https://history.meigslibrary.org/files/original/f44e072b43958832142c54396cd8aa75.pdf 025ca0b7466e0de2b41c726df984ca33 PDF Text Text A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 1. THE STAGE THE BOOT-SHAPED BEND La Belle Riviere, French equivalent of oyo, an Indian term signifying The Beautiful River- thus, in substance, do certain Canadian records designate1 the mighty stream which Monsieur de la Salle, 1. “The Iroquois Indians who guided La Salle to the Falls of the Ohio, borrowed the name which they gave the River from the Delaware language. In the various dialects of the Confederation it was indifferently called Ohio or Allegheny, both signifying ‘fine’,’fair’, or 'shining' river. In the Candian records it is given, 'Ohio or Olighisipon que dire en Iroquois et en Outaouac La Belle Riviere.’ (Ohio or Olighisipon, which, in the Iriquois or Ottawa language, which means The Beautiful River.)” -Clark’s Picturesque Ohio, page 237. French trader and empire builder, is generally believed to have discovered and to have given the above name. If that dauntless explorer was indeed the first white man to be borne southwestward through the Ohio's many bends and curves and loops; the first to observe the ever-present line of hills rising now on his left side now on his right from the water's edge while flanking a more or less broad stretch of bottom land on the opposite side; the first to admire the many picturesque little islands dotting the River's surface in short, if La Salle was the first European explorer to look upon the Ohio's many pleasing features, then it was he too, no doubt, who first applied the Indian's rather indefinite "oyo” to that particular river and translated it into La Belle Riviere2. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 2. 2. The doubts expressed and implied in the above paragraph were suggested by historians Hulbert (The Ohio River, pp. 2, 3,), and Ambler (Transportation in the Ohio Valley, pp. 23-24.) Be that as it may, The phrase, la belle riviere, whatever its connection or lack of connection with the word oyo and by whomsoever given originally, will keep right on being the favorite appellation of our great western waterway; for, taken as a whole, the Ohio IS a beautiful river. And, taken in sections, that unusual series of curly cues encountered about half-way between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati that crookedest part of the notoriously crooked Ohio-is, in the opinion of many, the most beautiful section. George Washington, when journeying down that river in the year 1770, recorded that section in his Diary as “what they call the Great Bent"; he made note also of its two islands, with the "rapid at their lower end," and of the River's northeast course for "two Miles and an half.” Though Washington said nothing about the beauty of the "Bent,” tourists travelling up the Ohio in the summertime have been heard to express surprise and delighted wonderment at the sudden change of their steamboat from a general northeast to a succession of zig-zags involving almost every known direction. On the other hand, captains, pilots, mates, deckhands, (in the old-style towboat days)-all with one accord pronounced imprecations upon those same bewildering eccentricities. Poetically minded riverman occasionally were moved to express their feelings in rhyme. One widely known jingle of the 1870s runs thus: Letart Falls and Graham Station, Meanest places in creation; Little Antiquity between The d…dest places ever seen. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 3. If the reader will take a look at any map of the United States he can spot Washington's "Great Bent” at once for it is the only bend of its kind in the Ohio river. And, if the map is a fairly large one, said reader will recognize a feature of that bend which Washington did not mention, probably did not see; namely. That that large bend, together with its several smaller appendages, is shaped like a boot--a clumsy looking boot but its shape so generally recognizable as to have won for that bend the specific name of boot-shaped Band. Now, it happens that the stage of the century-long industrial drama presented in this work is the entire western side of this boot- shaped bend, not only the land on each side of the river but the River itself. Furthermore, since the drama’s main action took place on both sides of the large curve that encircles the "Bottom in the Shape of a Horse Shoe” (Washington's words), that part of the boot will, until further notice, appear as the Horseshoe Bend, or simply as The Bend, its capital letters setting it apart from all other horseshoe bends (of which there are many) in the Ohio river. The curtain now rises, bringing into view the drama's EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BACKGROUND Whereon is protrayed, briefly, the various New-World scenes in which the boot-shaped bend appeared before the opening of the drama that was destined to be enacted on its premises. Until about the middle of the eighteenth century the Shawanese, Delawares, Mingoes, and other tribes of so-called Red Men held �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 4. undisputed sway in the vast region drained by the Ohio and its tributaries. They roamed at will from their habitations at the head waters of the streams on the north side-the Muskingum, the Scioto; Big Miami, Little Miami-down into their favorite hunting grounds and the country of their enemies, the Cherokees, on the south side of Oyo. They never resided in those hunting grounds, however, and in only a few instances did they have permanent dwellings on the shores of that river, Hulbert asserts. (See his Ohio River, pp.9-10) Indians from the north side visited the boot-shaped bend quite frequently, it is believed. Shade Creek, in the upper part of The Bend, the mouth of which is still (1936) called Devil's Hole, was one of the paths taken by their warriors when roaming from their towns on the upper Scioto into the Cherokee country; and vast heaps of flint chips, accidentally uncovered within the last fifty years on one of the islands above Letart Falls, indicate the probable location of one of their munitions factories4. Outside of 4. Flint Ridge, in Licking county, Ohio, was one of the Indians' chief sources of flint for arrow-heads, etc. Blocks of flint were removed from the ridge, hammered into convenient sizes for transportation and in many instances taken great distances before being worked into their finished shapes. See -Howe's Historical Collect ions, p. 96, Vol II. these visits and the occasional appearance of a French fur trader paddling his heavily laden canoe up or down its waters5, the boot5. One such trader, Le Tarte by name, is believed to have had a trading post on the Ohio side just above the rapids. Hence the name Letart for the falls and also, later, for the vast bottom lands on that side. shaped bend in pre-Revolutionary days was like the rest of the Upper Ohio Valley: a densely forested, somber solitude. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 5 Its first definite appearance on the white man's stage was in the opening Act of the drama known as The French and Indian War (1755-63). Even then it played no leading part but merely figured in the geographical setting of that Act: first, as a segment of the backbone of that vast and rich wilderness, the Ohio Valley-which at that time was designated as The Ohio Country-the region to which both France and England laid claim; second, as a few thousand of the half-million acres of Ohio-River land granted in 1748 by the English king to a group of Virginia land speculators called The Ohio Company. Acting on the principle that possession is nine points of the law, England was inspired to make the grant as encouragement to the settling of the Valley by her sea-board colonies. France, moved by the same principle but deeming military occupation the more convincing, challenged England's claims by building forts in the northeastern part of the Valley-on the Allegheny Fork. The war which these acts made inevitable brought the Ohio Company to an end but gave the whole disputed region, boot-shaped bend and all, to the English crown. It happened, however, that the colony of Virginia, by virtue Of her Royal charter, claimed all the land west of the Allegheny mountains. Her governor it was who, in reply to the French challenge, had instigated an expedition for the seizure of the French fort (Ft. Duquesne, now Pittsburgh), at the Forks of the Ohio and had offered bounty lands beyond the Alleghenies as an inducement to volunteers. Hence the princely domain just wrested from France was promptly regarded by, the Old Dominion as her exclusive property to be parcelled out to her officers and sol- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 6 diers if she saw