Chillicothe. The contest over county seat locations became tied to the larger issues of whether St. Clair would succeed in establishing the Scioto River as a new territorial boundary, slicing Ohio into two new federal territories, and whether the new territorial seats of government should be located in Cincinnati in the West and Marietta in the East, two cities that included powerful Federalist factions.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN1vt1ltNOH1MbI6LY8nK4V3xjDPJDpLdpLcAbchQYLXTSD9xhdiNJghKQudjXUph7t6QggTsXUS6R0JcttSot6OSlouS_OKuoYIf9VqiPg9c0mlZvwDpHPCfpWsm75K2z5-RUn7OyI-RM/s1600/ArthurStClair.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN1vt1ltNOH1MbI6LY8nK4V3xjDPJDpLdpLcAbchQYLXTSD9xhdiNJghKQudjXUph7t6QggTsXUS6R0JcttSot6OSlouS_OKuoYIf9VqiPg9c0mlZvwDpHPCfpWsm75K2z5-RUn7OyI-RM/s320/ArthurStClair.jpg" width="285" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Northwest Territorial Governor Arthur S</td></tr>
</tbody></table>The fortunes of Chillicothe and the other county seats in the Scioto Valley hung in the balance. The region had attracted skilled artisans and merchants; farmers, large and small, had begun to clear and fill the hinterlands of VMD towns. Personal interest in these matters cut across class-lines, from the hardworking black smith and penniless, but ambitious tenant farmer, to the young lawyers and wealthy land speculators – all had a personal interest in the larger fortunes of their region and the location of their seats of government. Many of the new settlers had gambled on a bright, prosperous future in the valley; they had staked their all in establishing farms and businesses in these frontier towns and the surrounding fertile lands. Support for statehood was truly a popular phenomenon, shared by the leading politicians of the Scioto valley and the overwhelming majority of their constituents. It truly was a popular republican revolution.<br />
<br />
Although St. Clair had vetoed the Adams county seat bill at the first session of the Territorial Assembly, representatives from the VMD succeeded in having William Henry Harrison (another Virginian) elected as the territory’s first non-voting delegate to Congress. Massie along with others, who would become known as the Chillicothe Junta, would also send Chillicothe resident, Thomas Worthington to Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the Federal government, to lobby on their behalf. Worthington had immigrated from Virginia to Chillicothe in 1797, had served as a Justice of the Peace with Massie in Adams County, and had recently been appointed Surveyor-General of the North-West Territory, where he would oversee the sale of federal lands outside the VMD, on the east side of the Scioto River. Finding allies among Democratic-Republicans, Harrison, with the assistance of Worthington, succeeded in blocking St. Clair’s division along the Scioto and instead secured passage of the Virginians’ plan to divide the larger Northwest Territory into two districts at the western boundary of the Greenville Treaty line. The two men also succeeded in having Congress move the capital of the newly drawn eastern district from Cincinnati to Chillicothe. Harrison and Worthington had accomplished all they had set out to do.<br />
<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8xXQ7oYovSSnbguAztIz1K30hH4QqounAjUeVjEiqal9s2O-oZu0p5CmZYUFc3PyB66BKGVmMf3Lg_rIexeyWyj9Pu-QfwjGyzL0d_x-0EYPjbbFLPB6PbntteS5EPzgwSb6Dyi_Okh8n/s1600/ThomasWorthington.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8xXQ7oYovSSnbguAztIz1K30hH4QqounAjUeVjEiqal9s2O-oZu0p5CmZYUFc3PyB66BKGVmMf3Lg_rIexeyWyj9Pu-QfwjGyzL0d_x-0EYPjbbFLPB6PbntteS5EPzgwSb6Dyi_Okh8n/s320/ThomasWorthington.jpg" width="228" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Worthington, future governor of Ohio</td></tr>
</tbody></table>St. Clair and his Federalist allies feared the actions of Congress would lead to the creation of a state government covering the whole new eastern district, which would fall under the control of Democratic-Republicans. At the next meeting of the Territorial Assembly in December 1801, the Virginians found themselves out-voted. St. Clair, as historian Donald J. Ratcliffe writes, “bought off some opposition leaders by offering them jobs, appealed to the self-interest of different power centers in the territory, and thereby ensured that the ... assembly would be more amendable to his wishes.” The new Federalist majority in the assembly revived St. Clair’s division plan. The assembly passed a resolution on December 21st that called on Congress to divide the new eastern district into two future states, with the Scioto River as the dividing line. St. Clair and the Federalists were attempting to drive a stake into the fortunes of the Scioto Valley and the ensuing anger in the Virginia Military District quickly boiled over.<br />
<br />
It was this vote that led a mob of settlers to take to the unpaved streets of Chillicothe for two nights, culminating in a doorway confrontation with Governor St. Clair in the halls of a local tavern, where the Governor had taken up temporary residence. On the first evening, Thomas Worthington attempted to restrain the mob’s leader, a young lawyer, Michael Baldwin. The fiery Baldwin was a native of Connecticut, who had familial ties in the American South (his older brother was a US Senator from Georgia). With a letter of recommendation addressed to Nathaniel Massie, Baldwin quickly aligned with the Virginian partisans. To some he was a demagogue of the worst stripe. To his supporters, who he affectionately called his “Bloodhounds,” Baldwin was the champion of the common man. In a confrontation outside one of the town’s taverns, and witnessed by numerous people, Worthington told Baldwin that if he attempted any violence on the Governor that he would “prevent it at the risque of his life, and would go and fetch his weapon, and if said Baldwin went there, he would kill him the first person.” This warning apparently worked, but the following night, Baldwin was again at the head of a drunken and enraged mob and this time he and others forced open the Governor’s door. Jonathan Schieffelin, a St. Clair ally from Wayne County who was boarding with the Governor, pulled out a pair of “loaded pistols and drove them back into the street.”<br />
<br />
The clash between the “Bloodhounds” and the Governor has drawn the attention of a number of historians. Most recently, Andrew Cayton remarked that: “These incidents were not simply some episodes of frontier violence or rowdiness; rather, they were symptomatic of the profound confusion in the Ohio Country over the nature of social relationships and political processes. In the absence of legitimate (meaning widely accepted) authority, all persons or groups were left to assume that role themselves.” While Cayton appears to differentiate the clash in Chillicothe from a simple “episode of frontier violence,” his explanation – the absence of legitimate authority – is one of the primary conditions that helped generate episodes of frontier violence and disorder. The Chillicothe mob was both revolutionary in character – taking place during the so-called “Ohio Revolution,” and the result of conflict rooted in the frontier character of the Scioto Valley.<br />
<br />
The unruly actions of the Chillicothe partisans led the Federalist majority in the Assembly to introduce a measure that would move the territorial capital back to Cincinnati, a town (with its own record of drunkenness, violence, and disorder) that many Federalists nevertheless viewed as more refined, civil, and orderly. Before adjourning, the Federalist majority also succeeded in electing Judge William McMillan of Hamilton County, as the new Congressional delegate. The Chillicothe Junta’s ally, William Henry Harrison, had resigned to become the new governor of the Indiana Territory. McMillan soon left for Washington to lobby Congress to approve St. Clair’s Scioto division. Chillicothe interests held a public meeting and raised money to once again send their own team of lobbyists to the national capital. They chose an unlikely pair, considering recent events.<br />
<br />
Thomas Worthington found himself traveling eastward on horseback along the new Zane’s Trace with the Michael Baldwin at his side. Their mission was to have the new Republican controlled Congress, once again, reject St. Clair’s proposed division and, instead, authorize the calling of a special convention in the recently shrunken North West Territory, to be held at Chillicothe, wherein the inhabitants of the territory would vote on whether to create a state government. If the delegates voted in favor of statehood, Congress would authorize the convention to adopt a state constitution. McMillan did his best, but his arguments in favor of the land division found few supporters in Congress. Meanwhile, back in Ohio, Federalist control of the Territorial Assembly proved short-lived; their attempt at thwarting the interests of the settlers in the Scioto Valley would fail. The Virginia Congressional delegation would champion statehood legislation for an Ohio that would have Chillicothe as its first capital. And they would be victorious.<br />
<br />
Statehood, however, did not bring an end to the county seat wars. As we will see in the next post, speculation in Virginia Military District lands would be the source of conflict in the newly created Highland County. And, this time, rather than the interests and plans of Nathaniel Massie, it would be those of his younger brother, Henry Massie, which lay at the heart of the controversy.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-35648463177493979652009-12-15T14:06:00.004-05:002009-12-15T16:43:22.901-05:00The Adams County Seat Fight<i>What follows is another revised section of the conference paper I presented at the University of Dundee in July 2009. We pick up the story of the role land speculation played in generating frontier lawlessness in the Lower Scioto Valley. The signing of the Greenville Treaty of 1795, opened the era of American settlement in the valley and led to a series of conflicts over the location of seats of government. Here we turn our attention to the county seat fight in Adams County. In future posts, we will examine the dispute over locating the territorial and state capitals in Chillicothe and the Highland County Seat Fight, which culminated in a bloody melee in the streets of New Market. ~ ALF</i><br />
<br />
<br />
Following the Greenville Treaty of 1795, the rapid settlement of Chillicothe and its environs, along with the further settlement of Manchester (Massie’s original town speculation in the Virginia Military District), and the founding of Alexandria at the mouth of the Scioto River, necessitated the creation of local territorial government in the Lower Scioto Valley. With the lands on the eastern side of the Scioto closed to sale by the US Congress, the Scioto Valley was cleaved in half, with settlement and economic development first concentrated on what became known as the “West Side” of the Scioto. Under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the territorial governor had the power to establish the boundaries of new counties and the location of their seats of justice. These executive powers quickly became the source of conflict in the years following the Greenville Treaty.<br />
<b><br />
The Creation of Adams County</b><br />
<br />
In July 1797, Winthrop Sargent, the Territorial Secretary, acting in place of Governor Arthur St. Clair, who was absent the North-West Territory, proclaimed the creation of Adams County, which encompassed much of the eastern section of the Virginia Military District, along with lands on the eastern side of the Scioto. The county included the first three major settlements in the valley – Manchester and Alexandria on the Ohio River and the booming town of Chillicothe to the north. The fortunes of the settlers and speculators of the new Adams county now turned on the establishment of seats of government and locating of new county boundary lines. <br />
<br />
<b>The Adams County Seat Fight: Manchester Partisans versus the Up-River Faction</b><br />
<br />
When creating the county, Sargent also appointed all of the county officials – from the Justices of the Peace, to the clerk of the Court of Common Pleas to the County Sherriff, among other lesser offices. Sargent’s proclamation authorized David Edie, the Sherriff, to choose a temporary seat for the court’s inaugural session in September, after which the Territorial Governor would establish a permanent location. Thus, according to Edie’s order, the first meeting of the court was held in Manchester on 12 September 1797. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj29SJyRQTluM-fN7jFeTrD6cErZczmp22XkMyGqAerDPLaWcZTJ84I-EwvRf0TWuGLEcmzi6AgaIttUliDBCKmsT-kz63UWGaR3_KTxPUYThVuxHibfRvKTO0buB5EV_-4WCk5eBJhKrq4/s1600-h/Adams+County+Seats.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj29SJyRQTluM-fN7jFeTrD6cErZczmp22XkMyGqAerDPLaWcZTJ84I-EwvRf0TWuGLEcmzi6AgaIttUliDBCKmsT-kz63UWGaR3_KTxPUYThVuxHibfRvKTO0buB5EV_-4WCk5eBJhKrq4/s400/Adams+County+Seats.jpg" /></a><br />
</div><br />
<i>Thanks to Google Earth, here's a satelite image of modern day Adams County, with the locations of Adams County's various county seats. West Union became the permanent seat in 1804.</i><br />
<br />
Just prior to this first meeting, Sargent appointed a special commission to select the permanent site. Chosen from the county’s newly appointed officials. Nathaniel Massie (Justice of the Peace and Justice of the Court of Common Pleas), John Beasley (Justice of the Peace and Justice of the Court of Common Pleas), John Belli (Justice of the Peace, Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and County Recorder), and John S. Wills (Prothonotary of the Court of Common Pleas and Clerk to the Court of General Quarter Sessions of the Peace), four of the region’s largest land speculators, were given the authority to select the site, operating under certain restrictions. Sargent expressly forbid the selection of Manchester, Chillicothe, or Alexandria, indicating a preference for a site at or up-river from the mouth of Ohio Brush Creek. Except for Massie, the commissioners were all Federalists. John S. Wills, a lawyer and land speculator who lived in Cincinnati, led the so-called “Up-River” faction. <br />
<br />
<b>The Town of Adamsville</b><br />
<br />
On the 26th of December, 1797, based upon what Sargent described as the “majority” opinion of the special commissioners, he issued a proclamation establishing the permanent seat of justice, up-river from Manchester, at the mouth of Stout’s Run. The town’s official name was Adamsville, but the Manchester faction would call it “Scant,” for the lack of any structural improvements, excepting a hastily constructed log cabin courthouse. Massie and his allies viewed the selection of Adamsville as a transparent attempt to thwart their interests and undermine the influence of Virginians in the Scioto Country. <br />
<br />
When the Court met for the first time in Adamsville, in December 1797, the Massie faction boycotted the meeting. By the June 1798 meeting of the Court, the various Justices of the Peace who favored Manchester had settled upon their strategy; they would introduce a motion to accept offers of land for the erection of a courthouse and jail. Five offers were made and after much debate, a majority of the JPs voted to accept Massie’s offer of one acre of land in Manchester. Thus, a new and broader majority of county officials voted to return and fix the county seat at Manchester.<br />
<br />
<b>Governor St. Clair Intervenes</b><br />
<br />
The fight over Adams county’s seat of government had really only just begun. When news of the Court’s decision reached Governor St. Clair, he was incensed. He quickly wrote a letter to Massie, who had served as the presiding judge during the June meeting. “The power of fixing the places where the courts are to be held in every county is exclusively in the Governor,” explained St. Clair. “It is an exercise of executive authority of which no other person or persons is or are legally capable; and it is important to the people that the places where they have been appointed to be held should not be subject to wanton change.” The capital investments and the hard earned fruits of settlers’ labor -- their larger fortunes -- were at stake. “When the people lay out their money in improving county-towns,” St. Clair continued, “it is in confidence of their stability; and, when the courts are removed from those towns their importance is lost, and the property of the adventurer sinks with it, and it is to them a real breach of public faith.” He accused Massie and other Adams County JPs of “a most unwarrantable assumption of power and contempt of authority by the justices, which might subject them to prosecution.” <br />
<br />
St. Clair charged the Manchester JPs with pursuing their own private interests. “In the situation of a county town a Governor can have no private interest of his own to serve, but,” explained St. Clair, “it is very possible that even a majority of persons who may have been appointed justices may have such interests, and be disposed to prefer them to those of the public at large.”<br />
<br />
<b>The Town of Washington</b><br />
<br />
In September 1798, due to Adamsville’s tendency to flood and a pending lawsuit involving the title to the land upon which the town had been located, St. Clair overruled the Court’s decision in favor of Manchester and ordered the courts to meet at a new location at the mouth of Ohio Brush Creek. There, another new town would be platted on the lands of Noble Grimes, and named Washington. Grimes and his family had immigrated to Ohio from Pennsylvania in 1796. He had purchased title to a thousand acres at the confluence of Brush Creek and the Ohio, and emerged as a leading Federalist and opponent of the Manchester faction. <br />
<br />
Massie and others balked at St. Clair’s orders and their outright defiance led the Governor to strip Massie and another JP, William Goodin, of their judicial commissions in October 1798. St. Clair and Sargent claimed that the two men “had Misdemened themselves in the execution of their office by attempting to disturb the regular administration of Justice by adjourning the sessions of the said Courts ... to meet at Manchester where they had been duly & regularly appointed to be held thereafter at Washington and fixed at that place by a Proclamation of the Governor.” Stripped of his local governmental power, Massie did not give up on his Manchester speculation. He, along with his allies in the VMD, would seek redress in the new Territorial Assembly and, if necessary, from Congress. The issues involved in the struggle over the location of the Adams County seat would be at the heart of the controversy between Republican forces in the VMD and Governor St. Clair and his Federalist allies. <br />
<br />
<b>The First Territorial Assembly and the Clash Over County Boundaries and Seats</b><br />
<br />
The rapid growth in population in southern Ohio led to the creation of the first Territorial Assembly in 1799, through which Nathaniel Massie and other Virginians attempted create new county boundaries and seats of local government. The focus of Virginian interests in Ohio now shifted to the new Territorial Assembly. The election of the first Assembly in 1799 allowed frontier Ohioans to assert local government powers that had previously been claimed by the Territorial Governor. While the governor continued to have the power to create new counties and appoint the locations of their original county seats, the new assembly claimed that they had the power to redraw existing county boundaries and relocate existing county seats. As Andrew R. L. Cayton has argued, the devolution of power to the county officials or to the new Territorial Assembly would “forfeit all the efforts of the Federalist hierarchy to increase the power of the national government in the Northwest Territory.” <br />
<br />
In October 1799, the Assembly, to which Massie had been elected, passed a resolution fixing the Adams county seat at Manchester. St. Clair then vetoed the bill and hatched a plan to divide the territory in such a way that the speculative schemes of Massie and others in the VMD would be forever ruined. Frustrated at the local and territorial levels, the Virginians and their allies would turn to the US Congress to block St. Clair’s plans and thereby advance their own interests.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-19008042214369129112009-10-01T16:04:00.005-04:002009-12-15T13:19:03.429-05:00Nathaniel Massie and the Paint Creek Fight of 1795<i>The story of Nathaniel Massie, which I began in the last post, is picked up here in another excerpt of the paper I presented at the University of Dundee in July 2009. Additional excerpts of this conference paper will be posted in the coming weeks. ~ ALF</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Surveying the lands of the Scioto Valley may have been legal under American law in the spring of 1795, but the Shawnee and others, at the time, did not recognize American surveying rights to these lands. The pan-Indian alliance of Ohio Indians that had recently been defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers had yet to sign a peace and land cession treaty. Leaders of the Indian nations, however, were in council with American Indian commissioners at Ft. Greenville. General Anthony Wayne had proclaimed a truce for the purposes of negotiating a treaty, allowing the representatives of the different parties to travel unmolested to and from Ft. Greenville, the location of the council.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0PPV8Gy_a78NEHB5hd7QH4qYudAp3vwLSnxgCi9stmcGruCa1P4zlSvipIxYwOcewSXKUErk-b85kFN2pn9bQpkKYjBtNxBZ04iAI25rzwR2biuVITMxCDDotCypZtYcX8uTFlTyx8U0D/s1600-h/Paint+Creek+Fight-McDonald-Sketches-p59.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0PPV8Gy_a78NEHB5hd7QH4qYudAp3vwLSnxgCi9stmcGruCa1P4zlSvipIxYwOcewSXKUErk-b85kFN2pn9bQpkKYjBtNxBZ04iAI25rzwR2biuVITMxCDDotCypZtYcX8uTFlTyx8U0D/s400/Paint+Creek+Fight-McDonald-Sketches-p59.jpg" /></a><br />
</div><i>The only known illustration of the Paint Creek Fight was published in John McDonald's</i> Biographical Sketches<i> in 1852.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
In late May of 1795 towards the end of the council, Virginia land speculator Nathaniel Massie led an expedition aimed at surveying lands on Paint Creek, a major tributary of the Scioto River. Massie planned to locate the site for a new town, which would become known as Chillicothe. Massie and his men, however, ran into a band of Shawnee who were camping on Paint Creek, an area that had long been a popular Indian hunting ground.<br />
<br />
Massie and the other leaders of their party decided to attack in a surprise and pre-emptive manner. In their attack, Massie’s party killed a handful of Indians and then pillaged their camp grounds. Massie and his men quickly looted all the Shawnee possessions they could carry and then began a rapid retreat back to Manchester. Once safely back in their stronghold, Massie and others piled their treasure into boats and floated down to Maysville, Kentucky, where they auctioned off $500 worth of booty to the highest bidders in broad daylight. In retaliation for the fight on Paint Creek, the leader of the Shawnee who had been attacked, a man named Pucksekaw – known in English as the Jumper – led warriors into the mountains of western Virginia, where they carried out raids on new settlements, ultimately taking four Americans captive.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3IYl30V9zcSUjK5hRFGHe4DlXHP7MEvZ0sRFUSU1OJFW0HEX90Hwu7nMaGVhKKGkhtpfUwlvsd4oQuksCNKeEUg2ysyEzj8MClE4Bd9a-4BGg7V-NKhmesl2qZmUUJFnlWKQ0nhlxxgVx/s1600-h/Reeves+Crossing-Paint+Creek+Fight+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3IYl30V9zcSUjK5hRFGHe4DlXHP7MEvZ0sRFUSU1OJFW0HEX90Hwu7nMaGVhKKGkhtpfUwlvsd4oQuksCNKeEUg2ysyEzj8MClE4Bd9a-4BGg7V-NKhmesl2qZmUUJFnlWKQ0nhlxxgVx/s400/Reeves+Crossing-Paint+Creek+Fight+copy.jpg" /></a><br />
</div><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">The Paint Creek Fight occurred near Bainbridge, Ohio, at what became known as Reeves' Crossing in Ross County, Ohio.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;"></span>Massie’s attack on Paint Creek and Pucksekaw’s retaliatory raids threatened to derail the peace negotiations that were then underway at Ft. Greenville. Chief Blue Jacket, himself, and a handful of other prominent Shawnee leaders agreed to temporarily leave the negotiations in order to track down Pucksekaw and return him and his captives to Ft. Greenville. Blue Jacket’s efforts were successful; Pucksekaw agreed to bury the hatchet and return his newly acquired captives. Massie, however, had earned the wrath of Arthur St. Clair, who served as the Governor of the North-West Territory. St. Clair considered prosecuting Massie for his actions, but the matter was soon dropped, when St. Clair found it difficult to secure witnesses willing to testify against Massie. With the peace finally secured, Massie’s speculation ultimately paid off; the lands at the confluence of Paint Creek and the Scioto would end up in his hands; his major town speculations would now involve Manchester in the southern region of the Virginia Military District and Chillicothe in the eastern section of the District.<br />
<br />
The new frontier town of Chillicothe, located amidst the ruins of ancient Indian earthworks in a bend of the Scioto River, was on the very eastern edge of the Virginia Military District, surrounded by fertile Scioto River bottomlands, which beckoned American settlers from Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Chillicothe, named after the Shawnee word for their principle town, was also centrally located within the lands ceded by the new Greenville Treaty; Nathaniel Massie’s newest town speculation was quickly perceived far and wide to be the future center of frontier life in Ohio.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-87784657147394211162009-09-07T09:14:00.005-04:002009-09-07T09:42:03.682-04:00Land Speculation and Lawlessness<span style="font-style:italic;">This past July I presented some of my recent research on the history of the Lower Scioto Valley at an international conference, hosted by Dr. Matthew Ward at the University of Dundee in Scotland. The Conference was entitled, “From Borderland to Backcountry: Frontier Communities in Comparative Perspective” and the title of my talk was “Land Speculation, Lawlessness, and the Establishment of Seats of Government in Ohio’s Scioto Country, 1783-1807.” The conference captured the renaissance of international scholarly interest in Ohio Valley frontier history and brought together scholars from as far away as South Africa, Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including three other historians from state universities in Ohio (Cleveland State, Kent State, and Ohio State).<br /><br />I’d like to thank Tim Scheurer, Dean of Arts & Sciences, and Shawnee State University’s Faculty Enrichment Fund Committee for funding the research and presentation. Martin McCallister of the Natural Areas and Preserves Division of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources also deserves special thanks for facilitating a “research” hike to Raven Rock.<br /><br />Below is the introduction to my talk; excerpts from the paper will follow in future posts.<br /><br />~ALF<br /></span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Land Speculation and Lawlessness on the North American Frontier</span><br /><br />In the 1780s and 1790s, in the newly independent United States of America, Virginians possessed long-standing, as well as newly awarded land bounties, issued at various times as compensation for colonial or revolutionary era military service. Virginians looked to the Scioto Valey in south-central Ohio as their Promised Land, where their family’s fortunes were to be made and their independence and liberties secured. Many obstacles, however, stood in their way. First and foremost, the determination of the Shawnee (and other Ohio Indians) to maintain possession of their lands north and west of the Ohio river posed the most immediate hindrance to the designs of Virginia veterans and other land speculators who sought their fortunes in the Scioto Valley.<br /><br />Only the extinguishment of Indian land claims to the region would allow for the legal (though not necessarily orderly) survey, sale, and settlement of the region. In frontier regions, where new administrative boundaries were being run and seats of government located, large land and town speculators, with the backing of yeoman farmers and other urban settlers, sought the powers of local, state, territorial, and national governments to secure their community’s fortunes and forward their own speculative ventures.<br /><br />Land speculation’s role in the development of the American West has long been a subject of debate amongst historians. The western land jobber has been cited as a primary factor in the inequitable distribution of land, which stifled social mobility and frustrated economic development. The speculator, however, has also had his champions, those who view these businessmen as the main drivers of economic development. Still others have argued that large landowners had their speculative schemes frustrated by liberal federal land policies, which ensured that middling settlers could purchase smaller tracts of land at affordable prices and with generous credit options. Historians have been primarily interested in the speculators’ role in the development or frustration of democratic institutions and their role in the emerging national market economy. Although Woody Holton and others recent work has drawn scholarly attention to the role of Virginian land speculation in the Ohio Valley in generating conflict between Indians, colonists, and British officials, greater attention to the role speculation played in generating episodes of frontier violence and lawlessness is needed. Attention to the relationship between frontier speculative ventures and lawlessness suggests that Indian-settler violence, as well as settler-on-settler violence, sprang from a rapidly growing American population’s pursuit of personal gain, which manifested itself in a thirst for cheap, productive land.<br /><br />Speculative ventures, large and small, in the Trans-Appalachian West combined with the weakness of governmental authority on the frontier to generate significant lawlessness and violence, and, paradoxically, the same interests in personal gain also led frontier settlers and eastern speculators to seek the powers of government in order to pass laws protecting and promoting their investments. The high stakes nature of frontier land and town speculations, however, meant that local, state, and national authorities found it difficult to always maintain law and order and restrain conflict to the orderly confines of governing institutions. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9xu7OrmCwycdDZYSCORTOIx7VlFzn3wd_BMLej714ONVamW2p-0x7EUlx0FEkUpdKYRWlJh2SJR3rAw19Jb50mgaA9E6QXs9tYSHVNha73TXJnTYmYd1O3NLbF7iU9w9DsiE0oEYcO8rS/s1600-h/VMD.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 253px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9xu7OrmCwycdDZYSCORTOIx7VlFzn3wd_BMLej714ONVamW2p-0x7EUlx0FEkUpdKYRWlJh2SJR3rAw19Jb50mgaA9E6QXs9tYSHVNha73TXJnTYmYd1O3NLbF7iU9w9DsiE0oEYcO8rS/s400/VMD.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378719864569006626" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Virginia Military District, established in 1784</span><br /><br />Thanks to the influence of Virginians in the Confederation Congress, the veterans of Virginia, along with allied land speculators, succeeded first in securing their prior land claims north of the Ohio River through the creation of the Virginia Military District (VMD) in 1784. The cession of Virginia’s larger land claims in the region and the federally guaranteed reservation of millions of acres of lands in an Ohio VMD unleashed the speculation of thousands of Virginians and generated a new round of lawlessness and disorder. Virginians and their allies would go on to harness the powers of the new federal government to officially extinguish Indian land claims in the region. Federal troops with the assistance of frontier state militia forces defeated the Shawnee and other Indian nations, forcing, at the barrel of a gun, the cession of their lands in southern Ohio. It was then, in the 1790s, that speculation-related struggles over new administrative boundary lines and seats of government began to generate still another stage of lawlessness and disorder in frontier Ohio. <br /><br />Although lawlessness and violence are found in all societies and eras of history, scholars studying the development of the United States have long cited lawlessness and its offspring – violence – as a central characteristic of frontier life. Indeed, a central part of the telling of the story of western settlement has been the violent struggle to establish the supremacy of law and the authority of civil government.