Tallmadge City

Tallmadge City

His experiences in the wilderness and the difficulties he had to contend with in establishing his little colony are typical, and for that reason are here set forth in full according to the excellent narrative of his .son, Dr. Leonard Bacon, as published in Howe's Historical Collections (Ohio). It may readily be believed that the labors and dangers incident to the settlement of Tallmadge were no greater than those attending the settlement of the other townships of the county.

Rev. David Bacon, the founder of Tallmadge, was born in Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1771, and died in Hartford in 1817 at the early age of forty-six years, worn out by excessive labors, privations and mental sufferings, largely consequent upon his financial failure with his colony. He was the first missionary sent to the Western Indians from Connecticut. His means were pitifully inadequate, but with a stout heart, reliant upon God, he .started, August 8, 1800, from Hartford, afoot and alone through the wilderness, with no outfit but what he could carry on his back. At Buffalo Creek, now the site of the city of Buffalo, he took vessel for Detroit, which he reached September 11, thirty-four days after leaving Hart-ford, and was hospitably received by Major Hunt, commandant of the United States garrison there. After a preliminaiy survey he returned to Connecticut, and on the 25th of December was married at Lebanon to Alice Parks, then under eighteen years of age ; a week later, on the last day of the la.st year of the last century, December 31, 1800, he was ordained regularly to the specific work of a missionarj' to the heathen, the first ever sent out from Connecticut.

On the 11th of February, 1801, with his young wife, he started for Detroit, going through the -n-dlderness of New York and Canada by sleigh, and arrived there Saturday, May 9. The bride, before she got out of Connecticut, had a new and painful experience. They stopped at a noisy countrj"- tavern at Canaan. There was a large company altogether, some drinking, .some talking and some

Detroit at this time was the great emporium of the fur trade. Some of the Indian traders were men of great wealth for those days and of highly cultivated minds. Many of them were educated in England and Scotland at the universities, a class today in Britian termed "university men." They generally spent the winter there, and in the spring returned with new goods brought by vessels through the lakes. The only Americans in the place were the officers and soldiers of the garrison, consisting of an infantry regiment and an artillery company, the officers of which treated Mr. Bacon and family with kindnees and respect. The inhabitants were English, Scotch, Irish and French, all of whom hated the Yankees. The town was enclosed by cedar pickets about twelve feet high and six inches in diameter, and so close together one could not see through.

At each side were strong gates which were closed together and .guarded, and no Indians were allowed to come in after sundown or to remain over night.

Upon his arrival in Detroit the missionary society paid him in all four hundred dollars; then, until September, 1808, he did not get a cent. He began his support by teaching school, at first with some success, but he was a Yankee, and the four Catholic priests used their influence in opposition. His young wife assisted him. They studied the Indian langiiage, but made slow progress, and their prospect for usefulness in Detroit seemed waning.

On the 19th of Febniary, 1802, hi^ first child was born at Detroit. - the afterwards eminent Dr. Leonard Bacon. In the May following he went down into the Maumee country with a view to establishing a mission among the Indians. The Indians were mo.stly drunk, and he was an unwilling witness to their drunken orgies. Little Otter, their chief, received him courteously, called a council of the tribe, and then, to his talk through an interpreter, gave him their decision that they would not have him. Tt was to this efi'ect:

Your religion is very good, but only for white people; it will not do for Indians. When the Great Spirit made white people he put them on another island, gave them farms, tools to work with, horses, horned cattle and sheep and hogs for them, that they might get their living in that way and he taught them to read, and gave them their religion in a book. But when he made Indians he made them wild, and put them on this island in the woods, and gave them the wild game that they might live by hunting. We formerly had a religion very much like yours, but we found it would not do for us, and we have discovered a much better way. Seeing he could not succeed he returned to Detroit. He had been with them several days and twice narrowly escaped assassination from the intoxicated ones. His son, Leonard, in his memoirs of his father, published in the Congregational Quarterly for 1876, and from which this article is derived, wrote :

"Something more than ordinary courage was neces-sary in the presence of so many drunken and half-dninken Indians, any one of whom might suddenly shoot or tomahawk the mLssionary at the slightest provocation or at none." The two instances mentioned by him in which he was enabled to baffle the malice of savages ready to murder him remind me of another in,stance.