fit to do so. The boot-shaped bend thus seemed now to be in line for a change of status. The change came quite soon; but not the kind anticipated by Virginia. In the same year of the Peace Treaty that followed the War, the Indians north of the Ohio River began to show an inclination openly to question England's right to their lands. England, in turn, showed an inclination to pacify the Indians--and thereby, incidentally, to protect her lucrative fur trade from the injury which an inrush of settlers might cause. And so, ignoring Virginia's charter claims to the region the King of England proclaimed the whole central part of the newly acquired territory, both sides of the River, to be Indian territory and forbade all settling there in "for the present." The natives were to have undisputed possession of their stamping grounds on the north side and also of their hunting grounds on the south side. Circumstances had altered the case of the settlers since the Ohio Company grant was made, it seems. The provision was not actually in force, however, even for the present; for bold pioneers from Virginia already were swarming into the "Monongahela Country." Washington himself, pronouncing the Proclamation of 1763 a “temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians," had land surveyed there in 1767. The very next year some of the Virginia invaders cajoled the Iroquois into "selling” practically all that portion of the Indian reservation now included in the states of West Virginia and Kentucky. By that Treaty (Fort Stanwix) the part of the boot-shaped bend north of the Ohio remained with the “Indian Side”’ while the south shores became Virginia bounty land again. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 7 It was for the purpose of taking a look at that land (200,000 acres) and selecting good tracts for the officers of the First Virginia Regiment that Washington on the 20th of October, 1770, with a party of eight, “Imbarkd" at Pittsburgh “in a large canoe with sufficient store of Provisions and Necessaries”6 on his nota6. From “The Diaries of Washington,” p. 412. As Pittsburgh was an important point in this drama's 8th century background, Washington's description of it is pertinent here: "Wednesday 17. Doctr. Craik and myself with Captn. Crawford and others arrivd at Fort Pitt… “we lodgd in what is called the Town, distant abt. 300 yards from the Fort at one Mr. Semples who keeps a very good House of Publick Entertainment… these Houses which are built of Logs and ranged into streets are on the Monongahela… and I suppose may be abt. 20 in number, and inhabited by Indian traders etca. “The Fort is built in the point between the River Allighany and Monongahela… It is five sided and regular, two of which (next the land) are of Brick, the others Stockade. A Mote encompasses it. The Garrison consists of two Companies of Royal Irish Commanded by one Captn. Edmoson.” ble trip down the Ohio, reaching the mouth of “Kenhawa” river on October 31st. Two years later Captain Crawford, who was Washington's land agent, with a party of men made the actual survey of the land. On the basis of these two appraisals, all the land on the south side of the boot-shaped bend was apportioned to eight men, one of whom was Washington himself. (For details of Apportionment see below.) The apportioning was not made at once, however, for Mother England did not hesitate to disregard the Old Dominion's claims to the Indian Side still further. Immediately after the Boston Tea Party (1773) she extended the boundaries of the Province of Quebec to the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers. Whether or not the Quebec Act was a part of her reward to the colonists for taking such good care of the East India Company's tea, its practical effect was to �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 8 shut them out still more completely from the Northwest. Thus, another grievance was added to the already long list against the Mother Country and hastening the crisis. And a remote cause of the American Revolution had involved the Boot-Shaped Bend! Before the Revolutionary drama opened, pioneers from Pennsylvania and Virginia and North Carolina (mainly Scotch-Irish and Germans and English) had ventured by way of the river valleys up-or down, to be exact-the Monongahela and Great Kanawha into that part of the Ohio Country secured to the white man by the Treaty of Stanwix. Virginia encouraged pioneering by permitting Protection7 the appropriating of idle lands, probably because it afforded frontier protection 7. By girding a few trees and planting a small patch of corn in some choice tract of land a man could claim 400 acres of it. Entries of this kind were called "tomahawk improvements.” Many men made a number of these entries in a season, selling them to the first comer for a few dollars, a rifle or some other small consideration. The great advantage of these simple claims was that they gave the possessor the right to enter 1,000 acres adjoining his "improvement" on condition of his paying a small sum of money per acre into the treasury of the colony of Virginia. Many of the richest lands on the left bank of the Ohio were secured by such so-called “Pre-emption Rights,” and some are still (1936) held by descendants of the original owners. –From Hildreth's “Early Ohio,” pp. 477-7 On the immediate banks of the Ohio, however, only two settle-ments had been made (Fort Henry and Grave Creek, now Wheeling and Moundsville, West Virginia). Those banks did not attract early settlers; for a great woods, "a veritable Black Forest” (quoting Dr. Hulbert), lay between the summit of the Alleghenies and the central part of what is now Indiana and Kentucky; and the shores of this area were one long succession of piles of driftwood and other flood plunder, the accumulation of centuries, its bottom lands believed to be teeming with fever and ague. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 9 But to the southwest, where the River emerged from the Black Forest, the country of "Ken-ta-kee"-the "meadow land”-lay invitingly. There were two entrances to that land: the Ohio River and Cumberland Gap-a front door and a back door (in Hulbert's picturesque wording). The front door was opened for the first time when James Harod with forty companions descended the Ohio nearly to the "Falls" (now Louisville, Kentucky), passed thence in-land and founded the first settlement in the Blue Grass State. That door did not become popular at once, however; bars and snags, protruding logs, islands almost innumerable; huge, matted masses of driftwood; Indians on the north side; the bootshaped bend with its dreaded rapids that "caused the water to boil and make a grumbling, dull noise, and…the eddy of great power, which sucked in logs and everything within its attraction" these were some of the obstacles encountered along the front entrance8. 8. The quotation is from "Description of the Ohio,” by Thomas Ashe, an English traveler who visited America in 1806. Traveler Ashe must have passed through the Boot-shaped Bend when the River was unusually low. The opening of the "blue grass” region's back door was made possible by a battle which was fought at the mouth of the Great Kanawha River only about eight miles west of the southernmost point of the boot-shaped bend. That conflict, known in history as to Battle of Point Pleasant, or the Battle of the Great Kanawha, was the out-come of the transaction at Fort Stanwix9. At the Peace Conference 9. When the Shawanese heard what had been done at the Fort Stanwix meeting they "used bitter words and threats,” for the lands cededby the Iroquois were the Shawanese's specially prized hunting grounds, to which, they claimed, the Iroquois had no right at all. More than that, the first bands of “Long Knives” (the Indian's name for the Virginians because of their long swords) had committed several wantonly barbarous murders, one of which was that of the help- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 10 less family of Logan, a friendly Iroquois chieftain. And so, "bitter deeds followed hard on bitter words;" a mighty Indian confederacy was soon busy with torch and tomahawk on the western frontiers. Virginia's Royal governor, Lord Dunmore, decided to crush the conspiracy by leading a large force composed mainly of hard y frontiersmen into the distant Northwest (which England had just removed from Virginia’s control). The rear division of the army was to come down the Great Kanawha and at its mouth cross into the enemy's own territory. The brilliant Shawanese leader Cornstalk, with his warriors, surprised the Virginians by crossing the Ohio first; but in the bloody conflict which ensued, his army was completely routed. held on the north side of the River after the battle, the Indians agreed to remain on their own side