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Nathaniel Massie, Pioneer Land Speculator</span><br /><br />Let us start with Nathaniel Massie, the largest land and town speculator in the Virginia Military District. The VMD had been promised to Virginians who had fought in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Virginians had signed up and fought against the British and their Indian allies for various reasons, but one of these was in order to establish land speculations on lands that were still controlled by Ohio Indian nations. Through their representatives, Virginians agreed to give up much of their larger claim to lands in the trans-Appalachian West in exchange for clear titles to claims in the Scioto Country. And they did this at a time when the Indians of the region had not yet ceded these lands to the new United States of America. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcmDqsirTrCX0n2FdOy6sec6UTu2lSqqN2YXwb1AC-FZ4lShqvj9EUpSlEhMCetKUu5y3bjq9U_e1V_HdXnZuKnSBeXw-dblZgfZgSgtlfP1UOwYZnK3Iid4bbB0EzrSriXh9Folr7cBfY/s1600-h/nathanielMassie-chilli-p8002-02.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 329px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcmDqsirTrCX0n2FdOy6sec6UTu2lSqqN2YXwb1AC-FZ4lShqvj9EUpSlEhMCetKUu5y3bjq9U_e1V_HdXnZuKnSBeXw-dblZgfZgSgtlfP1UOwYZnK3Iid4bbB0EzrSriXh9Folr7cBfY/s400/nathanielMassie-chilli-p8002-02.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378718192854054002" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Nathaniel Massie (1763-1813)</span><br /><br />In 1783, at the age of nineteen, Nathaniel Massie set off for Kentucky in search of his fortune. With the assistance of his influential father -- a large slave and plantation owner, Anglican vestryman, captain of the militia, and a Justice of the Peace in Goochland County, Virginia – Massie would eventually secure a clerk’s position in the office of Gen. Richard C. Anderson, the Surveyor-General for Virginia military lands in the Appalachian west. Operating out of the Louisville, Kentucky area, Massie would soon join in the surveying of Virginian lands in the Scioto Valley. <br /> <br />After the 1784 cession, but before the new American government had established peace treaties and land cessions with the Indian nations of Ohio, squatters from Virginia and other eastern states began settling on the northern side of the Ohio River, at the mouths of the various tributaries of the Ohio River. Federal troops were dispatched to ward off the squatters and burn down any of their buildings in an effort to secure peace negotiations with the Shawnee, who still inhabited and claimed the Scioto country as theirs. In 1785, American Indian Commissioners threatened a handful of Shawnee leaders with the “destruction of your women and children” if they would not sign a treaty extinguishing Shawnee land claims in southern Ohio. Moluntha, an aged civil chief, prevailed upon his fellow Shawnee to accept the treaty; in fear of their destruction, they signed what became known as the Treaty of Ft. Finney. Colin Calloway has written that many of the Shawnee “who did not attend the conference were outraged by the terms, scorned those who accepted them, and repudiated the treaty.” A year later, in 1786, after what Americans considered Shawnee violations of the treaty, a militia force from Kentucky crossed the Ohio destroyed Shawnee villages and killed the peaceful Shawnee leader Moluntha. Then, the following year, in June of 1787, acting on intelligence that pointed to an impending Indian raid into Kentucky, three hundred Kentuckians, under the command of Col. Robert Todd, invaded the Scioto Country in search of marauding bands of Shawnee warriors. Todd’s forces briefly engaged a group of Indian warriors on Paint Creek, leading many Indians to evacuate the larger Lower Scioto Valley. <br /><br />Indian resistance to the American settlement of southern Ohio continued; the Ft. Finney peace treaty lay in Moluntha’s grave and a state of war now largely existed between the United States and an alliance of Indians nations who no longer or who had never recognized the legitimacy of the Ohio land cession treaties. <br /> <br />In the wake of Todd’s Campaign, the first official land surveys in the Virginia Military District were completed in the late summer and fall of 1787. At this time, it appears that Massie conducted his first surveys at the confluence of Paint Creek and the Scioto River, the future site of his greatest town-speculation, the city of Chillicothe. In July 1788 Congress suspended the surveying of the VMD over the objections of Virginia’s congressional delegation. The suspension had the backing of New England and New Jersey land speculators, who had invested capital in lands on either side of the VMD – the Symmes Purchase area centered around Cincinnati in the west and the Ohio Associates’ Purchase centered around Marietta in the east. The surveying and sale of lands in the VMD undermined the financial interests of those speculators involved with Symmes and the Ohio Associates, as well as the new Federal Government, which sought much needed revenue in the sale of Western lands. <br /><br />After three years, the surveying suspension was lifted in August 1790. The surveying activities of the Virginians, along with other encroachments on to lands claimed by Ohio Indian nations, would then become the primary cause of Indian attacks on American surveyors and settlers in the late 1780s and early 1790s. The Indian raids involved extreme physical violence, hostage taking, and horse thefts, which, in turn, generated a series of military operations against the Indian inhabitants of the larger Ohio Country. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOoFB3Am_UOK_ikcFUPX_3iVQBjcPdRMM-mMcPObH2PcxYczFnTXaSD7ND263cmx4FPjMGlTsBDTgJXZHgnE_Dxee8axZu3s7qUGO0nXn1tXMa4xaF5gVIaxu_XdQ77F1jNpWejvIoqhKK/s1600-h/View+from+Raven+Rock.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOoFB3Am_UOK_ikcFUPX_3iVQBjcPdRMM-mMcPObH2PcxYczFnTXaSD7ND263cmx4FPjMGlTsBDTgJXZHgnE_Dxee8axZu3s7qUGO0nXn1tXMa4xaF5gVIaxu_XdQ77F1jNpWejvIoqhKK/s400/View+from+Raven+Rock.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378715572418279042" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">View from Raven Rock, Scioto County, Ohio (June 2009</span>)<br /><br />In March 1790, four months before Congress re-opened the VMD, a band of Shawnee and Cherokee warriors set up camp near the mouth of the Scioto River. From their lookout atop Raven Rock on the West Side of the Scioto’s mouth, the warriors could look up and down the Ohio River for a dozen miles. The vantage point gave the Indian warriors time to set up ambushes at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers. Much property was taken and numerous men, women, and children were killed or taken captive (some accounts place the number over 100). <br /> <br />In response to these and other “provocations” in the larger Northwest Territory, the Washington administration would order federal military operations against the Indians of the Northwest Territory in the 1790s. The first major campaign launched against the Ohio Indians by the new federal government was aimed at eliminating the Indian threat in the Scioto Valley and at its mouth, to ensure the safety of American settlers headed to Ohio and Kentucky and beyond, down into the Mississippi Valley. In April 1790, in a largely forgotten campaign, Secretary of War Henry Knox authorized a military operation against the Indians at the mouth of the Scioto. Led by Gen. Josiah Harmar, the first Federal campaign into the Scioto Country did not lead to any great victory or defeat. By the time US forces arrived in the Scioto Valley, the Indian warriors had abandoned their position and retreated from the area.<br /> <br />Attacks at the Mouth of the Scioto appear to have stopped following Harmar’s Scioto Campaign, thus clearing the way for Virginia surveyors and speculators to enter the VMD. In April 1791, a group of immigrants, drawn largely from Kentucky, established the first American settlement in the VMD. The settlement, planned and organized by Nathaniel Massie, originally entailed a stockade and was known as Massie’s Station. Under what they believed to be the constant threat of Indian attack, Massie and his associates launched clandestine surveying parties deep into the Scioto Valley. As more settlers arrived, Massie would survey lots and plat a town; nearby lands would be cleared for farming. Massie’s Station would become the town of Manchester.<br /><br />While Massie and his assistants surveyed the VMD, a confederation of Indian nations fought a series of battles with the forces of the US Army and regional state militiamen. The culmination of this fighting came in 1794 at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, where American forces under the command of General Anthony Wayne defeated the Indian alliance. Many of the future settlers of the Scioto Country saw service in these campaigns and when the peace had been secured they and thousands of others from Virginia and other eastern states descended upon the Scioto Valley like a host of locusts.<br /><br />Some Virginians, however couldn’t wait for the treaty to be negotiated and signed. In their minds, after Fallen Timbers, all that was left undone was the legal rigmarole of a peace treaty council. Much of the best lands in the VMD had not yet been surveyed. Future town sites had not yet been platted. During the lengthy council, which was held at Ft. Greenville in western Ohio, all sides in the conflict had proclaimed a truce. The peace process, however, was nearly derailed when Virginian surveyors led by Nathaniel Massie violated this truce.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-56209082706665007962008-12-20T15:55:00.013-05:002009-05-15T20:33:33.375-04:00Flora and Fauna<span style="font-weight:bold;">The Impact of American Settlement on the Ecosystem of the Lower Scioto Valley </span><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">This past May the <a href="http://www.heartwood.org/">Heartwood Forest Council</a> invited me to address their annual meeting, which was held at Camp Oyo in the Shawnee State Forest. Cheryl Carpenter, the founder of <a href="http://www.voicesfortheforest.org/">Voices for the Forest</a>, a local organization dedicated to protecting the health of the Shawnee State Forest, helped organize the event and suggested that I speak on some aspect of local environmental history. What follows is an essay based on my Forest Council talk, a first stab of sorts into the environmental history of the Lower Scioto River Valley. Its focus concerns the impact of American settlement on the flora and fauna of the region. <br /><br />Today, when one visits the Shawnee State Forest and hikes along its ridges and through its hollows, one can easily imagine they have stepped back in time to an era when southern Ohio was still home to the Shawnee and other Ohio Indians. The sounds of modern American civilization fall away until all that you are left with are the sounds of the forest -- the song birds, the bugs, the rustling of the underbrush by a nearby deer, the call of a wild turkey, the wind through the trees, the water gurgling over rocks, the sound of the occasional tree limb falling. This visual and aural illusion is fleeting as it is eventually shattered when a plane flies across the sky, or when a truck drives by on one of the forest’s many roads, or when one comes across the scarred land of a recent clear cut. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6EJMf7LgXpYt7jOz5PG_sYzzgLij1vm27eUjR0PFUiddyVPNs8D0A6E6CRfI2QCNVyNLLY6iyX6hP4Pi_rNdsGZaa8wRUnlRdv4VMMTE4LEg5m1szF4a9TWF0lgrZmRzreqrTp8z9RAlw/s1600-h/Shawnee+State+Forest+Day+Trail.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6EJMf7LgXpYt7jOz5PG_sYzzgLij1vm27eUjR0PFUiddyVPNs8D0A6E6CRfI2QCNVyNLLY6iyX6hP4Pi_rNdsGZaa8wRUnlRdv4VMMTE4LEg5m1szF4a9TWF0lgrZmRzreqrTp8z9RAlw/s400/Shawnee+State+Forest+Day+Trail.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5281992405513077106" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Crossing a dry run on the Shawnee State Forest Day Hike Trail (August 2008</span>) <br /><br />The illusion is not only fleeting, it can leave the hiker with a false sense of what the sounds and sights of the region’s forests would have actually been like at the dawn of nineteenth century. There is no recovery of the old original growth forest; the forest has forever changed; the flora and fauna of its ecosystem has irreversibly been transformed. Even in the most remote sections of the forest, where this illusion can be its strongest, the sights and sounds are now different from what they would have been in the 1790s.<br /><br />So what has changed? What has been lost? What impact did American settlement have on the animal and plant species of the Lower Scioto River Valley?</span> ~ ALF<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The rapid American settlement of the Valley</span> at the beginning of the nineteenth century inaugurated a new chapter in the region’s natural history. The flora and fauna of the Scioto would never be the same. Farming, tanning enterprises, and charcoal-fired industries would destroy the largely virgin forests of the valley, forever altering the habitat of the region’s animals. Some species would be extirpated as nuisances, others would be over-hunted until they disappeared from the Valley, and in some cases, such as with the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon, until there were no more to be found anywhere. The American settlement of the Scioto Valley would lead to massive deforestation and contribute to the extirpation and extinction of a number of animal species.<br /><br />The forests of the 18th century and before swarmed with wild life and left its first American visitors in awe. James B. Finley, one the first settlers in the valley in the late 1790s recalled his first trip into the Scioto Country:<br /><blockquote>It would be impossible for me to describe the beauty of these rich bottoms. The soil itself for richness was not exceeded by any in the world. The lofty sugar [maple]-tree, spreading its beautiful branches; the graceful elm, waving its tall head, the monarch of the forest; the black and white walnut; the giant oak, the tall hickory; the cherry and hackberry; the spicewood, with its fragrance; the pawpaw, with its luscious fruit; the wild plum; the rich clusters of grapes, which, hanging from the massy vines, festooned the forest; and, beneath all, the wild rye, green as a wheat-field, mixed with the prairie and buffalo clover — all formed a garden of nature most enchanting to behold. The clear and beautiful rivulet creeping through the grass, and softly rippling over pebbly bottoms, the gentle zephyrs [breezes] freighted with nature's incense, pure and sweet, regaled our senses, and filled us with delight. All nature had a voice which spoke most impressively to the soul; and while all the senses were pervaded with an unutterable delight, the solemn stillness seemed to say, God reigns here. The song of the lark and nightingale, the melancholy wail of the dove [passenger pigeon] or whistle of the whippoorwill, the low hum of the bee, the chirping of the grasshopper, the bark of the squirrel, the drumming of the pheasant, the bleat of the fawn, the growl of the bear, the hoot of the owl, the howl of the wolf, the scream of the panther, and the yell of the Indian, were all that broke the silence in this deep and beautiful forest.</blockquote><br /><br />The reign of God, like the reign of the Shawnee and other Indians, however, was coming to an end. Within a generation, man, more particularly, Homo Americanus, let’s call him, would claim dominion over the valley and its flora and fauna. The animal species that would soon disappear included some of those mentioned by Finley, such as the passenger pigeon, white-tailed deer, wolf, black bear, and panther. But others he failed to mention would also be extirpated, such as the American Bison and the Carolina Parakeet.<br /><br />The bottomlands of the river, for instance, that were once populated with massive, hundred or more year old sycamores, would be cleared for the planting of corn. While sycamores can still be found along the edges of the Scioto, the Ohio, and the smaller tributaries of the region, such as Turkey Creek, the ancient giants are gone.<br /><br />One traveler who passed through the Valley in 1807 noted the following in their journal: “The river meanders through an extensive alluvial bottom of the richest quality of land. In the low, inundated bottoms, the timber is mostly cottonwood [or more commonly known as poplar] and sycamore, some of them very large; in the high bottoms, black walnut, ash, and sugar maple prevail, with pawpaw.” This last reference, that of the pawpaw to which James Finley also referred, is to a North American tree of the custard apple family, with purple flowers and edible oblong yellow fruit with a sweet pulp. Pawpaw, which can still be found in the Shawnee State Forest, was once found in large thickets along the banks of the Scioto and the Ohio – at one point in time a massive thicket lined the river, where Portsmouth now stands.<br /><br />Another traveler, who visited the Scioto Valley just after the War of 1812, nearly twenty years after the first American settlers began clearing the land, noted remnants of the ancient forest and experienced the same sense of time travel that hikers can experience even today: <br /><br /><blockquote>… in the rich bottoms [the trees] sometimes exhibit a grand assemblage of gigantic beings, which carry the imagination back to other times, before the foot of a white man had touched the American shore. Yesterday I measured a walnut tree almost seven feet diameter, clean and straight as an arrow; and just by were rotting, side by side, two sycamores of nearly equal dimensions. The sycamore grows in bottoms [that frequently flood], to an unwieldy bulk; but the white oak is the glory of the upland forest. .... [The oaks] have rarely an opportunity of swelling out to a large diameter, owning to their crowded growth. They are, for the same reason, very lofty, straight, and clear in their stems; sometimes eighty or ninety feet without a branch. I measured a white oak, by the road side, which, at four feet from the ground, was six feet in diameter, and at seventy five feet measured nine feet round, or three feet in diameter.</blockquote><br /><br />The thinning of the sycamore is believed to have contributed to extirpation of the Carolina Parakeet. <br /><br />Considered the largest deciduous tree species in North America, the sycamore was the source of food and nesting for a species of birds that once populated the Valley, but is no more. The Carolina Parakeet once called the Scioto Valley home. Amongst the stone pipes unearthed in the Tremper Mound, which is located near the mouth of the Scioto, on the West Side, were pipes depicting the green-bodied, yellowed-headed parakeet. When Fortescue Cuming visited Portsmouth in 1808, he noted large flocks of the birds, which “when they alight on a tree, they are not distinguishable from the foliage, from their colour.” <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhsE9e4UBu9MTtLDtpiF9IMW1-P7Fbk0aldu-82E_caAix2ITeEPPWXpXwhHsjKvvmtKK6y5eEjJeMNOMps5_brpPzOkbIB3cKTh9DXTlBHwWurQuMBuJKJeLkzyM2AR4nXxJk13Vn3Y2x/s1600-h/Sycamore+Shore.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhsE9e4UBu9MTtLDtpiF9IMW1-P7Fbk0aldu-82E_caAix2ITeEPPWXpXwhHsjKvvmtKK6y5eEjJeMNOMps5_brpPzOkbIB3cKTh9DXTlBHwWurQuMBuJKJeLkzyM2AR4nXxJk13Vn3Y2x/s400/Sycamore+Shore.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5281986869681383346" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">A sycamore reflected in the waters of Wolfden Lake, Shawnee State Forest (November 2008).</span><br /><br />The giant sycamores, many of which had been hollowed out by decay were favorite nesting and roosting sites for the Carolina Parakeet. A single, large tree cavity would be the home of numerous birds. The sycamore also provided one of the bird’s favorite foods before the arrival of the Americans. The seed balls of the sycamore, along with the seeds of the cocklebur were a primary source of food for the bird. With the arrival of the Americans, however, the parakeets developed a fondness for apple and pear seeds, which were found in abundance in the newly planted orchards of the Americans. To the great consternation of the new settlers, the birds would destroy the fruit in order to get to the seeds; a flock of parakeets could wipe out a whole season’s fruit crop in little time. The birds also appear to have devoured corn, particularly when it had been cut with its stalks and stacked in piles, a common practice of the region’s cattle farmers. The decline of the parakeet coincided with the destruction of sycamore of the ancient forest, but the spread of cocklebur (a weed that flourished in newly cleared land) may have made up for the loss of sycamore seed balls.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkGGsbYNh2gpdjXEokpKiaDYF13sDL01UQVwPfVwuHHynCEaGEFsZUpCZ0Eka9ebE4I4Pxa7w5BddjgAOL_mlYeT1r4WuK7e57g7vs_1tUKRWlWWjpwrJKinzRXOhlWzfy_qQa4dFW2RiE/s1600-h/Carolina+Parakeet.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 328px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkGGsbYNh2gpdjXEokpKiaDYF13sDL01UQVwPfVwuHHynCEaGEFsZUpCZ0Eka9ebE4I4Pxa7w5BddjgAOL_mlYeT1r4WuK7e57g7vs_1tUKRWlWWjpwrJKinzRXOhlWzfy_qQa4dFW2RiE/s400/Carolina+Parakeet.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5281988953279165874" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Audubon's painting of the Carolina Parakeet</span><br /><br />The thinning of sycamores had its greatest impact on the destruction of roosting and nesting sites. One theory about the destruction of roosting and nesting sites includes a role for European honeybees, which moved westward in advance of American settlements. The bees themselves may have displaced the parakeets by taking over hollow trees. Then when the Americans arrived they sought out these hollowed out trees, chopping them down in search of honeycomb. While habitat destruction clearly played a role in the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet, the birds were also hunted, but unlike the passenger pigeon, which was hunted for food and for which there was significant market demand, the parakeet because of its smaller size and its less tasty meat, and its appetite for apples, was hunted as a nuisance, simply exterminated.<br />John James Audubon, the great American naturalist and artist, noted in 1831 that:<br /><br /><blockquote>The parrot does not satisfy itself with Cockle-burs, but eats or destroys almost every kind of fruit indiscriminately, and on this account is always an unwelcome visitor to the planter, the farmer, or the gardener. The stacks of grain put up in the field are resorted to by flocks of these birds, which frequently cover them so entirely, that they present to the eye the same effect as if a brilliantly colored carpet had been thrown over them. The cling around the whole stack, pull out the straws, and destroy twice as much of the grain as would suffice to satisfy their hunger. They assail the Pear and Apple-trees when the fruit is yet very small and far from being ripe, and this merely for the sake of the seeds. As on the stalks of corn, they alight on the Apple-trees of our orchards, or the Pear-trees in the gardens, in great numbers; and, as if through mere mischief, pluck off the fruits, open them up to the core, and, disappointed at the sight of the seeds, which are yet soft and of a milky consistence, drop the apple or pear, and pluck another, passing from branch to branch, until the trees, which were before so promising, are left completely stripped, like the ship water-logged and abandoned by its crew, floating on the yet agitated waves, after the tempest has ceased. They visit Mulberries, Pecan-nuts, Grapes, and even the seeds of the Dog-wood, before they are ripe, and on all commit similar depredations. The Maize alone never attracts their notice.<br /><br />…. The parakeets are destroyed in great numbers, for whilst busily engaged in plucking off the fruits or tearing the grain from the stacks, the husbandman approaches them with perfect ease, and commits great slaughter among them. All the survivors rise, shriek, fly round for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The gun is kept a work; eight or ten, or even twenty, are killed at every discharge. The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies screaming as loud as ever, but still return to the stack to be shot at, until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of ammunition. I have seen several hundreds destroyed in this manner in the course of a few hours, and have procured a basketful of these birds at a few shots, in order to make choice of good specimens for drawing the figures by which this species is represented in the plate now under your consideration.</blockquote><br /><br />Audubon also sounded the first alarm about the birds impending demise:<br /><blockquote>Our Parakeets are very rapidly diminishing in number; and in some districts, where twenty-five years ago they were plentiful, scarcely any are now to be seen. …. At the present day, very few are to be found higher [in the Ohio Valley] than Cincinnati….</blockquote><br /><br />By the mid-nineteenth century, records indicate that the Carolina Parakeet was only to be found in large numbers in the swamps of Florida. The last of the wild parakeets are believed to have died in the 1920s. One expert on the Carolina Parakeet put it mildly that “the lack of a general sentiment in pioneer society for their protection may have been their downfall.”<br /><br />Hunting by Americans in the region has also been blamed for the extinction of the passenger pigeon, whose massive flocks once darkened the sky of the valley. In 1813, Audubon recorded an account of a massive migration of passenger pigeons flying south from Ohio across the river into Kentucky:<br /><br /><blockquote>I observed the Pigeons flying from north-east to south-west, in greater numbers than I thought I had ever seen them before, and feeling an inclination to count the flocks that might pass within the reach of my eye in one hour, I dismounted, seated myself on an eminence, and began to mark with my pencil, making a dot for every flock that passed. In a short time finding the task which I had, undertaken impracticable, as the birds poured in in countless multitudes, I rose, and counting the dots then put down, found that 163 had been made in twenty-one minutes. I traveled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.</blockquote><br /><br />Audubon estimated the numbers in the billions. By sampling and measuring the size of this mile-wide flock and the three-day duration of its flow, Audubon concluded that there had been “One billion, one hundred and fifteen millions, one hundred and thirty-six thousand” pigeons flying overhead. The flocks darkened the sky, as if there was an eclipse. <br /><br />Audubon’s writings (as well as his painting) of the passenger pigeon are quite well known, especially his description of their multitudes. However, if one reads further in Audubon’s account of this incredible migration, we can gain some insight into the eventual extinction of the passenger pigeon.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuE5Nxkei94I0JEFYH2Cju4hmJG2pRqXP5HhvJSMf4FVrOWg93NPNU_1SUpfzHdSeuWxQ6ncnnIoCtWIM75oM3XZureZVMeVdJ9iqIUhAhua2gIDQSRX2oSCQnXW0VfrSu3Q3vzAdCUwxb/s1600-h/Passenger+Pigeon.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 237px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuE5Nxkei94I0JEFYH2Cju4hmJG2pRqXP5HhvJSMf4FVrOWg93NPNU_1SUpfzHdSeuWxQ6ncnnIoCtWIM75oM3XZureZVMeVdJ9iqIUhAhua2gIDQSRX2oSCQnXW0VfrSu3Q3vzAdCUwxb/s400/Passenger+Pigeon.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5281990019396305506" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Audubon's painting of the Passenger Pigeon</span><br /><br />After commenting upon their shear number of pigeons flying overhead, Audubon wrote that:<br /><br /><blockquote>The people were all in arms. The banks of the Ohio were crowded with men and boys, incessantly shooting at the pilgrims, which there flew lower as they passed the river. Multitudes were thus destroyed. For a week or more, the population fed on no other flesh than that of Pigeons, and talked of nothing but Pigeons.</blockquote><br /><br />Audubon believed that it would not be the mass slaughter of the birds, but rather the destruction of the forest that would cause the demise of the passenger pigeon, whose range was from Canada to the Gulf Coast, with the Ohio valley (and the Scioto in particular) as its center. In the end, it was both. The pigeon’s habitat was largely destroyed in the 19th century; while their numbers were severely diminished through large scale, over-hunting. By the start of the 20th century, the passenger pigeon was on the brink of extinction. And within a decade it would be extinct, with the last wild pigeon being shot near the banks of the Scioto River in Pike County.<br /><br />The destruction of the forest in the Lower Scioto Valley would pick up rapidly with the advent of the industrial revolution, as charcoal-fired furnaces were constructed to manufacture, first salt, and then pig iron. Steamboats plying the Ohio, and later railroad locomotives would also consume hundreds of thousands cords of timber. The regions furnaces and steam engines would not covert to coal until the region’s forests had been depleted – the earliest transition to coal began in the Scioto Valley in the second decade of the nineteenth century and the transition would not be complete until the 1870s.<br /><br />The first manufacturing industry in the valley centered on the production of salt. On Salt Creek, a tributary of the Scioto, which flows south westerly from Jackson County to its confluence with the Scioto in Pike County, Native Americans were the first to boil the saline water for salt production. It was here that Daniel Boone, when taken hostage by the Shawnee, helped manufacture salt in the 1780s. The manufacture of salt would become closely tied to another industry – the meat packing industry. The basis for both of these industries is ultimately agriculture. Farmers in the valley found it profitable to convert much of their grain production into the flesh of animals, which could be driven to the market place or packed in barrels and shipped down river.<br /><br />Prior to the development of refrigeration technologies, meat was preserved in salt. The by-products of meat-packing became the raw materials for other manufacturing establishments – lard-oil, soap, candles, glue, and other chemical compounds. The hides of the cattle were converted into leather, which was then used in the shoe and harness manufacturing industry. An auxiliary tanning industry also developed, which further impacted the forest, as tanners sought tannic acid in the region’s tree bark.<br /><br />During the period of greatest production at the Scioto Salt Works, from 1806 to 1808, there were twenty furnaces in operation. These made an average of from fifty to seventy bushels of salt per week. If they were working at capacity – 70 bushels of salt per week – each furnace would have had to boil 46,200 gallons of brine. The furnaces were fired by the combustion of charcoal, which was made from the timber surrounding the various furnaces. Around 1814, the state of Ohio began offering subsidies to salt manufacturers who would use coal, rather than wood to fire their furnaces. The use of coal at the Scioto Salt Works is believed to mark the first application of coal in industry in America and can be cited as one of the beginnings of coal mining in Appalachia.<br /><br />The second decade of the nineteenth century – the 1810s – also witnessed the first construction of charcoal-fired iron furnaces in the Scioto Valley, and more precisely in Adams County, where iron ore was first discovered in the woods that now adjoin Shawnee State Forest. In the 1820s and 1830s, iron production shifted eastward into Scioto and Lawrence counties, to the area now partially protected by the Wayne National Forest.<br /><br />A skilled collier, working for one of the region’s furnaces, could turn a cord of wood into forty bushels of charcoal. And it took some four hundred bushels of charcoal (roughly 10 cords of wood) to produce one ton of pig iron. In essence one acre of timber could produce enough energy to process 4 tons of pig iron. The annual consumption of timber per furnace ranged from 50 and 200 acres. “At various times there were from fifty-seven to seventy blast furnaces in southern Ohio with an annual capacity of 142,000 tons of iron.” If the region’s furnaces operated at capacity that would translate into the destruction of some 35,500 of acres of timber per year, at the height of production. Although such a large amount of acreage was probably never consumed a year, even with a conservative estimate of 16,000 acres per year (or 25 square miles of forest), the pre-coal-fired iron industry in Southern Ohio took an immense toll on the Old Growth forests of the region. Consider the size of Shawnee State Forest today, which has over 60,000 acres, which equals about 94 square miles. With my conservative estimate, it would have taken just under four years to clear the present size of the Shawnee State Forest.