|
a.
|
Note: ording to the History of Delaware County and Ohio). The area was a wilderness and they moved into a deserted log cabin (that may still exist as an unused chicken house on the farm) that had a small clearing around it. Around 1820, Lee built his home (the first house south of Orange Road on Bale Kenyon). This is the farm that now has the Deleware County Bicentennial Barn. Hurlburt's descendants Sue and Bob Postle still live there.
Tombstone, Obituary; Tombstone (Africa Cemetery and Cemetery on Orange and Rt 23); Delaware County Land Office, marriage, and tax records. History of Delaware County and Ohio, O. L. Baskin & Co. Historical Publishers, 186 Dearborn Street, 1880; Lytle, A. R., History of Delaware County Ohio, Delaware, Ohio 1908; The Hurlbut Genealogy, by Henry H. Hurlbut.
The Hurlburts were important in the history of the Midwest. Dulcina's grandfather was Jacob Hurlburt (1762 to 1840). Jacob's tombstone and a small Hurlburt family graveyard were unearthed in 1982 along Alum Creek. Early 19th-century maps of Delaware County show that Lee and Jacob Hurlburt had adjoining farms by Alum Creek. Jacob's tombstone shows that he was born on 6 June 1762 and that he died in Delaware County, Ohio, on May 31, 1840.
Another Hurlburt was Benoni Hurlburt , who may have been related.His story was written about in numerous history books including History of Washington County, 1881; Memoirs of the Early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio, 1852; History of Marietta, 1903; and History of Athens County, Ohio. The Hurlbut Genealogy, by Henry H. Hurlbut shows the descent of Benoni Hurlburt from Thomas Hurlbut who immigrated to Connecticut in 1635.
Jacob had a brother Rueben and more is known about him than about Jacob. Reuben moved to Athens, Ohio (the county where Marietta is located) in 1790, a year before Benoni was killed. A few years after Benoni's death a Reuben Hurlburt is listed in the (1803) Census as a property owner in Belpre. Reuben's mother, who had traveled to Athens, Ohio and then moved on to the small town of Ames, Ohio, died in Ohio, at the age of 112.
Later Reuben is shown as living in Ames, Ohio. Reuben and his family later moved to Indiana, where they founded the town of Hurlburt Indiana (The Hurlbut Genealogy).
Marietta became the first permanent American settlement to be organized in the Northwest Territory. It became the gateway into Ohio, which was the first state to be formed from the Northwest Territory according to the protocol drawn up in the Northwest Ordinance. Through this prototype other states followed and the Colonies became the United States of America.
*** Rolling hills and fertile bottomlands of the Alum Creek valley have attracted people since ice age Indians following the glacier's retreat, first colonized the area. Their tools and sites remain visible as are the sites and even the postholes of the later Archaic Indians and the mounds of the Moundbuilders. Today the Alum Creek dam is located near the spot where an Archaic Indian site once stood. It is a unique area where history still lives. Orange Township began as a part of the United States military lands and was once known as Township 3, Range 18.
The area's abstract shows that its original owners were Lucas Sullivant and Israel Ludlow, who were among the founders of the Northwest Territory and of Columbus, Cincinnati, and Dayton. Sullivant's son, Joseph, was instrumental in the founding of The Ohio State University, and his brother-in-law, Lyne Starling, established the Starling Medical College, which after several changes became The Ohio State University Medical School.
***One of the first settlers to arrive in the Alum Creek area was Lee Hurlburt, who moved into a log cabin on a squatter's abandoned site. Hurlburt was one of the first white people in the area. According to Bateman, Selby, and Bell in their 1907 history Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois, Hurlburt arrived in Ohio 1803 and, according to the History of Delaware County and Ohio, he had settled on his homestead beside Alum Creek by 1812. The oral history says he came with his father at around 1803 at age six. They were a part of the first wave of migration into Ohio and several documents record their movement.
Hurlburt family members were also among the original settlers in the Ohio Territory. Marietta, in Athens County, on the Ohio River became the first permanent white settlement organized under the Northwest Ordinance. The Benoni Hurlburt family arrived in the Marietta area in 1788 and lived on an isolated island, now called Blennerhassett. Later when the Ohio Company made its initial trip to the area, Benoni's family backtracked to become one of its first 16 listed founding families. In 1791, Native Americans defending their homes against the whites scalped Benoni. Benoni has been written up in a number of history books and in a genealogy (The Hurlbut Genealogy, by Henry H. Hurlbut).