thereafter. The following year (1775) Daniel Boone, acting as agent for a group of land speculators, cut a wagon path-the Wilderness Road-through Cumberland Gap, thereby opening the back door to the Kentucky Country. To that door prospective immigrants were drawn immediately. Throngs of them soon were trekking or footing it through the Gap into the Blue Grass Region, many of them in time reaching the River; and some of the more daring even going across to the forbidden side. The boot-shaped bend saw none of this back-door conquest of Kentucky. Nor was that bend an actual observer of any event of the War For Independence (1775-’81). Though time and again Indian raiders, supplied with arms by British officers located along the Great Lakes, crossed the River into Virginia and her new "County of Kentucky," they went down by way of the Muskingum and Scioto valleys. Thus the boot-shaped bend escaped having part in those invasions, In the fourth year of the War, however, it probably did experience the thrill of bearing on its forty-odd convoluted miles of now smooth now ruffled bosom the twentyfive-year-old hero George Rogers Clark when he was on his way down the Ohio getting recruits for �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 11 his contemplated attack on the British forts in the Illinois Country in order to secure the Northwest for the new nation. But not forever were adventurous Virginians and Pennsylvanians to be kept from entering the Southwest by the front-door route. The Zeitgeist (Spirit of the Age) that had impelled them to migrate to the New World now spurred them on to brave the River's dangers and enter the new region by the more direct route. During the closing years of the Revolution, possibly before Clark's expeditions, an occasional family head started from the threshold of that door (Fort Pitt) or from Fort Henry, with his family and household goods and live stock all huddled together in one of the new-style down-river craft, a flatboat, on a ten- or fifteen-day journey down the perilous River seeking a new habitation, new opportunities. Perhaps he went as far as Louisville (settled by Clark's comrades in 1778) and there took one of the newly established routes to the inland settlements; or perhaps he stopped farther up and entered one of the River's southern tributaries. Nor was it long before the Indian on the north side saw, not an occasional emigrant craft but a fairly steady stream of them passing down Oyo. He saw now and then an unusually bold homeseeker stop at one of the bottoms on the illegal side, HIS side. Resolving in his heart that "white man shall not plant corn north of Oyo,” he set about trying to stop the threatened conquest of his domain by the only method he could command: attacking the pioneer as the latter descended the River. And many were the "desperate little battles amid stream, hard handto-hand struggles in the water, where each antagonist sought to maim or drown the other; the bloody running fights alone the drift-strewn shadowy shores, savage attacks on �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 12 riffles where boats were aground, attacks at the gray dawn of day-the Indian's favorite time of battle ,"-all of which and more was a part of the "wild story of the real conquest of the Ohio River." (Hulbert's Ohio River, p. 138). One such tragedy occurred so near the upper part of the boot-shaped bend that it came within the range of that bend's vision. (See Howe, Vol. II., p. 271). The Treaty closing the Revolution set the boundaries of the new nation at the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River and Florida. The vast trans-Ohio country was now United States territory. But still Virginia's private domain, of course; had not her Charter of 1608 given her all that region? Besides, had not her own George Rogers Clark, aided by her Governor Patrick Henry, taken it from the British during the Revolutionary War? Nonetheless, Virginia was destined to lose possession of practically the whole region. New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut-each came forward with claims to parts of it; a fourth state, Maryland brought the matter to a climax by refusing to ratify the proposed new instrument of government, The Articles of Confederation, unless all western lands were made the common property of the States. The claimant states finally yielded, Virginia only on condition that the River10 and a large tract 10. Virginia passed a Relinquishment Act formally ceding all claim to the territory “within the limits of the Virginia Charter, situate, lying, and being to the northwest of the river Ohio.” But Congress in no way ever recognized Virginia's claim to the River as being preeminent. lying between the Scioto and Miami rivers (later called The Virginia Military District) be granted her for her veterans of the Revolution. By these concessions the immense wilderness between the Great Lakes and the Ohio came under the control of the United States, whose �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 13 governing body then was the Confederation Congress. That Congress had urged the cessions so as to secure a source of revenue for the paying of its war debts; hence it set to work at once to devise methods for opening the land to settlement. This involved the adopting of a system of land surveys and also the fixing of terms and conditions of land sales. Remembering the old Indian title to the whole Northwest, Congress decided that first of all it must get rid of that title by making treaties with the various Indian tribes. Accordingly, agents were sent out immediately to perform that service. As soon as the first treaty was concluded (1785), Congress passed a Land Ordinance; and two years later it enacted the ORDINANCE OF 1787, which provided a form of government for the whole former Indian Side, the region to be known thereafter as THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY. While this latter Ordinance was still pending in Congress, action, thereon was suspended by a proposition from a representative of a new Ohio Company grew out of an endeavor, several years previously, to secure the bounty lands due for war service (bounty lands which the Continental Congress had offered when it did not own an acre of land). Congress took no action then. But the land sold slowly under the Land Ordinance, mainly because the price was too high. And so, when THE OHIO COMPANY OF ASSOCIATES (a group of New England officers and soldiers) proposed the purchase of a million and a half acres on the Muskingum river, payment to be made in Continental certificates, Congress lent a willing ear11. The price offered was a million dollars in �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 14 11. There was really much opposition but it was due mainly to the coupling of the proposal with the speculative scheme of the disreputable Scioto Company. When that company was dropped from the proposal it went through without further opposition. certificates, which then were worth about twelve cents on the dollar. And now the boot-shaped bend comes into the scene again, for that bend's north shore was a part of the Ohio Company Purchase. From Marietta, the Company's first settlement-and also the first legal settlement on the north side of the Ohio River12 were to come 12. After Clark's Conquest many land-seekers crossed over from the "Monongahela Country" and built their cab ins at the headwaters of the Muskingum and other streams, expecting to hold the land by right of "tomahawk improvements," but Congress sent troops to remove them and burn their cabins. Some of them later came to the boot-shaped bend. many of the boot-shaped bend's first settlers and the Horseshoe Bend's very first. Thus, New England was to have a voice in the civilizing of that region; moreover, her voice was to mingle with that of ScotchIrish, German, Dutch immigration from Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas-in a word, the voice of that "astounding race mixture" already so far on its way on the Virginia side of the Ohio River basin. The Ohio Company's settlement project encouraged further immigration into the Northwest Territory. Whole colonies from New England soon dotted the streams of the Company's purchase. Organizations were formed in other parts of the East, as for example the Symmes Company of New Jersey, which began a cluster of hamlets on the present site of Cincinnati only a few months after the founding of Marietta. Virginians and Kentuckians began as early as �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 15 1790 to migrate into the Virginia Military District. Four miles below the mouth of the Great Kanawha was the French colony of Gallipolis, the Scioto Company's innocent victim. The Ordinance of 1787 and the several Indian treaties of 1785,-88 had