<br /><br />The destruction of the forest, combined with over-hunting, also took its toll on the American Bison and white-tail deer of the valley. The extirpation of the Buffalo, of which there were relatively small herds east of the Mississippi compared to those in the West, was completed by 1830. The last killed in Pennsylvania was in 1801, the last in Louisiana in 1803, the last in Illinois and Ohio in 1808; the last sightings in Kentucky came in 1820, in Tennessee in 1823, and in western Virginia in 1825; the last Buffalo in Indiana was shot down by a hunter in 1830. Records suggest that the overwhelming bulk of the eastern herds had been destroyed by the year 1800. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2T5aoycA67Oq10uDQ7IHRLzlcz362rshXRSaqHaqdcabZSJAAb7pmjlAOazbSelhLFwM0psZUNF53SDZpuU2JZ96KMWzNw5d1CyYxH8IxoCJqDb6TbmC7aHntUh4RSoxaHZrTkDiTow4r/s1600-h/Eastern+Bison.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 296px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2T5aoycA67Oq10uDQ7IHRLzlcz362rshXRSaqHaqdcabZSJAAb7pmjlAOazbSelhLFwM0psZUNF53SDZpuU2JZ96KMWzNw5d1CyYxH8IxoCJqDb6TbmC7aHntUh4RSoxaHZrTkDiTow4r/s400/Eastern+Bison.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5281991498753884210" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">An American Bison herd in Kentucky</span><br /><br />The last Buffalo shot in the Scioto Valley was killed by Phillip Salladay in Green Township in southeastern Scioto County around the year 1801. According to local legend, Phillip and his son were hunting on Pine Creek when they came across a solitary buffalo. Phillip took the first shot, which only wounded the animal. The bison turned and charged straight at them. “As the boy was getting his rifle ready to shoot, the father snatched it from him, and killed the buffalo.” The general consensus among scholars who have studied the demise of the Bison east of the Mississippi, its extirpation was the result of over-hunting and the “destruction of their habitat destroyed their range.” <br /><br />The over-hunting of white-tailed deer and black bear began even before the settlement of Americans in the Scioto Valley. One reason the Shawnee and other eastern Indians had re-turned to the region in the early 1700s was because of the depletion of deer and other game in the East. Indian hunters traded deer and bearskins for European and American manufactured goods. Over-hunting, however, truly began to decimate these animal populations in the Scioto Valley only after American settlement had begun. In the memoirs and journals of the early pioneers, bear meat was a choice meal; bear bacon was used like cash. Their hides also brought in good money. According to one record, between 1805 and 1807, more than 8,000 bearskins were shipped to eastern markets from the Tri-State Region of Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Many a hollowed-out sycamore and other trees were felled to get at the bears. The shooting of bears accomplished two purposes – it provided much needed meat in early years of settlement, before cattle and swine had come to supply the needs of the settlers, and it removed what many saw as a dangerous wild neighbor.<br /><br />Deer meat was also a regular staple of the early pioneers and continued for decades to be a source of nutrition in the backwoods of the valley. But, as the forests were cut down, destroying their range and the abundant mast – the acorns and other nuts – that the deer relied upon, their numbers began to dwindle. Considering the large numbers of deer that currently inhabit the Valley (and Shawnee State Forest, in particular), it may be surprising for some to learn that the White-Tailed Deer was actually hunted into oblivion by the dawn of the twentieth-century. According to a local historian writing at about this time:<br /><br /><blockquote>The whitetailed deer was the last of the big game in Scioto County. They were killed in numbers, as late as the [eighteen] seventies in the region drained by Twin Creek [in what could be described as the heart of the modern-day Shawnee State Forest]. Some were killed in the [eighteen] eighties, but by this time, they were quite scarce. The last deer, killed in Scioto County, was killed on Turkey Creek about 1895.</blockquote> <br /><br />Turkey Creek, as many of my readers may know, is the creek that runs alongside State Route 125 and feeds Shawnee State Park’s two major lakes – Roosevelt Lake and Turkey Creek Lake.<br /><br />Just as the deer have returned to the valley and Shawnee State Forest, so have the coyotes that had once been hunted to extirpation. Coyotes that once preyed on the deer and other smaller animals were seen as a great nuisance to the early American settlers of the region. They killed cattle and swine and generated fears over the safety of young children. County governments, such as that of Scioto County, even had bounties for their scalps. The last recorded bounty of $1 was paid out for a scalp in Scioto County in 1831.<br /><br />So what are we to take away from these chapters in the environmental history of the Lower Scioto Valley? The forest was a critical part of a very delicate ecosystem. The return of the forest has helped bring about the return of certain species. But, others like the Carolina Parakeet and the Passenger Pigeon are gone forever. Once lost, somethings can never be restored.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-20711142355650486252008-10-21T15:11:00.005-04:002008-10-21T15:40:30.023-04:00Lower Scioto Valley History Website Launched<a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Lower_Scioto_Valley_History/Welcome.html">Lower Scioto Valley History: Shawnee State University’s Local History Workshop</a> is now on-line. This new website is meant to encourage the study and preservation of local history. I’d like to thank those who helped fund and support the creation of this on-line resource. First, thanks go to Jerry Holt, the former Dean of Arts and Sciences, and Jim Miller, the long-serving chair of the Social Sciences Department at Shawnee State. It was Jerry and Jim who first supported the development of a local and oral history curriculum. With their support I was able to attend the Ohio Humanities Council’s annual Oral History Institute at Kenyon College. Then with the support of two grants from the Ohio Board of Regents’ catalystOhio initiative and the ongoing support of the Department of Social Sciences I and my students were able to conduct oral history interviews and develop other primary source material for the website. Dr. Stylianos Hadjiyannis and Dr. Michael Barnhart, who also received grant money for the project, contributed their know-how in helping me design and develop the website.<br /><br />The website has oral history interviews, image and map scrapbooks, an archive of primary research documents, and a list of related website links. The interviews include the latest recordings, which focus on the Norfolk and Western Railway Strike of 1978. Earlier interviews focusing on the shoe, steel, and nuclear industries are also available. <br /><br />In the scrapbook section, highlights from the Harald Daub Collection are also now available. The Daub Collection consists of clippings from the personal scrapbooks of former City Councilman Harald Daub. These highlights focus on Daub’s election in 1979, the controversy surrounding a proposed downtown mall for Portsmouth, and city council’s attempt to fire City Manager Barry Feldman. More highlights covering the successful campaign to recall Daub and other councilmen will be added in the near future. Thanks are due Harald Daub for allowing the presentation of these highlights. <br /><br />In addition to the scrapbook section of the website, the digital archive section includes copies of historically significant letters, manuscripts, and government documents. As with the rest of the website, new content will be added in the future. Currently, there are only a handful of documents on-line; one of which, known as the “Sears Letter,” dates back to 1981 and involves the proposed downtown mall.<br /><br />The current controversy over the re-use of the old downtown Marting’s Department Store building for new city offices has marked a return to local politics for Harald Daub. His recent Ohio Election Commission complaint against the Marting’s supporters for false advertising, has generated letters to the editor of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Portsmouth Daily Times</span> that have rehashed Daub’s roll in the Feldman/Mall Controversy of 1980. Did Daub and his supporters kill the mall project, as one recent letter writer claimed? Are they to blame?, as Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce President Michael Gampp suggested in a recent fund raising letter for their pro-Marting’s city building plan. “Our City has been paralyzed for almost thirty years by a group of individuals who wish to use threats and intimidation as tools to further their agenda and silence anyone with a different opinion.” According to Gampp, “During this time our City has, at best, stagnated and in many ways, deteriorated. Recalls, mudslinging and personal attacks have not helped our situation.”<br /><br />The economic woes of Portsmouth since the 1970s have been the primary cause of political upheaval and in-fighting among the city’s residents. Systemic changes in the economy, nation-wide and across the globe, brought de-industrialization to the Ohio valley and Portsmouth like many other river cities has been devastated economically. Blame for the decline has become central to understanding local politics. All parties in the current controversy want what they believe is best for the town, but both sides fix the responsibility of the decline on the other. To some outside observers these divisions have come to be seen as one of the greatest hurdles to reviving the city. A struggle for control of local government and the future of the city is underway and this struggle has its origins in the Feldman/Mall Controversy of 1980.<br /><br />Highlights from the Daub Collection help shed light on this area of Portsmouth history; although an incomplete record, it is hoped that other documents related to these controversies will be preserved for history’s sake. The scrapbook section of the website is open to submissions from the public. If you have letters, newspaper clippings, or other documents that you’d like to add to a scrapbook, whether on the 1980s Feldman/Mall Controversy, the current quarrel over the Marting’s building, or any other historical event in Portsmouth’s past please consider submitting it for inclusion. <br /><br />These digital scrapbooks are modeled on the legendary Portsmouth scrapbooks created by Henry A. Lorberg at the turn of the 20th century. The original Lorberg Scrapbooks can be examined in the <a href="http://www.portsmouth.lib.oh.us/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6&Itemid=8">Local History Department of the Portsmouth Public Library</a>. The new Lower Scioto Scrapbooks are meant to replicate this incredible local history resource, but do it through the latest computer technology. During the 1890s and first decades of the twentieth century Henry Lorberg went door-to-door collecting items for his scrapbooks. His multi-volume collection of photos, news-clippings, and other ephemera offers an amazing window into the past. Hopefully, these new digital scrapbooks will help open another window through which we all can come to a better understanding of how we got to where we are today.<br /><br />With Lorberg's method in mind, the Lower Scioto Valley History website accepts submissions from the public. Again, I encourage you, if you have an item -- photograph or other type of document of local or regional interest that captures the past or present -- please consider having it placed in one of the project scrapbooks. To make a contribution, e-mail a digital copy of your item or send a query to me at afeight at shawnee.edu. Free scanning of documents or images is available following a consultation. When submitting an item, please include text for a caption, explaining (if possible) the who, what, where, and when about the submitted item.<br /><br />Thanks for reading. Feedback on the new website is welcomed, as well.<br /><br />To visit the new website click ---> <a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Lower_Scioto_Valley_History/Welcome.html">Lower Scioto Valley History</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-453245361366341412008-10-08T09:15:00.002-04:002008-10-08T13:49:32.142-04:00The Great-Great-Great-Grandfather of a President?<span style="font-weight:bold;">Barack Obama’s American Roots Are Traced to the Lower Scioto Valley</span><br /><br /><br />Just days before the announcement that US Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic Party Presidential Nominee, would be campaigning in Portsmouth, Ohio, news began circulating of Obama’s ancestral roots leading back to the Scioto River Valley. On October 5th, the <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://blog.cleveland.com/openers/2008/10/kin.html">Cleveland Plain Dealer</a></span> published the fullest account yet. They quote another Scioto Valley notable, current Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, as saying: "Ohio's supposed to be the mother of presidents. Wouldn't it be interesting if we were the great-great-great-grandfather of a president?"<br /><br />Obama’s earliest direct ancestor in Ohio is a man named Joseph Kearney, who immigrated from Moneygall, Ireland to Ross County in 1849. Members of the Kearney family, however, had been in Ross County as early as 1805, when Joseph’s uncle, Thomas Kearney and his young family had moved from Baltimore, Maryland. Thomas Kearney had earlier left Ireland, sometime in the late 1780s, and had established himself as a master carpenter in his new American hometown. He married a Virginian from nearby Fairfax County in 1791 in a Baltimore Methodist Church. <br /><br />Exactly how is not yet clear, but by 1805, if not before, Thomas Kearney had come into possession of lands in Ohio’s Virginia Military District. Kearney accompanied a flood of migrants who settled in the valley during the first decade of the nineteenth century. The rapidly growing Ross county town of Chillicothe was not only the seat of the county, it was the seat of the newly created state government of Ohio. Before Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland came to overshadow Chillicothe, this town was the locus of wealth, power, and land speculation in Ohio. Chillicothe to the north and Portsmouth to the south were the axis upon which the region spun and in the early 1800s the valley experienced rapid economic development.<br /><br />Details of Thomas Kearney’s life in the Scioto Valley are meager, but he appears to have thrived and his success encouraged his brothers and nephews to leave Ireland in a chain of migration that lasted over fifty-years. Thomas would be followed by his brothers and their children in the 1830s and 1840s. One of those nephews, Joseph would have a son named Fulmoth Kearney, and it is through him that a direct link extends to Barack Obama’s mother.<br /><br />What led Joseph Kearney to immigrate directly to the Scioto Valley in 1849? It was the death of his brother, Francis, in early February 1848. Francis, another nephew of Thomas Kearney, had died in Pickaway County, on his property near the Ross County line. In his Last Will and Testament, Francis gave his Ross County lands on the North Fork of Paint Creek to his brother Joseph and his sons. Joseph appears to have left Ireland nearly as soon as he had received word of his inheritance. Joseph arrived in Ross County in 1849 and his son, Fulmoth, followed a year later in March of 1850. <br /><br />Fulmoth married Charlotte Holloway, a native of Ross County, whose family had also been among the earliest settlers in the Valley. Fulmoth and Charlotte would later move to Indiana, where Fulmoth died in 1878. Their daughter, Mary Ann Kearney married Jacob W. Dunham, the great-grand-father of Ann Dunham, who it turns out was the mother of Barack Obama.<br /><br />Roger Kearney, the self-appointed Kearney family genealogist in Ohio, first discovered the Obama connection after reading a sketch of Obama’s genealogy in a newspaper article. The article mentioned that Obama’s mother’s ancestry in America went back to a man named Fulmoth Kearney. It turned out that Roger Kearney recognized the name Fulmoth, as one he had in his database. Working with Ancestry.com, Roger was able to firmly establish the link to Obama and trace it all the way back to Ireland, where the genealogical research continues.<br /><br />That Barack Obama’s American roots are to be found in the Lower Scioto Valley is a testament to the region’s significance in the history of our nation. In a region with a rich history associated with the heroic undertakings of the Underground Railroad, it seems only appropriate that America’s first African-American (or African-Irish-American) presidential nominee would have ancestors who came to this valley in pursuit of their happiness and their very own American dreams.<br /><br />This Thursday, October 9th, at 5:30 PM, Shawnee State University will host Senator Obama, where, on the Alumni Green, he will give a speech to a crowd of students, faculty, staff, and members of the surrounding community. The following day, he will campaign in Chillicothe, in Ross County, the original destination of his Irish ancestors who came here in the early 1800s. Welcome home, Senator Obama. Welcome to the Lower Scioto Valley.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-87407876233199981762008-05-03T13:22:00.002-04:002008-05-03T13:27:00.805-04:00Remembering the Norfolk & Western Strike of 1978Thirty years ago this coming July, the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (BRAC), after more than a year and a half of negotiations, called a company-wide strike against the Norfolk & Western Railway. In Portsmouth, BRAC members were joined by other union railroad workers who refused to cross picket lines, bringing the N&W yard and repair shops in the city to a virtual standstill. As the N&W's management implemented their strike contingency plans, the trains would start moving again – salaried N&W officials and non-union workers would attempt to keep the railway in operation in an effort to break the strike. <br /><br />The N&W in 1978 was one of the few American rail companies operating with a large profit. As the ninth largest railroad in the nation, the N&W operated 7,000 miles of track, connecting 14 states and Canada, with the bulk of its business (40% of its annual revenue) being the transportation of coal from the mines of East Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio. The N&W also did significant business with US automakers in Detroit, running nearly forty special "run-through" trains that bypassed many regular stops. Portsmouth was home to one of the largest locomotive and car repair shops of the N&W because of its central location on the main N&W line, which connected the south east coast and the coal fields of southern Appalachia to Chicago and Detroit.<br /> <br />N&W's success in a time of woe for many other railroads has been attributed to increasing demand for coal in the early 1970s, as well as the leadership of John P. Fishwick, who became President and CEO of the company in 1970. Fishwick, along with Southern Pacific and the Southern Railway, pioneered the introduction of computers to help schedule its labor crew and its fleet of trains. Fishwick's computerization efforts, which contributed to his general policy of cutting employment levels, was believed by many Wall Street analysts to be the secret to his success. In 1971, after his first year on the job, N&W posted a $68 million profit. Between 1971 and 1978, N&W cut its payroll by nearly 15 percent and increased by a third their gross tonnage shipped per man-hour. In 1977, a year before the strike, N&W posted a profit of $103 million.<br /> <br />Fishwick's cost-cutting efforts, particularly in the area of computerization and job cuts, while posting significant profits, set off a series of conflicts with the various railroad unions. At a time of record high inflation and with clerks being especially impacted by the job cuts accompanying computerization, BRAC began demanding significant pay raises and expanded job security clauses in their contract.<br /> <br />By 1978, N&W's Fishwick was willing to risk a strike in order to block BRAC's demands. He had good reason to believe N&W could weather any such work stoppage. The railroad industry had organized to deal with the costs and disturbances of strikes. The Association of American Railroads had created the National Railway Labor Conference (NRLC), a coalition of 74 railroad companies, which set up a strike insurance program known as the Services Interruption Policies, which gave N&W access to an $800,000 a day mutual aid fund; the program also provided for the "interchanging" of equipment, employees, and services, including freight contracts. Fishwick's computerization efforts had also included the creation of a non-contract supervisory employee database, which could be used during a work stoppage to make job assignments across the whole N&W operation.<br /> <br />In effort to counter the assistance of the NRLC's mutual aid pact, BRAC began setting up secondary picket lines at a handful of sites that were providing "interchange" assistance to N&W. Members of other railroad unions respected the BRAC picket lines, both the primary ones at N&W yards, as well as at non-N&W yards. The railroad companies, at first, succeeded in obtaining temporary federal court injunctions shutting down these secondary pickets.<br /><br />These secondary pickets had threatened to turn the strike against the N&W into a nationwide strike against all 74 members of the NRLC.<br /> <br />From the start of the N&W strike the companies appeared to be largely successful in blocking the secondary picketing through court injunctions until the 26th of September, when U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger vacated the injunctions against BRAC, ruling that the union had a right to carry out secondary actions against members of the NRLC under the Railway Labor Act. Interestingly, unlike the National Labor Relations Act, which governs industries other than the rails, the Railway Labor Act allows for secondary strike actions in cases where the primary company is receiving significant assistance that unfairly enables the primary company to resist the effects of the primary strike.<br /><br />Chief Justice Burger's ruling led to a virtual nationwide walkout by the 235,000 member clerks' union. BRAC locals struck 74 rail lines in 42 states, "idling up to 350,000 of the nation's half a million rail workers, stranding thousands of commuters and millions of tons of freight." <br /><br />At the time of the strike, US railroads carried about 47% of the nation's freight. With N&W heavily involved in the transport of coal from the coalfields of Appalachia, coal operators began laying off miners in July; when the strike went national at the end of September, General Motors laid off 6,700 workers; Ford furloughed 550 employees and warned that they may need to lay off 100,000 workers if the strike was not settled within days. The strike also impacted the shipment of farm produce in the Midwest, whose farmers were shipping their fall harvest of soybeans, corn, and other grains from elevator terminals. Over 100,000 commuters in Chicago were also left stranded. Some 26,000 Amtrak riders were left without service.<br /><br />As BRAC pickets began shutting down rail traffic throughout the nation, the Carter Administration stepped up their efforts to bring BRAC and N&W to an agreement that would end the strike. On the 27th of September 1978, Labor Secretary Ray Marshall hosted negotiations at the Department's headquarters in Washington, D.C., giving the two sides twenty-four hours "to resolve the dispute without government intervention." The <span style="font-style:italic;">Washington Post</span> would report: "the talks continued through the night with only a short dinner break; the negotiators remained at loggerheads as the noon deadline approached, prompting a last-minute personal mediating attempt by Marshall. By 1:30 p.m., the labor secretary had to concede defeat. He reported that the National Mediation Board, which handles railway and airline labor problems, was recommending creation of an emergency board, a move that automatically triggers the 60-day 'cooling-off' period."<br /><br />With the deadline past and the National Mediation Board's recommendation in hand, President Carter invoked emergency provisions of the Railway Labor Act, which enables the president to order strikers back to work for a 60-day "cooling-off" period, during which time all parties were to participate in federally mediated negotiations. If, after such time the two sides were still unable to reach an agreement, the union would be free to re-launch its strike.<br /><br />In the past, the rare invocation of emergency powers had generally been done at the last minute to avert a strike, not in the midst of one to force workers back to their jobs. Whether the president had the power to shut down a strike already legally underway had not been firmly established by the federal courts. At his press conference, when he announced the appointment of an emergency mediation board, Carter made it clear that he was willing to immediately take the issue before the federal courts if BRAC refused to end its strike.<br /><br />Even though the administration would most likely succeed in such a court battle, and a defeat for the union could prove incredibly costly to the Brotherhood, BRAC President Fred Kroll at first refused to obey Carter's order. Not wanting to test the President's authority, but fearing retaliation against members of his union, Kroll refused to order his members back to work until a federal judge inserted a provision barring the railroad companies from retaliating against the striking workers in his court order demanding an end to the strike.<br /><br />For BRAC, as a whole, the strike was a success. Fearing their destruction at the hands of Fishwick and the NRLC, the union survived and gained significant concessions in the final federally mediated contract. Locally, however, in Portsmouth, where striking workers had derailed and looted a train and where a company official had been severely injured, the strike has at times been seen as a failure. In the wake of the strike, N&W would close the repair shops and hundreds of jobs would be lost. After twenty-plus years, the successor to N&W, the Norfolk Southern Railroad, announced this past year their plans for refurbishing and re-opening the Portsmouth Car Repair Shop. <br /><br />With the thirtieth anniversary of the 1978 strike approaching, there is no better time than now to record the history associated with these local events that played such an important part in the larger national story of the transformation of the American railroad industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Local history is its most revealing and of greatest significance when understood in a larger, national context. The N&W Strike of 1978 is not only important local history; it is important to understanding American history.<br /><br />In the coming year, students at Shawnee State University, under my direction, will conduct oral history interviews with local residents involved in the strike, from both sides of the conflict. The interviews will become part of an on-going project entitled <span style="font-style:italic;">Life & Labor: Oral Histories from Portsmouth, Ohio</span> , and will be made available to the public via the internet.<br /><br /> If you or someone you know participated in the strike, whether as a striker or as management, and are interested in being interviewed, please contact Dr. Andrew Lee Feight by phone at 740-351-3143, by e-mail at afeight@shawnee.edu, or by mail at the Department of Social Sciences, Shawnee State University, 940 Second Street, Portsmouth, OH 45662.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-66532501060082272012008-03-13T14:38:00.006-04:002008-03-13T15:13:29.041-04:00"Follow the Money": A History of the Marting's Scandal<span style="font-style:italic;">Now that Portsmouth City Council is once again considering renovating the old Marting’s Department Store Building to house offices for city government, it seems only appropriate that we recall the origins of one of Portsmouth’s greatest scandals.<br /><br />In April 2006, I wrote the following, “History of the Marting’s Scandal,” for a special election newspaper published by the Concerned Citizens Group of Portsmouth and Scioto County. Slightly revised to bring the piece up-to-date, this essay, from what I’ve been told, helped defeat city council’s first attempt to renovate the Marting’s building.<br /> - ALF</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">James A. Mueller's Failed Hostile Takeover of Martings</span><br /><br />During the unraveling of the Watergate conspiracy, Woodward and Bernstein’s notorious informant, known as “Deep Throat,” told the Washington Post reporters to “Follow the money.” In the case of Portsmouth’s Marting’s Scandal, which involves the City’s purchase of a downtown department store building for $2 million, such advice also proves helpful. The revelations of secret, illegal meetings and crooked backroom deals designed to bail out a failing business, fund a private real estate development, and prop up the value of downtown properties with city taxpayer money has awakened a municipal reform movement aimed at righting the wrongs that originated in and were revealed by the illegal Marting’s deal. <br /><br />The story begins in January 1996, when James A. Mueller, the president of the Marting Brothers Company, attempted a hostile takeover of the company with plans to liquidate its assets when he gained a controlling share of the company’s stock. Available records from the Marting’s Company indicate that Mueller’s aggressive stock purchases began in November 1991, when he already owned 666 shares. Over the next year and a half Mueller purchased 596 shares at an average price of $41 each. In February 1994, Mueller stepped up his purchases, buying 400 shares for $48 a share from Suzanne Duis Carico, and the following year, in early May 1995, he bought 926 shares from the Horr family of Portsmouth (which included the shares owned by former Marting’s president David A. Horr). The Horrs apparently drove a hard bargain, for Mueller ended up paying them $92,600 for the holdings, which amounted to $100 a share. <br /><br />According to one account, Mueller’s hostile take-over was blocked by the aging Richard D. Marting, the largest stock owner, who possessed 26% of the company stock. Marting reportedly refused to sell any of his shares to Mueller. A special, secret meeting of the company’s Board of Directors was called (without notice given to Mueller). At this meeting, it was decided that the Board would fire Mueller and attempt a restructuring of the company to guard against any future attempted hostile takeover and liquidation. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Creation of the Richard D. Marting Foundation</span><br /><br />By 1996, the department store’s profits were in serious decline; after overhead and taxes, the company had made a profit of only $7,315 during 1995. Marting’s officials would later claim that “in 1996, it became apparent to the company’s management that a downtown retail department store in a city experiencing economic reverses and population decline could no longer continue to operate at a profit.” Mueller’s liquidation made sense, but the prospects of Marting’s shareholders receiving anything near the $100 a share that Mueller had paid the Horr’s was not a likely prospect. The Marting’s Board hired local attorney C. Clayton Johnson to design a new corporate structure for Marting Brothers. At the suggestion of Johnson, the company moved to buy back all 10,000 shares of outstanding stock, which had been privately sold, traded, and inherited largely within the local Portsmouth community. Once the stock had been purchased, the plan called for the company to transfer all of the stock to a new entity, a non-profit corporation, which would be named the Richard D. Marting Foundation. <br />The problem for Marting’s directors, however, was that the company did not have the capital to buy back the stock. Mueller had paid the Horrs $100 a share and he would take no less in return. Thus, valued at $100 a share, the company needed $1 million to accomplish the scheme of Clayton Johnson, which would mean more cash to the stockholders than any liquidation could have ever paid out. To raise the buyout money, Marting’s applied for a loan at the local branch of Bank One, where, it turns out, Clayton Johnson also served on the bank’s Board of Directors. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Rittenhouse's Original Appraisal</span><br /><br />Before Bank One would loan Marting Brothers the $1 million, however, they needed an appraisal of the company’s properties, which would be used as collateral for the loan. While it is unclear who exactly recommended the appraisal company, records indicate that it was someone at Bank One who suggested the services of a small, new appraisal company in Hillsboro, Ohio, Rittenhouse and Associates, which in late May 1996, valued the property at $2,386,000. <br /><br />With this appraisal, Bank One then loaned Marting Brothers $1,150,000; the extra $150,000 was obtained to apparently help finance the day-to-day operations of the faltering department store. Richard Marting received the lion’s share of the loan money, some $289,500 for his 2,895 shares; Jim Mueller walked away with $258,800; a Robert G. Matthias, the next largest share owner, who may have been on the verge of selling out to Mueller, sold back his 1,061 shares for $106,100. The remaining 3,456 shares were held by some thirty-three other stockholders, including board members Julia Smith Wisniewski, Gerald R. Jenkins, and Randal Arnett. Although the exact holdings of these officers are not known, their payoffs may have averaged about $10,473 each. <br /><br />As planned, all of the outstanding stock was transferred to the new Richard D. Marting Foundation in late July 1996, which, it turned out, now had the same board members as the Marting Brothers Company, except now Clayton Johnson had been appointed a regular voting member of the Foundation’s board of directors. The Marting Brothers Company became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Foundation, which existed primarily as a front for Johnson and his associates, who have acknowledged that the Foundation had conducted no financial dealings from the day they took over ownership of the department store in the summer of 1996 until the spring of 2001, when the Foundation began making plans for the sale of the Marting’s property to the city. <br /><br />By the end of the summer of 1996, the Marting’s board appointed Larry Leiter to serve as company president and oversee the daily operations of the department store. Later that fall, Leiter and Marting Brothers secured another loan of $150,000 from the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership (SOGP), an organization of which Leiter was also a member, along with other Marting’s Board of Directors, including Clayton Johnson. The SOGP loan was used by Marting’s to pay back the $150,000 that Bank One had loaned, on top of the $1 million, back in the summer of 1996. <br /><br />In March of 1997, when Johnson joined the Board of Directors of Oak Hill Banks, the Marting Brothers Company authorized the refinancing of their Bank One loans with Oak Hill Banks, in Jackson County. When interviewed by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (BCII), Johnson “stated he accepted a position on the Board of Directors of Oak Hill Bank after Bank One left the area and retired from the board on December 31, 2002.” Annual Reports published by Oak Hill, however, state that Johnson joined the Oak Hill board in March of 1997, the very same month that the Marting’s debt was refinanced by Oak Hill. <br /><br />In the spring of 2001, the directors of Marting’s, according to the statements of Clayton Johnson, “decided to liquidate when they realized that their current assets were no longer sufficient to cover the liabilities of the Marting Brothers Company.” And just how much money did the Marting Company owe in the spring of 2001? Records indicate that the company owed approximately $480,000 to Oak Hill Banks and to the SOGP, corporations in which, it should be reiterated, Clayton Johnson also served as a director. Thus, in the spring of 2001, Marting’s officials began looking for a way to close the store and sell off their property in order to liquidate their debts. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Plan is Hatched: Martings and the “Solove-Hatcher Development"</span><br /><br />By mid-August 2001, if not before, Clayton Johnson and Larry Leiter began informal and secret talks with Portsmouth Mayor Greg Bauer about the possible purchase of the Marting’s department store for use as a “new” city hall. These discussions about the sale of the building to the city took place in the context of another real estate development deal. In memos to the City Council, Mayor Bauer referred to this other real estate deal as the “Solove-Hatcher Development.” This development was to be christened the Portsmouth City Center, the long-dreamed of downtown strip mall. According to Bauer’s memos, which were obtained by means of Ohio Sunshine Laws, the attorney working on the Solove- Hatcher Development was none other than Clayton Johnson. <br /><br />In a memo dated 20 August 2001, Mayor Bauer wrote to City Council: “On Wednesday, August 15, 2001 I met with the architects and engineering firms that will work on the Preliminary Site Studies for the Portsmouth City Center. Also in attendance were Jerry Solove and Neal Hatcher. . . . . As some council members are aware, there is interest from a local retailer [Marting’s] to have a new store in the proposed city center.” On 31 August 2001, eleven days after sending the first memo to City Council, which broached the subject of Marting’s leaving their old home on Chillicothe Street for what would be a much smaller space in the new Solove-Hatcher shopping center, Mayor Bauer fired off another memo, proposing that the city purchase the old Marting Department store properties. After considering the estimated costs of renting space for a new city building and the cost of building a new structure for city offices, Mayor Bauer told the City Council that he “seriously questions whether the city can afford either.” He then went on to note that “A less costly idea [for new city offices] could be that the city works out a deal with Marting's to purchase their building and they move into a new store in the Solove project.” <br /><br />For reasons that remain unclear, in the fall of 2001, while the Solove-Hatcher Development appeared to be moving forward and preliminary talks with Mayor Bauer had taken place, Larry Leiter, the president of Marting’s, approached American Savings Bank (ASB) to see about refinancing the company’s debt. Leiter told state investigators that “The Board of Directors wanted to switch to a different lender and discussed American Savings Bank for two reasons, a member of the [Marting’s] board was an ex-president [at ASB] and it was a local bank.” This Marting’s board member was Gerald R. Jenkins, who was not simply an ex-president of American Savings Bank. Jenkins, at the time, was a member of the ASB Board of Directors and was the second largest owner of stock in the bank, just a few thousand shares less than ASB’s current President Bob Smith. Jenkins had served as president of the bank since 1983 and had retired from his executive position in only 1998; he continues to serve on the Board of Directors of ASB, having recently been reelected to another term. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">John Kizer's Appraisal</span><br /><br />When Leiter applied for the loan, he also gave ASB a copy of the old Rittenhouse appraisal from 1996. However, bank officials refused to use the pre-existing appraisal, not because it was outdated, but because, as Bob Smith reportedly claimed, “there did not seem to be any real information in the Rittenhouse appraisal.” So, ASB hired John Kizer to do a new appraisal. Kizer was an experienced local and licensed commercial real estate appraiser. At first, Kizer was told by ASB that the appraisal was needed in support of a loan application, but he was later told that there was an interested buyer. Kizer believed the unidentified buyer was another regional department store chain, but the buyer may have been the City of Portsmouth. <br />According to his BCII interview, sometime in the late fall or early winter of 2001, Kizer contacted Larry Leiter to arrange for an inspection of the Marting property, and when they met, Leiter gave him a copy of the well-worn Rittenhouse appraisal, which had valued the property at $2,386,000. Kizer told the BCII investigators: “I saw the figure and told him if this is the kind of value you are expecting I might as well stop right now and save my time and your money because there is no conceivable way this property is worth that kind of money in downtown Portsmouth.” According to Kizer, “LEITER agreed saying; Oh no, we know it is ridiculous, all we want to know is what we can sell it for to a prime buyer.” Kizer completed his appraisal on 27 December 2001 and turned it in to ASB’s President, Bob Smith, who then passed it on to Marting’s officials. Kizer’s appraisal had come in at $762,000, about $1.6 million less than the original Rittenhouse appraisal. <br /><br />Kizer told state investigators that ASB’s president Bob Smith related to him that when Clayton Johnson had been told of Kizer’s numbers he had gone “berserk.” Smith, according to a BCII report, then allowed Marting’s to withdraw its application “rather than being formally turned down for the loan.” To keep the Kizer appraisal from becoming public, Marting’s then purchased the appraisal from American Savings Bank. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Violating the City Charter and Ohio's Sunshine Laws</span><br /><br />At the next meeting of the Marting’s Board of Directors in January or early February 2002, they voted to move forward with their plan to shut down the store and liquidate their assets, specifically authorizing Clayton Johnson and President Larry Leiter to formally negotiate the sale of the Marting’s properties to the City of Portsmouth. Thus, at some point in January or February 2002, discussions between Mayor Bauer, Clayton Johnson, and Larry Leiter resulted in the scheduling of a round-robin meeting with City Council members at the law office of Johnson, along with a tour of the Marting’s properties.<br /><br />City Clerk Jo Ann Aeh helped schedule the meetings so that no more than three council members at a time met together with Johnson. As Jim Kalb, City Council President, later acknowledged in a sworn deposition, the Sunshine Laws’ requirement that any meeting of more than three council members must be announced in advance and be open to the public “was on everybody’s mind.” When Kalb was asked whether “one of the purposes of doing it three and three [was so that their meeting with Johnson would] not . . . be construed as having a meeting,” Kalb answered: “I would say.” First Ward Councilwoman Ann Sydnor told state investigators that it was her recollection that it was Johnson who “suggested meeting with three City Council members at a time.” <br /><br />Scioto County Common Pleas Court Judge William Marshall would later rule in Mollette v. Portsmouth City Council that this secret round-robin meeting violated both the City Charter and Ohio’s Open Meetings Act. The secret and illegal meeting with Johnson took place in either late February or early March 2002. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Ken Rase's Over-Valued Appraisal</span><br /><br />Although Council members’ memories of this meeting are vague at best, Councilwoman Sydnor has claimed that during her tour of the building she “was afforded the opportunity to see the Rittenhouse appraisal but was not given a copy.” Sydnor told state investigators that “she did not pay much attention to this appraisal as it was ‘their’ appraisal and not the City’s but did look at the bottom line of 2.4 million and felt this amount was too high.” From the depositions of Council members, it appears that soon after this meeting both the Marting Brothers Company and city officials agreed that each party to the sale would obtain their own appraisal and then establish the price for the properties by splitting any difference in valuations. Thus, with the consent of members of City Council, but without a formal authorization made during a public meeting, Mayor Bauer, with Neal Hatcher working as an intermediary, hired Ken Rase, another local real estate appraiser, even though he was not licensed to appraise commercial structures with a value over $1 million. In fact, when first contacted about doing the appraisal, Rase turned down the job, claiming he was unqualified. However, he later changed his mind and agreed to perform the appraisal for Mayor Bauer. <br /><br />According to John Kizer’s statements made to state investigators, Rase contacted Kizer about helping him do the appraisal. Kizer claimed that he turned down Rase’s request for assistance and advised Rase against performing the appraisal. But Kizer never divulged to Rase that he had carried out his own appraisal of the property just three months earlier. Although Rase took the job, he never actually carried out an independent appraisal. According to Portsmouth Police Chief Charles Horner, either Mayor Bauer or someone working in his office provided Rase a copy of the 1996 Rittenhouse appraisal. The Rase appraisal of the Marting’s property consisted of nothing more than a review and revision of the Rittenhouse appraisal of 1996. <br /><br />While Rase may have never known of Kiser’s earlier appraisal, there is reason to believe that Mayor Bauer knew about its existence at the time of the purchase negotiations. In Ann Sydnor’s BCII interview, she claimed that when “she received the appraisal by KEN RACE [sic], she asked the Mayor why JOHN KIZER had not done the appraisal and was told KIZER was busy at the time.” While not conclusive evidence that Bauer lied to Sydnor in order to cover-up his knowledge of Kizer’s earlier appraisal, Bauer’s explanation does point to the fact that Rase was seen as an odd choice for an appraiser. Sydnor’s surprise, she explained, was the result of her familiarity with Kizer during her employment at Civic Savings Bank, which had employed Kizer for “a lot of their appraisals.” She told state investigators that “she knew [Kizer] was qualified and highly thought of professionally.”<br /><br />While awaiting the submission of Rase’s appraisal, Mayor Bauer moved forward with arranging the financing of the purchase. He contacted the city’s municipal bond agent and requested that they work up a debt service schedule for $2.3 million. On March 26th, 2002, Ken Rase turned his appraisal in to Mayor Bauer’s office. Rase had valued the property at $1,850,000, which was $536,000 less than the original Rittenhouse appraisal and over $1.1 million more than the Kiser appraisal. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Rittenhouse's Second Appraisal</span><br /><br />Meanwhile, in March, Clayton Johnson was busy filing paperwork with Ohio’s Secretary of State to obtain “a certificate of continued existence” for the Marting Foundation, whose incorporation papers were set to expire in June. Johnson was also busy tracking down John V. Rittenhouse, who made the original 1996 appraisal, to have his firm carry out a new valuation. Rittenhouse, however, would serve only as the supervising appraiser, overseeing the work of Laura A. Hannahs, who personally inspected the Marting’s properties on 12 March 2002. Hannahs appraised the property at $2,469,000, which was $83,000 more than the original Rittenhouse appraisal. <br /><br />By early April 2002, Mayor Bauer, with the secret consent of City Council, had hired a Cincinnati firm known as PFB Architects, Inc. to inspect the Marting’s property and develop a cost estimate for its renovation into a new city building. Michael A. Finn of PFB subcontracted with Thermatech Engineering and together they inspected the properties on 10 April 2002. Seven days later, Bauer sent a memo to City Council informing them that PFB had provided a preliminary estimate of the renovation costs, which he quoted as being between $1.75 and $2.63 million. Bauer pushed City Council to take action on the deal, suggesting that Council needed to pass the necessary legislation to authorize the purchase because “Marting’s will announce the liquidation Wednesday of next week and it would soften the negative impact on the area if we could adopt the resolution and prepare a joint press release announcing our plans to turn the Marting’s building into a new city hall.” <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Sealing the Deal in City Council's Secret Session</span><br /><br />On 22 April 2002, at the start of the next regularly scheduled meeting of Council, members entered into a secret executive session, during which they met with Marting’s officials for over an hour. When Council returned to the public meeting, they added a new item, ordinance #53, to the agenda, which authorized the mayor to negotiate the purchase of properties belonging to the Marting Brothers Company. Council declared the ordinance an emergency measure and suspended the City Charter’s requirement of three separate readings. Upon the motion of Howard Baughman, the ordinance was amended “by changing the amount” that the Foundation would return to the city in grants “from $150,000 to $200,000.” There was no debate and the amendments and ordinance passed unanimously.<br /><br />The City and Marting’s had their press release ready. Written with the help of Sallie Schisler, the wife of Municipal Judge and former City Solicitor Richard Schisler, the press release quoted Council president James Kalb as if the agreement had already been negotiated and signed. Kalb stated: “This agreement makes the best of a challenging situation. It is always difficult when a business which has served our community for over one hundred years has to close.” Mayor Bauer is quoted as having said: “these are very difficult times economically, and being able to utilize the Marting’s property is very important to the future growth of Portsmouth.” <br /><br />Julia Smith Wisniewski, heir to the Smith’s Pharmacy fortune and the Chairperson of the Marting Brothers Company, as well as of the Richard D. Marting Foundation, explained the origins of the foundation: “We asked our legal counsel to design a corporate structure which would assure that no person could profit from the liquidation of Marting’s. We were determined to keep the store open as long as possible, and thus also requested a structure which would not require a return on investment to shareholders.” According to the press release, “Substantially all of the $1,999,900 purchase price paid for the real estate will be held by the Foundation as a public trust dedicated by its charter to economic betterment for the Portsmouth area.” The press release then quotes Council President Kalb as stating that “due to the unique structure of Marting’s and its nonprofit ownership, the purchase is a ‘win-win’ situation because all of the purchase money will be put right back into the city’s efforts to improve the economy through the vehicle of the Richard D. Marting Foundation for economic betterment.” <br /><br />Wisniewski closed out the press release with a misleading claim: “while we are all saddened by the loss of a Portsmouth fixture and the closure of our company, we are pleased that we have been able to transform a negative into a positive by allowing the city government to achieve substantial economies in finding much needed facilities for housing local government.” Wisniewski’s claim that the city was achieving “substantial economies” – in other words, saving lots of tax payer money – was a bold claim considering Marting’s officials knew very well just how much the $2 million price tag for the Marting building had been inflated. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Kalb's $200,000 Kickback</span><br /><br />While some on City Council may not have known about the Kizer appraisal, they went along with paying the $2 million to prop up property values in downtown. As James Kalb admitted in an interview with the Portsmouth Free Press, Bauer and the City Council negotiated a $200,000 kickback for the city. Kalb claimed that when he asked whether Marting’s would sell the building for $1.5 million he was told by the others involved in the deal: “Uhh, no . . . you know we really can't . . . uh . . . we don't want to lower the property values down town that much and everything.” Kalb explained the kickback straightforwardly. The city, he stated, “could pay the $2 million for [the Marting Building], which keeps the property values up, you know, I guess, is what they were telling me and ... uh ... they [the Marting Foundation] would return $200,000 to us after the sale, which [meant] they got their price out of it; we got our money back.” <br /><br />Council members knew the price of the Marting’s properties was inflated, but perhaps not how much it had been overvalued. Nevertheless, Mayor Bauer and City Council members Jim Kalb, Howard Baughman, Carol Caudill, Barbara Halcomb, Ann Sydnor, and Ray Pyles, as well as Clay Johnson and other officials at Marting’s were willing to take tax money from the city and use it to inflate the value of property in downtown Portsmouth. <br /><br />The joint press release broke the news of the deal, though none of the backroom shenanigans. We now know the deal had nearly been fully negotiated by mid-April in the days just before City Council officially authorized the Mayor to enter into negotiations. Before the deal could be signed, however, Council wanted to have the final report and renovation cost estimates back from PFB Architects. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Mayor Bauer, PFB Architects, and Estimating the Costs of Renovation</span><br /><br />On Monday, 13 May 2002, the Mayor received by fax the much anticipated PFB report in draft form. Although the Executive Summary segment of the draft report estimated the renovation costs, depending upon which option the City chose, as falling between $2.5 and $3.9 million, the draft documents in the general report listed total costs ranging from $2.2 to $4.5 million. Such renovation costs would make the total cost of moving the city offices into the Marting’s building between $4.2 and $6.5 million. These estimates, however, did not include the cost of asbestos removal, which was later discovered during an environmental hazards inspection. <br /><br />The total costs, as outlined in the PFB report, turned out to be quite similar to the estimated costs of building a new structure for city offices, which Bauer had reported to Council in a memo back in August of 2001. Bauer, when writing in favor of the possibility of purchasing Marting’s, stated that the city could not afford the estimated $6.3 million that a newly constructed building would cost. <br /><br />On the evening of the 13th of May, City Council held their only public discussion of the Marting’s purchase, during the Conference portion of their meeting. Mayor Bauer submitted the formal request to have City Council pass an ordinance authorizing him to officially enter into a purchase agreement “in an amount not to exceed $1,999,990.” No official minutes of this “conference” meeting were kept by the City Clerk, and the only record that exists to document Council’s decision to authorize the preparation of legislation that would give Mayor Bauer the authority to sign the purchase agreement is a copy of the formal letter Bauer submitted to Council requesting the passage of an ordinance. This letter, which has notes recorded on it by City Clerk Jo Ann Aeh, indicates that Council voted 5 to 0 in favor of preparing the necessary legislation. With this virtually clandestine vote secured, all that was left was a formal vote on the ordinance at the next Council Meeting, which was scheduled for the 29th of May. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Infamous 29th of May</span><br /><br />The 29th of May 2002 is a day that should live in infamy in Portsmouth’s history. At 2:00PM that day the board members of the Marting Foundation – Clayton Johnson, Julia Smith Wisniewski, Gerald R. Jenkins, Roy B. Payne, Jr., and Randal Arnett – gathered together at the law offices of Johnson & Oliver to hold an official meeting, at which they authorized the acceptance of the proceeds obtained by the Marting Brothers Company in the sale of its properties. The official minutes state that “the Foundation shall accept transfer from the The Marting Brothers Company of net proceeds of sale of Marting’s real estate by way of ‘up stream transfer’ from the wholly owned subsidiary corporation of the Foundation.” The directors voted to kick back $200,000 to the city in grants and then pay off all the debts of the Marting Brothers Company; the remainder was to be invested in Neal Hatcher’s Portsmouth City Center shopping strip project. The Foundation Minutes state: “It was resolved that the Foundation specifically ratify its action and decision to commit 100% of its assets to an equity position in the Portsmouth City Center Shopping Center.” Thus, before City Council had even officially authorized the mayor to enter into a purchase agreement, the Marting Foundation was already spending their anticipated profits from the sale. They voted to use tax payer money to pay off some $400,000 in debt owed to Oak Hill Banks and the SOGP, and then whatever was left over after bailing out the Marting Brothers would be invested in the proposed shopping center. <br /><br />Exactly what time of the day the purchase agreement was actually signed on the 29th of May 2002 is uncertain. All we know is that Greg Bauer and Julia Smith Wisniewski signed the agreement on the 29th of May in the presence of at least four witnesses, who signed their names to the agreement, as well. And who were these? Clayton Johnson, of course, along with his partner in the whole larger scheme, real estate developer Neal Hatcher, Councilwoman Carol Caudill, and Amy C. Fleming, a legal assistant working for Clayton Johnson. Regardless, of exactly where and when the purchase agreement may have been signed, City Council clearly violated the Ohio Open Meetings Act and the Portsmouth City Charter, which requires all Council meetings be open to the public and that all decisions be made before the public. <br /><br />That evening, when Council introduced the legislation that would authorize Mayor Bauer to sign the agreement, Councilman Howard Baughman made the motion to suspend the charter’s requirement of three separate readings, and pass the ordinance immediately. There would be no debate, no discussion, and when the vote was called, the council voted unanimously to purchase the Marting’s properties in order that it could be renovated into new city offices. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Bill Shaw and the Original Referendum Petition</span><br /><br />It was not until February 2004, nearly two years later, that the public became aware of the existence of the Kizer Appraisal; it was then that the municipal reform movement began to pick up steam. However, the controversy surrounding the purchase began almost immediately when local attorney Bill Shaw and others helped organize a petition drive to have the purchase placed on the ballot as a referendum. The voters suspected that the City had paid an inflated price for the Marting’s building, which would lead to increased property taxes, and it had all been done without any real public discussion. They suspected the Council had suspended the rules to quickly and silently push through the legislation needed to complete the Marting’s deal. By waving the Charter’s required three readings, the Council had effectively denied the voters a chance to learn about and debate the proposed purchase. <br /><br />Bill Shaw’s petition drive failed when City Clerk Jo Ann Aeh ruled that there were insufficient valid signatures. But memos between Mayor Bauer and City Solicitor Kuhn indicated that had Aeh certified the petitions, Kuhn and the Council were ready to declare the referendum in violation of the City Charter.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Recalls and the Referendum of May 2006</span><br /><br />In the summer and fall of 2004, Mayor Bauer and two city council members would be recalled by angry city residents. James Kalb, as Council President, would assume the Mayor’s office and after signing a second deal with the Marting’s Foundation, the new Mayor and Council would move forward with their original plans to renovate the Marting’s Building on Chillicothe Street into a new city hall. This decision led to the dramatic referendum in May 2006, when Portsmouth voters soundly rejected the renovation of the Marting’s building for use as a city building.<br /><br />While city, county, and state law enforcement have been reluctant to complete a thorough investigation of the Marting Scam, the voters of Portsmouth through the May 2006 referendum believed that they had blocked the renovation. In doing so, the majority of Portsmouth voters refused to support a scheme that was designed to unload a 100-plus-year-old white elephant off on the public, pay off Marting’s creditors, raise money for Neil Hatcher’s shopping mall, and provide an over-sized home for city officials. Having followed Deep Throat’s advice to “follow the money,” it is clear that all of this was to be paid for with tax dollars raised within the City of Portsmouth.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-66022791140423440582007-12-31T00:26:00.000-05:002007-12-31T13:20:54.080-05:00Belli's Town: Alexandria and the Virginia Military District<em>To answer the question, "Why was Alexandria, the first American settlement in Scioto County, situated in a flood prone location on the west side of the Scioto River," we needed to look back at the founding of Lower Shawnee Town. Picking up from my last post on the demise of this Native American village at the mouth of the Scioto, I will now carry the story forward with a look at the role of federal land policy and the creation of the Virginia Military District on where the first American settlements in the Scioto Valley were located.<br /><br />~ ALF</em><br /><br />Imagine, if you can, floating down the Ohio, or pushing a keel boat up the river in 1796. When you reach the mouth of the Scioto, the Westside is overgrown, but is not covered with the massive sycamores, oaks, poplars, and black walnut trees that you see on the eastside peninsula, which also appears lower and especially prone to flooding. About a mile above the mouth, on the eastside, one would see the land rise, heavily forested and rimmed with pawpaw thickets; if you were to disembark and explore the eastside, swampy ground would have slowed your trek. While on higher ground, the high ground on the eastside, where Portsmouth is now located, was covered with mosquito breeding pools of stagnant water.<br /><br />At first glance, it appears that the decision to locate the first American town of the region on the site of the old Lower Shawnee Town was primarily based upon three factors: 1) the land was already cleared of large timber; 2) the location was at the actual confluence of the two rivers; and 3) the site did not appear to be as subject to flooding as it would later prove. <br /><br />While all of these factors undoubtedly played a role in the decision to locate the first American town on the Westside, the most influential factor actually had little to do with these considerations. The creation of the Virginia Military District (VMD) and the opening of the region to surveying and land sales led to the platting of Alexandria on the Westside of the Scioto River. And it is the same reason why the American town of Chillicothe, to the north, was located on the Westside of the river.<br /><br />The VMD was a massive tract of land (over 3.8 million acres) that Congress had reserved for Virginia Revolutionary War veterans. In an effort to recruit and pay for the service of Virginians in the Continental Army, the government of Virginia had promised land grants in the west, upon lands that Virginia’s colonial charter had assigned to the colony – these lands included Kentucky and much of the land north of the Ohio River. The size of Virginia bounty lands were awarded according to one’s length of service and final rank at the end of the war.<br /><br />In the fall of 1783, soon after Independence had been achieved a major compromise was worked out between the member states of the Confederation. In exchange for transferring ownership of lands north of the Ohio River to the control of the Confederation Congress, a tract of land in the territory would be held in reserve for Virginian veterans. Thus, the Confederation Congress created the Virginia Military District, which included all of the lands north of the Ohio River and between the Little Miami River in the west and the Scioto River in the East. <br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/OhioLandDivisions.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/OhioLandDivisions.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>Historic Land Divisions of Ohio</em><br /><br />The VMD sliced the Scioto River Valley in two. Lands on the eastern side of the Scioto would become known as Congress Lands. And these Congress Lands would not be opened to settlement until the spring of 1801. Before 1801, settlers living on the eastern side of the river were squatters – they had no legal title to the lands. <br /><br />In other words, even if some land speculator had wanted to develop a town on the eastside, on the location of modern-day Portsmouth, they could not do so until after 1801. The platting of Portsmouth would not happen until 1803, and then it was nearly three years later in 1806, after another major flood in 1805, which inundated Alexandria, that settlement at Portsmouth began to take off.