Lee's father, Jacob Hurlburt's, tombstone and a small Hurlburt family graveyard were accidentally unearthed in 1982 along Alum Creek by people digging in their yard. Early 19th-century maps of Delaware County show that Lee and Jacob Hurlburt had adjoining farms by Alum Creek. Jacob's tombstone shows that he was born in 1762 and that he died there in 1840. Jacob had a brother Rueben, who moved from Pennsylvania to Athens County, Ohio in 1790. Reuben's mother died there at the age of 112. Later Reuben's family moved to Indiana, where they founded the town of Hurlburt Indiana (located southeast of Chicago).
Lee, who was 15 years old in 1812, then left Orange Township to fight in the War of 1812 as a replacement for his 50-year old father. His name is recorded in the register of Ohio soldiers at the Ohio Historical Society.
At that time no roads existed; trees were blazed here and there to mark wilderness paths. In the winter of 1812-13, Lee's Indian trail along Alum Creek underwent great improvement to become the first cleared road in the area. The trail on Lee's side, chopped out of the wilderness with cast-iron axes, was perhaps more used for the army than any other. Stores for William Harrison's army, including powder and shot came from Ohio's capital, Chillicothe, 75 miles to the south, by long trains of packhorses. After this initial clearing more settlers began to arrive.
Lee returned to his home and in around 1825 built his house on the same hilltop as the log cabin (the first house south of Orange Road on Bale Kenyon). Around that time a sawmill had been built by Alum Creek and the settlers began to convert their log cabins into frame houses. Lee's home is built of a hand-hewn beam framework and of milled lumber.
At first the Hurlburts lived as the Native Americans. Hungry bears and wolves made keeping livestock and living by European agriculture difficult. A noted hunter, Lee often shot five deer in a day's effort.
In 1832, Lee purchased his land. In 1800, when Ohio was still Northwest Territory (the area to the west of the original colonies), Lucas Sullivant and Israel Ludlow received a portion of one of the original 4000-acre military tracts in the Alum Creek Area. Both men held significant places in history. Sullivant, Franklintown's founder, in 1812 helped legislate Columbus, Ohio, into existence. Ludlow, the Ohio Company's surveyer, platted Cincinnati and Dayton. They sold their land to pioneers, who traveled the principal Shawnee Indian trails into the area (later Bale Kenyon and Africa roads along Alum Creek and Route 23 to the west). Many of these early settlers came from historic families whose stories are known from the time when their ancestors traveled into the frontier to begin their farms.
Lee's descendants still live in his house. They recently learned that the remains of the first log cabin on the farmstead may still exist. An abandoned farm building, they had used as a chicken house, was said to have been made from the original cabin and it might even contain a portion of one of its walls. The small building is built of a hand-cut log framework containing some rounded logs with bark, some milled wood, and some interior wood paneling. It has wood flooring, but no trace of plastering.
The Hurlburt family was involved in the development of the Northwest. Edwin Hulbert and his pigs discovered the Calumet and Hecla copper mine sites (by all of them falling into the hole). Rev. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut developed the Sunday School and the Chautauqua and wrote a best selling book, Hurlbut's Story of the Bible. Hurlburt family members married into both the Sullivant and Ludlow families.
Lee soon began to have neighbors:
To Lee's north--settled Susanna and Cyrus Chambers. Cyrus was orphaned at an early age when his father, a miller, drowned in his millrace. Chambers traveled west with five others in a wagon that left Vermont on August 8, 1815. He worked for several years, often at clearing land, until he accumulated the means to buy 100 acres and later moved to Alum Creek. He married Susana Jaynes in 1824. They had a 1-room lob cabin with a clapboard roof and a stick chimney. After Uncle John Jaynes loaned him chairs, a neighbor gave him a dinner pot, and another some soap, they began their married life. Cyrus made $ .25 a day working for Mr. Ferson. (Possibly the chairs, retrieved from the old chicken house and used as roosts, were these chairs. They are now back in use as kitchen chairs.)
The Chambers carved their beautiful house from local walnut around 1830 (the third house on Bale Kenyon north of Orange Road). It is a large two-story home with an interior finish hand made of black walnut. Some say this house also contains log cabin parts.