legalized settlement on the Indian side by the whites; and the Treaty of Greenville, closing the Indian War of 1791-94 (which had resulted from the Indians' claims of unjust treatment) had pushed the natives so far north that they no longer needed to be considered one of the dangers of "the white and foaming River." In view of all this immigration into the eastern half of the Northwest Territory, it is not surprising that as early as 1803 that part satisfied the Ordinance’s requirements for admission into the Union as a sovereign state. As the first state to be carved out of the vast Ohio Country, it quite naturally called itself Ohio. The north shore of the boot-shaped bend, lying within the boundaries of the new commonwealth, thus at last found itself safely and permanently ensconced. The south shore, since there never had been any reason whatever for expecting or even wanting Virginia to renounce her claims on the south shore of the River, had no other thought than to continue indefinitely as a part of the Old Dominion's now much curtailed but still extensive back yard. However, instead of going each its own way thereafter, those two shores were to be more closely united than ever before; together they were destined to provide a stage for the enacting of one of the outstanding industrial dramas of the nineteenth century. "WESTWARD HO” SETS THE STAGE (1798-1816, approx.) The task of getting the stage ready for the drama fell to the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 16 Great Westward Migration which, as already indicated, began even before the Revolution, but which did not take on a serious aspect until after the Treaty of Greenville. THE VIRGINIA SHORE'S SETTING:-Five years after the Old Dominion had yielded her claims to the Northwest Territory, she permitted her County of Kentucky to enter the Union as a separate state, What remained of her trans-Allegheny region was growing larger in a sense, for migration into that region was rapidly increasing. In 1778 or ‘79 the Virginia Assembly authorized the opening of a land office and ·in the same year facilitated the government of Botetourt County (including all her territory beyond the mountains) by organizing all its western part into a new county, the County of Greenbrier. By 1804 Kanwaha County had been carved out of the western part of Greenbrier and Mason County out of the western part of Kanawha. In each of these partitions the Bootshaped Bend's Virginia side happened to be in the new county. But that side was not open to the pioneer; it was private property whose several owners had not made that land accessible to the westward migrator. Some of those owners were the various heirs of the French and Indian War officers to whom the five large Virginia bottoms had been patented, others were subsequent purchasers13. 13. THE KING GEORGE GRANT: “…for encouraging men to enlist in the service of our late grandfather, we do give, grant and confirm unto George Muse, Adam Stephen, Andrew Lewis, Peter Hog, John West, John Polson, Andrew Waggener, one certain tract or parcel of land containing 51,302 acres lying in and being in the county of Botetourt and bounded as follows, to wit…” The line began about three miles up the Kanawha River, followed the meanderings of the Ohio at some distance back, and extended a short distance above Buffington's Island. For exact complete text of the grant, see “The Roush Family in America,” page 262. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 17 To George Muse was allotted the bottom and bordering hills farthest north in the boot-shaped bend. To Washington himself went the next two bottoms-2448 acres and 4395 acres respectively--extending around the heel and partly under the fore part of the boot. John West and John Polson were to share equally the 12,000-acre tract of bottom land and hills lying between the "rapids" in the "Great Bent" and the "Mile of Hills” above the bottom "in the shape of a horse Shoe.” Andrew Waggener was to be sole owner of all the horse-shoe bottom except the western elongation, or "narrows," which was a part of the Muse grant. The Peter Hog tract began with the widening of those narrows and extended far beyond the end of the boot-shaped bend; the Adam Stephen and Andrew Lewis tracts lay wholly outside of it. The first settlement on the Virginia side of the Boot-shaped Bend was made in a comparatively level tract of about four hundred acres that evidently had not been included in any one of the seven officers' grants. A deed made by Virginia's Governor Patrick Henry "on the eighteenth day of May in the year of our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-six and of the Commonwealth the Tenth," states that "by virtue and in consideration of a Certificate in right of Settlement given by the Commissioners for adjusting Titles to unpatented lands in the District of Monongalia, Yohagania and Ohio, and in consideration of an ancient Compensation of Two Pounds Sterling paid by Joseph Tumblestone into the treasury of the Commonwealth, there is granted by said Commonwealth unto Joseph Tumblestone a certain Tract or Parcel of Land, containing Four Hundred acres by survey bearing date the ----, lying and being in the County of Monongalia on the Ohio River opposite Letart Falls including his settlement made thereon in the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 18 year 1773 and bounded as follows, To wit…14” 14. Taken from a copy of the original deed, the copy being now (1936) in the possession of Dan P. Gist, of Letart, West Virginia, whose courtesy made this interesting item possible here. Of this settlement of 1773 nothing else is known except that it was not permanent. But the next settlement on the Virginia side has a better record. It was made in the John Polson tract, the northern half of the 12,000 acres granted to John West and John Polson. Washington on his return trip up the River had written of that bottom: "After passing this Bottom" the one taken notice of the #Oth Ulto, to lye in the shape of a horse Shoe"-namely, the Horseshoe Bottom- "and abt. a Mile of Hills… I set of the Canoe with our baggage and walkd across the Neck on Foot with Capt. Crawford, distant according to our walking abt. 8 miles as we kept a strait course under the Foot of the Hills which run abt. So. Et. and was two Hours and an half walking of it. This is a good Neck of land the soil being generally good and in places very rich. There is a large proportion of Meadow Ground and the land is high dry and Level as one coud wish… upon the whole a valuable tract might be had here.15" 15. This is the trip assumed by some Ohio historians to have been made by Washington across Letart Bottom, which is in Ohio. But, as the late C.R. Myers, State Historian and Archivist of West Virginia, pointed out, there are two good reasons for being sure that the "neck" which Washington crossed on foot on November 5, 1770, was not on the north side of the River: 1, Virginia's bounty land lay on the south side only; 2, there is no such "Neck,” or bottom, on the Ohio side at the place indicated by Washington. When in 1798 the Reverend William Graham of Richmond, Virginia, purchased John Polson's 6,000 acres of that bottom it is quite possible that he knew about Washington's estimate of it. Mr. Gra- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 19 ham’s purpose was to establish a community of his own faith in the western wilderness. With a number of other Presbyterian families he set out at once for the Ohio Country, traveling in wagons as far as Pittsburgh, thence down the River by flatboat. Upon its arrival at its destination the colony set to work building a block-house, putting up cabins near by and enclosing the whole with a log picket. To this blockade, or "station," (as such enclosures were called in Virginia) the entire community was to retire for safety after the day's work of clearing and planting was done. But no sooner did the little Graham colony begin to have a feeling of permanence with its log church and regular preaching services, than it lost its leader; near the end of the first year the Rev. William Graham was compelled to return to Richmond on business, and while there contracted pneumonia from which he did not recover. As soon as the news of his death reached to colonists at Graham Station most of them went back East. Of those who remained, a few crossed to the Ohio side and forthwith named their embryo settlement Graham Station (details farther on)16. 