HISTORICAL SKETCH OF DAYTON (Part 1)

            The original inhabitants of the region of which the Miami Valley forms a part were the Mound-Builders.  Nothing is known of their origin, and they have left no trace of their history except the many relics found in the numerous mounds which they built, and which still exist in various places.  The Mound-Builders were followed by the Indians, who were in possession of the country when it was explored by white men, and continued to occupy portions of it after settlements had been made by the whites.  The principal tribes inhabiting this portion of Ohio were the Miamis and the Shawnees.

            When the forests of the Ohio Valley were first penetrated by Europeans, the region was claimed by Spain, France, and England.  England afterward gained possession of it, but in 1783, at the close of the War of the Revolution, yielded it to the United States.  The title to the land northwest of the Ohio River was also claimed by Virginia, but in 1784 was ceded to the United States.  In 1787 the Northwest Territory was formed by Congress, including the present States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

            The land lying between the Great Miami and Little Miami rivers was not inhabited by the Indians, but was reserved as a hunting-ground, and it is probable that there was no Indian village in all this region after the year 1700.

            Long before any permanent settlement was made in the Miami Valley, its beauty and fertility were known by the inhabitants of Kentucky and the people beyond the Alleghanies, and repeated efforts were made to get possession of it.  These efforts led to conflicts with the Indians, and until the close of the eighteenth century the valley was known as the “Miami slaughter-house.”

            As early as 1749 the French Major Celoron de Bienville ascended the La Roche or Big Miami River as far as Piqua.  In 1751 Gist, the agent of the Virginians who formed the Ohio Land Company, visited the same region, and wrote a description of it in English.  The country, he says, abounded with “turkeys, deer, elk, and most sorts of game, particularly buffaloes….

It wants nothing but cultivation to make it a most delightful country.  The land upon the Great Miami River is very rich, level, and well timbered, some of the finest meadows that can be.  The grass here grows to a great height on the clear fields, of which there are a great number, and the bottoms are full of white clover, wild rye, and blue grass.”  Buffaloes and elf were found here until 1795.

            In the summer of 1780 General George Rogers Clark led an expedition against the Shawnees near Xenia and Springfield. He defeated the Indians and destroyed their property. Among the officers under Clark was Colonel Robert Patterson, from 1804 to 1827 a citizen of Dayton.

            In 1782 Clark led a second expedition of one thousand Kentuckians to Ohio.  They met the Indians at the mouth of Mad River, and on the 9^th of November a skirmish occurred on the site of Dayton, in which the Kentuckians were victorious.  These two expeditions were campaigns of the Revolution, as the Indians were friendly to the British.

In 1786 a force under Colonel Logan was sent against the Wabash and Mad River villages of the Indians. One of the brigades was commanded by Colonel Robert Patterson.  On their return, they met a party of Indians at the mouth of Mad River, and gained the second battle between whites and Indians on the site of Dayton.

            In 1789 Major Benjamin Stites, John Stites Gano, and William Goforth formed plans for a settlement to be named Venice, at the mouth of the Tiber, as they called Mad River, but their plans failed.

            In 1794 General Anthony Wayne defeated the Indians and ended four years of Indian war. August 3, 1975, the General concluded a treaty with the Indians, at Greenville, Ohio, which was regarded as securing the safety of settlers in Indian country.

            August 20, 1795, seventeen days after the treaty was signed, a party of gentlemen contracted for the purchase of the seventh and eighth ranges between Mad River and the Little Miami from John Cleves Symmes, a soldier of the Revolutionary army, who, encouraged by the success of the Ohio Company, had, after much negotiation, obtained from Congress a grant for the purchase of one million acres between the two Miamis.  The purchasers of the seventh and eighth ranges were General Arthur St. Clair, Governor of the Northwest territory; General Jonathan Dayton, afterward Senator from New Jersey; General James Wilkinson, of Wayne’s army, and Colonel Israel Ludlow, from Long Hill, Morris County, New Jersey.  On the 21^st of September two parties of surveyors set out, one led by Daniel C. Cooper to survey and mark a road and cut out some of the brush, and the other led by Captain John Dunlap, which was to run the boundaries of the purchase.  On the 1^st of November the surveyors returned to Mad River, and Israel Ludlow laid out the town, which he named for General Dayton.  Three streets were named St. Clair, Wilkinson, and Ludlow for the proprietors.  Another was called, as a sort of compromise, Jefferson, as the proprietors were Federalists.  Dayton was founded by Revolutionary officers and bears their names.  It is also linked to the War of 1812 by a street called for Commodore Perry.