Cyrus is thought to have cleared more timberland than anyone else in the county. He is also thought to have been the county's first schoolteacher. Susanna died in 1844, leaving seven children.
Chambers descendants wrote a history of the family, Ancestors of Fay E. Maugans and Leta Love Maugans, that began with the earliest Jaynes immigrants. The present owners of the Chamber's home, while doing some reconstruction discovered its lovely walnut beams and a bottle with the word Jaynes in raised glass. They think the bottle could have been a medicine bottle sold by Susanna's father, who was in a medical profession.
The Barrows and Ferson families built their log cabins next to each other in 1818 (north of the Chamber's place). The Fersons came to Ohio via sailing vessel to Baltimore, next by ox cart across the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh, by water down the Ohio, and finally up the Scioto to Columbus. The Barrow's first cabin was a windowless, one-room dwelling with an earthen roof and floor. The Fersons later became involved in the Underground Railroad
Mrs. Kyle Barrows said that both families can trace their history from the same seven Mayflower pilgrims including William Brewster, the leader, who arrived in 1620. Several writings by descendants describe the story of this family's journeys and travails in the wilderness. They had to leave their home, which still contained log cabin parts, around 1970, when the Alum Creek Dam was built. This was written up in The Columbus Dispatch Sunday Magazine in a story titled "From Beginning to End," by descendant Candace (Viers) Hartzler. Some descendants still live on the original property, which is located east of what is now the Galena boat dock.
To Lee's East--Hannah and Sam Patterson, settled across Alum Creek from Hurlburt around 1820, and soon began harboring escaped slaves in their log cabin in defiance of laws making this offense punishable by 10 years of hard labor. Around 1841, they finished a dazzling mansion (south of the I-71-Africa Road crossing), which remained an important Underground Railroad station throughout the Civil War. The gigantic Corinthian columns and native hardwood mantles of this house later attracted as residents the inventor of the gold fiber movie screen, "silverscreen," Lyle Gardner, and the Leveque family, developers of the automatic bowling pin spotter and owners of the Leveque Tower, in Columbus.
Patterson son, Milo built his house directly north of the Samuel Patterson home. It now belongs to a descendant of Ludwig Sells, who arrived in Franklintown with Lucas Sullivant. Mr. Leppert, says his ancestor tried to trade his good black horse to spare Leatherlips (a Wyandott chief and signer of the 1795 Greenville Treaty opening the Northwest Territory for settlement) from an execution ordered by Tecumseh's brother. (Tecumseh's family did not sign this treaty to give away their homeland. The Native Americans had done this under duress.) Today it is site of the Black Horse Inn. Mr. Leppert also descends from the Pugh, and the Case and Griswold families, of Worthington's founding families. Sells' land, Starling's land, and Worthington vied for Ohio's capitol between 1808 and 1812. Sells descendants later brightened the world with the international Sells Brothers' circus, which was stationed across the Olentangy River from the Ohio State University. Patterson descendants live in the area.
To Lee's South--Around 1820, Orange Township almost became the site of a major college. Bishop Philander Chase, the first Bishop west of the Alleghenies, chose a handsome beech grove on the farm south of Lee's as the site for a college he wanted to found. Chase wanted a college in the wilderness where students would receive an education in the pure air and away from temptations of city.
Around 1818, the tall, polished, erudite Chase contracted with the tall, unpolished, unlettered Lee to prepare for the school and Lee and other settlers cleared around ten acres. Chase then went to England to solicit subscriptions. Although he very much wanted to found his college at the Alum Creek location, others thought this site was too forbidding and the location, of what would be Kenyon College, was changed to Gambier, Ohio. Lee, who was thought to have been illiterate, was very proud to have helped in this enterprise.
From Bishop Chase's schools came such notable students as Rutherford B. Hayes; Chase's nephew, Salmon Chase; and Joseph Sullivant, Charles Hamilton and Starling Loving of Ohio State University.
In 1848 this same farm attracted James and Sarah (Havens) Bale. Bale ancestors Henry (Heinrich Behl) and Elizabeth Gunderman, from Germany, had settled in the area of Lafayette, in Sussex County, New Jersey, sometime before 1750, and founded the town of Baleville. Here they had built a log house on their home place and then built one of the country's first flourmills. Henry Bale operated the mills while Elizabeth ran the blacksmith shop they had built.
