Mantua Center School

The first man to drive a stake, put up a cabin, make a clearing and settle down to business was Abraham L. Honey, which he did in the fall of 1798, and although it has been asserted that a man by the name of Peter French came in the fall of 1798, cleared off some land on the northwest quarter of Lot 24 and put out a small patch of wheat, he also cleared some land on the southwest quarter of Lot 29. After making those improvements he moved to Mentor. That a small crop of wheat was harvested the next season by Rufus Edwards, who came in and took possession of Lot 24, the lot settled upon by Honey, is beyond dispute. How he got possession of Lot 24 does not now appear. Honey remained only two or three years in Mantua, when he moved to Hiram and from there to Cuyahoga County. The wife of Honey was a sister of Rufus Edwards, and it is possible that Honey made the improvements for his brother-in-law, himself settling on a portion of the land, there being plenty of room on 420 acres for three or four families in those times. At any rate Rufus Edwai-ds was the second settler, for in the notes keptby Elias Harmon of those early days he says that just after he came in he chopped for Edwards and hewed for Crooks. Crooks by this appears to have been the third settler, though not a permanent one, as he only arrived at Mr. Honey's on the 12th of June, 1799. David Crooks, the person referred to, settled on the southwest part of Lot 29. He remained there until November, 1799, when he went for his family, who refused to return to Ohio with him. William Crooks died in Aurora, some time in the fifties at the age of eighty-five years. He located in Warren, then at Nelson, next at Parkman, and ultimately in Aurora.

Passage source: History of Portage County, Ohio, published 1885.

Elias Harmon, who can be set down as the fourth settler, was born in Suflield. Conn., in 1773, and started for the Reserve in February, 1799, in a twohorse sleigh, going as far as Pittston, N. Y., where he remained till May, when, in company with Benjamin Tappan, David Hudson and Jotham Atwater, started for their future home - Ta,ppan for Ravenna, then Town 3, Range 8; Hudson for what is now Summit County; Atwater for Euclid, and Harmon for Mantua. After a long, tiresome and perilous trip, partly by lake, partly by land and partly by river, Harmon landed at the clearing of Honey, as stated, on the 12th of June, where he stopped awhile, and then went to the place of Ebenezer Sheldon, who had engaged him before leaving home to help him in boarding and aiding the surveyors in their allotment of Aurora, afterward returning to Mantua with his wife in September, 1799, and settling on Lot 18. One of two or three entries in his diary, shows that the erection of a habitation in those days was a matter to be accomplished in short order; he savs: "July 1, began to cut timber for our house. July 2, put up and moved into house. July 3, got timber for floor. July 4, laid thefloor."

Passage source: History of Portage County, Ohio, published 1885.

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

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