<br /><br />Settlement on the Westside of the river was also delayed. The legislation creating the VMD, though passed in 1783, did not immediately open the region to settlement. For one, the legislation stipulated that the district be held in reserve until all of the valuable land in Kentucky had been claimed by Virginia veterans. Another reason for the delay was that the US government had not yet extinguished Indian claims to these lands. On the last day of January 1786, a handful of Shawnee leaders signed the Treaty of Fort Finney, which ceded Shawnee lands in Southern Ohio. This treaty, however, was immediately repudiated by a number of more influential Shawnee leaders, which essentially nullified the treaty. In short, any surveying and settlement of the VMD would meet violent resistance until the US had secured the acquiescence of the Indians. And it would be through war that this would be achieved. <br /><br />In the meantime, the mouth of the Scioto became one of the most dangerous points on the Ohio River, with Shawnee and Cherokee warriors attacking American flatboats, as they made their way to Limestone (Maysville), which was the gateway to the frontier settlements in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky.<br /><br />The legislation that created the VMD authorized Gen. Richard C. Anderson, the Principal Surveyor of Virginia Bounty Lands, to decide when the Kentucky bounty lands had been depleted, and upon such a declaration the VMD in Ohio would then be opened to surveying and settlement. Anderson did not wait for the final extinguishment of Indian land claims. On the 1st of August 1787, he recorded the first deed in the VMD, thereby opening the region to settlement. His decision appears largely to have been triggered by the passage of a new piece of national legislation known as the Northwest Ordinance, which was passed two weeks prior, on 13 July 1787.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/%20GenRichardCAnderson-Evans-Scioto005.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/%20GenRichardCAnderson-Evans-Scioto005.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>Richard C. Anderson, Principal Surveyor of Virginia Bounty Lands</em><br /><br />The Northwest Ordinance began the process of opening up the non-VMD land north and west of the Ohio River to settlement. Among other things, the legislation banned slavery in all of the Northwest Territory and established a system for surveying and selling land that would shape settlement patterns outside the VMD. The NW Ordinance quickly (two weeks after its passage) led to the sale of a huge tract of land (1.5 million acres) to the Ohio Company of Associates, who then, in April 1788, established the town of Marietta, the first authorized American settlement in all of the Northwest Territory. <br /><br />A group of the Ohio Associates also formed a second speculative venture, known as the Scioto Land Company, which took out an option on 3.5 million acres of land between the western border of the Ohio Company purchase and the eastern bank of the Scioto River. For various reasons, in one of the greatest financial scandals of the Early Republic era of American history, the Scioto Company failed and the lands on the eastern side of the Scioto remained in the hands of Congress. These Congress Lands would finally be auctioned off in 1801, a good five years after the first American settlements had been established on the western banks of the Scioto.<br /><br />In addition to the Ohio Company’s purchase in the summer of 1787, John Cleves Symmes also petitioned Congress for the purchase of 1 million acres in south-western Ohio. Although Symmes’ purchase was not finalized until the next fall, in October 1788, discussion of speculative schemes such as Symmes’ were rampant among members of Congress in the summer of 1787. There is no doubt that Gen. Anderson and other speculators in VMD lands were aware of these plans. Ever since the creation of the VMD in 1783, Virginians and others had been speculating in Virginia land bounties – numerous financially strapped veterans, during a post-war economic depression, when hostile Indians were blocking settlement, had sold their land warrants to their more wealthy neighbors, many of whom were also entitled to land by their own service in the Revolution.<br /><br />Anderson’s decision to open the VMD appears to have been triggered by the passage of the Northwest Ordinance and the speculative schemes of the Symmes and the Ohio and Scioto companies. Unless the VMD was opened to surveyors, settlers, and speculators, the value of its land and its future development might be irrevocably harmed. The flow of settlers and capital would be directed towards eastern and western Ohio, while south-central Ohio – the VMD – would be left behind, their property values depressed.<br /><br />Anderson’s decision led to the first official surveys in the Scioto River Valley in the summer and fall of 1787. However, before any extensive surveying was completed, the Continental Congress brought a halt to the surveys, shutting down the district and nullifying those surveys that had been completed. The Congress, which had a financial interest in the sale of federally controlled lands, wished to hold back the surveying and settlement of the VMD. The national government would not make a dime off of land sales in the VMD; settlers and capital would be siphoned off to the VMD and the beneficiaries would be the owners of Virginia military bounty land warrants, not the federal treasury.<br /><br />There were other concerns influencing Congress. As mentioned above, American claims to the lands in the VMD were not yet fully accepted by the various Indian nations of the Ohio country. Diplomatic efforts at securing title to the land were proving difficult and relations with the Indian nations of the Northwest were tense. Survey teams in the VMD risked igniting a war with the Indians, particularly the Shawnee.<br /><br />Before Congress shut down the VMD in July of 1788, the land at the mouth of the Scioto, on the western side of the Scioto, had been surveyed. Operating out of the Limestone settlement in Kentucky, John O’Bannon led a team of chain-carriers, markers, and hunters to the south eastern corner of the VMD and recorded a number of surveys that ran up the Scioto, and down the Ohio, including surveys of the mouth of Turkey Creek. <br /><br />In mid-November 1787, while the inhabitants of the US were in the midst of their debate over the ratification of the proposed Constitution, John O’Bannon surveyed 900 acres for Thomas Parker of Virginia. O’Bannon’s survey, number 508, included the lands at the mouth of the Scioto River, the future location of Alexandria.<br /><br />Another surveyor, who would become the most famous and wealthiest of land speculators in the VMD – Nathaniel Massie – did not participate in these first surveys. From extent records I have been able to examine, it appears that Massie made an exploratory trip across the Ohio into the District in the summer of 1788. Contrary to some published claims, Massie did not make the first entries in the District. So, where was Massie in 1787? According to his correspondence, it appears that he was busy in Kentucky attempting to cut a road from Lexington to the Kanawha River in western Virginia. This project, however, had fallen through by 1788 and, at that point, Massie turned his attention to the VMD. <br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/nathanielMassie-chilli-p8002-02.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/nathanielMassie-chilli-p8002-02.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>Nathaniel Massie - Surveyor, Speculator, and Founder of Manchester and Chillicothe</em><br /><br />Massie’s first excursion into the VMD occurred about the same time that Congress closed down the district with legislation in July of 1788. By early August 1790, over two years later, Congress agreed to reopen the VMD and allowed the original surveys, such as those by O’Bannon, to be recorded. <br /><br />Pressure from the Virginia Congressional delegation was intense. Indian claims to the lands had still not been extinguished and in October of the same year, American armed forces under the command of General Josiah Harmar suffered a major defeat at the hands of an Indian alliance bent on blocking the American settlement of the Ohio Country. Harmar’s Defeat, however, did not deter Nathaniel Massie; that fall he began recruiting settlers for what he planned to be the first permanent American settlement in the VMD. <br /><br />In light of the hostilities, Massie’s plans were bold and provocative. He selected a site 11 miles up river from Limestone, his original base of operations. Here there were three islands in the middle of the Ohio River, upon which he would build a blockhouse, known as Massie’s Station. With his surveying crew he would layout a town on the banks of the Ohio, which he ultimately named Manchester. By April of 1791, Massie had completed the island stockade and would soon begin leading surveying parties deep into the VMD.<br /><br />Although Massie’s Station never came under direct attack, a handful of its first settlers were captured and taken hostage by the Indians. And Massie’s surveying parties fought a number of skirmishes adding to the tensions between the Ohio Indians and the United States. After a series of humiliating losses at the hands of the Indian alliance, the US military, with the assistance of volunteer militia from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky, finally achieved a decisive victory over the Indian alliance at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in the late summer of 1794. <br /><br />Although a peace agreement – the Treaty of Greenville – would not be reached for another year, the victory at Fallen Timbers encouraged surveyors such as Nathaniel Massie and Lucas Sullivant to extend their surveying work deeper into the VMD and up the Scioto River Valley, thereby threatening to disrupt the peace negotiations. In November 1794, Sullivant who would later plat the town of Franklinton (from which Columbus was born) was the first surveyor to enter the VMD lands above modern day Chillicothe. With the earlier O’Bannon surveys covering much of the lands in the southeastern corner, Nathaniel Massie would focus on the central region and Sullivant on the northern. <br /><br />In 1795, Massie would survey the lands around Paint Creek and the Scioto River, where he would later plat the town of Chillicothe. These lands on the eastern extremity of VMD were considered the most valuable – the Scioto River ran south, dividing Ohio nearly into two equal parts. Chillicothe was located about midway between the Ohio River and the Greenville Treaty Line to the North, which separated Indian land from that which had been obtained by the US. At the time of Chillicothe’s founding in 1796, the two other major Ohio settlements (besides Manchester) were located at Cincinnati in the west and Marietta in the East. Chillicothe was located at the center of the part of the Ohio country that had been cleared of Indian claims and opened for settlement.<br /><br />Chillicothe’s rapid rise as the center of Ohio settlement immediately spurred the development of land at the mouth of the Scioto River. The overland route from Wheeling, Virginia, in the east – what became known as Zane’s Trace – was not cut until 1797 and for at least a decade, the Trace was little more than a bridle trail, not wide enough for large wagons. In the late 1790s, if you were to immigrate to the vicinity of Chillicothe, you would more than likely come via flatboat, down the Ohio to the mouth of the Scioto, or up river from Limestone on a keelboat. From there your belongings would be taken northward either by boat or over land. Narrow ancient Indian paths led north on both sides of the Scioto. One, on the Westside, ran through what is now West Portsmouth roughly along modern-day State Route 104. On the Eastside, an ancient Indian trace (the Warrior’s Path), which became known as the Scioto Trail (modern-day US 23), ran north along the river until modern-day Piketon, where a river crossing took the immigrant over to the Westside and into the VMD. There, from what became known as Pee Pee Prairie, the path continued north until it crossed Paint Creek before reaching Chillicothe. With Chillicothe attracting a large share of the western immigrant flow, the Ohio River route to the west naturally encouraged the development of a new American settlement at the mouth of the Scioto.<br /><br />Thus, in the long human history of the region, a new era of settlement near the mouth of the Scioto began in 1796, coinciding with the platting of Chillicothe. Thomas Parker, the owner of the land on the western side of the Scioto’s mouth, was now in a position to exploit his early speculations in VMD lands. Parker was an absentee landlord, a speculator in Virginia Military District lands. A Revolutionary War veteran from Frederick County, Virginia, Parker had been awarded bounty lands for his own service and he had actively purchased warrants from other veterans.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/MajorJohnBelli.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/MajorJohnBelli.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>Major John Belli, Agent of Thomas Parker, the Absentee Proprietor of Alexandria</em><br /><br />The development of Parker’s VMD lands was left in the hands of his brother, Alexander Parker, and a close confidant, Major John Belli. Although Alexander Parker undoubtedly spent some time in the area, John Belli ended up serving as the Parkers’ primary agent. Alexandria, for all intents and purposes was Belli’s Town.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-91453822513766485982007-12-24T13:34:00.000-05:002007-12-27T11:08:31.471-05:00Lower Shawnee Town and the Flood of 1753<em>Why was Alexandria, the first American settlement in Scioto County, situated in a flood prone location on the west side of the Scioto River?<br /><br />My answer to this question begins with the story of Lower Shawnee Town, the last Native American settlement at the Mouth of the Scioto, and ends with an examination of the history associated with the creation of the Virginia Military District. <br /><br />This blog entry is the first in a two-part series, which in a re-worked and expanded form, will ultimately become part of my book project, Southerners in the Promised Land: The Lower Scioto Valley in the Early American Republic.<br /><br />I’d like to thank the Scioto County Genealogical Society for giving me the opportunity to present a preliminary version of these posts at their annual Family History Day, which was held this past September at the Scioto County Welcome Center in downtown Portsmouth.<br /><br /> ~ ALF</em><br /><br /><br />The confluence of the Scioto and Ohio rivers has long been the site of human habitation. The remains of the ancient earthworks created by the Adena and Hopewell sometime between 700 BC and 500 AD remind us that ancestors of the modern Eastern Woodland Indians called this place home. For hundreds of years they lived and died along these waters – long before Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo, and other Ohio Indians made their home here – long before Americans pushed the Native Americans aside and founded their own villages at the mouth of the Scioto. Taking the long view, it appears that human communities at the site of modern-day Portsmouth have risen and fallen like the waters of these two rivers.<br /><br /><strong>The Return of the Shawnee</strong><br /><br />Beyond the archeological record, the first historical records that document a modern Indian settlement at the mouth of the Scioto point to the mid-1740s as the founding decade of a Shawnee Indian settlement, which became known to the English as Lower Shawnee Town. The Shawnee inhabitants probably called the village “Chillicothe,” the name for the Shawnees’ principle town, wherever it might be located. From its inception, Lower Shawnee Town was a cosmopolitan settlement, which large numbers of Delaware, Mingo, Delaware, and other Ohio Indians called home. Located on the western side of the mouth of the Scioto River, as well as a smaller settlement on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, Lower Shawnee Town would later become the site of Alexandria, the first American town platted in what became Scioto County.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Alexandria%20from%20US52.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Alexandria%20from%20US52.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>The Site of Lower Shawnee Town, viewed from US 52, looking South-East towards Kentucky (September 2007)</em><br /><br />The founding of Lower Shawnee Town coincided with the return of the Shawnee, who had been expelled from their homeland by the Iroquois in the mid-1600s. Once back in Ohio, the Shawnee aligned themselves with the English colonists on the East Coast, opening their settlement to English merchants, who traded manufactured European goods for animal furs and skins. Lower Shawnee Town was strategically located on the rivers, as well as near the Warrior’s Path, a Native American trail that ran from the Great Lakes region, south, across the Ohio River, and over the Appalachian Mountains into the upcountry of the Carolinas. Lower Shawnee Town was sufficiently west, down into the larger Ohio Valley, that few Europeans, whether English or French, were ever seen. Yet, it was also far enough east, up the Ohio River, to make trade with the English practicable and profitable. Game was plentiful; the bottom lands of the Scioto and the Ohio ideal for corn fields; and the English and French were still at arms length.<br /><br /><strong>The Flood of 1753</strong><br /><br />The location of the village, despite its strategic and economic advantages, proved to be problematic for the Shawnee and other Indians who called it home. In 1753 a massive flood overflowed both the Scioto and Ohio River banks, carrying away their log cabins, warehouses, public buildings, and undoubtedly much personal property. Having themselves only recently returned to the region, at least three generations since their ancestors had been expelled, the Shawnee were apparently unfamiliar with the occasional massive floods that can make the annual, predictable floods, which inundate the area’s bottom lands, seem unremarkable. The Flood of 1753 would undoubtedly compare with the devastating flood of 1937, which swallowed much of Portsmouth and many other towns along the Ohio River.<br /><br />In the aftermath of the Flood of 1753, some Shawnee relocated to the eastern side of the Scioto, to where Portsmouth is now situated, but this settlement was also abandoned in the 1760s, when the Shawnee relocated northward, up the Scioto River, to a new town site just north of modern day Chillicothe.<br /><br />In light of the periodic flooding that hit the site of Lower Shawnee Town and the future demise of Alexandria as a result of the flooding, it has long been an issue of speculation as to why the American settlers who first came to the area would have located their first town in a location so prone to flooding.<br /><br /><strong>The Old Mouth of the Scioto</strong><br /><br />At this point, I should point out that the original mouth of the Scioto, the location of Lower Shawnee Town and Alexandria, is not where it is today. Those who try to imagine Alexandria in the bottoms – about where Boone Coleman has his dirt race track – are looking in the wrong place – on a number of occasions I have had people tell me that is where Alexandria used to be. In the nineteenth century a new mouth for the Scioto was cut as part of the construction of the Ohio and Erie Canal. Originally, the Scioto flowed south towards the Ohio and just before their waters met, the Scioto made a hard right and then receded, forming a narrow, short isthmus and then a wide peninsula, nearly a mile long, before finally entering the Ohio. <br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/OldSciotoMouthAriel.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/OldSciotoMouthAriel.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>Lower Shawnee Town (Alexandria) and the Original Mouth of the Scioto River</em><br /><br />The land located on the westside of the original mouth – the land between Carey’s Run and the original mouth of the Scioto – was and is higher than the bottom lands that now sit on the current westside of the modern Scioto’s mouth. In other words, the flooding that we see today, every winter and spring, which fills the bowl of Coleman’s race track and turns these bottom lands into a lake, would not necessarily reach the higher ground upon which Lower Shawnee Town and Alexandria were located.<br /><br />The site of Lower Shawnee Town is prone to flooding, but it is not an annual event. The location, however, proved to have another serious problem. The northern bank of the Ohio, on which the town fronted, was also subject to erosion. Over the course of the 19th century, after Alexandria had been essentially abandoned, the northern bank of the Ohio would erode and sections collapse into the river. The handful of houses that once fronted the river eventually crumbled into the water. <br /><br />In 1795 and 1796, when Americans began arriving at the mouth of the Scioto, when the threat of Indian attack had been ended with the Greenville Treaty, the location of Lower Shawnee Town had not been permanently inhabited for over forty years; the smaller Shawnee village that had been located where Portsmouth now stands had been abandoned for around thirty years. Whether any of these original American settlers knew of the Flood of 1753 is unclear; whatever the case, they possessed visions of wealth and happiness, believing that the confluence of these two rivers would soon form a nexus, where people, money, and goods would pass and fortunes would be made.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-54037129106516066752007-12-05T10:10:00.000-05:002007-12-08T23:09:49.665-05:00Scioto: Variations on a ThemeAs I mention in the masthead of this blog, the name "Scioto" is believed to derive from an Indian word related to "deer." Recently, I compiled a list of variations of this name, as well as of the name of the original Shawnee village (what the English generally called "Lower Shawnee Town) that was located at the mouth of the Scioto River. Here is what I found:<br /><br /><strong>Names for the River and the Town</strong><br /><br />Chianotho<br />Sonioto<br />Sonnioto<br />Sonniato<br />Sonyoto<br />Sonyote<br />Souyoto<br />Sinhioto<br />Sihotta<br />Siota<br />Sciodoe<br />Sciota<br />Scioto<br />Sikoder (from an old German map)<br /><br /><strong>Names for just the Town</strong><br /><br />Lower Shawnee Town<br />Lower Shawna Town<br />Lower Shanna Town<br />Lower Shawonese Town<br />Lower Shawanese Town<br />St. Yotoc<br />Chillicothe on the Ohio<br /><br />Perhaps there are even more variations out there. A note to local history researchers and genealogists, in an age of keyword searches through digital databases: it is important to try all of these variations.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-23849425886502959712007-11-23T11:07:00.000-05:002007-11-23T11:31:34.305-05:00The Infamous "Hell-Roaring" Jacob Smith<em>The following story of Gen. Jacob Smith, "Portsmouth's General," was first published in the </em>Portsmouth Free Press<em>, 2nd Series, Vol. 1, no. 2 (November-December 2005). In addition to my recent and new research, I plan on occasionally republishing some of my earlier writings on local history for those who might have missed them when they first appeared in the</em> PFP. <em><br /> ~ ALF</em><br /><br />Portsmouth, Ohio, it turns out, was the hometown of one of the Philippine War’s most infamous generals, “Hell-Roaring” Jacob Smith. His story is one well worth remembering, though you won’t find this one depicted in the historic flood wall murals of Portsmouth.<br /><br />This bloody Philippine War, which lasted from 1899 through 1913, resulted from the foreign policy of a group of imperialists within the Republican Party of President William McKinley. After their quick victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States military found themselves playing the part of an occupying army on the Philippine Islands. A Filipino independence movement had been working to overthrow their Spanish colonizers for years. Emilio Aguinaldo, the charismatic leader of the movement, provided critical aid to the Americans during their war with Spain. However, when US armed forces did not withdraw from the islands and the US government did not recognize Philippine independence, Aguinaldo and his compatriots rose up against the United States. <br /><br />It was a choice, ultimately the Ohioan McKinley’s choice, to annex the Philippine archipelago and deny the Filipinos their independence. The imperialists chose to conquer these far off islands in the Pacific and more Americans died fighting the Filipino insurgents than died fighting the Spanish.<br /><br /><strong>The Balangiga Massacre and Samar Campaign</strong><br /><br />General Jacob Hurd Smith led American forces during one of the most brutal and controversial campaigns of the war. The Samar Campaign of 1902 was an offensive aimed at punishing and crushing the insurgency on the Island of Samar. An American garrison in the town of Balangiga was attacked in September 1901 by the local population, with the support of the local police chief and members of the insurgency. The people of Balangiga revolted in reaction to their abuse at the hands of the Americans. The US commander at Balangiga had sent troops out to destroy crops and grain reserves, to keep such food from flowing into the hands of the insurgents; he had also ordered all males over the age of thirteen, at gun-point, to work at clearing brush and repairing the streets of the town.<br /><br />Fifty-four of the seventy-eight American troops stationed at Balangiga were killed; their bodies were mutilated and burned; only four escaped uninjured. Like the story of American mercenaries (or “military contractors,” as the US Department of Defense prefers to call them) who were captured, killed, burned, and put on display in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, the mutilation of Americans at Balangiga triggered a massive response that left Samar in taters and General Smith seated before a court-martial.<br /><br />The Balangiga Massacre, as the Americans called it, occurred two months after the government of the Philippines was transferred from the US military to US civilian authorities, headed by future President William Howard Taft. Aguinaldo had been captured in March of 1901 and it was hoped that the transition to civilian rule marked the beginning of the end of the war. The Balangiga Massacre, however, ended all talk about the reduction of troop levels in the Philippines.<br /><br /><strong>Jacob Smith's Background</strong><br /><br />Jacob Smith was born 29 January 1840 near Jackson Furnace, in Scioto County, and he spent his boyhood in Portsmouth and in Greenup County, Kentucky. Having briefly attended a military academy in Connecticut, the home state of his parents, Smith joined the Union’s Second Kentucky Infantry, receiving a commission as a First Lieutenant. Severely wounded during the Battle of Shiloh, Smith was brought back to his parent’s home in Portsmouth to recuperate. After the Civil War, he obtained a commission as a Captain in the Regular Army and rose through the ranks, serving in Louisiana during Reconstruction and then later on the Great Plains, where he participated in a number of the so-called “Indian campaigns,” against the Northern Cheyenne, the Apache, and the Uncompahgre Ute. Contrary to some claims, there is no record of Smith’s participation in the Wounded Knee Massacre of Sioux in 1890. Nevertheless, he had participated in some of the most brutal campaigns in the Plains Indian Wars of the late 19th-century.<br /><br />Smith went on to lead American forces in Cuba, during the Spanish-American War, where he was again wounded in action at the Battle of Santiago. Smith then took command of troops in the Philippines, where he was promoted to Brigadier-General in March of 1901. After fighting a number of successful campaigns against the Filipino insurgents, Smith was given the task of crushing the resistance on Samar and exacting revenge for the deaths of the American soldiers at Balangiga.<br /><br /><strong>Brig. Gen. Smith's Murderous Orders</strong><br /><br />The <em>Manila News </em>reported on 4 November 1902, that General Smith ordered all inhabitants of Samar’s interior to relocate to coastal towns, “saying that those who were found outside would be shot and no questions asked. …. All suspects, including Spaniards and half-breeds, were rounded up in big stockades and kept under guard.” At the same time, Smith cut off all food shipments and trade from the towns into the backcountry, carrying out a policy designed to starve the resistance into submission. Detachments of American troops then traversed the island’s interior, in search of rebel bands, burning villages and destroying crops and livestock. It was not these general policies that ended up getting Smith into trouble, rather it was the specific orders he gave to one of his main subordinates, Marine Major Littleton W. T. Waller. <br /><br />At the beginning of the campaign when officers had gathered at the site of the Balangiga Massacre, Smith told Waller, “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. …. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.” When Waller asked Smith to set an age limit for the kill orders, Smith said, “Kill everyone over ten.” Smith would later send Waller a written order “that the interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness.” During the four and half month-long campaign, an estimated 15,000 Filipinos died on Samar as a result of the actions of US forces.<br /><br /><strong>The Courts-Martial of Major Waller and Brig. Gen. Smith</strong><br /><br />Smith’s orders were first revealed during the court martial of Major Waller, who was charged with ordering the summary execution of eleven Filipino civilians, who had worked as baggage carriers during one of Waller’s missions into the interior. The eleven civilians turned out to be boys and young men, who were accused of hoarding food and threatening mutiny while helping the US troops march through the jungles of Samar. Waller’s defense would become known after World War II as the Nuremburg Defense – I was only following my orders. Waller would be acquitted on the charges of murder, but the testimony during his trial would lead to the court-martial of his commanding officer, Brigadier-General Jacob H. Smith.<br /><br />Smith was charged with having committed “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.” The court-martial found Smith guilty and recommended an “admonishment” by his superiors. The Samar Controversy hit the American press just when the US Senate was investigating the abuse of Filipino prisoners of war by the American military. Soldiers back from the islands testified to having observed and participated in the torture of prisoners. They described the common practice of the so-called “water cure,” wherein a person is tied down to a board and a bamboo shaft is inserted into their mouths. Water is then forced into their stomachs and pressure applied to their abdomen, forcing the water back out of their mouths, or, in some cases, causing the stomach to rupture, which can and did lead to the death of prisoners.<br /><br />Members of Congress and editorials in the nation’s papers called for a severe punishment of General Smith. “In the records of all the great wars since the Middle Ages,” declared Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado, “you cannot find such a disgraceful and wicked order as that issued by Gen. Smith.” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, one of the most ardent supporters of the war, stated: “Gen. Smith’s order is one which every American should regret. On the surface those orders seem to me to be revolting.” In the House of Representatives, Republican Joseph C. Sibley of Pennsylvania called on President Theodore Roosevelt “to discharge Smith dishonorably from the service that he has disgraced. …. He is a disgrace … to every man who ever wore the uniform of the United States, and he is a blot and a disgrace to our present civilization.” The <em>New York Times </em>editorialized, “These orders are bloody and cruel to a degree which the American people will not believe to be justified even against the most treacherous savages. They will not regard as fit to remain in the service an officer capable of issuing them.”<br /><br />The politics of the moment proved fateful. Roosevelt, upon reviewing the records of the court-martial decided against a simple admonishment, as had been recommended by the court. Instead, he forcibly retired Smith, two years before his scheduled departure from the service. Smith learned of his punishment upon his return to the United States, when his ship docked in San Francisco. From there Smith traveled by train to Portsmouth, where he was given a hero’s homecoming welcome.