James and Sarah purchased a 247-acre Ohio farm at $15 an acre. On May 1, 1849 they began their journey west. They traveled in a large covered wagon drawn by two horses. They towed a one-horse buggy with wood axles behind the wagon and are said to have herded some animals as they came. A Bale daughter gave birth during this journey, and both mother and baby (and father) arrived safely at their new home on May 23. They had to wait for the items they had sent by canal. By fall, they had planted about 20 acres of corn using a large single shovel plow on a wood frame.
Like many people at that time, they came by way of Columbus, which was now called the "Gateway to the West," because the National Road was the primary route into the West. The National Road enabled the Bale family to make the trip much more quickly and safely than had the previous families.
Sarah also came from a historic family whose immigrant ancestors could be traced to old European families such as the Bacon, Scott, and Bancroft families (Genealogies of Watertown, Massachusetts including Waltham and Weston, Burke's Peerage and Baronetage). One line of these descendants traveled to New Jersey (The Gustin Compendium) where Sarah's mother, Mary Gustin, married Daniel Havens (History of Sussex and Warren Counties New Jersey). The Bale's journey to and settlement on the family farm were described by John Bale in a series "Sixty Years in Ohio" for the Delaware Semi Weekly Gazette in 1909.
James Bale was a miller and the Bale family built several mills and one larger one on Alum Creek. When the sewer was being dug around 1980, workers found a large worked log that was probably a part of the mill. It is not known what happened to it. The race from this mill can still be seen near Alum Creek to the southeast of the Bale house (the second house on Bale Kenyon south of Orange Road). Bale-Hurlburt descendants still live in it.
The Bale-Havens family has also been important in the development of the Northwest. Homer Havens, designed the hydraulic aerial ladder still used on fire engines and patented numerous other inventions. John Bale's son, Fred, graduated from the Ohio State University law school and became a faculty member of several universities and a professional lecturer, who spoke extensively in nearly every state on the Chautauqua and Lyceum platform. He served as mayor and municipal court judge in Westerville. Another Bale, William, organized the Bale Family Circus.
Bale descendant, Paul White became mayor of Delaware. Ohio. (White's ancestors received the Columbus land east of Union Station for their Revolutionary War service, but gave it away because it was then a useless swamp.)
Bale-Hurlburt descendants also built the next two farmhouses to the south (although the one farthest south was taken down when a development was put in). The next house south is exceedingly old. The inner portion of the house is actually a log cabin, believed to have been built around 1805. The log cabin's outside and inside walls and are now covered with siding so that it appears to be a frame house like all the others. Its logs are hand-hewn and squared.
Copyright Irena Scott
The Alum Creek Pioneers
First White Settlers, 1800-1840
Rolling hills and fertile bottomlands of the Alum Creek valley have attracted people since ice age Indians following the glacier's retreat, first colonized the area. Their tools and sites remain visible as are the sites and even the postholes of the later Archaic Indians and the mounds of the Moundbuilders. Today the Alum Creek dam is located near the spot where an Archaic Indian site once stood. It is a unique area where history still lives. Orange Township began as a part of the United States military lands and was once known as Township 3, Range 18.
The area's abstract shows that its original owners were Lucas Sullivant and Israel Ludlow, who were among the founders of the Northwest Territory and of Columbus, Cincinnati, and Dayton. Sullivant's son, Joseph, was instrumental in the founding of The Ohio State University, and his brother-in-law, Lyne Starling, established the Starling Medical College, which after several changes became The Ohio State University Medical School.
One of the first settlers to arrive in the Alum Creek area was Lee Hurlburt, who moved into a log cabin on a squatter's abandoned site. Hurlburt was one of the first white people in the area. According to Bateman, Selby, and Bell in their 1907 history Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois, Hurlburt arrived in Ohio 1803 and, according to the History of Delaware County and Ohio, he had settled on his homestead beside Alum Creek by 1812. The oral history says he came with his father at around 1803 at age six. They were a part of the first wave of migration into Ohio and several documents record their movement.