16. One source takes the whole colony back East. But tradition has a Presbyterian church in Virginia's Graham Bottom in the very early part of the 19th century, its members said to be a remnant of the Reverend William Graham's church. And it is beyond doubt that some of these or their descendants were first settlers of the Ohio side directly opposite Virginia's Graham Station. Mr. Graham himself had sold one hundred and fifty acres of his land to Michael Siegrist, a German immigrant from the Shenandoah Valley. Within a year of the minister's death the Graham heirs permitted the remaining 5850 acres to be sold at auction. The highest bid, $5020, was made by John Rausch (now Roush), likewise a Shenandoah German. John Roush had nine brothers, five of whom were equal sharers with John in the Graham land purchase17. Two �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 20 17. Owing to the slowness of the times the six Roush brothers did not get a clear deed to their land until 1812, as the following extract from the Court records reveals: "John Rousch vs William Graham's Heirs Etc… In the Chancery Court holden at Stanton… between John Rousch, Jacob Rousch, Henry Rousch, Daniel Rousch, Jonas Rousch plaintiffs, and William Graham's heirs and Edward Graham, administrator of the said William Graham, deceased. The Commissioners… having returned their report to this Court bearing date the third of March, 1812 whereby it appears… they have duly sold the land for the price of five thousand and twenty dollars and John Rousch, one of the plaintiffs in this cause was the purchaser thereof…” “…Witnesseth that for and in consideration of the sum of five thousand and twenty dollars to… by said John Rousch one of the ptfs. as aforesaid… who was the highest bidder at a public sale for 5850 acres of land lying in Mason County aforesaid on the Ohio River being the tract of land known by the name of Graham Station tract [italics are this writer's] and residue of the six thousand acre tract purchased by said William Graham from John Polson which was not sold by said Graham in his life time to Michael Siegrist… the said Commissioners do grant bargain and sell unto the said John Rousch the aforesaid 5250 acres residue of the 6000 acres aforesaid, which said 6000 acres is bounded as follows to wit…” From The Roush Family of America, p. 263 ff. Years before this time, three of the ten Roush brother with their own families and several other German families (probably including Michael Siegrist and family) had migrated to the Ohio Valley. Three others followed in 1798. These two colonies traveled on horseback to Pittsburgh and from there in flatboats down to their respective destinations. In those two parties were children of all ages, from babes in arms to marriageable and married sons and daughters. The mothers with babes were given the saddle horses, the rest of the party rode bareback, some of the men walking the greater part of the way carrying axes for the purpose of opening new trails occasionally. The first Roush colony had gone much farther down the Ohio than the boot-shaped bend; in fact, it had gone to the Virginia Military District, where some of the relatives of Philip Roush (who was not) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 21 one of the six Graham-land purchasers) had inherited bounty lands. Two of the second colony remained in the Graham Station tract only a short time; John, seeming to prefer town life, migrated to Point Pleasant, and Henry moved up the River and across to the Letart bottom. But within the next few years six or eight other German families joined the Roush colony, settling along the creek (the later Broad Run) that borders the Graham bottom on the north, and in the uplands that hem in the bottom. In a short time there began a marrying of Roush offspring into the Zirkel (Zerkle), Niehs (Nease), Reichart (Rickard), Wolfe, Yaegar, Siegrist and other German families, most of the new families thus founded remaining in the region. This predominance of Germans won for the section the name, Dutch Flats; and the six original Roush farms gradually were divided and subdivided and often distinguished from the Dutch Flats by the name of Roush Settlement18. 18. The families of the seven Roush brothers (three of the ten are lost to the Roush records) together with their many thousand descendants constitute one of the largest (if not the largest) families in the United States. There is scarcely a city, town, village or rural district that does not number among its inhabitants one or more of the Roush progeny. The boot-shaped bend has an especially large representation. The book, The Roush Family of America, deals with the history of the family and contains also the names of thousands of branches and branchlets, twigs and twiglets of the Roush family tree. The next settlement brought into the Virginia setting was made in the Horseshoe Bottom; but it did not come in until after the War of 1812 was over. As hereinbefore stated, that bottom was granted to Colonel Andrew Waggener, French and Indian War officer. None of the Waggeners ever occupied the land until the close of the year 1815. In December of that year, against the entreaties of relatives and friends, a Waggener colonizing party left the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 22 Waggener homestead in Berkeley County, Virginia, to take possession of the 4000-acre Waggener inheritance across the mountains. The party consisted of the original grantee's son Major Andrew Waggener, and the Major's family; Edmund Waggener and family; James Waggener and family; Archibald Williamson (an intimate friend) and family-twenty-four in all-and one hundred and fifty Negro slaves. The party traveled in covered wagons, stopping overnight at taverns along the way. The journey, which lasted three weeks, was enlivened by the slaves, who “made the forest echo and re-echo with old plantation songs19.” 19. This and nearly all subsequent material regarding the Wagggener Colony was obtained from letters appearing the "Log Cabin Reminiscences" (See SOURCE MATERIAL) and signed "Pioneer’s Granddaughter.” The letters were dictated by Mrs. Elizabeth Williamson McIntyre, daughter of Archibald Williamson. Negroes had been sent ahead with an overseer to get some dwellings ready. The colony reached the Horseshoe Bend just before Christmas, found two cabins built ”chinked and daubed"; a double cabin (two oneroom cabins about ten feet apart but under one roof) and a single, or one-room cabin. These stood on the old (latter 19th century) German Furnace site. In a very few days a second double cabin had been built just opposite Kerr's Run; and "numerous little huts, all of one pattern, most of them without without floors and windows," stood scattered among the forest trees and in open places where but recently trees had stood. The upper part of the Horseshoe Bottom was taking on the appearance of a Southern plantation; its four gentlemen planters beginning to mingle socially with planters above and below The Bend, especially below, or in the "Lower Flats." And the whole bottom, the four farms along with the densely wooded remainder, before long was known to �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 23 the whole Bend and Beyond, as WAGGENER’S BOTTOM. This, then, by way of review, is the setting of the Virginia side in the sixteenth year of the nineteenth century: a few scattered clearings in the upper part; the German settlement in and back back of the "Graham Station Tract"; the beginnings of Waggener Plantation in the Horseshoe Bottom; all the rest an unbroken wilderness. THE NORTH SIDE.-Here the setting of the drama was begun about the same time as was that of the southern side; but in viewing this setting one needs to recall that the north side of the Boot-shaped Bend was a part of The Ohio Company Purchase. The various stockholders' offers of cheap land induced many a New England householder to sell his possessions, load his family on a wagon alone with farm implements, seeds, a chest of bed clothes, a spinning wheel, dishes, and as many other things as he could get on, travel overland to Pittsburgh, exchange his wagon for a flatboat (keeping the horse and perhaps buying a cow, too) at one of the recently established boatyards, then float down to Marietta, where he stopped to buy his land at the Ohio Company's land office -if he had not already bought it back East. But if he had not started before the early 1790s he probably decided to stay at Marietta a while; for, with increased interest in the West had come also the Indian War of 1791-95, hence the emigrant was advised to remain at Campus Martius20 until travel 20. Campus Martius, with a blockhouse at each corner and private dwellings filling in its four sides gave refuge to nearly three hundred people during the Indian wars. The stockades at Fort Harmar and Belpre a short distance below Marietta also were available to refugees. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 24 would become safer. In 1795, after the Treaty of Greenville had removed the Indian menace, the Marietta refugees began to resume their journeys down the River. Now, Fate had brought to Marietta three shareholders of Ohio Company land whol happened to choose to settle in the Boot-shaped Bend at about the same time: 1, Young Hamilton Kerr (pronounced Karr), noted scout and forest ranger in the employ of the Ohio Company during the recent Indian War and before that period engaged as hunter by the garrison at Fort Harmar, had earned in one fall and winter's hunting the thousand dollars required for a full share of Ohio Company land. 2, Col. John Nigheswanger (later shortened to Niswonger), Swiss German veteran of the Battle of Point Pleasant and of the Revolution, who had migrated from Winchester, Virginia, in 1790 and whose daughter had married Hamilton Kerr at Marietta. 3, Lieutenant James Smith, Revolutionary veteran and associate of the Ohio Company, who had brought his family from Roxbury, Massachusetts to Marietta late in 1798. These three men settled at the mouth of the creek which Washington had noted as being "a little lower down than the bottom describd to lye in the shape of a Horse shoe," and which had been named Leading Creek21 by some earlier immigrants, who, 21. Each Ohio Company share (1173 acres, assigned by lot-drawing) consisted of one 640-acre section, or Mile Square Section, to which was “annexed” six smaller tracts: namely, 262 acres, 160 acres, 8 acres, 3 acres, and a 1/3 acres town lot. There fractions were located in various parts of the Purchase. It so happened that Hamilton Kerr and Col. Niswonger and Jamee Smith each drew fractions near the mouth of Leading Creek. tradition says, had been led by that creek to better locations up near its source. There are extant several traditions regarding the time and circomstances of the coming of the Kerr, Niswonger and Smith families �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 25 to Leading Creek. One of them brings the three men down to the Creek in a canoe in the autumn of 1796, keeps them there long enough to build one cabin and to locate their separate tracts of land, takes them back to Marietta; then brings them back the following spring with their families, their household effects, farming implements, food, cows, horses and so on, a11 loaded on a fleet of canoes lashed together so as to form one large raft, or boat. Another version is that Hamilton Kerr came alone to the Creek in the fall of 1796, built a cabin on his tract on the lower side of the Creek's mouth, and cleared some land; and that just before he started back to Marietta the Virginian immigrant David Thomas (who is known to have settled on the Creek's first fork some time during the late 1790s), stopped with his wife at Kerr's cabin and was given permission to spend the winter there. Unfortunately, neither of these traditions is established historically. Diligent research produced for this writer only two authentic records regarding the coming of any one of these three families to Leading Creek: 1st, that on April 15, 1797, James Smith landed with his wife and six children and a daughter-in-law about a mile above the creek and built a cabin there; 2nd, that on August 27 of that year (1797) a son was born in that cabin to Benjamin Smith and wife. Taken from Smith Family Records. Ben Smith was the oldest son of James Smith; his wife was the former Alma (found also in records as Almy and Amy) Barker, whom he had married at Marietta. The infant was named John and was distinguished in later years as being the first white child born in Meigs County Ohio. On July 20, 1798, at Gallipolis, James Smith deeded to his son Benjamin Smith the three fractional parts of his 100-acre Lot 313. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 26 That the Smith cabin was built on the 640-acre fraction and that the two families occupied the one cabin are facts fairly well established in those same family records. Hamilton Kerr left no discoverable record of the date of his coming to the Leading Creek region to reside permanently. Only two of Col. Niswonger’s seven children, Christina, nearly grown, and Susanna (Mrs. Hamilton Kerr), came to Leading Creek. As none of our sources speak of a Niswonger cabin or later residence, the inference is that the Colonel was a widower and that he and Christina lived with the Kerr family. Of special significance to the Leading Creek region's later history was the forced landing of BENSON JONES a short distance east of or up the River from the mouth of the Creek. Benson Jones had been a sea captain during the Revolutionary War and later owned a merchant vessel. When his younger brother Seth Jones migrated to the Ohio River from Massachusetts, Benson Jones sold his ship and followed his brother. But Seth Jones had stopped at Letart Bottom whereas Benson Jones wanted to go farther down the River; in fact, he had set his heart on making Cincinnati his future home. Now, Benson Jones was childless, while Seth Jones had ten children; the older brother, on the other hand, had money but the younger one had none. Wherfore. Benson Jones proposed that his nephew, PHILIP JONES accompany him and his wife to Cincinnati and remain with them as their son and heir. The father and the fifteen-year-old lad both agreed. Arrangements were made for resuming the down-River journey and the aging couple with their newly acquired son set out from Letart in a little hastily constructed flatboat. The time was early spring; the River, as often happened at that season, was "on a rampage, due to its rapid rising. The frail �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 27 craft with its three occupants was toosed about by the strong current. It had made little more than sixteen miles when Mrs. Jones became violently ill; and, feeling convinced that her end had come, she begged to be taken ashore to die. The man and boy steered the boat toward the right bank, got it safely landed, and began at once to make it over into a temporary land residence. The place where the new abode was put up chanced to be not more than half a mile or so northeast of the Smith family's residence. Mrs. Jones recovered but her husband gave up the idea of going to Cincinnati. Instead, he decided to buy the land on which his cabin stood and become a permanent resident of the region. The Jones immigration to Leading Creek is said to have taken place in the year 1803.22 22. This is the date given by Mrs. W.J. Hudson (See SOURCE MATERIAL). But Gallia County records have the name Benson Jones on a list of persons who reported the ear marks of their stock to the Township Recorder in the year 1802. Similarly recorded is a deed for the sale of fifty acres of Letart Township land, by Levi Chapman to Seth Jones on November 15, 1799. This little group of settlers (called Leading Creek Settlement in the Smith and Kerr deeds of 1798) was not increased by new immigrants to that part of the Creek for several years. Its first neighbors were not in the Boot-shaped Bend proper but six or seven miles up the Creek. In April 1799, Brewster Higley, Revolutionary veteran originally from Rutland County, Vermont, landed his family flatboat at the mouth of the Creek; but instead of debarking there the party poled up the stream as far as its third fork—being directed by John Chase (or Case?), a former member of the surveying corps that platted the Leading Creek portion of the Northwest Territory. Four years later, Joel Higley brought a company of twenty �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 28 seven to swell the number of settlers in that portion of the Bootshaped Bend's hinterland which not many years later (1819) had become populous enough to effect township organization. As Rutland Township it was a very close neighbor to the western end of the Boot-shaped Bend. In 1803 the United States Congress acknowledged its duty to the Western Movement by authorizing the Gallia County Court (whose jurisdiction at that time included the north shore of the Boot-shaped Bend)to appoint a competent person to pilot flatboats over the rapids in the Great Bend when the water was low. The following year Thomas Sayre, whose father, Daniel Sayre, recently had become a fellow farmer to Henry Roush in the Letart Bottom, was given the appointment. Thus encouraged, the tide of westward migration continued to increase in volume. Even the tree-clad, vine-covered semi-circular slope around the north shore of the Horseshoe Bend attracted a few settlers. In the year l806 one Samuel Ervin is said to have come to those forbidding Horseshoe “Narrows" to build a cabin and clear a patch of ground. Whence he came and how, whether with or without benefit of land deed, the chronicler does not state23. He says, 23. He does speak of Erivn's "improvement," suggesting thereby to this researcher that Ervin may have thought he was settling on government land which he could buy later. The site he had chosen was private property (as will be shown farther on), hence not open to squatter improvement; but there is some evidence that Ervin did own the land several years later. however, that several years earlier Samuel Ervin helped Hamilton Kerr and others to cut a path, or State "road," from French Town (Gallipolis) to Athens, a new settlement some twenty-five miles inland from the Horseshoe Narrows. This furnishes a basin for as- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 29 immagining Samuel Ervin to have come to the Narrows from the interior of the State and in the manner that other pioneers are known to have traveled overland: namely, with family and household effects and implements for felling trees and hauling logs all loaded on a sled drawn by a yoke of oxen. Whether this picture is true or not, one fact remains: that the site of the Ervin cabin was at the mouth of a ravine which from a certain point on the opposite side of the River appears to be directly under the North Star--the ravine which at some vary early date was given the name Naylor’s Run (or Nailor's Run), probably by a forest ranger. Nor was it long before a second family, the Partlows, were in the Horseshoe Narrows putting up a cabin about eighty rods above, or east of, the Ervin cabin. Soon after the Partlows came Frank Hughes and made for himself and wife an abode by arranging pawpaw poles around a tree stump and covering them with the bark of a linden, or linn, tree. This cabin, or hut, stood near the mouth of the ravine which later (or possibly earlier) was named Sugar Run because of its dense grove of "sugar" trees, or sugar maples. At least one more clearing had been made in those Horseshoe Narrows by 1815, for by that time Samuel Ervin had disposed of his first "improvement" to Nathaniel Clark and built himself a new cabin at the mouth of the ravine a short distance east of Naylor's Run. This third ravine was the scene of several interesting incidents connected with Hamilton Kerr's scouting career. Not far west of its mouth stood an immense sycamore tree eighteen feet in diameter. The trunk of the tree was hollow, it had a natural doorway and a natural opening for the smoke from a fireplace. Hamilton Kerr lived in that tree during his scouting excursions through that section of Ohio-Company land. On one of those excursions he �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 30 killed an Indian near the mouth of the creek, the last Indian ever seen in that section it is believed. Quite as a matter of course that stream and its ravine took the name of Kerr's Run. Farther up in the boot-shaped bend the Ohio Company's River-bottom land continued to draw purchasers. By 1816, in the broad Ohio bottom opposite the Graham Station Tract in Virginia, the two or three families from the abandoned Graham Station settlement were no longer the only inhabitants. In that bottom lived the Peter Lallance and the George Wolfe families, and the families of George Wolfe’s sons Jacob and Henry; the Fuller Elliot, Adam Houdescheldt and Andrew Donnally families, all on extensive clearings. In the Letart Bottom were Alexander, Chapman, Hayman, Roush, Sayre, and Harpold clearings; still farther up the River at intervals more or less long, stood log dwellings with their surrounding "patches” as evidence that on the Ohio side the breaks in the wilderness were increasing much more rapidly that they were on the Virginia side. PIONEER LIFE.-The pioneering spirit was inborn in the early American blood, its outward expressions were indomitable courage and daring-thus briefly could be explained the readiness with which the first boot-shaped bend pioneers undertook the hardships, the privations, the loneliness of the Western wilderness. Nonetheless, a glance at early-19th-century life in the settled part of our country helps to make such readiness somewhat more plausible. In the early 1800s neither cooking stoves nor friction matches had been invented, coal for domestic use was still far in the future; cotton and woolen cloth, hardware, china, tools and practic- �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend 31 other manufactured articles still had to be imported from England. Although frame or clapboard houses were the rule rather than the exception in towns and cities, log houses still were common (and in not too neighborly proximity) in the rural regions, home-made furniture and household utensils were by no means out-moded there and the United States was far more rural than urban in the early 1800s. Hence we can be sure that when the Smiths, the Kerrs and the Niswongers left Marietta for Leading Creek and the Joneses and other Eastern and Virginian first-settlers came to the Boot-shaped Bend, they expected as a matter of course to start their fires by means flint and tinder, to cook their food over the fire of an open fireplace, to light their dwellings with candles or with rags soaked in grease. Some, if not the most of them, had lived in log houses furnished with hand-made beds, tables and chairs; had worn garments of various kinds of homespun; and they expected nothing else than to continue that same manner of living. But felling trees and sawing them into logs, hewing and splitting logs for puncheons and clapboards, with no neighbors to help, was slow work; and the clearing of a patch of ground was an immediate necessity. Consequently the first abode of a Boot-shaped Bend's pioneer family, was in many instances, a hastily constructed one-room cabin with rude stone-and-mud fireplace topped, by a funnel of sticks and clay, the cabin without either door or floor. At night, on shakedowns made with the bedding brought from "the old home," with a blanket fastened at the door opening and a bright fire burning-for warmth, if the family had come in the spring or fall, and also for keeping wild night prowlers at a safe distance-the cabin's occupants slept in tolerable comfort. When punch- �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend 32 eon door and floor finally were in place, they were likely to shrink and leave cracks which, to be sure, were not conductive to comfort in cold weather. But then, even frame or plank houses in the East, with most of the heat going up the big chimney were not wholly cold-and wind-proof. Whatever other discomforts the first Boot-shaped Bend settlers experienced, only in rare instances could hunger have been one of them. Corn and turnips, because they grew quickly with little trouble and could be stored for the winter, were the first things planted. The woods were full of wild turkeys, deer, bears, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits; the Creek and the River supplied fish. Wild plums and berries in abundance could be found in their season. Maple sap in early spring made sugar as good as or better than that used in the East. Nearly every family had a cow, either brought from up the River or procured from somewhere down the River. Wheat was raised sparingly; it grew too slowly and was too hard to grind in handmill, mortar or on hominy block. Pork was scarce until after wolves and bears had become less bold and less numerous. Sheep, like hogs, were too often the prey of wolves and bears; therefore not much woolen cloth was made in the first years. Flax, for linen cloth, was raised instead. If for some reason linen was lacking, then dressed deerskin or buckskin was used for men's garments and for women's too, sometimes. Bearskins made quite comfortable bed coverings when those brought from the East had to be replaced or supplemented. When new winter head-gear or foot-gear was needed (none was worn in summer), the coonskin cap and moccasins left nothing to be desired. When something was needed that the woods or the "patch" did not �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 33 supply, a trip had to be made, in canoe or skiff, on horseback or on foot, either to Marietta or to Gallipolis. Such trips were seldom made for anything but absolute necessities. The Waggener Colony's four families, though they did not come to the boot-shaped bend until the end of the Pre-1816 period, had the same general type of household furnishings as did the Leading Creek settlers. Mrs. McIntyre (See Footnote 19) recalls the "wide one-posted bed built in one corner by inserting the ends of two saplings into holes made in two sides of the cabin and fastening the other end to a post made secure at the proper distance from the wall; clapboards laid on this stout framework and on these a bed of leaves; the children's beds (for ten children) in the loft, reached by climbing up the logs; the greased paper for glass in the cabin's one window; the huge fireplace that served as cook stove, heater and lamp; the kettle singing on the trammel supported by the iron crane; the three-legged stools, and the blocks of wood cut from the trunk of a