"It was while my parents were living at Detroit, and when I was an infant of less than four months, two Indians came as if for a friendly visit; one of them, a tall and stalwart, young man, the other shorter and older. As they entered my father met them, gave his hand to the old man, and was just extending it to the other, when my mother, quick to discern the danger, exclaimed, 'See! He has a knife.' At the word my father saw that, while the Indian's right hand was ready to salute, a gleaming knife in his left hand was partly concealed under his blanket.

And Repkesentative Citizens

6ye was fixed upon the murderer, and watched him eye to eye. The Indian found himself strangely diseoncert.ed. In vain did the old man talk to my father in angry and chiding tones - -that keen, black eye was watching the would-be assassin. The time seemed long. My mother took the baby (himself) from the birch-bark cradle, and was going to call for help, but when she reached the door, she dared not leave her husband. At last the old man became weary of chiding; the young man had given up his purpose for a time and they retired."

Failing on the Maumee, Mr. Bacon soon after sailed with his little family to Mackinaw. This was at the beginning of summer, 1802 Mackinaw was then one of the remotest outposts of the fur trade and garrisoned by a company of United States troops. His object was to establish a mission at Abrecroche, about twenty miles distant, a large settlement of Chippewa Indians, but they were no less determined than those on the Maumee that no missionary should live in their villages. Like those, also, they were a large part of the time drunk from whiskey, supplied in abundance by the fur traders in exchange for the proceeds of their hunting excursions. They had at one time no less than 900 gallon kegs on hand.

His work was obstructed from the impossibility of finding an interpreter, so he took into his family an Indian lad, through whom to learn the language - his name was Singenog. He remained at Mackinaw about two years, but the Indians would never allow him to go among them. Like the Indians generally, they regarded ministers as another sort of conjurors, with power to bring sickness and disease vipon them'.

At one time early in October the second year, 1803, Singenog, the young Indian, persuaded his uncle, Pondega Kawwan. a head chief, and two other Chippewa dignitaries, to vi.»it the missionar\r, and presenting him a string of wampum, Pondega Kawwan made a ver^' non-committal, dignified speech, to the effect that there was no u.^e of his .going among them, that the Great Spirit did not put them on the ground to learn such things as the white people taught. If it were not for rmn they might listen, "but," concluded he, "Rum is our Master." And later he said to Singenog, "Our father is a great man and knows a great deal ; and if we were to know so much, perhaps the Great Spirit would not let us live."

After a residence at Mackinaw of about two years and all prospects of success hopeless, the !iii.ssionary society ordered him to New Connecticut, there to itinerate as a missionary and to improve himself in the Indian language, etc. Ahout the l.^t of August, 1804, with h-s wife and two children, the youngest an infant, he sailed for Detroit. From hence they proceeded in an open canoe, following the windings of the shore, rowing by day and sleeping on land by night, till having performed a journey of near 200 miles, they reached, about tlie middle of October, Cleveland, then a mere hamlet on the lake shore.

Leaving his family at Hudson, he went on to Hartford to report to the society. He went ;ilmost entirely on foot a distance of about 600 miles, which he wearily trudged much of the way through the mnd, slush and snow of winter. An arrangement was made by which he could act half the time as pastor at Hudson, and the other half as a missionary to the various settlements on the Reserve. On his return a little experience satisfied him that more could be done than in any other way for the establishment of Christian institutions on the Reserve, by the old Puritan mode of colonizing, by founding a religious colony strong enough and compact enough to maintain schools and public worship.