Hurlburt family members were also among the original settlers in the Ohio Territory. Marietta, in Athens County, on the Ohio River became the first permanent white settlement organized under the Northwest Ordinance. The Benoni Hurlburt family arrived in the Marietta area in 1788 and lived on an isolated island, now called Blennerhassett. Later when the Ohio Company made its initial trip to the area, Benoni's family backtracked to become one of its first 16 listed founding families. In 1791, Native Americans defending their homes against the whites scalped Benoni. Benoni has been written up in a number of history books and in a genealogy (The Hurlbut Genealogy, by Henry H. Hurlbut).
Lee's father, Jacob Hurlburt's, tombstone and a small Hurlburt family graveyard were accidentally unearthed in 1982 along Alum Creek by people digging in their yard. Early 19th-century maps of Delaware County show that Lee and Jacob Hurlburt had adjoining farms by Alum Creek. Jacob's tombstone shows that he was born in 1762 and that he died there in 1840. Jacob had a brother Rueben, who moved from Pennsylvania to Athens County, Ohio in 1790. Reuben's mother died there at the age of 112. Later Reuben's family moved to Indiana, where they founded the town of Hurlburt Indiana (located southeast of Chicago).
Lee, who was 15 years old in 1812, then left Orange Township to fight in the War of 1812 as a replacement for his 50-year old father. His name is recorded in the register of Ohio soldiers at the Ohio Historical Society.
At that time no roads existed; trees were blazed here and there to mark wilderness paths. In the winter of 1812-13, Lee's Indian trail along Alum Creek underwent great improvement to become the first cleared road in the area. The trail on Lee's side, chopped out of the wilderness with cast-iron axes, was perhaps more used for the army than any other. Stores for William Harrison's army, including powder and shot came from Ohio's capital, Chillicothe, 75 miles to the south, by long trains of packhorses. After this initial clearing more settlers began to arrive.
Lee returned to his home and in around 1825 built his house on the same hilltop as the log cabin (the first house south of Orange Road on Bale Kenyon). Around that time a sawmill had been built by Alum Creek and the settlers began to convert their log cabins into frame houses. Lee's home is built of a hand-hewn beam framework and of milled lumber.
At first the Hurlburts lived as the Native Americans. Hungry bears and wolves made keeping livestock and living by European agriculture difficult. A noted hunter, Lee often shot five deer in a day's effort.
In 1832, Lee purchased his land. In 1800, when Ohio was still Northwest Territory (the area to the west of the original colonies), Lucas Sullivant and Israel Ludlow received a portion of one of the original 4000-acre military tracts in the Alum Creek Area. Both men held significant places in history. Sullivant, Franklintown's founder, in 1812 helped legislate Columbus, Ohio, into existence. Ludlow, the Ohio Company's surveyer, platted Cincinnati and Dayton. They sold their land to pioneers, who traveled the principal Shawnee Indian trails into the area (later Bale Kenyon and Africa roads along Alum Creek and Route 23 to the west). Many of these early settlers came from historic families whose stories are known from the time when their ancestors traveled into the frontier to begin their farms.
Lee's descendants still live in his house. They recently learned that the remains of the first log cabin on the farmstead may still exist. An abandoned farm building, they had used as a chicken house, was said to have been made from the original cabin and it might even contain a portion of one of its walls. The small building is built of a hand-cut log framework containing some rounded logs with bark, some milled wood, and some interior wood paneling. It has wood flooring, but no trace of plastering.
The Hurlburt family was involved in the development of the Northwest. Edwin Hulbert and his pigs discovered the Calumet and Hecla copper mine sites (by all of them falling into the hole). Rev. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut developed the Sunday School and the Chautauqua and wrote a best selling book, Hurlbut's Story of the Bible. Hurlburt family members married into both the Sullivant and Ludlow families.
Lee soon began to have neighbors:
To Lee's north--settled Susanna and Cyrus Chambers. Cyrus was orphaned at an early age when his father, a miller, drowned in his millrace. Chambers traveled west with five others in a wagon that left Vermont on August 8, 1815. He worked for several years, often at clearing land, until he accumulated the means to buy 100 acres and later moved to Alum Creek. He married Susana Jaynes in 1824. They had a 1-room lob cabin with a clapboard roof and a stick chimney. After Uncle John Jaynes loaned him chairs, a neighbor gave him a dinner pot, and another some soap, they began their married life. Cyrus made $ .25 a day working for Mr. Ferson. (Possibly the chairs, retrieved from the old chicken house and used as roosts, were these chairs. They are now back in use as kitchen chairs.)