<br /><br /><strong>Smith's Return to Portsmouth</strong><br /><br />Smith’s train arrived at the Norfolk and Western Depot on the evening of 11 August 1902 and an estimated 3,000 residents came out to meet him. Among the crowd, waiting in a horse-drawn carriage was Smith’s mother, Charlotte Maria Hurd Smith, who had told a reporter just a few days before, “What matters what he said? Look upon what he has done. Look upon a record without a blot or blemish. Then shall we consider a few words spoken when the atrocities to American soldiers were confronting him on every hand.” Two companies of the Ohio National Guard, one from Portsmouth and the other from Manchester, along with the Portsmouth Cycling Club Band, dressed in khaki, escorted the General and his entourage to the Hilltop home of Judge James W. Bannon, his brother-in-law. Just before dispersing the guardsmen gave three hearty cheers.<br /><br />After dinning with his closest friends and relatives, Smith welcomed newspaper reporters into the home and fielded questions. He attempted to justify his brutal orders. The inhabitants of the interior of Samar were, according to Smith, “savages of the most degraded kind. They were nomads and had no fixed habitation. …. The childhood of the natives is a dream by the time they are thirteen years of age. They are ready to take up the burden of life before that time. …. The natives of Samar are treacherous and barbarous. They mutilate the bodies of the dead in the most horrible manner.”<br /><br />Smith won over the local press. Perhaps, they had never left his side. One reporter, writing for the <em>Portsmouth Daily Times</em>, opined that “He is a small man, rather slim, and is very bald. He is a neat dresser and in his citizens clothes did not look like the fierce soldier who had carried terror to the hearts of the most savage tribes in the Philippine islands.” Smith may have looked well that evening, but the following day he had a nervous breakdown. The planned formal reception and banquet had to be postponed. Smith’s illness made headlines around the nation, with the <em>New York Times </em>reporting “a complete nervous collapse.”<br /><br />When Smith had recovered, the elite of Portsmouth celebrated Smith’s long career of military service and formally welcomed him home. The event was held at the Washington Hotel, Portsmouth’s most exclusive address. The <em>Portsmouth Daily Times </em>reporter captured the scene: “The lobby itself was a maze of red, white, and blue. The national colors were everywhere. Bunting circled about the columns, and hung in festoons from the balcony and … railings. Flags were unfurled here and there about the room to give the whole a general artistic effect. Pictures of McKinley, Washington, Grant, and Lincoln, draped with the national colors, hung upon the walls. …. Suspended from the center of the balcony was the greeting “Welcome” prettily made from crimped tissue paper.” The <em>PDT</em> also reported that that the absence of a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt “was noted by all who viewed the scene.”<br /><br />During the after dinner toasts, Smith, wearing his most formal military uniform, addressed the gathering. Again, he sounded unrepentant and the gathered crowd loved him for it. Reviewing his forty-years of army service, Smith declared: “We have fought to make this a united country; to wrest the great West from the hordes of Indian savages and to protect the frontiersman and his wife and children in their homes; to bring the blessings of liberty and good government to our neighboring and distant isles of the sea; to avenge the massacres in the harbor of Havana, to compel obedience to our authority in the Philippine Islands and to pacify and subdue the most savage tribes of the earth.” <br /><br />The Island of Samar, explained Smith, was “peopled by savage tribes who do not recognize any rules of civilized warfare, but are treacherous and brutal to the lowest degree. Still, they must be brought into subjugation, and kept so until they learn that the purpose is to give them freedom and the blessings of that good government which we enjoy.” Spontaneous applause interrupted the speech numerous times and upon its conclusion, Smith received a standing ovation and another round of three cheers for “Portsmouth’s General.”<br /><br />The General’s defenders in the press and in Congress claimed that he had been singled out and punished for political reasons, that other officers had implemented similar orders and the brutal tactics of taking no prisoners had been practiced at various times throughout the archipelago by American forces. The press and influential members of both political parties, however, demanded that some high-ranking official be held accountable. <br /><br /><strong>The Iraq War Parallel: From Fallujah to Abu Ghraib</strong><br /><br />The deaths of hundreds of Iraqi civilians during the various stages of the US assault on Fallujah, along with the televised execution of an unarmed and injured Iraqi prisoner inside a mosque during the campaign, never led to court-martialing of any soldier or officer in the Battle of Fallujah. The Iraq War, however, has had its share of courts-martial for the torture and abuse of prisoners. In addition to the prosecution of low ranking soldiers, a one star general, Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, the officer in command of the Abu Ghraib prison complex, was removed from her command and demoted to the rank of colonel. <br /><br />In her defense, Karpinski stated that Major General Geoffrey Miller had told her to treat the Iraqis “like dogs” because “if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you've lost control of them.” Miller denied ever making such comments and was later given command over of all US detainee operations in Iraq, including the prison facilities at Abu Ghraib.<br /><br />In the first weeks and months after his forced retirement, Jacob Smith hoped he would be reinstated; rather than blame his superior officers for their role in setting the general policies and standards of conduct of US forces, he kept his silence, claiming the circumstances on the islands required what might be construed to be brutal and uncivilized tactics in other places, particularly if it those tactics were used against Americans – an odd and racist form of moral relativism. However, like Karpinski, Jacob Smith would ultimately try to shift some of the responsibility for his actions on to the shoulders of his superiors. <br /><br />In 1906, Smith authorized his nephew, the newly elected Congressman Henry T. Bannon, to vindicate his honor on the floor of the House of Representatives. Bannon, for the first time, revealed part of the orders that had been issued to his uncle on the eve of the Samar campaign. “I do not propose to hamper you at all,” General Adna R. Chaffee wrote to Smith, “but on the contrary, give you all the assistance you need to crush the insurrection in Samar…. The interior must be made a wilderness if that is the only remedy.” Neither Chaffee’s, nor Miller’s words amounted to express commands to kill “everything over ten” or to violently torture and humiliate prisoners. Yet, there is no doubt that in both cases, responsibility for war crimes went higher than one-star generals and were more widespread than might appear because of the handful of courts-martial.<br /> <br />Rather than hold those at the highest levels of the military responsible, where the general policy and orders originated, both Roosevelt and Bush have scapegoated low-ranking generals. For Smith and his supporters it was pure politics. “To my knowledge,” Smith told a crowd in 1911, “Theodore Roosevelt has never hesitated in sacrificing a friend to further his own insane ambitions and desires for popularity.”<br /><br />When “Hell Roaring” Jake Smith died in 1918, his remains were transported to Washington, D.C., where he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-85295546059007031022007-11-11T15:30:00.001-05:002010-03-11T16:01:25.450-05:00The Battle of Houlton’s MillMy research continues to uncover further material on the Pike County anti-abolitionist mob that disrupted Rev. Edward Weed’s lecturing in Sinking Spring, Ohio, in early August 1836. I recently came across a letter written to the editor of the <i>Hillsborough Gazette</i>, which was first published on September, 4th,1836, about three weeks after violent confrontations had taken place, yet before anti-abolitionist James Houlton had succumbed to his knife wound. The <i>Hillsborough Gazette</i> letter caught the attention of the editor of <i>The New-Yorker</i>, which reprinted it on the 24th of September, under the title, “Lynch Law in Ohio” – the day before James Houlton died.<br />
<br />
The anonymous letter writer fills in more detail on the “crisis” that Edward Weed had predicted following the near riot in Waverly the previous July. With help of the author’s references to dates we can now better establish the chronology of events the led to the fatal stabbing of James Holton. After arriving in Sinking Spring via Piketon in the last week of July, Weed and his supporters spread word that a series of public lectures on the issue of slavery and abolition would begin the evening of Monday, August 1st. Members of the Paint Valley Abolition Society, which had members in Highland, Ross, and Fayette counties, including a number of inhabitants of the Sinking Spring region of Highland, organized the meetings, helping Rev. Weed, the traveling agent of the American Anti-slavery Society, publicize his lectures. At some point before the start of the first lecture, a group of eight or ten men from the Sunfish Creek community in Pike County’s Mifflin Township “came into town and told some of Mr. Weed’s friends that” the abolitionist speaker would not be heard “in peace.” According to the <i>Hillsborough Gazette </i>letter, “Mr. Weed’s friends replied that he should lecture, let the result be what it might.” <br />
<br />
When the evening came, the Sunfish Creek anti-abolitionists attended the lecture and just as the Reverend began his talk, they rose from their seats and began pelting Weed with rotten eggs. Immediately, the local constable, who was also in attendance, placed the men under arrest. He told them that he would release them if they immediately left the premises and the larger village of Sinking Springs. They agreed and were allowed to return to Pike County.<br />
<br />
The Sunfish men had surrendered to rally the like-minded and fight another day.<br />
<br />
Weed would resume his lecture and upon its completion, but when he finished, “some of the citizens requested him to leave the village. He said he would do so if his friends wished it; but his friends said they wished him to lecture, and would defend him.” <br />
<br />
The next evening Rev. Weed gave his second lecture with no disturbance. However, on the third evening a large Pike County mob showed up just before the start of the lecture. Although the <i>Hillsborough Gazette</i> letter does not relate the detail, it may have been at this point that a mob of “seventy or eighty men from Sunfish” led to the call up of local militia members. In Weed’s account of the incident, he estimated the mob’s size to have been around forty and stated that “as soon,” as troops “appeared in the village with guns our mobocratic gentlemen began to talk about home, and … soon ‘put out.’” Weed’s account, however, failed to mention that the showdown between the militia and rioters led to the cancellation of his evening lecture. He would resume the schedule of lectures the following day, concluding the series after three or four more lectures in as many days.<br />
<br />
The concluding evening finished with the enrollment of forty new members in the Paint Valley Abolition Society, an affiliate of Weed’s national organization, the American Anti-slavery Society. I also recently came across a short report published in an April edition of James G. Birney’s <i>Philanthropist</i>, which announced the formation of a separate Sinking Spring Anti-Slavery Society. Founded on the 5th of January 1837, five month’s after Weed began his lecture series, the society enrolled thirty-seven members, the core supporters who first publicly embraced abolitionism in the midst of the turbulent summer of 1836. They elected John Weyer, president, and John Forbuish, secretary. The members pledged $50 to the Ohio State Anti-slavery Society and an additional $20 to purchase abolition literature for “general circulation.” In response to Weed’s lecturing and the violent opposition of Lower Scioto Valley anti-abolitionists, Sinking Spring abolitionists resolved to assist the newly organized state-wide abolition campaign. <br />
<br />
Our <i>Hillsborough Gazette</i> letter writer provides further information about the deadly events that followed Weed’s lecture series. “Some eight or ten days afterwards the Abolitionists of the village concluded that it would not do for Sunfish to dictate to them, and determined to punish them for the course they had taken.” On the first of August 1836, the abolitionists secured arrest warrants for a number of Pike countians from the Sunfish Creek community.<br />
<br />
The local constable refused to sign the warrants unless the abolitionists would accompany him as a <i>posse comitatus</i>. Relying on a provision of common law, the constable could legally conscript residents over the age of fifteen to assist him in maintaining peace or pursuing and arresting suspected law breakers. With warrants secured, the “constable, with ten or fifteen Abolitionists, took up their line of march to Houlton’s Mill, on Sunfish,” starting out at 3 AM in the morning, in order to arrive at their destination just after dawn. Houlton’s Mill on Sunfish was a community center, where the rural inhabitants of Pike County ground their grain and rallied for public events. News of the <i>posse </i>and the warrants reached Sunfish in time for the anti-abolitionists to call their own rally in expectation of the arrival of the <i>posse</i>. “Some seventy or eighty of the citizens of Sunfish had collected for the purpose of making battle.”<br />
<br />
The Sunfish anti-abolitionists sent two men on horse back to intercept the posse and deliver a message of defiance. They advised the constable “not to go any further as they would not be taken” without a fight. What happen next became a source of controversy. The abolitionists would claim “that the constable told them to go on.” The constable, however, would counter that he had not authorized them to proceed all the way to Houlton’s Mill. Whatever the case may have been, the abolitionists pushed on and the constable and his guard followed. Soon thereafter the “battle commenced.” Although our letter writer states that “one of the Sunfish party was stabbed with a knife, and was the only person seriously injured during the engagement,” the abolitionists, facing a crowd seven or eight times their size, retreated after their attempt to serve the warrants was met by force – Our <i>Hillsborough Gazettee</i> letter writer tells us that “the constable and his party were forced to run to save their lives.”<br />
<br />
The Sinking Spring abolitionists had been repulsed and with James Houlton lying in bed with a mortal knife wound, it appears that the Sunfish anti-abolitionists sent word that they wished “to have the matter settled on peaceable terms.” They were “perfectly willing to drop it as it is,” noting that they still would “never be taken by force.” Houlton’s death on the 25th of September, changed things. The young father, who himself had once been orphaned, left nine young children in the care of his now-widowed young wife. Houlton was also well connected with one of the most influential families in the state. When James Holton’s own father had died, former governor Allen Trimble served as the teenager’s legal guardian. Holton’s death at the hands of an abolitionist <i>posse </i>was not going to be tolerated by the Sunfish community. They sought and secured the indictment of William H. Mitchell on charges of murder. Cooler minds were now prevailing; the anti-abolitionists would use the state court system to go after the man they believed was Houlton’s murderer.<br />
<br />
As mentioned in a previous post, the case of Ohio v. Mitchell came before Pike County presiding Judge John H. Keith, who had only recently taken up the courtroom gavel, after having handed over the speakership’s gavel of the Ohio House of Representatives. Records of this trial have not yet been uncovered, but it appears that Judge Keith provided legal rulings that helped lead to the acquittal of William Mitchell in October 1836.<br />
<br />
In light of the jury’s judgment in favor of Mitchell, it appears that the Sunfish anti-abolitionists backed off their campaign to disrupt the activities of the Sinking Springs abolitionists. The abolitionists appear to have rallied around Mitchell’s case and further organized their support for the larger cause of abolition, by spinning off a new chapter of the Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society from the original Paint Valley Abolition Society. And their pledge in January 1837 to raise $20 for the express purpose of circulating abolitionist literature within the state of Ohio amounted to open resistance to the demands of the Piketon Anti-abolition Resolutions of the preceding July.<br />
<br />
By 1837, when Sinking Spring abolitionists organized, certain homes in the community were already serving as stations on the Underground Railroad. With area abolitionists’ previous connections with members of the Paint Valley Abolition Society, lines of the railroad ran through Sinking Spring, northward from Adams and Scioto Counties to stations in the northern townships of Highland County and on into Fayette and Ross Counties. <br />
<br />
Reverend Edward Weed’s visit in the summer of 1836, at a time when anti-abolitionists were stirring up race riots in Cincinnati, when the office of James Birney’s antislavery newspaper, <i>The Philanthropist</i>, had been ransacked and the press destroyed, at a time when a violent clash between a local constable’s <i>posse comitatus</i> and anti-abolitionists in Pike County ended in the death of one of the rioters, Weed’s tumultuous tour of the Lower Scioto Valley had won over new converts and hardened the prior commitment of existing antislavery activists to the larger cause of abolitionism.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-46702493229372173182007-11-01T16:09:00.001-04:002007-11-01T16:09:49.298-04:00Portsmouth’s First City BuildingAlthough Portsmouth was incorporated as a city in March 1815, it was not until twenty-one years later, in 1836, that a city hall was constructed to house the mayor’s office, a council chamber, and a police station. As in modern-day Portsmouth, its location and construction was not without controversy.<br /><br />The story of Portsmouth’s first city building starts with the construction of another public building, the first county court house. In 1807, as part of a coordinated effort to have the seat of Scioto county government shifted from Alexandria to Portsmouth, Henry Massie, the proprietor of Portsmouth, donated several city lots to the county commissioners, with the stipulation that the lots be sold to raise money for the construction of a county courthouse. Two years later, in 1809, Massie donated lot 31, on the south side of Second Street, between Market and what is now Court Street, for the exclusive purpose of erecting a courthouse on the lot. The sale of the donated lots, however, did not raise enough funds to construct the building; to cover the shortfall, the commissioners implemented taxes on the owners of horses and cattle and tapped funds raised by fines and licenses for ferries and taverns. <br /><br />By 1814, with necessary funds now raised, the commissioners were ready to contract for the construction. For some reason, however, the commissioners decided not to use lot 31, which Massie had donated for that express purpose. Instead, in a bizarre decision, they chose to build smack dab in the middle of Market Street, on the block between Front and Second Street.<br /><br /> The commissioners awarded the contract to John Young, a Portsmouth resident who operated a dry goods store near Market on Front Street. “English John Young,” as he was known around town, subcontracted with Nathan Wheeler (of Wheelersburg) to provide the brick, which were made with an 8-inch mould, an inch shorter than the standard. When Wheeler’s brick ran out, the building was completed with 9-inch brick, causing the upper part of the structure to extend an inch out over the lower part. Young apparently underbid the actual cost of the construction and ran into financial trouble in his attempt to finish the structure; he was forced to liquidate his dry goods store to complete the project. When finished the structure was a bit strange -- forty-feet square, having the look of a barn, with two stories, toped with a low square cupola, twelve-to-fifteen feet high, with a spire rising another fifteen feet towards the sky, “on which was a figure cut or carved out of a common pine board, intended to represent an angel blowing a trumpet.” <br /><br />The location of the court house proved to be problematic. Although situated at the center of the old town, the modern-day Boneyfiddle District, it’s placement in the middle of Market Street prevented the Commissioners from inclosing the structure behind any kind of fence. As one resident later recalled, “if the door should accidentally be left open, any cattle or hogs straying around could enter without molestation or trouble.” Unsurprisingly, the structure also came to obstruct business and traffic on Market Street, which was meant in the original design of the town to provide direct access to the Ohio River waterfront. <br /><br />In 1836, the Portsmouth City Council voted to condemn the building, declaring it a nuisance; the city notified the County Commissioners, demanding that they remove it from the street or it would be pulled down by city authorities.<br /><br />Whether the scheme had already been launched or not before the council’s vote, once the building had been declared a nuisance and the county commissioners had laid their plans for the construction of a new county court house, city officials began openly discussing the possibility of using the old court house for a new city building. The mayor, it appears, believed that it was time that he have an official office and the councilmen believed it was only right that they have their own official chambers; and the city constable, of course, was looking for an official, city-owned “watch-house.”<br /><br />When word of their plans swirled around town, the City Council decided that such a scheme “would look too much like swindling to take possession of it themselves after having driven the county out of it.” In the end, the council did the right thing. As one resident recalled in 1869, “in order to be consistent in the matter, and as people were not as corrupt in those days as they are now, they pulled the old court house down.” Council then voted to tear down the old the old city-owned market house, removing the market house’s roof and placing it upon a new city building, constructed from the now dismantled court house bricks.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-16806455248879583242007-10-22T18:44:00.001-04:002007-10-23T12:30:37.541-04:00Joe & Jemima Logan<span style="font-style:italic;">This past Saturday, the 20th of October, I gave the following public lecture at the Twelfth Annual Ohio Underground Railroad Summit, sponsored by the Friends of Freedom Society, the Ohio Underground Railroad Association. The symposium was hosted by Shawnee State University in Portsmouth.<br /><br />I'd like to thank Matt Matthews and Beverly Gray, the organizers of the summit, for inviting me to present some of my recent research on the Undergound Railroad of the Lower Scioto River Valley. Thanks also goes to the Shawnee State University Development Foundation that provided a grant to help finance my research for the presentation.<br /><br />Rather than divide up the talk into separate short blog entries, I have posted the work in whole. Hopefully you'll find the story compelling enough to read it straight through. Thanks for reading and leaving comments. If anyone knows a descendant of the Logans of Adams County, please let me know. ~ ALF</span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Emancipating Jemima</span><br /><br />The dogs of the neighborhood had come to fear Joe Smith. Joe was a twenty-something year-old slave in Granville County, North Carolina, a slave whose young wife and small child had been freed and removed to southern Ohio by their former owner, a Miss Jane Smith Williamson. Joe knew that when his master, a Mr. John G. Smith, discovered his flight, the other whites in the neighborhood would join with his master in trying to hunt him down. To thwart their success, Joe spent the weeks leading up to his escape in the summer of 1822, going house-to-house in the vicinity of his home plantation, beating and whipping the dogs of the neighborhood, hoping to instill fear in them, hoping that this would deter them from pursuing his tracks once he made his dash for freedom.<br /><br />Joe’s destination was Adams County, Ohio. More specifically his destination was the village of Bentonville (located half-way between West Union – the county seat, on the old Zane’s Trace – and the town of Aberdeen on the Ohio River, opposite Maysville, Kentucky. Just outside Bentonville was an estate known as “The Beeches,” the farm of Jane Smith Williamson’s father, the place where Joe Logan’s wife and child now resided. The nineteen-year-old, Miss Williamson had come into the possession of Jemima and her two children through an inheritance – one of the children, however, died before Jane was able to travel to North Carolina to personally take possession of her slave property.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/The%20Beeches.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/The%20Beeches.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>"The Beeches," the Williamson Farm, as it appeared in the 1880s.</em><br /><br />Jane had inherited $300 from a relative in Granville County, North Carolina. Word had reached the Williamsons in Ohio that Jemima and her children might be sold to raise Jane’s $300 inheritance. Jane notified her North Carolina relatives that she would take possession of Jemima and her children in lieu of the cash. Jane’s plan was to take temporary legal possession of these three souls for the purpose of setting them free in Ohio. North Carolina law at the time forbade emancipation except for meritorious behavior, which had to be adjudged by a civil authority. Further restrictions on emancipation also applied in North Carolina, as well as some other states, which required emancipated slaves to leave the state on threat of re-enslavement. Emancipation and removal were bound together in North Carolina law.<br /><br />In the early spring of 1821, when Jane had turned eighteen and reached the age of majority, she and her older brother, Thomas, traveled to their maternal grandmother’s plantation in North Carolina, where Jemima and her children had been living. Upon their arrival, they learned that one of Jemima’s children had recently died. Jane was also approached by Jemima’s husband, who was then known as Joseph Smith (only after running away to Ohio would Joe and Jemima take the sir name of Logan, perhaps a reference to the respected and feared Indian warrior of 18th-century Ohio). Joe begged the Williamsons to take him to Ohio with his wife and children. <br /> <br />When her uncle, John G. Smith, refused to give Joe to his niece and asked that she purchase his freedom, Jane and Thomas were unable to raise the money. John G. Smith, it turns out, was somewhat attached to his slave Joe, who was not only a favored slave, who appears to have served as his personal attendant, but was also a very valuable piece of property, who would have fetched a handsome price if sold into the interstate slave market. <br /><br />The Williamsons, for some unknown reason, left with Jemima and her surviving child without giving Joe and Jemima the chance to say good-bye. One can only imagine how bittersweet the trip to Ohio was for the mourning mother Jemima, who was leaving behind not only her husband, but her friends and other family members. A life of freedom lay ahead, as she and the Williamsons, two strangers who had entered her life like the fates, road horseback over the Appalachian Mountains and then crossed the Ohio River – a river that African-Americans and many antislavery evangelical whites considered to be the American Jordan – whose northern shore was a Promised Land that flowed with milk and honey.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Meet the Williamsons</span><br /><br />Jane Smith Williamson was an extraordinary young woman, who never married and spent the later part of her life working as a missionary to Native Americans in Minnesota. She was the daughter of William and Mary Webb (Jane) Smith Williamson. The Smiths and the Williamsons were both prominent slaveholding families in the backcountry of North and South Carolina. They were also Presbyterians. <br /><br />William’s father – Thomas – had moved his family from North Carolina to the Spartanburg area of South Carolina following the Revolutionary War, in which both father and son had briefly served. In 1790, William Williamson graduated from the Presbyterian supported College of Hampden-Sydney in Virginia; he returned to his father’s cotton plantation in the upcountry of South Carolina. In April 1793, he entered the ministry and found a mentor in the Rev. William C. Davis, an antislavery Presbyterian pastor who was temporarily preaching at the Fairforest Church, near Spartanburg. In 1794, the Fairforest Church invited Williamson to become their settled minister and he was then officially ordained by Davis. In 1799, a year after the death of his first wife, William married Mary Webb Smith. This marriage only added to the slaveholdings of the Reverend, whose holdings had been previously augmented by the dowry of his first wife. <br /><br />The young Reverend Williamson and a handful of other ministers ran into opposition to their antislavery preaching in the Presbyterian Synod of South Carolina. Meanwhile, his new wife, Mary, had begun teaching their family’s slaves how to read and write in preparation for their emancipation. After a group of their neighbors threatened to have the Williamsons indicted for violating a South Carolina law that banned such education, the couple resolved to leave the South for Ohio, where William could openly preach his antislavery faith and where they could lawfully emancipate and educate their slaves. <br /><br />The Williamsons came to Adams County, Ohio, in 1805, to escape the institution of slavery, to raise their young children in a society, where slavery did not pervert the morals of the people. Ultimately, the Williamsons freed twenty-seven slaves (the bulk of them in 1813, after the death of his father when he legally received them as an inheritance). <br /><br />Among the slaves freed by the Williamsons in 1813 were two brothers -- Benjamin Franklin and John Newton Templeton. The later, John Newton, was the first African American to attend and graduate from Ohio University in Athens in 1828. The former and younger brother, Benjamin Franklin, first attended Ripley College, which was presided over by radical abolitionist John Rankin; after a violent attack by a racist thug in a Ripley alleyway, Benjamin transferred to the Presbyterian-supported, Hanover College, near Madison, Indiana; he would later join the Presbyterian ministry after graduating from Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. Without the original education and support provided by the Williamsons these two young men never would have achieved the greatness that they did.<br /><br />By the time of Jemima and her child’s arrival in Ohio in 1821, William Williamson had recently resigned from his ministry at the West Union Presbyterian Church because of ill health. His health recovered and he would continue his ministry at the Presbyterian Church of Manchester, where he had also regularly preached since 1805. By the early 1820s, Williamson’s older children had begun to marry and marry well. His daughter Esther, for example, had just married Col. William Kirker, the son of former Ohio Governor Thomas Kirker. <br /><br />Jane’s decision to take her inheritance in slaves in order to emancipate them undoubtedly met the approval of her father (her mother had died in 1815, when Jane was 12 years old). There is little doubt that her decision was predicated upon her father’s willingness to shelter and help Jemima and her children start a new life in Ohio. In the Spring of 1821, the freed mother and child would first make their home at “The Beeches.” <br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/DSCN0125.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/DSCN0125.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>"The Beeches," as it appears to day on Cabin Creek Road, Adams County</em><br /><br />As the fates would have it, Jemima and her child had fallen into the hands of a family of emancipators, whose home was one of the first stations on the yet to be named “underground railroad.” Indeed, the network of stations and the conductors of runaway slaves was only in its infancy. To a large extent, runaway slaves in the first decades of the nineteenth century were on their own.