An ordinarv township, with its scattered settlements and roads at option, with no common central point, cannot well grow into a town. The unity of a town as a body politic depends very much on fixing a common center to which every homestead shall be obviously related. In no other rural town, perhaps, is that so well provided for as in Tallmadge. "Public spirit, local pride," writes Dr. Bacon, "friendly intercourse, general culture and good taste, and a certain moral and re- ligious steadfastness are among the characteristics by which Tallniadge is almost proverbially distinguished throughout the Reserve. No observing stranger can pass through the town without seeing that it was planned by a sagacious and far-seeing mind. "It was fit that he who had planned the settlement, and who had identified with it all his hopes for use-fuln&ss for the remainder of his life, and all his hopes of a competence for his family, should be the first settler in the township. He did not wait for hardier adventurers to encounter the first hardships and to break the loneliness of the woods. Selecting a temporary location near an old Indian trail, a few rods from the southern boundary of the township, he built the first log cabin, and there placed his family.

"I well remember the pleasant day in July, 1807, when that family made its removal from the center of Hudson to a new log-house in a township that had no name and no human habitation. The father and mother - poor in this world's goods, but rich in faith and in the treasure of God's promises; rich in their well-tried mutual affection ; rich in their expectation of usefulness and of the comfort and competence which they hoped to achieve by their enterprise; rich in the parental joy with which they looked upon the three little ones that were carried in their arms or nestled among their scanty household goods in the slow-mo\'ing wagon - were familiar with whatever there is in hardship and peril or disappointment, to try the courage of the noblest manhood or the immortal strength of a true woman's love. The little ones were the natives of the wilderness - ^the youngest a delicate nur.?ling of six months, the others bom in a remoter and more savage We.st.. These five, with a hired man, were the family.

"I remember the setting out, the halt before the door of an aged friend to say farewell, the fording of the Ciiyahoga, the day's journey of somewhat less than thirteen miles along a road that had been cut (not made) through the dense forest, the little cleared spot where the journey ended, the new loghouse, with what seemed to me a stately hill behind it, and with a limpid rivulet winding near the door. That night, when the first family worship was ofi'ered in that cabin, the prayer of the two worshipers, for themselves and their children, and for the work which they had that day begun, was like the prayer that went up of old from the deck of the Mayflower, or from beneath the wintry sky of Plymouth. One month later a German family came within the limits of the town ; but it was not until the next February that a second family came, a New England family, whose mother tongue was English. AVell I do remember the solitude of that first winter, and how beautiful the change was when spring at last began to hang its garlands on the trees.

"The next thing in carrying out the plan to which Mr. Bacon had devoted himself was to bring in, from whatever quarter, such families as would enter into his views and would co-operate with him for the early and permanent establishment of Christian order. It was at the expense of many a slow and weary journey to older settlements that he succeeded in bringing together the families who, in the spring and .summer of 1808, began to call the new town their home. His repeated absences from the home are fresh in my memory, and so is the joy with which we greeted the arrival of one family after another coming to relieve our loneliness: nor least among the merhories of that time is the remembrance of my mother's fear when left alone with her three little children. She had not ceased to fear the Indians, and .sometimes a straggling savage, or a little company of them, came by our door on the old portage path, calling, perhaps, to try our hospitality, and with signs or broken English phrases asking for whiskey. She could not feel that to 'pull in the latch string' was a stifflcient exchision of such visitors, and in my mind's eye I seem now to see her frail form tugging at a heav\' chest, with which to barricade the door before she dared to .sleep. It was, indeed, a relief and joy to feel at last that we had neighbors, and that our town was begin- ning to be inhabited. At the end of the second year from the commencement of the survey, there were, perhaps, twelve families, and the town received its name, Tallmadge."

Slowly the settlement of the town proceeded from 1807 to 1810. Emigration from Connecticut had about ceased, owing to the stagnation of business froni European wars, and the embargo and other non-intercourse acts of Jefferson's administration. Mr. Bacon could not pay for the land he had purchased. He went East to trj^ to make new satisfactory arrangements with the proprietors, leaving behind his wife and five little children. The proprietors were imnmovable. Some of his parishioners felt hard towards him because, having made payments, he could not perfect their titles. With difficulty he obtained the means to return for hi^^ familv.