The Chambers carved their beautiful house from local walnut around 1830 (the third house on Bale Kenyon north of Orange Road). It is a large two-story home with an interior finish hand made of black walnut. Some say this house also contains log cabin parts.
Cyrus is thought to have cleared more timberland than anyone else in the county. He is also thought to have been the county's first schoolteacher. Susanna died in 1844, leaving seven children.
Chambers descendants wrote a history of the family, Ancestors of Fay E. Maugans and Leta Love Maugans, that began with the earliest Jaynes immigrants. The present owners of the Chamber's home, while doing some reconstruction discovered its lovely walnut beams and a bottle with the word Jaynes in raised glass. They think the bottle could have been a medicine bottle sold by Susanna's father, who was in a medical profession.
The Barrows and Ferson families built their log cabins next to each other in 1818 (north of the Chamber's place). The Fersons came to Ohio via sailing vessel to Baltimore, next by ox cart across the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh, by water down the Ohio, and finally up the Scioto to Columbus. The Barrow's first cabin was a windowless, one-room dwelling with an earthen roof and floor. The Fersons later became involved in the Underground Railroad
Mrs. Kyle Barrows said that both families can trace their history from the same seven Mayflower pilgrims including William Brewster, the leader, who arrived in 1620. Several writings by descendants describe the story of this family's journeys and travails in the wilderness. They had to leave their home, which still contained log cabin parts, around 1970, when the Alum Creek Dam was built. This was written up in The Columbus Dispatch Sunday Magazine in a story titled "From Beginning to End," by descendant Candace (Viers) Hartzler. Some descendants still live on the original property, which is located east of what is now the Galena boat dock.
To Lee's East--Hannah and Sam Patterson, settled across Alum Creek from Hurlburt around 1820, and soon began harboring escaped slaves in their log cabin in defiance of laws making this offense punishable by 10 years of hard labor. Around 1841, they finished a dazzling mansion (south of the I-71-Africa Road crossing), which remained an important Underground Railroad station throughout the Civil War. The gigantic Corinthian columns and native hardwood mantles of this house later attracted as residents the inventor of the gold fiber movie screen, "silverscreen," Lyle Gardner, and the Leveque family, developers of the automatic bowling pin spotter and owners of the Leveque Tower, in Columbus.
Patterson son, Milo built his house directly north of the Samuel Patterson home. It now belongs to a descendant of Ludwig Sells, who arrived in Franklintown with Lucas Sullivant. Mr. Leppert, says his ancestor tried to trade his good black horse to spare Leatherlips (a Wyandott chief and signer of the 1795 Greenville Treaty opening the Northwest Territory for settlement) from an execution ordered by Tecumseh's brother. (Tecumseh's family did not sign this treaty to give away their homeland. The Native Americans had done this under duress.) Today it is site of the Black Horse Inn. Mr. Leppert also descends from the Pugh, and the Case and Griswold families, of Worthington's founding families. Sells' land, Starling's land, and Worthington vied for Ohio's capitol between 1808 and 1812. Sells descendants later brightened the world with the international Sells Brothers' circus, which was stationed across the Olentangy River from the Ohio State University. Patterson descendants live in the area.
To Lee's South--Around 1820, Orange Township almost became the site of a major college. Bishop Philander Chase, the first Bishop west of the Alleghenies, chose a handsome beech grove on the farm south of Lee's as the site for a college he wanted to found. Chase wanted a college in the wilderness where students would receive an education in the pure air and away from temptations of city.
Around 1818, the tall, polished, erudite Chase contracted with the tall, unpolished, unlettered Lee to prepare for the school and Lee and other settlers cleared around ten acres. Chase then went to England to solicit subscriptions. Although he very much wanted to found his college at the Alum Creek location, others thought this site was too forbidding and the location, of what would be Kenyon College, was changed to Gambier, Ohio. Lee, who was thought to have been illiterate, was very proud to have helped in this enterprise.
From Bishop Chase's schools came such notable students as Rutherford B. Hayes; Chase's nephew, Salmon Chase; and Joseph Sullivant, Charles Hamilton and Starling Loving of Ohio State University.