            On November 1 a lottery was held, and each one present drew lots for himself or others who intended to settle in the new town.  Each of the settlers received a donation of an inlot and an outlot.  In addition, each of them had the privilege of purchasing one hundred and sixty acres at a French crown, or about one dollar and thirteen cents, per acre.  The proprietors hoped by offering these inducements to attract settlers to the place.

            Forty-six men had agreed to remove from Cincinnati to Dayton, but only nineteen came.  The following men and about seventeen women and children were the original settlers of Dayton:  William Hamer, Solomon Hamer, Thomas Hamer, George Newcom, William Newcom, Abraham Glassmire, Thomas Davis, John Davis, John Dorough, William Chenoweth, James Morris, Daniel Ferrell, Samuel Thompson, Benjamin Van Cleve, James McClure, John McClure, William Gahagan, Solomon Goss, William Van Cleve.

            In March, 1796, they left Cincinnati in three parties, led by William Hamer, George Newcom, and Samuel Thompson.  Two parties came by land and one by water.       

            The party coming by water made the voyage down the Ohio and up the Miami River in a boat called a pirogue.  In the pirogue came Samuel Thompson and his wife, Catherine; their children, Sarah, two years old, Martha, three months old, and Mrs. Thompson’s son, Benjamin Van Cleve, then about twenty-five, and her daughter, Mary Van Cleve, nine years of age; the widow McClure and her sons and daughters, James John, Thomas, Kate, and Ann, and William Gahagan, a young Irishman.  The passage from Cincinnati to Dayton occupied ten days.  Mrs. Thompson was the first to step ashore.  Two small camps of Indians were here when the pirogue touched the Miami bank, but they proved friendly and were persuaded to leave in a day or two.  The pirogue landed at the head of St. Clair Street April 1, 1796.  The Thompson party was the first to arrive.  The other two parties arrived a few days later.

            As soon as possible after the arrival of the pioneers, the whole of Water Street, now Monument Avenue, was cleared of brush and trees.  The country around for many miles, with but few exceptions, was covered with unbroken forest, or a thicket of hazel bushes and wild fruit-trees.

            Colonel George Newcom, one of the first settlers, built a log cabin, immediately after his arrival, on the southwest corner of Main Street and Water Street, now Monument Avenue.  Other cabins also were built, all of them being one story high and containing only one room.  In the winter of 1798-99 Colonel Newcom built Newcom’s Tavern on the site of the first cabin.  The new cabin was two stories high and contained four rooms.

            For several years the settlers were much annoyed by the Indians, and in 1799 a blockhouse was built on the site of the Soldiers’ monument.     

            In 1798 Rev. John Kobler, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, preached the first sermon in Dayton, and a class of eight persons was formed, which has grown into the present Grace Methodist Church.

            In 1799 the First Presbyterian Church was organized, and in 1800 built the first meeting-house, on the northeast corner of Main and Third streets.  It was constructed of logs, and was eighteen by twenty feet in size.  From these small beginnings the number of churches has grown until there are now in the city eighty-one churches of all denominations.

            In 1800 the first wedding in the little town occurred- that of Benjamin Van Cleve and Mary Whitten.  April 14 of the same year was born the first child- Jane Newcom.  During the same year the first store was opened in the second story of Newcom’s Tavern. 