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Joe's Escape to Adams County</span><br /><br />The story of Joe Logan’s escape to freedom in Ohio in 1822 is thus a window, however dark the glass, through which we can glimpse the dangerous flight of a runaway slave before the Underground Railroad had become a much more organized affair.<br /><br />Plans and preparations for Joe’s flight to freedom were nearly a year in the making. In the summer of 1821, just a few months after Jemima and his child’s departure for Ohio, Joe accompanied his master, John G. Smith, on a visit to Ohio, which included a stay at “The Beeches,” where Joe was briefly reunited with his family. Before leaving Ohio, Joe promised Jemima that he would be back or he would die trying. Joe’s plan was to use his return trip to North Carolina as a means of charting his future route to freedom, befriending slaves along the way, basically setting up safe houses, so that when he finally did flee, he could make his way safely from Granville County, North Carolina to Adams County, Ohio, a trip of some 500 miles.<br /> <br />When Joe finally ran away, after terrorizing the slave-hunting dogs of his neighborhood, he made his way north, carrying a suit of finely made clothes, wrapped in a bundle, which his master had previously given him, and a hatchet as a weapon to fend off any man or animal that might track him down. His preliminary beatings of the dogs in the neighborhood of Smith’s plantation worked, with the dogs refusing their “accustomed duties.” However, on his way through western Virginia he had a number of encounters with the dogs of slave catchers.<br /><br />In one instance, two dogs pursued Joe into a river, where man and beast then did battle, one by one. Taking each dog by the throat he was able to hold them underwater until they drowned. In a separate incident, Joe used his hatchet to kill two dogs, silencing their raucous barking before their handlers were able to track him down. At one point, two men on horseback pursued him and got close enough that they fired their guns, only to miss as Joe wove and dodged through the forest’s trees. By the time he made it to the Ohio River, he had abandoned his bundle of clothes and looked a bit ragged – he looked the part of a runaway slave. <br /><br />He traveled at night, spending much of his time in water, following streams, to cover his tracks. Whenever he crossed a river he would study his crossing in daylight before swimming it at night. When unsure of his way he asked for directions “of slaves, of children, or of white men whom he met alone. He would inquire for a route, but would never take the one he inquired for, but would travel parallel with it and away from it.” <br /><br />When he finally reached the banks of the Ohio, it was near the mouth of the Big Sandy River, at what was then known as Poage’s Settlement (modern-day Ashland, Kentucky). There he swam across the American Jordan to his Promised Land. While south of the river, Joe had traveled at night; now, on so-called “free soil,” he thought it safe to move about the roads in broad day light. Joe was headed west on what is now US 52, but was then the Gallipolis Pike. Just east of Portsmouth Joe ran into a couple of tough looking white guys who after speaking with him for a few minutes concluded that Joe was a fugitive slave. When they told him that they were going to take him to town and throw him in the Scioto County jail in hopes of obtaining a reward, Joe grabbed one of the men and threw him over a nearby fence. The other man decided that Joe wasn’t worth the trouble. In the end, the two would-be slave catchers ended up giving Joe directions to Bentonville, Adams County, directions that he did not directly follow; he detoured around Portsmouth, out of fear that the two men might gather a posse and track him down. <br /><br />On the outskirts of Bentonville, Joe once again ran into trouble. A man, he later identified as a stone cutter, threatened to arrest him, but Joe vowed that he’d only be taken dead. Now, within a short walk of “the Beeches,” Joe decided to hideout one last night in the woods. The following day came the much longed for reunion. Jemima would be the first person he saw that hot and happy summer morning. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Enter Gen. David Bradford</span><br /><br />For how long they continued to live at “The Beeches” is unknown, but, in time, he and Jemima and a once again growing family of now free-born children would move to the town of West Union, where Joe had found work as a hostler at Bradford’s Tavern (what is now the Olde Wayside Inn, where one can still stay the night in one of its five bedrooms and get a traditional home-cooked meal). David Bradford, who built his tavern in 1804, also ran a stage coach business, which operated along the old Zane’s Trace, between Aberdeen on the Ohio River and Chillicothe to the north-east.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/DSCN0078.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/DSCN0078.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>The Bradford Tavern (built in 1804), as it appears to day in downtown West Union</em><br /><br />Bradford, it should be noted, was one of the early Trustees of the Town of West Union and the long-serving treasurer of Adams County, having first filled the office in 1800. He held the post until 1832. He was known as General Bradford because he served as the Quartermaster General of the Second Division of the Ohio militia. Bradford was also a supporter of the West Union Presbyterian church, where the Rev. William Williamson had long-served as its minister.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Black Laws of the Promised Land</span><br /><br />The Promised Land that the Logans had found was far from perfect. Legal African-American residents were treated as second class citizens by the Ohio state constitution and its law code. And Joe was never a legal resident of Ohio. His open flaunting of the law is one of the more interesting aspects of his story. Only African Americans with legal papers proving their free status were allowed to settle in Ohio; they were to register with their county court clerk and were to have a $500 surety bond for good behavior signed by at least two other Ohio property owners. African Americans were denied the right to vote by the state constitution and for many years were even denied the right to testify against whites in criminal cases. To employ a runaway like Joe, if prosecuted, could end in a fine of up to $100, with the informer receiving half as a reward. Sheltering a fugitive slave or helping a fugitive settle illegally in Ohio, as the Williamsons and David Bradford had done, left such people susceptible to a fine of $100, with half of the fine again going to the informer. Ohio’s legislators designed the state’s black laws to discourage runaway slaves from coming into or staying in the state, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the laws were meant to encourage private citizens to turn informer and help enforce the discriminatory restrictions through lucrative financial rewards.<br /> <br />Joe Logan’s, as well as David Bradford’s and, undoubtedly many others, open flaunting of these laws suggests two things: 1) popular support for the enforcement of these laws in certain communities, especially when those in government and church violated the laws, was not as strong as their existence in the law codes might indicate; and 2) financial interest in using the labor of illegal black immigrants also appears to have outweighed the threat of fines or the financial reward of turning informer. It may be that the experience of illegal runaway slaves in early nineteenth century Ohio is in some ways analogous to the current-day, open use and exploitation of illegal Mexican labor. White Ohioans have a long history of hiring and sheltering illegal immigrants.<br /><br />It was these discriminatory laws, along with a federal law meant to facilitate the extradition of runaway slaves, which made it necessary to establish the “underground railroad” – had there been no black laws or a federal fugitive slave law, there would have been no need to go underground. There would have been little need to keep moving northward to Canada. The fact that Joe Logan stayed in Adams County, found work in Adams County, and, as we shall see, purchased land in Adams County, suggests that in some Ohio communities runaway African Americans – illegal immigrants --, if shielded by influential white friends and patrons, and if determined to fend off any attempt at capture, could maintain and establish a life of relative freedom.<br /><br />Even with the patronage and support of men like David Bradford and the Rev. William Williamson, several attempts were made to capture and return Joe to his master in the South. Apparently, Joe’s owner showed little interest in forcing Joe back into servitude. According to Emmons B. Stivers, the co-author of an early history of Adams County, Joe had enemies in and about West Union, who would occasionally write a letter to John G. Smith in North Carolina and offer to capture Joe and return him to his rightful owner. Smith never accepted such offers, knowing that Joe would never be returned alive.<br /><br />On numerous occasions, Joe made it clear “that if any attempt were made to recapture him, he would kill as many of his captors as he could, and would die himself, before he would be retaken.” To further deter any such attempt Joe “was in the habit of carrying a great club with him wherever he went, and it was well known that he would use it on dogs or men, as [the] occasion required.” Stivers also claimed that Joe eventually began telling people that he had purchased his freedom for $200, one-hundred of his own and one-hundred raised by his white friends. While such a purchase was possible, no record has come to light proving Joe’s claim and it can be reasonably assumed that Joe perpetuated this story to dissuade anyone from trying to re-enslave a legal free resident of Ohio. Joe’s claim may have also helped clear the way for his purchase of property in Adams County.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Rev. John Meek and the Logan Cabin</span><br /><br />In 1841, nearly twenty years after fleeing slavery, for the sum of $100 Joe Logan purchased 26 and 3/4th acres of land on the outskirts of West Union; it had taken some time for the Logans to both save enough money and find a willing seller. The details of Joe’s purchase sheds further light on the network of white friends that helped the Logans maintain a residence in Adams County. The seller, it turns out, was the Rev. John Meek, a well-known and respected Methodist preacher who had been an early settler in Adams County. <br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/John%20Meek.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/John%20Meek.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>The Methodist Rev. John Meek</em><br /><br />Meek first came to Ohio in 1803 as an itinerant minister on the Scioto Circuit, as it was then called. Although not a radical abolitionist like Williamson, Meek preached an antislavery faith and actively supported the American Colonization Society, which had a chapter in Adams County. Notwithstanding his support of the removal (deportation) of the free black population of the United States back to Africa, Meek’s sale of land to the Logans suggests that he was willing to contract with an illegal immigrant and help a black family settle in Ohio. There also appears to have been a significant connection between the Meeks and Joe’s employer, David Bradford. The Meek and Bradford families, it turns out, were connected by the marriage of David Bradford’s grandson to the daughter of Rev. Meek.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Joe%20Logan%20Deed_Page_1.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Joe%20Logan%20Deed_Page_1.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>The Adams County Recorder's Deed for the Logan's Property</em><br /><br />Joe would build a one room cabin on his hillside farm, which only provided enough arable land for a small garden patch. Much of Logan’s property was taken up with a ravine, which included a number of hidden rock shelters. A spring also flowed from the rock, which provided the Logans with fresh water, but also turned the ravine into an excellent hiding place for fugitive slaves. The Logan’s cabin still stands today on Logan’s Lane, though it has been extensively added onto, virtually encasing and obscuring the original structure. The ravine has been recently backfilled, covering a number of the rock shelters and the spring that may have provided water to runaways still flows, though it now feeds a small pond. With a little imagination one can envision “Black Joe,” as the whites of West Union called him, leading a solitary man or woman, or small family of fugitive slaves up from the ravine to an awaiting horse-drawn cart for a quick dash to the next station on the Underground Railroad.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/DSCN6705.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/DSCN6705.JPG" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>The Logans' Cabin, as it appears today, on Logan's Lane, West Union</em><br /><br />Joe Logan would die in his mid-50s in 1849 from a case of lockjaw, which he contracted after an accidental shooting, which left a bullet lodged in the big toe of one of his feet. Jemima lived to be 85 years old, dying in 1885. A number of their children continued to live in Adams County, well into the twentieth century, though the original cabin has passed out of the descendants’ hands.<br /><br />The story of Joe and Jemima Logan and the survival of three structures associated with their lives in southern Ohio – “The Beeches,” where Jemima first lived and where Joe first found shelter after escaping north of the Ohio River, the Bradford Tavern, where Joe found work and earned enough money to support a family and purchase land, and the Logan cabin, where this African American family made their home and helped other runaways to freedom – these buildings’ existence today is truly amazing. It is my hope that Joe and Jemima’s story and the buildings associated with their lives will be preserved and that their experience might help us all appreciate the plight of today’s illegal immigrants, who might not be fleeing slavery, but nevertheless look upon southern Ohio as a Promised Land of freedom.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-7853173220284804822007-08-27T10:10:00.000-04:002007-08-27T10:17:48.409-04:00Sinking Spring and the Death of James Holton<strong>Part IV</strong><br /><br /><em>This is the last of the installments on the story of Reverend Weed. - ALF</em><br /><br />After causing a near riot in Waverly, the Rev. Edward Weed found a more receptive audience at Sinking Spring, an area where some residents had already joined a local chapter of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS). In a letter to an abolitionist newspaper published in New York, Weed claimed that a mob had followed him from Pike county, but they had “found but little countenance among the citizens” in Sinking Spring. When the crisis, which Weed had predicted, came the Pike countians were chased out of Highland county by the local militia and then pursued by a posse comitatus. When all was said and done, when rumors of Weed’s lynching began showing up in the nation’s papers, one man lay in the grave and another faced charges of murder.<br /><br />“When they [the mob] commenced their interruptions,” Weed would later explain, “they were promptly met by the authorities of the place and dispersed.” However, the anti-abolitionists rallied and came back the following day with greater numbers, “about forty strong, a dirty, shabby, and savage looking set.” Arrest warrants were secured and the local militia unit was called up to clear the mob before Weed’s second lecture was to begin. According to Weed, “as soon,” as troops “appeared in the village with guns our mobocratic gentlemen began to talk about home, and … soon ‘put out.’” Weed’s series of lectures proceeded and in the end he succeeded in starting a branch chapter of the AAS at Sinking Spring with about 40 founding members.<br /><br />The militia was most likely raised under the authority of Col. Thomas Rodgers of the Highland County Militia, the first president of the Paint Valley Abolition Society, which had members in Ross, Highland, and Fayette counties. Rodgers had risen to the rank of major in the War of 1812 and was widely respected in the region.<br /><br />Unlike any other anti-abolition riot I am aware of, the Sinking Spring mob is the only one in which arrest warrants were secured. Whether led by the Highland County Sheriff or the Brush Creek Township Constable, it appears a posse comitatus was raised, which pursued the warrants into Pike county.<br /><br />Among those sought was James Holton, who, once found, resisted his arrest. Holton was thirty years old at the time, a father of nine children, the youngest having been born the previous year. Like many early settlers of the Lower Scioto River Valley, Holton was a native of Virginia, who moved to Ohio with his father at a young age. When his father died James Holton was orphaned at the age of sixteen – his legal guardian was Allen Trimble of Highland county. Trimble was one of the early leaders of the region, having served in the state house and senate, before becoming Governor of Ohio in 1826. Holton’s own children, after his untimely death, would also marry well, finding brides from families such as the Vanmeters and the Beekmans. <br /><br />A member of the Sinking Spring posse, William H. Mitchell found himself in a deadly confrontation with Holton. In what appears to have been self-defense, Mitchell stabbed Holton in the gut with a large bowie knife, leaving a four-inch deep mortal wound. Holton was slow to die. He lingered on until the 25th of September when he finally died, whereupon a Pike County grand jury indicted William Mitchell for murder.<br /><br />The case came before the Pike County Common Pleas Judge John H. Keith, who had recently been elected by the State Assembly to the post, after having served as the Assembly’s presiding officer. Judge Keith oversaw a brief trial, whose jury returned a verdict of not guilty. With friendly rulings by Keith, the jury found that Mitchell’s use of force was lawful.<br /><br />That October, when the editor of the <em>Chillicothe Gazette</em> published his correction of the false reports of Rev. Weed’s lynching, he suggested that Holton’s murder may have been the confused origins of the report. Somebody had, in fact, died, but it was not Edward Weed. Somehow this news had gotten so twisted and turned around that a traveling agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society (Edward Weed) had been attacked and murdered by an angry proslavery mob of southern Ohioans. I’m not so sure that explains the rumored lynching of Weed. <br /><br />Considering the mob actions in Waverly and Sinking Spring and the anti-abolition resolutions passed in Piketon, one can reasonably conclude that these rumors were purposely generated by anti-abolitionists who wanted to scare off any future visits by the Rev. Edward Weed, or any other abolitionist organizer, for that matter.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-77037388135241345942007-08-17T16:41:00.000-04:002007-08-17T16:47:51.402-04:00John I. Vanmeter and the Piketon Anti-Abolition Resolutions<strong>Part III </strong><br /><br />Having been run out of Waverly by a mob, which had been led by James Emmitt, the Rev. Edward Weed traveled west on horseback, just over the line into Highland County, where he had arranged for another series of abolition lectures for the first week of August, 1836.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/JohnIVanmeter.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/JohnIVanmeter.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>John Inskeep Vanmeter</em><br /><br />Meanwhile back in Piketon, in reaction to Weed’s visit, a group of prominent community members called a public meeting to be held at the County Court House. According to an account of the meeting published in the Chillicothe Gazette, “a large and respectable meeting of citizens of Piketon and the vicinity” assembled on the 29th of July and chose John Innskeep Vanmeter to preside. Vanmeter was a Virginian by birth, who had been raised in a family of wealthy slaveowners. He was a graduate of Princeton University, a lawyer and former state representative in Virginia before moving to Pike County in the 1820s, where he settling on lands inherited from his father. Vanmeter had quickly emerged as a prominent leader of the local Whig party and was, at the time of the meeting, a candidate for the Ohio legislature in the upcoming fall elections. His victory that November of 1836 would re-launch his political career, which ultimately took him to Washington, D.C., as a US Congressman, representing a district that included much of the Lower Scioto Valley.<br /><br />Vanmeter was given the job of selecting a committee to draft resolutions – and on this committee were among others, Abraham Chenoweth and William Reed. Abraham Chenoweth, one of the older members of the committee, was an early settler on what was then called Pee Pee Prairie, just north of Piketon. Chenoweth, it turns out, was the father-in-law of Dr. William Blackstone – Weed’s host in Waverly. But, he was also the father-in-law of one of the other committee members, William Reed. William Reed was the son of Judge Samuel Reed, who had intervened in Waverly to stop the mob from destroying the home of Blackstone and doing violence to Rev. Weed. William Reed’s mother, Rebecca Lucas Reed, was the sister of Robert Lucas, who was just then finishing his second term as governor of Ohio. These men -- the powerful and influential of Pike County – leading anti-abolitionists – were often related to each other, but also to some of the supporters of Rev. Weed and the American Anti-Slavery Society. Chances are that it was the family ties between the Reeds, Chenoweths, and Blackstones that enabled Judge Reed to negotiate Rev. Weed’s safe exodus from Waverly.<br /><br />The committee produced and the meeting then adopted the following resolutions:<br /><br /><em>“Whereas, the subject of modern abolition has created, and is still causing great excitement in this State, particularly in the town of Waverly and Piketon, and the county generally, and viewing with regret the unwarrantable steps taken by certain enthusiastic abolitionists lately, to agitate the public mind on this subject by lectures, and by circulating pamphlets, calculated not only to disturb our peace and happiness as citizens, but, if suffered to proceed, will ultimately cause a disunion of this great and glorious Republic. Viewing, then, Abolitionism as one of the greatest evils, and tending directly to infringe the compact of our Federal Union, we cannot but look upon these infatuated zealots as the worst of enemies we have to fear in this day of our national prosperity.<br /><br />1. Resolved, Therefore, that we, the citizens of Piketon and the vicinity, in council assembled, are diametrically opposed to modern abolitionism, and feel no desire to interfere with the concerns of the slave-holing States, and still less between master and slave.<br /><br />2. Resolved, That we disapprove of the late conduct of certain abolitionists who have attempted to deliver lectures on this subject; also, we are determined to discountenance them in the circulation of inflammatory publications.<br /><br />3. Resolved, That we do in the most unequivocal terms request all abolitionists to desist from visiting our towns for the purpose of delivering lectures, or circulating publications on the subject of abolition; and should they persist we will not hold ourselves accountable for the consequences.”</em><br /><br />The last of these – the one about not holding themselves “accountable for the consequences” virtually authorized the use of violence if Edward Weed or any other abolitionist returned to Pike County. As far as the existing correspondence of Reverend Weed and other records indicate, neither Weed and nor any other agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society returned to Pike County. Dr. Blackstone would soon thereafter relocate to Athens, Ohio. James Emmitt would claim that Blackstone left after stating that he would no longer live “in such a damned intolerant community.”<br /><br />The controversy surrounding Reverend Weed, however, was not over. The Piketon Anti-Abolition Resolutions appear to have encouraged some Pike countians to follow Weed into neighboring Highland county. At Sinking Spring, the Reverend would have his “crisis,” which he had predicted soon after he fled James Emmitt’s mob.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-26775214823384786812007-07-30T16:55:00.000-04:002007-07-30T17:14:32.498-04:00James Emmitt’s Anti-Abolition Mob<strong>Part II</strong><br /><br />The anti-abolitionist mobs of Pike County were not simply an isolated event – they were part of a larger phenomenon that broke out in the mid-1830s. From Alton, Illinois to Cincinnati, Ohio, to the streets of Boston, Massachusetts, white Americans reacted violently to the emergence of immediate abolitionism, the movement for which Rev. Edward Weed was a paid organizer. In the history of the Lower Scioto River Valley and Pike County, in particular, the violence experienced by the Rev. Weed in the late summer of 1836 occurred at a moment when the economy of the region was experiencing dramatic growth.<br /><br />The Ohio-Erie Canal had been in operation for about three years. The citing of the canal had transformed the development of the towns of Pike county. In one of the great controversies of the period, the canal commissioners, under the influence of Robert Lucas (a resident of Pike County and speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives and a future governor), the canal was run down the west side of the Scioto River through a tiny village soon to be known as Waverly. Rather than run down the east side through the original county seat of Piketon, it ran through lands owned by Lucas (among others), where he laid out a new village, which he named Jasper.<br /><br />The citing of the canal on the west side helped make the young James Emmitt a wealthy man, as his town of Waverly became the economic hub of Pike County. Waverly soon eclipsed Piketon and after a long drawn out battle, the county seat would eventually be moved to Waverly.<br /><br />By the summer of 1836, when Rev. Weed came to Pike County, Waverly was experiencing its initial boom time and James Emmitt was already the wealthiest businessman in the area.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/JamesEmmitt.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/JamesEmmitt.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>James Emmitt</em><br /><br />Edward Weed arrived in Waverly around the 14th of July, where he was welcomed into the home of Dr. William Blackstone, a local supporter of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Exactly where Weed gave his first lecture is unknown, but once word spread an angry mob began to form, which according to Weed, had none-other-than James Emmitt at is head.<br /><br />In his memoirs, James Emmitt provides a fairly detailed account of Rev. Weed’s visit, but strangely, he changes Weed’s identity to that of George Thompson, a much more infamous English abolitionist, who was met with angry mobs on his tour of New England. Although a mob sought Thompson in Boston around this time, the British abolitionist never visited Ohio in 1836. Writing some fifty years later, perhaps for dramatic reasons, Emmitt chose to portray Weed as Thompson, but one thing that is clear is that Emmitt downplayed his own leading role in the whole affair. He acknowledged his opposition to abolitionism at the time, but explained it as being the common sentiment. As he put it in his memoir, “Blackstone and his … followers, in 1836, had arrayed against them the combined, determined, outspoken sentiment of this whole community, and this whole section as well.”<br /><br />According to Emmitt, Dr. Blackstone publicized the upcoming visit of Rev. Weed and at that time was warned that if the abolitionist speaker “came he would not be allowed to make a public speech, and warned that it would not add any to Dr. Wm. Blackstone’s happiness, for him to slap public sentiment in the face. But warnings and threats only intensified the doctor’s bitterness, and strengthened his determination to have [Weed] come to Waverly and enlighten us as to the iniquity of the national crime we were sustaining in upholding slavery….”<br /><br />Weed arrived the night before his first scheduled lecture. That evening, according to Emmitt, his opponents broke into Blackstone’s stable – they clipped the mane from Weed’s horse and shaved off all of its hair. They took Weed’s buggy and smeared it with excrement. The following morning, a mob gathered outside Blackstone’s house. According to Emmitt, the leader of the mob yelled: “I tell you, Blackstone, the unanimous sentiment of the people is agin this thing. You’ve imported [an outsider] into Pike County to teach seditious doctrine. …. And I tell you, Blackstone, the loyal people ain’t going to stand it. Do you expect us to stand here and listen to a traitorous [abolitionist] telling us what is right and what is wrong? Do you think we’re going to let [this] fanatic lead us around by the nose and give us good advice, and tell us just what an iniquitous, miserable lot of scalawags we are? …. We’re here to tell you that that man isn’t here to preach for our good. And we are here to tell you that that man can’t make a speech here today. We are fully determined on that.”<br /><br />The leader of the mob then told Blackstone: “That man … is a traitor and here for a traitor’s purpose; and the sooner he gets out of this community, the better it will be for Dr. William Blackstone” and his unwelcome guest. With the cheers of the crowd behind him, he continued: “The best thing you can do for your nigger-loving friend, Blackstone, is to get him out of the country, just as soon as it is possible to jump the border.”<br /><br />At this point, Blackstone emerged from his house and declared that his guest would speak “if he had to wade in blood knee deep to protect him.” The mob’s leader responded: “If that man attempts to make a speech here today … we’ll pull down the last log in the house over your head. If you think you can defy the sentiment of this community, just let that traitorous [abolitionist] attempt to make a speech. I say attempt, because he’ll never finish it. Now, we give [your guest] just fifteen minutes to get outside of the city limits, and five hours to leave the county.” According to Emmitt, this threat led Blackstone to give in and Rev. Weed fled out a back door and to his horse, which he quickly road off upon without a saddle or any of his belongings. As he galloped down the road towards Piketon, the young children of the town were waiting with rotten eggs, with which they pelted the young minister – what Emmitt called “a fitting, loud-smelling, farewell salute.”<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/SamuelReed.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/SamuelReed.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><em>Judge Samuel Reed</em><br /><br />Emmitt’s account underplays his own role and misrepresents how the standoff was actually resolved. According to a letter later published in the <em>Chillicothe Gazette</em>, Samuel Reed, a former Associate Judge of the Court Common Pleas in Pike County, negotiated Weed’s peaceful exit. Reed, who was later accused of being an abolitionist for his role in the affair, defended his actions, stating that he “went and reasoned with [the leaders of the mob] on the impropriety of using any force, it being in direct violation of law – and proposed that, if they would use no violence to the persons or property of any of the citizens, I would persuade Weed to leave the place, which he did….”<br /><br />With the intervention of Judge Reed, the Reverend Weed fled to Piketon, where he spent the night in the home of another supporter before leaving the county the following morning. While there he wrote a letter to his new wife, who at the time was living near Cincinnati: “Much violence is abroad in the land. For the last four days” – Weed had apparently lectured in Waverly, contrary to the account provided by Emmitt – “I have been in the midst of an infuriated mob who were seeking my life. But the Lord has delivered me out of their hand. …. Now, while I am writing, there are men all around thirsting for my blood, and would kill me, if they had a good opportunity, as soon as they would a snake! Pray for me, that I may, in patience, possess my soul, and be ready to depart whenever God calls. We have fallen upon perilous times; law is prostrate, God alone must be our shield and protector. The crisis is not yet come, but is fast approaching. I say, with all my soul, let it come; I may fall, but truth must and will triumph”<br /><br />The crisis would come at the village of Sinking Spring and Edward Weed would live to tell about it.