In 1848 this same farm attracted James and Sarah (Havens) Bale. Bale ancestors Henry (Heinrich Behl) and Elizabeth Gunderman, from Germany, had settled in the area of Lafayette, in Sussex County, New Jersey, sometime before 1750, and founded the town of Baleville. Here they had built a log house on their home place and then built one of the country's first flourmills. Henry Bale operated the mills while Elizabeth ran the blacksmith shop they had built.
James and Sarah purchased a 247-acre Ohio farm at $15 an acre. On May 1, 1849 they began their journey west. They traveled in a large covered wagon drawn by two horses. They towed a one-horse buggy with wood axles behind the wagon and are said to have herded some animals as they came. A Bale daughter gave birth during this journey, and both mother and baby (and father) arrived safely at their new home on May 23. They had to wait for the items they had sent by canal. By fall, they had planted about 20 acres of corn using a large single shovel plow on a wood frame.
Like many people at that time, they came by way of Columbus, which was now called the "Gateway to the West," because the National Road was the primary route into the West. The National Road enabled the Bale family to make the trip much more quickly and safely than had the previous families.
Sarah also came from a historic family whose immigrant ancestors could be traced to old European families such as the Bacon, Scott, and Bancroft families (Genealogies of Watertown, Massachusetts including Waltham and Weston, Burke's Peerage and Baronetage). One line of these descendants traveled to New Jersey (The Gustin Compendium) where Sarah's mother, Mary Gustin, married Daniel Havens (History of Sussex and Warren Counties New Jersey). The Bale's journey to and settlement on the family farm were described by John Bale in a series "Sixty Years in Ohio" for the Delaware Semi Weekly Gazette in 1909.
James Bale was a miller and the Bale family built several mills and one larger one on Alum Creek. When the sewer was being dug around 1980, workers found a large worked log that was probably a part of the mill. It is not known what happened to it. The race from this mill can still be seen near Alum Creek to the southeast of the Bale house (the second house on Bale Kenyon south of Orange Road). Bale-Hurlburt descendants still live in it.
The Bale-Havens family has also been important in the development of the Northwest. Homer Havens, designed the hydraulic aerial ladder still used on fire engines and patented numerous other inventions. John Bale's son, Fred, graduated from the Ohio State University law school and became a faculty member of several universities and a professional lecturer, who spoke extensively in nearly every state on the Chautauqua and Lyceum platform. He served as mayor and municipal court judge in Westerville. Another Bale, William, organized the Bale Family Circus.
Bale descendant, Paul White became mayor of Delaware. Ohio. (White's ancestors received the Columbus land east of Union Station for their Revolutionary War service, but gave it away because it was then a useless swamp.)
Bale-Hurlburt descendants also built the next two farmhouses to the south (although the one farthest south was taken down when a development was put in). The next house south is exceedingly old. The inner portion of the house is actually a log cabin, believed to have been built around 1805. The log cabin's outside and inside walls and are now covered with siding so that it appears to be a frame house like all the others. Its logs are hand-hewn and squared.
The Civil War Years
The township came into note before the Civil War as a part of the Underground Rail Road, a series of escape routes for slaves traveling to freedom in Canada. The Patterson and Ferson families were quite active and the Patterson farm became a major station. The haymows and sugarhouse in the woods were used to conceal numbers of runaways. Even today neighbors rumor about the hidden chambers and underground tunnels of the Patterson home. Today several of these homes still stand. The Patterson house is the first one south of the I-71 overpass on Africa Road. Another house built by David Patterson, was the original house north of Lee's. It was converted into a barn and its collapsed remains are still there.
This Underground Rail Road route was of note not only because it is now known to have been a principle route; it is also noted for its songwriters. A station north of the Patterson farm was in Mt. Vernon, the home of Daniel Emmett. In 1842, Emmett and three other men formed the Virginia Minstrels. Emmett wrote "Old Dan Tucker," "Dixie," "Turkey in the Straw," "The Blue Tail Fly," and "Old Dan Tucker." "Dixie" became popular immediately and, as the Civil War began troops of both North and the South armies marched to this tune, but by the end of 1861, Dixie had become a Southern song. Emmett was not a Southern sympathizer and was not pleased when the Confederacy adopted his tune as its unofficial "National Anthem." The Virginia Minstrels are today considered the nation's first true minstrel troop. The minstrel show represented America's first indigenous musical theater. Around the turn of the century this form evolved into vaudeville and later into Broadway. These were the forerunners of today's Hollywood.