The nine cabins which in 1799 constituted Dayton, contained only a few home-made benches, stools, beds, tables, and cupboards, often of buckeye and beechwood.  Doddridge in his “Notes” says that a pioneer’s table furniture consisted of “some old pewter dishes and plates; the rest, wooden bowls or trenchers, or gourds, and hard-shelled squashes.  A few pewter spoons, much battered about the edges, were to be seen on some tables.  The rest were made of horn.  If knives were scarce, the deficiency was made up by the scalping-knives, which were carried in sheaths suspended from the belt of the hunting shirt.”  The cabin was warmed and lighted wholly by the huge open hickory fire, over which, in pots suspended from cranes or on the coals or in the ashes, the cooking was done.  At an early date the pioneers raised flax, hemp, and wool, and the women spun, wove, and dyed, with colors made from walnut and butternut hulls, or wild roots, the fabrics from which they made the clothes of the family.  Every cabin had its spinning-wheel and loom, the latter built by the ingenious pioneer weaver, Abraham Glassmire.  One wonders whether pioneer women were really harder worked than their granddaughters.  They had little to occupy or amuse them outside their own homes – no benevolent societies, clubs, receptions, calls, concerts, or lectures, and only occasional church services.  They had only one or two rooms to keep in order, and no pictures, books, curtains, carpets, rugs, table-and bed-linen, bric-a-brac, china, glass, or silver to take care of.  Their wardrobes were scanty, and the weekly washing must have been small.  Wheat flour could not be obtained; corn hoe-cake, ash cake, johnny-cake, dodgers, pone, hominy, and mush and milk were the principal articles of diet.  Meal was slowly and laboriously ground in handmills.  Wild plums, crab-apples, blackberries, and strawberries, sweetened with maple sugar, furnished jellies and preserves.  There was an abundance of wild honey, and of wild goose and turkey and duck eggs.  They often tired of venison, bears’ meat, rabbits, squirrels, wild turkeys, ducks, geese, quail, and pheasants, and longed for pork.  There was great rejoicing, no doubt, when, in 1799, Mr. Cooper introduced hogs.

In the earlier years of our history settlers’ families were often dependent upon the father’s gun for a breakfast or dinner, and hunting was oftener an occupation than an amusement.  Deer and bears were killed in large numbers for both their pelts and flesh, and the bears also for their oil.  Deerskin was made into men’s clothes and moccasins, and bearskins were used as rugs and coverlets.  The meat, and also that of wild birds, was salted and eaten as we eat dried beef.  Raccoon skins were in demand for winter caps.  Pelts of various kinds were used instead of money.

            There was little money in circulation, and business in the Northwest Territory was chiefly conducted by barter of articles that were easily transported on packhorses, such as ginseng, peltries, beeswax, which had fixed values.  A muskrat skin passed for twenty-five cents; a buckskin for one dollar; a doe-skin for one dollar and fifty cents; a bearskin for from three to five dollars; a pair of cotton stockings cost a buckskin; a yard of calico cost two muskrat skins; a set of knives and forks, a bearskin; a yard of shirting, a doeskin; a pair of moccasins, a coonskin, or thirty-seven and a half cents.  The want of small change led the pioneers of the Ohio Valley to invent what was called cut money, or sharp shins.  They cut small coins, chiefly Spanish, into quarters, and circulated them as readily as money that had not been tampered with.  American merchants had not yet learned to use the United States currency, and their charges were in pounds, shillings, and pence.

            The habits and surroundings of the people were very primitive.  Wildcats and panthers strong enough to carry off a live hog prowled in the surrounding woods, and wolves, which destroyed stock, poultry, and young vegetables, were shot by moonlight through the chinks of the cabins.  The wolves howled from dusk till dawn like innumerable dogs, as any one who has visited prairie countries can understand.

            The settlement did not grow rapidly.  As stated above, in 1799 only nine cabins constituted the town of Dayton, and in 1802, when Ohio was admitted into the Union, only five families remained.  In 1801 Daniel C. Cooper, who had settled in Dayton in 1796, became titular proprietor of the town, and secured satisfactory titles by patent and deed.  He made several plats of Dayton, and was very liberal in his treatment of settlers.  To him we owe Copper Park and other advantages which we now enjoy.

            In 1803 Mr. Cooper resuscitated the town, Montgomery County was separated from Hamilton County, and Dayton was made the county-seat.

            The first county court was held on the 27^th of July, 1803, in an upper room in Newcom’s Tavern, Hon. Francis Dunlevy being the presiding judge. Colonel George Newcom was sheriff.  There was no business to transact, and the court adjourned on the same day. Afterward, when there were prisoners to be cared for, white prisoners were confined in a dry well on the Colonel’s lot, and Indian prisoners were bound and placed in his corn-crib.

            In 1806 the first Court-house was built, of brick, on the present Court-house lot.  In 1817 a new Court-house on the same site was finished.  The present old Court-house was completed in 1850, and the present new Court-house in 1884.