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-19130157485915253762007-07-13T16:50:00.000-04:002007-07-16T21:14:58.757-04:00Reverend Weed<em>This past April, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Beaver Valley Historical Society Annual Heritage Banquet, which was held in the auditorium of Eastern High School in Pike County. Jim Henry, an officer in the Society and columnist with the <em>Pike County News Watchman</em>, arranged the invitation and made sure that I was not only well-fed, but welcomed into their community. I chose for my topic the anti-abolition mobs of Pike County in the 1830s. <br /><br />As part of my research for my book project, which is tentatively entitled, "Southerners in the Promised Land: The Lower Scioto River Valley in the Early American Republic," I had been looking into the activities of valley abolitionists. To my surprise, I discovered a thoroughly fascinating story that has long been overlooked by local historians, as well as by scholars of the antislavery movement.<br /><br />Below is the first installment of my talk, “When Reverend Weed Came to Town.” Over the coming days more will follow.</em><br /><br /><strong>Part I</strong><br /><br />In the early fall of 1836, reports began to appear in Ohio papers and later in national newspapers, such as the <em>Boston Courier</em> and the <em>Washington Globe</em>, that a mob in southern Ohio had attacked the Reverend Edward Weed, who had come to the region to speak in favor of the abolition of slavery. According to the reports, after the mob had offered him “some indignities,” “Mr. Weed soon after left town, was followed by the mob, his wagon broken to pieces, his horse killed, and at length himself suspended to a tree by a rope … until he was dead.” <br /><br />The reports of Rev. Weed’s lynching eventually made it back to the region’s most influential newspaper, the <em>Chillicothe Gazette</em>. The editor of the <em>Gazette </em>decided to set the record straight.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Edward%20Weed.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Edward%20Weed.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /> <em>Rev. Edward Weed</em><br /><br /><br />While it was true that the Rev. Weed had visited the area earlier in the summer and there had been some “outbreaking of popular passion” against his lectures, there was no truth to the story of his lynching. “Mr Weed himself,” assured the <em>Gazette’s </em>editor, had been in Chillicothe less than a week ago, attending a regional meeting of Presbyterian ministers. Rev. Weed was alive and well and still traveling in the region. The <em>Gazette’s </em>editor distanced the people of Chillicothe from the residents of Pike County, where Weed’s lectures had generated, in his words, a “disturbance.” “The peaceable community of Chillicothe, although generally opposed to Abolitionism, have, during the whole history of this exciting topic, kept aloof from any outbreaking of popular passion. No part of it would ever permit transactions such as” a lynching of an abolitionist speaker “to transpire within our borders.”<br /><br />As we shall see, while it is true that Rev. Weed was never lynched and lived to tell his tale of the anti-abolition mobs of Pike County, his visit to the region did end in the death of one Pike county resident. A member of the mob that had risen up against Weed would die as a result of wounds suffered when resisting arrest for his role in the anti-abolition riots that followed Weed from Waverly to Piketon and on to the small village of Sinking Spring, just over the border, in Highland County.<br /><br />At the time of his rumored untimely demise Edward Weed had just celebrated his 29th birthday. Born in the town of North Stamford, Connecticut, Edward’s ancestry was pure Puritan. At the age of ten, he and his family moved to a newly settled region of upstate New York, where he was swept up in one of the numerous evangelical revivals that covered the region in the 1820s. His biographer wrote that Edward “believed, if God call him to preach, he would make the way plain, and provide the means. He left his trade, and began to use such facilities for the improvement of his mind, as he could obtain.” He eventually enrolled in the Oneida Institute, at the time, a new college in Whitestown, New York, which allowed students to pay their tuition and board by working for the college. After four years of study and work, Weed was among the first graduating class. From there he decided to head west to Cincinnati, to attend Lane Theological Seminary, a newly established evangelical institution that was largely under the control of evangelical Presbyterians. Lane’s first president was the Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher of Boston, the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of <em>Uncle Tom’s Cabin</em>.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Lane%20Seminary.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Lane%20Seminary.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /> <em>Lane Seminary, near Cincinnati, Ohio</em><br /><br /><br />It was at Lane Seminary that Edward Weed became a committed abolitionist – a supporter of an immediate end to slavery. In 1834, the seminary’s literary society hosted a debate on whether or not slavery should be abolished immediately within the bounds of the United States; the debate came on the heels of the abolition of slavery throughout the British empire in 1833. The overwhelming response from the student body and much of the faculty was in support of an immediate abolition. White Americans, even in the South, had long tolerated talk of an eventual, gradual emancipation, with the understanding that such an emancipation was so far off in the distance that the current generation of Americans need not seriously concern themselves with the problem. The demands of an immediate emancipation, however, was considered downright dangerous by a large segment of white America, both in the South and in the North. In the Border States of the North, place like Ohio, talk of an immediate emancipation generated vocal and at times violent opposition. <br /><br />Lane Seminary President Beecher and his institution’s Board of Trustee’s were concerned that the financial backing and local community support for their new school would collapse if Lane became known as a hotbed of abolitionism. The school administration ordered an end to the debates and forbid its students from joining abolitionist organizations. Many of the students at that point withdrew from Lane. Some of the so-called Lane Rebels transferred to Oberlin College. Others, like Edward Weed, entered the ministry and joined the ranks of traveling agents for the American Anti-Slavery Society, the national immediate abolitionist organization that had been founded by men like William Lloyd Garrison and the Rev. John Rankin of Ripley, in southern Ohio.<br /><br />The controversy at Lane signaled the beginning of a series of confrontations between the opponents of slavery and those who wanted to silence any public discussion of the abolition question.<br /><br />Historians have long focused their attention on anti-abolition riots in Cincinnati, as well as in Boston, Massachusetts, where, for example William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets with a noose around his neck and nearly hung before his supporters succeeded in freeing him. In Cincinnati, at the same time that Mr. Weed was touring south-central Ohio, a mob twice attacked and destroyed the press and offices of an abolitionist newspaper edited by James G. Birney. Historians have also focused on the murder of another antislavery editor – Elijah P. Lovejoy -- and the destruction of his press at Alton, Illinois, just across the river form St. Louis, Missouri.<br /><br />The murder of Lovejoy is one of the most famous acts of violence against a free press in American history and that is why when I first came across the reports that an abolitionist named Rev. Edward Weed had been lynched by a mob in southern Ohio, I was quite surprised. I wondered how could Weed’s story have been left out of our history books? Why weren’t the anti-abolitionist mobs of Pike county, Ohio, as infamous, as those of Alton, Illinois? It is because Weed, in fact, was not lynched, and his encounter with the Pike County mob was overshadowed by the events in Cincinnati that occurred at the same moment in time.<br /><em></em>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-23646302877044236082007-06-28T20:45:00.000-04:002007-06-28T20:56:54.181-04:00Doesn't Anyone Care?The nation had just celebrated the bicentennial of American independence, but for many living in and around Portsmouth, Ohio, there was sadness and uncertainty about what the future held. As discussed in my previous post, "Cheap Shoes," Williams Manufacturing shut down its factory in 1976. Recently, while I was digging around in the local history department of the Portsmouth Public Library, I came across a letter to the editor of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Portsmouth Daily Times</span>, dated 15 July 1976. Written by Dorothy Robinson of West Portsmouth, a long time shoe worker at Williams, the letter deserves to be preserved. Mrs. Robinson clearly spent some time picking her words.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Doesn't Anyone Care?</span><br /><br />After all the blood, sweat and tears we've shed at Williams throughout the years, the time has come to say good-bye. I'm a little sentimental, so I'm gonna cry. I'll try to remember all the good times that we've had.<br /><br />I remember Blaine, Graves and Frosty* too, and they all knew how to make a good shoe! They were men who cared for their fellow man, always there to lend a helping hand. They passed on and entrusted their work to other men. I'm afraid it was never the same again.<br /><br />There were some who tried and gave their best, and some who couldn't stand up to the test. We've made many friends from day to day, with whom we've shared joys and sorrows along the way. As we sit and ponder and try to think back, when did we seem to get off the right track?<br /><br />Doesn't anyone care our hearts cry out for all these good people standing about? Nowhere to go and no work to do, for never again will they make a shoe. No more to eat from Williams kitchen, all that bologna and coffee we'll be missing. To hearts that were yesterday, light and gay, we know how heavy they must be today. And Blaine, Graves and Frosty, wherever you are, you looked to the future as a bright and shining star. <br /><br />We know your hearts too would be heavy today; not one of you this whole thing would have wanted it this way. I've thought this whole thing through and through. These are my sentiments; what about you?<br /><br />Mrs. Dorothy Robinson<br />West Portsmouth<br /></span><br /><br />*Blaine, Graves, and Frosty (Forrest) were the three Williams brothers who founded the company in the 1920s.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-32309471841805481832007-06-15T15:14:00.000-04:002007-06-15T15:46:40.468-04:00Cheap Shoes<a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/FormerSelbySite.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/FormerSelbySite.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />If we are to believe local writers Frank Byrne’s and Joe Hannah’s account of the closure of Portsmouth’s Selby Shoe Company, it is the United Shoe Workers, Local 117, who are to be held largely responsible for the shutdown and liquidation of the firm in the late 1950s. Their account places Roger Selby, the company president, in his office in downtown Portsmouth, meeting face-to-face with Ernest Dunaway, the local union president. Selby’s profits were suffering “due to economic conditions at the time and changing labor laws.” Citing “spiraling labor costs,” Byrne and Hannah claim that Selby issued a threat to Dunaway: “I’m 74-years old and got all the money I’ll ever spend. If you go on strike, I’ll close the shoe factory down.” Again, if we are to believe Byrne and Hannah, Roger Selby was true to his word. After the union voted to strike, the firm that had made shoes in Portsmouth since 1877 shut its doors, “never to reopen.” A shocking story if it were indeed true!<br /><br />Somehow the victims of Selby’s closure, the workers themselves, have come to be blamed for the loss of their jobs. Worse, unionized labor has in some ways, for some people, become the scapegoat upon which all of Portsmouth’s ills can be blamed. Selby’s demise, as written by Byrne and Hannah, fits into a popular myth about the causes of Portsmouth’s economic decline – the unions and their unreasonable demands drove away our manufacturing jobs and ended our prosperity. Since moving here in 2001, I’ve heard this explanation for why the steel mill shutdown, why the railroad repair shops were closed, and why the shoe industry failed. It has even been used to explain why so little manufacturing has returned to the area, despite similar revivals in other Rust Belt River Towns.<br /><br />This popular myth, with its source most likely in the managerial class of Portsmouth and environs, has so infused popular understandings of local history that its narrative made its way into Byrne’s and Hannah’s history of Scioto and Greenup counties, which was published under the title of <em>A Thirst for Land</em> (2004). The source for their Roger Selby quote turns out to be Denver Moore, a long-serving employee of Joe Hannah. If ever one was looking for a reason not to trust oral history, the case of Denver Moore and his telling of the closure of Selby is certainly a classic example. Someone, somewhere along the way, simply made-up the story of Selby’s threat and the union’s strike. It simply did not happen. Moore’s error is no case of faulty memory. Byrne’s and Hannah’s uncritical acceptance of Moore’s tale is evidence of not only shockingly shoddy research but an anti-union bias.<br /><br />One of the greatest voids in the published history of Portsmouth is that related to its shoe manufacturing. Not only has little been written down by historians, a good deal of what has been published is wildly inaccurate and incomplete. We know the rough outline of its history. The local shoe industry had its origins in 1850, when Robert Hunter Bell of Circleville, Ohio, set up shop in what is now popularly known as the Boneyfiddle District of downtown Portsmouth. From this small shop, where a handful of skilled cobblers made all of the shoes by hand, sprang a thriving industry, employing over 5,000 workers at its height before its decline and collapse in the decades following World War II. If R. Bell and Company started production, Williams Manufacturing Company ended it in 1976.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Selby%20Shoes%20Factory%2003.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Selby%20Shoes%20Factory%2003.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Selby was originally founded in 1877 by Frederick and Irving Drew, who had first established themselves working for R. Bell & Company. In 1880, George D. Selby, an industrial sales representative for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, joined the firm and ultimately bought out Irving Drew in 1906. By then, Selby was the largest employer in Portsmouth, with some 1,400 workers on their payroll.<br /><br />Selby’s specialty was fine women’s shoes, with their Arch Preserver line being their most popular. By the early 1950s Selby’s profits were in decline, as the company was forced into making concessions to their unionized workforce, at a time, when the market share of high-end footwear was shrinking. Though labor costs were certainly a factor in Selby’s troubles, the unraveling of the firm flowed from a failed hostile take-over attempt made in the spring and summer of 1956. Sydney L. Albert, a businessman from Akron, Ohio, who was the majority shareholder of the Bellanca Aircraft Company, had taken an interest in Selby. Bellanca had become Albert’s vehicle for buying up and liquidating struggling companies. <br /><br />In May 1956, according to <a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/lowerscioto/SEC_1958_0602_Bella_Corp.pdf">Securities and Exchange Commission records</a>, Bellanca purchased a total of 72,975 shares of Selby stock through a number of Wall Street brokers for $1,448,032. In the same month Albert personally purchased 1,800 Selby shares for about $37,000. Among the shares purchased by Albert and Ballanca were those of Homer and Mark Selby. Their youngest brother, Roger held on to his shares in an attempt to maintain local control of the firm. In a nasty proxy fight in June, where Albert and Bellanca attempted to gain control of Selby’s board of directors, Roger and Calvin Clarke, a local attorney, large shareowner, and Chairman of the Selby board, managed to hold on to power after other local investors bought shares and assigned their proxies to the Selby-Clarke faction. Disputed proxy votes involving some 1,300 shares had kept the board in the hands of Selby, but it became clear during the fight that Bellanca actually was in a dominant position and that Selby’s control could very well be short-lived. <br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Rockwood-Buys-Selby-1956-08-18.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Rockwood-Buys-Selby-1956-08-18.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Just as Bellanca’s attempt to takeover Selby failed, Sydney Albert’s house of cards began to collapse. Bellanca’s stock price on Wall Street fell dramatically in June and on into July, dropping from $25 down to $5. Selby and Clarke found themselves in a serious financial crisis. Fearing the collapse of Bellanca and the possible liquidation of Selby, bankers began refusing to extend their usual short term loans to Selby, credit which the firm relied upon for their upcoming fall season’s production. In an attempt to avoid bankruptcy, Albert and Ballanca moved to sell its Selby shares, but Selby and Clarke were not in a position to buyout Albert. In August, Roger Selby reluctantly traveled to New York City, where he met with Wall Street brokers, hoping to find what the <em>Portsmouth Times </em>called “a reliable purchaser who had financing and know-how.”<br /><br />In mid-August, a deal was struck between Selby, Bellanca, and Rockwood & Co. Rockwood was a Brooklyn, New York firm, which specialized in the manufacture of chocolate candies; it had come under the sway of the Pritzker family of Chicago. When the Portsmouth Times announced the buyout, they claimed the new owners “are in the process of formulating plans for expansion and for a profitable business.” Roger Selby, according to the Times, had “refused to sell his holdings without iron-clad assurance that the Selby company would continue as a going concern and would continue to uphold the high standard set in the shoe industry by the Selby family.” Selby walked away with $1 million; Calvin Clarke with $340,000.<br /><br />Rockwood’s promises of keeping Selby together, perhaps even expanding its production facilities, quickly proved to be little more than lies. By late October, Rockwood had announced they were closing Selby’s factory in Manchester, New Hampshire. Its machinery, molds, and other resources were soon sold to another footwear company. In the first months of 1957, the rights to various shoe lines, which had long been manufactured by Selby, either at the Manchester or Portsmouth factory, were being sold off. The last major line, the Arch Preserver, which was made in Portsmouth, was the last to be sold. Production of the AP line ended in early May 1957. <br /><br />By the end of May, Rockwood had sold the AP line to U.S. Shoe Corporation of Cincinnati, which immediately announced that it would seek a new location for the production of the AP. Joseph Stern, chairman of the board of U.S. Shoe, said: “We cannot produce shoes in Portsmouth because facilities for producing the Arch Preserver line are no longer available in the Selby plant. The machines have been sold and the factory space used by the AP line is in such shape that we could not possibly get it ready for production of the fall line.” <br /><br />At the same time that U.S. Shoe purchased what remained of Selby’s lines, another local Portsmouth shoe producer, Williams Manufacturing, purchased Selby’s factory building, with plans to use it as a warehouse until they could rent or sell it to another shoe manufacturer. Williams offered U.S. Shoe the use of the building, but U.S. Shoe declined.<br /><br />Rockwood’s liquidation of Selby was complete and had been accomplished in such a way that the new owners, U.S. Shoe, had concluded that continued production of shoes in Selby’s Portsmouth plant was not a viable option. <br /><br />The closing of Selby is often considered the beginning of the end, yet it was the infamous Flood of 1937 that struck the first blow to this industry in Portsmouth. After the water had receded, the Irving Drew Company, which had been formed in 1902, never truly restarted their Portsmouth operations. The company’s namesake founder, Irving Drew, had been one of the primary movers behind the creation of the firm that had evolved into Selby’s. His father, Frederick Drew, had overseen the introduction of machine stitching tools into the original R. Bell factory in 1869. By 1937, in the wake of the flood, Irving Drew, a pillar of the community, decided to cut his losses in Portsmouth and move his operations to Lancaster, Ohio. In an interesting twist of fate, Drew’s company is still in business, now specializing in orthopedic work and walking shoes. The firm, however, recently closed their Ohio plant and moved all of their production overseas.<br /><br />The relocation of Drew began the decline in Portsmouth’s shoe industry, but it is the final liquidation of Selby in May of 1957 that points to an early start to the larger, region-wide deindustrialization process that is most commonly associated with the 1970s and 1980s. The final end to this chapter of local history came in 1976 with the shuttering of the Williams Manufacturing Company, which had purchased the old Selby factory building from Rockwood in 1957. Organized in the early 1920s, Williams had been a smaller operation until the 1930s when it experienced a dramatic expansion during the Great Depression. Whereas Selby and Drew manufactured fine, higher-priced shoes (shoes, it has been said, that many of their workers couldn’t afford), Williams specialized in low-cost, shall we say, “cheap” shoes. And, in the midst of an economic depression, with everyone still needing shoes, the discount shoe trade in the United States began to expand rapidly. It would be Williams Manufacturing Company that lasted the longest, until they too found it difficult to compete in a globalized, low-end footwear market.<br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Williams.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/Williams.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />By the time Williams went under, they had already begun shifting their production overseas to Taiwan. Some of Williams’ employees no longer made shoes; they simply relabeled Chinese-made footwear, which had been transported to Portsmouth in loose pairs, in huge cardboard containers. The shoes were then re-packaged and shipped out with the Williams’ brand names emblazoned on the shoes and their new boxes. <br /><br />One of the greatest changes in the recent history of Portsmouth has been the loss of manufacturing jobs. Once a city renowned for its production of shoes and steel, what little manufacturing that remains only reminds us of what has been lost. Where steel workers once fed iron ore into huge coke-fired blast furnaces, where shoe workers once cut and stitched together millions of shoes, there are now largely empty brown fields, or in one exception, a newly opened Wal-Mart Supercenter. Numerous good-paying, unionized, manufacturing jobs have been replaced with a few non-unionized, service jobs, whose compensation is less than desired. Where the old Selby Shoe Company factory stood at the intersection of John and Seventh Streets, there are now neatly stacked piles of the building’s original foundation stones, looking like the ruins of some American Acropolis. In recent years, the streets around the former site of Selby’s factory have become a hangout for prostitutes, as if the name of John Street had come to accurately reflect the type of business now transacted along its sidewalks. <br /><br /><a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/FormerSelbySite.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/FormerSelbySite.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />About the time of Williams’ failure, the United States Trade Commission completed a <a href="http://omicron.shawnee.edu/lowerscioto/US-Tariff-Commision-Report-1974.pdf">report</a> on the impact of lower tariffs on foreign imported shoes that had been put into effect by the GATT world trade agreements. Congress had passed a law providing for special unemployment benefits to those workers negatively impacted by the lower GATT tariffs. The Commission’s majority found that the financial troubles facing Williams, which had already led to layoffs in the first years of the 1970s, had been caused by these lower tariffs. One commissioner, however, filed a dissenting opinion, wherein he blamed poor management decisions on the part of Williams’ executives. No commissioner blamed the workers. Considering the larger context of deindustrialization and the shifting of manufacturing jobs out of the Ohio Valley and the larger Midwest, blame, if we are to lay it, should fall on the shoulders of both the Williams management team and the larger forces of globalization associated with the tariff reforms of GATT.<br /><br />All that remains of the once thriving Portsmouth shoe industry is Mitchellace, Incorporated. This manufacturer of shoelaces got its start supplying Drew’s, Selby’s, and Williams’ factories in the early twentieth-century. After the closure of Williams, local bankers convinced Kerry Keating, the President of Mitchellace, to move his operations into the then empty Williams building, located at the corner of Gallia and Murray Streets. Yet, even Mitchellace, in order to survive, has begun shifting its production overseas to Honduras, where cheaper labor and other production cost savings help improve the firm’s bottom-line. In a recent oral history interview with Keating, he explained that shoelaces manufactured in Portsmouth are exported to China, where they are placed in popular lower-valued footwear before being sold back into the United States and around the globe.<br /><br />If the development of an American market for cheap shoes in the Great Depression helped at least one local Portsmouth firm survive through the 1950s and 1960s, cheap Chinese-made shoes continue to help support what remains of the once thriving, local shoe industry.<br /><br />This past week Congressman Joseph Crowley (D-NY) announced his support for the Affordable Footwear Initiative, which seeks to eliminate what remains of the old US import duties on low-cost and children’s shoes. The current tariff regime, which was originally put in place in the early 1930s to protect American shoe manufacturers (like Selby, Drew, and Williams) has become a regressive tax on low- and middle-income American households. The old rates were set so that higher duties fell on lower-valued imported merchandise. In other words, the tax paid by Americans who purchase high-end footwear is actually less than that paid by Americans who buy their shoes at places like Payless Shoes or your local Target and K-mart. When I spoke with Rohit Mahajan, Congressman Crowley’s press secretary, he said: “Its Paris Hilton versus the rest of us.”<br /><br />The elimination of these duties would recognize the reality of the disappearance of domestic low-end shoe manufacturing, but it would also virtually eliminate the possibility of its revival, whether here in Portsmouth or else where in the United States. Americans currently import 99% of their footwear, with nearly 80% of it originating in China. What remains of the US industry focuses on niche items, such as boots and other shoes for specialized purposes – duties on these types of footwear would remain in place. Backers of the Affordable Footwear Initiative include the American Apparel and Footwear Association and the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America. A lack of opposition from retail giants like Wal-Mart, according to Mahajan, also suggests that the change would be welcomed. <br /><br />“Common sense legislation,” is how Congressman Crowley is promoting the initiative. The current duties are protecting an industry that no longer exists in America and low- and middle-class Americans are left paying an un-needed tax in the form of higher priced discount shoes. How much cheaper would our shoes be? According to Mahajan, if the average pair of low-end shoes costs between $15 and $20, we could see their retail price drop by three-to-five dollars. With 99% of the market already in foreign hands and what remains of the American shoe industry still protected, it would appear that average Americans will see some significant savings, that is, as long as retailers like Payless and Wal-Mart pass the tax-relief onto their customers.<br /><br />Retailers are no doubt hoping that cheaper shoes will lead their customers to purchase more shoes, more often; and for companies like Wal-Mart, where profits are made by selling massive numbers of products with slim price margins, the Affordable Footwear Initiative could certainly help spur sales. We may soon see lower priced shoes in the Lower Scioto Valley. And Mitchellace, if they properly take advantage of this proposed tariff reform, may very well see an increase in the number of shoelaces they export to China. Cheap shoes, once a hallmark of Portsmouth manufacturing, may yet help keep the last remnant of that industry in business.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5602997944491611939.post-50027962503026442992007-06-07T22:47:00.001-04:002015-10-08T10:04:22.969-04:00A River of Deer<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5mFIYa0t3G3HoTpmWW1jIYWDO9qdFdhqyPUlUOqupn26BPdAvAVKz71LrU8mI3Zgjr3TA-4m-u2DFWqf0zO9lRah406zdz_aCaDn6OatLWQIWlTSykoIoK3OpNmucQvpCFRnJk6ISbn6S/s1600/deer+skull+on+turkey+creek.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5mFIYa0t3G3HoTpmWW1jIYWDO9qdFdhqyPUlUOqupn26BPdAvAVKz71LrU8mI3Zgjr3TA-4m-u2DFWqf0zO9lRah406zdz_aCaDn6OatLWQIWlTSykoIoK3OpNmucQvpCFRnJk6ISbn6S/s200/deer+skull+on+turkey+creek.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo Credit: Andrew Feight, Ph.D.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
This spring, hundreds of different species of migratory birds returned to the Lower Scioto River Valley, as they have done for thousands of years. Having now spent my first spring living along Turkey Creek in the Shawnee State Forest, I can testify to the amazing variety of birds who have stopped by my home on their way to some other place further north. <br />
<br />
The passenger pigeon flocks that once darkened this valley's skies have long since disappeared and while the great American bison, the deer, bear, and panther no longer seek out the saline waters of the Scioto Salt Licks, migrating human populations who first came to this valley because of its abundant game have definitely settled in and left their mark. As with the birds, there are old human migratory flows that drew and, to a certain degree, continue to draw people into this valley. There are little eddies here and there that swirl about and over the years they have managed to overpower many a rambling bone. <br />
<br />
Though I am relatively a newcommer here, I followed the path of many of the first white and black American immigrants who came to this region from the southeastern side of the Appalachian Mountains. From the foothills of Georgia and South Carolina, through the Cumberland Gap and into the Kentucky Bluegrass, I eventually made my way to the mouth of the Scioto River in Southern Ohio.<br />
<br />
Over the millenia a number of different civilizations have inhabited this region - migrants all. They have come and gone and returned. Whether the prehistoric Native Americans or their European, African, and Mexican American successors, many decided to stay here and sow their seeds and reap their life's joys and sorrows. Yet, like the migratory birds of this spring, there is no doubt that more have simply passed by and through our valley than have made this their home and laid their bones in our soil. <br />
<br />
If one stays in this valley long enough to know it, the layers of its history, reaching back to the earliest days of contact between Native Americans and European explorers, reveal themselves to be as rich as the valley's primeval forest, when the passenger pigeon turned day into night and the doe and the buck were so thick that the Shawnee spoke of a river of deer.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04419648820747123662noreply@blogger.com11