The station to the south of the Patterson place was in Westerville. Here Benjamin Hanby, an Otterbein College student, heard the story a sick slave had told about his sweetheart, Nelly Gray, who had been sold down the river. He wanted to get to Canada and earn money to buy Nelly's freedom, but he died. Hanby began to write a song. Later a Kentucky slave auction stirred him to compose more stanzas and he added a chorus. This song became the well-known "Darling Nelly Gray." It tells of Nelly, who white men bound in chains and took to Georgia, where they worked her in the cotton as she slowly died. Handy also wrote the Christmas Carol, "Up on the House Top," and a powerful of Christian hymn, "Who Is He In Yonder Stall?" Songs such as these and writings, such as those of Ohioan Harriet Beecher Stowe's, Uncle Tom's Cabin, sensitized northerners to the conditions of slavery and helped to initiate the anti-slavery movement.
Bishop Chase's nephew, Salmon Chase, who had worked as a boy on the Bishop's Ohio farm, became one of the notable personalities of the Civil War years. Chase was one of the strongest spokespersons against slavery in the Lincoln cabinet. He became governor of Ohio, U. S. senator from Ohio, Secretary of the United States treasury, and a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was a founder of the Republican, Liberty, and Free Soil Parties and was a presidential nominee.
During these years Lee Hurlburt began to call Orange Station, Africa, because of the Underground Railroad. Today it is Africa Ohio and the Indian Trail along Alum Creek is Africa Road-perhaps the only town and road named after the Underground Railroad.
Some of the escaping slaves might have stayed in the area. A log cabin on the Bale farm was that of a black family. People said that after the family had moved away, they returned each summer to have a picnic at the spot where their log cabin had stood so that their children would know about it. Another black man lived in a building next to the Bale house. He told the family that he had been born in the building and wanted to live there. We are still trying to find the names of these people or their families.
After the War
Soon after the war anther family settled on the farm north of Lee's. This was the McCammon family, who purchased their land around 1865. Catherine McCammon's brother was John Purdue, founder of Purdue University, who also contributed to several universities in Ohio and helped to restore Otterbein College after a fire. Purdue was a noted executive, who had also built the largest business block west of New York City in the 1850s in Lafayette, Indiana.
Catherine's father-in-law, Samuel McCammon founded Shirleysburg, Pennsylvania. McCammon-Hurlburt-Bale descendants still live in a newer house they built there and still have letters written in the 1860s from Purdue, asking his nephew, John McCammon, to move out to the farm. They converted the original house (the house David Patterson had used in the Underground Rail Road) into a barn and its collapsed remains are still visible. Still alive is the Osage Orange hedge the family planted around 1870 for fencing.
John McCammon, after fighting in the Civil War, moved to Marysville, Ohio, where he met Amanda Van Brimmer. Amanda was descended from the Brewster family and from the Chase family who traveled to North America in the 1630 Winthrop Fleet. Stories of her ancestors were described in the Plymouth Colony Records and in the Quaker records of New York. Amanda's grandmother moved from New York State to Athens Ohio in around 1815. John married Amanda and they moved to Westerville, Ohio in 1875.
Amanda's cousins on the Van Brimmer side were the Meeker family. George Meeker was once the mayor of Columbus, Ohio. His son, Claude Meeker became a journalist. He was a political editor, reporter, and special correspondent of the Cincinnati Enquirer and the New York World. During Grover Cleveland's presidential race, Meeker's comments gained prominence through the columns of the New York World, St. Louis Republic, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and the Times-Star. After his election, Cleveland appointed Claude Meeker as consul at Bradford, England. Meeker is noted today for bringing the work of the English Bronte family to a wider audience.
During the years of settlement, the original pioneer families became related. During the Civil War, Lee's daughter, Dulcina, married David Bale (son of James and Sarah Bale). Their daughter, Zelma Bale, married John McCammon in 1906. Through the generations the other families also
Note: Lee and his father Jacob arrived in Ohio 1803 (according to Bateman, Selby, and Bell in their 1907, Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois) and had settled on his homestead beside Alum Creek by 1812 (acc
|