            In 1804 a log jail was built on the Court-house lot.  A rubble-stone jail was completed in 1813, in the rear of which a cut-stone building was erected in 1834 or 1835, which was used until 1845, when the present work-house was built and used as a jail. This was followed by the present jail building, completed in 1874.

            In 1804 a postoffice was established, with Benjamin Van Cleve as first postmaster.  For many years the mails were carried on horseback, and later by stage-coach.  At first mail was transported only once in two weeks, between Cincinnati and Detroit, via Dayton.  The postage was from twenty to twenty-five cents.      

            In 1805 the town of Dayton was incorporated.  Up to this time the government had been conducted by the county commissioners, township assessors, and justices of the peace.  In this year the first town election was held, and seven trustees were elected, one of whom served as president.  In 1829 John Folkerth was elected the first Mayor.  In 1841 Dayton was incorporated as a city, and the City Council took the place of the Town Trustees.

            In 1804 Henry Brown built on Main Street, near the High School, a frame building for a store---the first house erected here specially for business purposes.  In 1808 Mr. Brown built the first brick residence in the town, on the west side of Main Street, on the alley between Second and Third streets.

            The town at first occupied only a small area near the river, between Main and St. Clair streets.  It was many years before the business center moved as far south as at present. The original plat of the city included only the land as far south as Sixth Street, as far west as to a block west of Perry, and as far east as a little beyond the present line of the canal.

            Communication between the early settlements was very difficult. The roads were narrow, muddy, and full of holes, and the best mode of travel was on horseback.  For many years there were no bridges across the streams, and it was necessary to ford or use ferries.  The first bridge in Dayton was built across Mad River in 1817.  In 1819 Bridge Street bridge was completed and in 1836 Main Street bridge was opened for travel.  In 1838 the Third Street Bridge Company was formed.  In 1818 a stage-coach line began to run between Dayton and Cincinnati.  In 1825 a stage line was established between Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati.  Between 1836 and 1840 several turnpikes were built, leading to Cincinnati, Springfield, Lebanon, Covington, and other towns.

            In 1810 the Town Council passed an ordinance for the improvement of the sidewalks on the principal streets.  They were to be laid with stone or brick, or graveled, and a ditch was to be dug on the outer edge of the walks.  In 1836 the Council ordered the streets and walks through the town to be graded.  The abundance of gravel in the vicinity of the city has been of great advantage in the improvement of the streets and walks.

            Within the last few years a complete sever system had been projected and largely finished, the principal streets of the city have been handsomely paved with asphalt, brick, sandstone, and granite, and many of the residence streets have been parked by narrowing the roadway and making lawns along the borders of the sidewalks.  These improvements, together with the large number of shade-trees which abound in the city, make the streets very attractive.

            In 1838 Cooper Park, donated by D.C. Cooper, was prepared for the use of the public.

            At the time of the settlement of Dayton and for many years after, the Miami River was regarded as a navigable stream, and flatboats and keel-boats were used to carry merchandise between Dayton and Cincinnati, and Dayton and New Orleans.  A warehouse stood for some years at the head of Wilkinson Street, but was floated away in the freshet of 1828.  Navigation, however, was often obstructed, and in 1825 the Legislature authorized the construction of a canal between Dayton and Cincinnati.  This was completed in 1828, and in January, 1829, the first canal-boat arrived form Cincinnati.  In 1841 the canal was extended northward, and forms the present Miami and Erie Canal.

            The first railroad which entered the city was the road from Dayton to Springfield, which was finished in 1851.  In the same year the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad was completed. Others roads followed, until the city now has eleven railroads, which form parts of four great railway systems.

            The first street-railroad was chartered in 1869, as the “Dayton Street-Railroad,” though generally known as the “Third Street Railroad.”   Others followed rapidly until in 1896 there are few parts of the city not reached by street-cars.  Electricity has taken the place of horse-power on all but one road.

            The blockhouse built in 1799 was never needed for defense against the Indians, but was used as a church and school-house.  In this rude building, on the 1^st of September, 1799, Benjamin Van Cleve opened a private school, the first school in Dayton, but taught for only a few months.  Mr. Van Cleve was an enterprising citizen, and to him we owe most of our knowledge of the settlement and early history of the city.