Wilhelm: Meek shares tales of early frontier days
If you have any doubts about how wild this area was 200 years ago, I have borrowed some tales from Basil Meek’s “Twentieth Century History of Sandusky County” to clear things up.
John Linebaugh, a native of Amsterdam, Holland, who came to this area from Fairfield County, Ohio, in 1818 when he heard that this was a great place to fish, had this story to tell:
Deer herds of 100 traveled the area
“I have seen as many as 100 deer in a herd. If my father wanted any deer meat, he would cut down some bass wood saplings or trees near the house in the evening, and by morning there would sometimes be as many as 50 deer browsing around the tops. He would then take is choice and shoot buck or doe or fawn as occasion required, rights from his door or window. He never shot more than one at a time.”
And, he also explained this: “When we first came to this country there were no mills here. We had to go to Castalia, or Cold Creek as it was called, and the neighbors took turns to accommodate each other, each taking a few bushels for a neighbor. To go to the mill and back usually took about a week. Sometimes when the roads were bad, we took our grists in canoes down the Sandusky River.”
Adam Hensel told of this adventure:
‘”When all the big folks had gone… to raise a log cabin, we young ones (For there were 11 of us) all played on the trunk of a broken down tree, we saw the leaves move aside and there stood a big Indian chief, ‘Itching Chief’ grinning at us and touching his scalp knife, all the little imps vanished into the house like mice, and left me hanging to the boughs of the tree, the old chief smiled and caressed me, stroked my legs, looked into my face and tenderly lifted and set me down and disappeared in the woods.”
It took the local mail a week for delivery
In 1818, Jeremiah Everett was “engaged by the government to carry the mail from Lower Sandusky to Fort Meigs. This mail was carried both ways once a week, when it was possible to get through, but was often omitted on account of the high streams and impassable swamps. In performing this duty Jeremiah Everett often encountered great difficulties and dangers.”
Jonas Smith, who was a county commissioner when the first court house was built, sometimes cut down trees in the woods in a line with the path on which the children went to school so that they could walk the logs and keep out of the water.
Apparently, through all these troubles, the pioneers managed to keep their sense of humor.According to Smith, “A stranger once came near Lower Sandusky, and seeing some men digging a ditch, asked them how far it was down to town. They said, about four feet.”
Roy Wilhelm started a 40-year career at The News-Messenger in 1965 as a reporter. Now retired, he writes a column for both The News-Messenger and News Herald.
This article originally appeared on Fremont News-Messenger: Wilhelm: Despite challenges local pioneers overcame issues
