Early Settlers and Pioneers

EARLY SETTLERS
WHO THE PIONEERS WERE.
THE KIND OF LIVES THEY LED.
Many Interesting Personal Incidents.
Author: P. W. Gillette
Ironton Register, May 20, 1897

Portland, Oregon, May 7, 1897
For the Register.
Perhaps few people realize that nearly all of the population and wealth of the United States has been acquired within less time than the length of two human lives. For instance, my father was born in 1799; then, the United States had just passed the 5,000,000 mark in population. The income of the government for that year was about $11,300,000. Now we have a population of 70,000,000, and the annual national income is about $500,000,000.

The increase in wealth has been many-fold greater than that of the population. Discoveries, inventions, and improvements have more than kept pace with the growth in wealth. Then steam was not known as a power and had never turned a wheel; railroads, telephones, electric lights, and electric power had never been dreamed of. Since then, tens of thousands of important inventions and discoveries have been made and added to the use, pleasure, and comforts of life. So fast has our country grown in power, population, wealth, and everything, that it seems older than it is. It is but a few years since the great state of Ohio was a wilderness in this “far west.”

In 1816, only 81 years ago, my grandfather, who lived in Central New York, wishing to emigrate to Ohio, hired wagons to haul his family and such household goods as he could afford to take so far and set out on what was then considered a long journey across the Allegheny mountains. When he reached the navigable waters of the Allegheny river, the only transportation offered was a passage down Ohio on board a pine lumber raft, on which they erected a temporary shanty in which to live during the passage. In this way, they reached Marietta quite comfortably on December 12, 1816.

The family remained in the neighborhood of Marietta for two years, when they removed down the river to Lawrence county in a small flat boat built by themselves for that purpose. There were no steamboats running on the river then. The first steamboat that ever passed down the river, as far as Lawrence county, was the “Cyclopedia.” She had the old-fashioned “walking beam” engine and was a great curiosity to the people. A man stood on the deck, constantly casting the lead and crying the depth of water to the man at the wheel. This was in 1819, but steamboats were not very plentiful on the river for many years.

Among the first settlers in the upper part of Lawrence county were:

• Joel BOWEN, who came in 1812
• Moses CHAPLIN
• “Old Grandpa FULLER,” father of Gen’l A. T. F. FULLER
• Judge E. B. GREEN came in 1816
• Solomon CHURCHILL came between 1816-1818
• Mr. McCAN
• Joel GILLETTE, father of Capt. Alanson GILLETTE
• Mrs. Thomas GARDNER
• Wm. GILLETTE
• Hiram BEARDSLEY
• Nathaniel PRITCHARD and sons
• Capt. Cyrus GREEN
• Joel SWAIN
• Zebedon GILLETTE, father of H. N. GILLETTE

Nearly all of these had families. Some of them came from New York and New England, except the BEARDSLEY’S who came from Pennsylvania. Nearly all the first settlers of Lawrence county were men of character, with great determination and industry. They were sterling men. There were few or no criminals, and in all my early life, I knew but two of the pioneers who ever got drunk.

As late as 1818 there were no roads in the county, nothing but trails, and the whole country was covered with timber and much of it was heavily timbered, and the ground beneath the timber was a perfect jungle of underbrush, but cattle eventually exterminated the most of the brush, so that one could ride on horseback pretty comfortably through the woods.

These sturdy pioneers had literally to dig and hew their farms out of the solid forest. There were no prairies. The timber was utterly valueless and had to be chopped down, cut, piled, and burned up. It required a vast amount of labor to grub the underbrush that covered the ground before it could be plowed and planted. They had roads and bridges to build, houses and barns to construct, fields to clear, and orchards to plant, but few of them brought any money, and none of them had much. Their strong arms and determined purpose were their only capital.

I believe Lawrence county was organized in 1816, though the townships were not named until later. Burlington was the first County Seat. David McLAUGHLIN (whose wife was my father’s sister and who is now living in Proctorville, in her 91st year) helped to build the old courthouse in Burlington in 1817. Mr. McLAUGHLIN, with three other young men, walked all the way from their homes in New Hampshire to Ohio in 1816. The old Court House, which had long been used as a schoolhouse, having become unsafe, was torn down about four years ago and is probably the oldest wooden building in Lawrence county.

Mr. BEACHLY was the first lawyer in the county and lived at Burlington; Dr. SPOONER was the first physician and also lived in Burlington. For many years after the first settlement, the people in the upper end of the county did all their trading at Guyandotte, Va. “Old Joe GARDNER” and Robert HOLDERBY had the first store there. P. S. SMITH came later and started a store in that place. I remember them all very well.

Our wool was carded, spun, and woven in the house for winter wear and blankets. The hides from beef, sheep, and veal were taken to the tanner, who gave half the leather to the farmer, who hired the shoemaker to come to the house each fall and make shoes for the family for winter use; in summer, the young people and children all went barefoot.

No one wore ornaments, jewelry, or fine clothing; no one had luxuries, and few had the common necessities of life. It was a desperate struggle these pioneers had against the forces of nature, for existence, for civilization, for empire. Tea and coffee were luxuries that few could afford to use in those days. My Aunt McLAUGHLIN, before mentioned in this paper, says, “the first coffee I ever tasted was at the house of Mr. John RUSSELL, which stood near what is now the northern boundary of the city of Huntington, and it was bought at the old Joe GARDNER store in GUYANDOTTE.

The only sugar used then was made from the sugar maple tree. I have heard my father say that he and his brothers made in one week 755 lbs. of good maple sugar from about 500 maple trees on my grandfather’s farm. In those days, there were no millinery shops, no dressmaking establishments, and but few tailors; every mother made her own bonnets and clothing, as well as that of her family.

The woman of today would die in a minute if she had to do half as much work as her grandmother had to perform, and the man today would not survive as long if he had to carry the burdens his grandfather bore. But it is not necessary. Then there were no cooking stoves, washing machines, sewing machines, nor thousands of other conveniences for the house and kitchen that have since been invented.

Our grandfathers had to plow the ground with homemade wooden shovel plows and cultivate their fields with old-fashioned “N- Killer” hoes made by the country blacksmith. Now we ride over our fields cleared and grubbed out by our fathers’ hands on the splendid gang plow, on the thresher, the reaper, the cultivator.

We do not have to pace across our fields with measured tread, sowing “broadcast” from a sack suspended to our shoulders; we mount the new-fangled “seeder” and whistle as we sow. Our grandfathers had to pound their corn in mortars, and when a boy, I had to go miles and miles away on horseback with a sack of grain “to mill.” But these old-fashioned things have passed away and almost seem like forgotten dreams.

Eighty-one years ago, my grandfather had to travel by wagon from New York to the navigable waters of Ohio and down the river on a raft to his new home in Ohio, then a wilderness.

Forty-five years ago, I left Ohio for Oregon and went as far as St. Joseph, Mo. by steamboat, the balance of the way 2000 miles, by ox team, through a country inhabited only by savages and wild beasts. Now that vast country is striped with railroads, dotted with cities, and teeming with the fruits of civilization. The changes wrought within these eighty-one years upon this country, its conditions, and its people are so vast that it bewilders the understanding to contemplate them and defies human wisdom to compute.

P. W. GILLETTE