In May, 1812, he left Tallmadge, and all "that was realized after five years of arduous labor was poverty, the alienation of some old friends, the depression that follows a fatal defeat, and the dishonor that falls on one who cannot pay his debts." He lingered on a few years, supporting his family by traveling and selling the "Scott's Family Bible" and other religious works, from house to house, and occasional preaching. He bore his misfortunes with Christian resignation, struggled on a few years with broken spirits and broken constitution, and died at Hartford, August 17, 1817. "My mother," said Dr. Bacon, "standing over him with her youngest, an infant in her arms, said to him : 'Look on your babe before you die.' He looked up and said, with distinct and audible utterance: 'The blessing of the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, rest upon thee.' Just before dawn he breathed his la«t. Now he knows more than all of us, said the doctor; while my mother, bathing the dead face with her tears, and warming it with kisses, exclaimed: 'Let my last end be like his.' "

There is little doubt that Rev. David Bacon was the first white person who made his home in this township. Other early settlers were George Boosinger, .Justin E. Frink, Ephraim Clark, .Jonathan Sprague, Titus Chapman,

William NeaJ, Elizur Wright, Moses Bradford, Salmon Sackett, John Caruthers, Reuben Upson, John Wright and Luther Chamberlain. The township was named in honor of one of its early proprietors, Benjamin Tallmadge, of Litchfield, Connecticut. Nearly all the original settlers were from Connecticut. It was organized as a separate township in November, 1812. Elizur Wright was elected clerk and Nathaniel Chapman, justice of the peace. Tallmadge has from the very earliest days brought a very strong religious and educational influence to bear upon the surrounding communities. The average of culture is higher here than in any other community in this vicinity - perhaps in Ohio. The purpose of its founder was religious. The Congregational Church was organized here in 1809. In 1810, a school-house was opened and Lucy Foster, who married Alpha Wright the next year, was its first teacher. In 1816 "Tallmadge Academy" was incorporated and opened to students. Among its teachers, Simeon Woodruff and Elizur Wright were the earliest, while later came Sidney Edgerton. About 1835 Ephraim T. Sturtevant opened a private school and taught it successfully for several years. Tallmadge established the first public library in Summit County, opening it in 1813, and continuing and increasing it until the present writing. The Congregational Church edifice was built in 1822, and Ls a fine specimen of the New England church architecifure of the period. With very few changes, it has continued to serve the society until now.. In 1825 the Methodist established a church organization, and in 1832 erected a church building. In 1874 they built the present structure near the public square. Coal and potters' clay are extensively mined in the township. In the early '40's several veins of iron ore were discovered and a furnace erected to smelt them. The attempt was unsuccessful and the enterprise ultimately abandoned. Some manufacturing has been successfully conducted, notably, carriage manufacturing, begun in 1827 by Amos Avery and William C. Oviatt. In 1836 thov took in Isaac Robinson. In

1841 Ira P. Sperry organized the firm of Oviaitt & Sperry and later took in Samuel J. Eitchie. L. V. Bierce and J. E. Baldwin also manufactured cairiages for many year.?. In 1868 Alfred Sperry, Charles Tryon and Benjamin D. Wright began the manufacture of sewer-pipe, Henry M. Camp later succeeding Mr. Tryon. In 1871 Samuel J. Ritchie and Ira P. and Willis Sperry bought them out and continued the business with success until the fire of 1878. In 1881 Ira P. and George P. Sperry rebuilt the w^orks. The apple-butter factory of John A. Caruthers should also be noticed. Tallmadge gave her full quota of men to preserve the Union during the rebellion of 1861. Tallmadge claims two of the greatest names in Summit County history in Sidney Edgerton and William H. Upson.