Elizabethtown, Ohio

Whitewater lies in range one of township one,and range one of township three, with a fractional section (thirtyone) belonging to range two, township two and three other bits of sections along the Great Miami belonging to other ranges or townships. It includes nineteen full and fourteen fractional sections, or fourteen thousand three hundred and twenty square acres. It is bounded on the west by Dearborn county, Indiana, and for the breadth of two miles at the northward by Harrison township, Hamilton county, on the north by Harrison and Crosby townships ; on the east and south by the Great Miami, beyond which lie the townships of Colerain and Miami. The township does not touch the Ohio river, although it approaches within a mile of it, at the lower part of Guard's island. The Great Miami has an exceedingly tortuous course along the front of this township, requiring about sixteen miles for its course, while the air-line distance between the point where it first touches the township and that where it makes its exit, is but ten and one-half miles. This is the extreme diagonal of the township ; its greatest length is six and one-half miles, being on its western line; its greatest width the same, on a line of latitude passing a little below Miamitown, from that deviating to a point at the southwest corner. The Whitewater river comes in from Harrison township, on the western side of section five, and flows in a southerly course four and one-half miles, reaching the Great Miami near the southeast corner of section twenty. Nearly two miles from its entrance it receives the waters of the Dry fork of Whitewater, which enters at the southeast corner of Harrison township, flows southward in a crooked course two miles, then westward two miles to the Whitewater. Another, but smaller tributary, heading in the border of Indiana, intersects sections eighteen, seventeen and twenty, and reaches the Whitewater near the railroad crossing. Two or three very pretty tributaries also enter the Great Miami from the side of this township. From time to time this river has changed its bed in the flow of the ages, and old channels are plainly to be seen, especially in the lower part of its course, as that south of Elizabethtown. The streams are generally well bridged at the desirable points ; and the Whitewater, at a point on the road from Elizabethtown northeastward, has the finest suspension bridge, exclusively belonging to this county. A notable pioneer ferry was kept across the Great Miami, a short distance from Cleves. A mile from the mouth of this stream, at the extreme southwestern corner of the township, about half a section of land is isolated by an irregular arc of water connecting at each end with the river, and probably one of its oldest channels - ^which takes the name Guard's island, from the old Guard family of pioneers. From this northeast and north for several miles the island is low, and part of it much subject to inundations. It is very fertile, however, some of it yielding, after more than two generations of culture, its hundred bushels of corn per acre with tolerable regularity. In the north of the township some of the characteristic hills of Hamilton county appear.

Passage source: History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches, published 1881.

Their subsistence was secured from the rivers and the forests, and the truck patch cultivated with a hoe, producing an abundant crop of corn, potatoes, beans and pumpkins. In the spring of the year they luxuriated on wild onions fried in opossum fat and omelets made of wild turkey eggs, accompanied by delicious beverage known as spice-wood tea. The sugar-tree supplied them with sap; but for the want of kettles they manulactured but limited supplies of sugar and molasses. When kettles were obtamed (brought to the North Bend on flatboats from Redstone, Old Fort, and bartered for buckskins, venison and peltries), the sugar and molasses made in the spring supplies them through the year, and the surplus was exchanged for goods at the traders' stores at the Bend, or Fort Washington. In these squatter times when kettles had been obtained, salt, a very scarce and necessary article, was manufactured at the "lick" a mile west of where Elizabethtown now stands. The well was sixteen feet deep and the supply of salt water enabled the boilers to produce a bushel a day, which could be sold at four dollars, hot from the kettles.

Passage source: History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches, published 1881.

When the stock brought from the old settlments was worn out, necessity compelled the hardy pioneers to depend on their wit, invention and skill in producing the clothing needed. The skins and furs of wild animals, especially the deer and raccoon, supplied the men with caps, pants, and Innged hunting shirts, and both sexes with moccasins. Cotton seed obtained from Kentucky and planted in their truck patches, afforded a valuable fiber manufactured by the use of hand-cards, spinning-wheels and the loom, furnished, with the help of flax, the material to replenish the wardrobe of these noble wives and daughters. In these early times the wild nettle, which grew luxuriantly and abundantly in the river bottoms, whose fiber was almost equal to hemp, was utilized and manufactured into a coarse linen suitable for use. The nettle, five to seven feet high, falling to the earth, would rot the stock during the winter and in the spring would be gathered and prepared tor the spinning-wheel and the loom. Mrs. Guard, the wife of Alexander Guard, during one season manufactured two hundred yards of this nettle cloth, which answered a very good purpose in meeting the wants of her large family. At the pioneer meeting, in Hunt's Grove in 1869, Dr. Walter Clark exhibited a well preserved specimen of this nettle cloth.

Passage source: History of Hamilton County, Ohio, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches, published 1881.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Whitewater Township - it names this place 24 more 24 times.