sycamore tree and used as a table." True, there were some luxuries in the Waggener cabins; as "the old cedar chest with its store of linen… mammoth feather beds… soft, fleecy white woolen blankets with roses in the corners… bright pewter dishes… the Dutch oven that had the place of honor among the many cooking utensils"; also sacks of Wheat flour, four-pound blocks of loaf sugar, green coffee-all brought from the old home. (Some of the Ohio side's settlers had brought such luxuries, too, but in much smaller quantities. Their transportation facilities were not so amply supplemented, as were those of the Waggener Colony by the backs of their numerous slaves.) Those slaves made the Waggener Colony different in a more fundemental way than any that luxuries alone could have caused. In that �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 34 colony it was not the wife or daughter who “crouched on the hearthstone and turned the broiling venison steaks, crushed grains of coffee with pestle and mortar while the potatoes were baking in the ashes, who placed the greased board of corncake before the fire”, who made the "mess of wheaten biscuits on Sunday for an especial treat"; it was Mammy Easter in the Williamson cabin, other mammies in the three Waggener cabins. A slave set the pewter dishes and the block of loaf sugar on the table; washed the puncheon floor with a hickory _broom; carried water from the creek or the River-a slave performed every household task. In the springtime slaves cleared and plowed the fields, planted the corn and tobacco and other things that were planted; and it was slaves who, under a trained overseer, did all the work incident to the growing season and the harvest time. Few, if any, of those Pre-1816 Boot-shaped Bend settlers were really poor. Doubtless under the spell of the Zeitgeist they had migrated to the West to improve their condition howsoever good that condition may have been. Some, after their arrival, lost little time in providing better homes for their families. Two notable instances of such early ambitions were the two-story brick residences built, the one by Michael Siegrist on his Broad Run farm, probably before 1800; the other by Hamilton Kerr in 1815 or '16 on his farm below Leading Creek. All the work involved, including the making of the bricks, was done by the owners themselves, Siegrist, perhaps, aided by Negro slaves. (He is known to have owned slaves in later years.) A cash income, however, could not have been even within the dream range of any of those earlier boot-shaped bend settlers. Farm produce, their only salable commodity, was in demand nowhere �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 35 outside of their own homes. Cincinnati in 1796 was a small village of log cabins and plank houses, its population about five hundred. Gallipolis, though it was the county seat24, was little more than a 24. Gallia County (including Meigs) was formed in 1803 from Washington County. The latter at the time of its organization (1798) embraced more than half of what later became the state of Ohio. hamlet and Point Pleasant was a little less. If perchance those Bootshaped Bend immigrants did not know before they came West that far-away St. Louis and New Orleans would be their nearest markets for farm produce, they learned that fact soon afterwards no doubt. And yet, cash was an absolute necessity at times: when the land payments were due and when the tax-gatherer came around. At such times the settler was often at his wits' end for money. Occasionally one would load a flatboat with farm products and would go himself or would send his sons with it to New Orleans. Such a voyage was long and hazardous; returning by flatboat was impossible, walking overland required passing through Indian territory infested with white bandits. After the Kanawha salt works were started (about 1808; see farther on) many young men went there to tend kettles, chop wood, etc., for which labor they were paid cash. Then there was always the River for the strong and stalwart-only such were employed for flatboating, but it was one of the very few services that were paid in cash. Though the land itself produced a fair living, some enterprising settlers increased the family income by methods outside of farming. One such method was grinding grist and sawing timber for the neighborhood. Crushing corn between two flat stones or on a hand-made grater or with a borrowed handmill (if one happened to be owned by a “neighbor”) was a real task, and we can be quite sure �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 36 that the grist-mill put up by Samuel Denny a few miles up Leading Creek in 1803 and the saw- and grist-mill built by James Phelps and Brewster Higley in 1806 were both well patronized by Leading Creek settlers. These were both water mills. Services were paid the owners in meal and wood. Another side-line pursued in a few instances was tavern keeping, the patrons of the taverns being mainly men who carried on trade up and down the Ohio in pirogues laden with flour, salt, groceries, bullets, fish hooks, etc., which they exchanged for furs, skins, ginseng, snake root and other medicinal herbs. At least two such "houses of entertainment" were in the Boot-shaped Bend before 1816, one belonging to James Phelps on Leading Creek And the Thomas Redding (or Ridding) inn near Graham Station settlement. This latter tavern was kept in Redding's double cabin, which had a spacious attic, or loft. When more than one boat crew came at the same time-a frequent happening-beds were made on the floors. Wash bowls and pitchers and mirrors were things unknown to those taverns. Hunting and root-digging were the sidelines followed by all settlers who wished to buy occasionally from those river traders. Most of the actual work, however, was done by the boys of the family, if any. EDUCATION.-A free school system was unheard-of in the Boot-shaped Bend's pre-1816 period. The State of Ohio had inherited from the Northwest Territory (by virtue of a provision of the Land Ordinance of 1785) a school endowment of 704,000 acres of land; but nothing had been done to make the land available for school purposes, while school taxes were non-existent. The State �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 37 of Virginia had no land endowment nor had it ever dreamed of a school tax. Nonetheless those first Boot-shaped Bend settlers did have opportunities to give their children the rudiments of an education. In 1802 Samuel Denny (or Dana?), Harvard student before coming West, helped, first, to build a log school house near the Higley settlement, then opened a school therein. Four of his nine "scholars" came from the mouth of the Creek: James and John Smith, Christina Niswonger, Sarah Kerr. The girls boarded with the Brewster Higley family, the boys boarded themselves at the school house. In 1812 a hewed-log school house was built in the Ministerial Section25. 25. The six-mile-square townships into which the Ohio Company's Purchase was divided were each subdivided into one-mile-square sections. Section 29 of each township was reserved for religious institutions-that is, for the support of a settled minister. James Gaston opened the school with twenty-five scholars; they were: John, Martha and Sophie Kerr; John, James, Benjamin, Mary and Elizabeth, children of Ben Smith; Philip Jones’s daughters Polly and Patty; Three of Archibald Murray’s children; four of George Russell’s, two of Joel Smith’s; also two Hysells and two Stowes. Both of these schools were, of course, private, or “pay” schools. A one-scholar school, also, was conducted in the Hamilton Kerr home. Former Scout Kerr was one of the very many pioneers whose land deeds had to be signed with an X followed by the words, "his mark.” After coming to Leading Creek Mr. Kerr, it seems, decided to get the rudiments of an education from his wife (see above), who could read and write both English and German. It is to be inferred that the instruction in this school was confined to English. FIRST PERMANENT CHURCH ORGANIZATION.-Nothing definite was �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 38 found regarding schools in the Roush Settlement, It is assumed, however that some elementary school work was involved in the founding of that settlement's church. Since the seven Roush brothers and their families were all members of the Lutheran church, the German Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania in 1806 sent the Reverend Paul Henckel as traveling missionary to the Ohio River. The Rev. Henckle made his headquarters at the home of "an old friend, John Roush and wife,” then living at Point Pleasant. From that Point the missionary first visited the Roush families living "nine miles above, in Gallia County, Ohio." Then he made several trips to the Rousch colony, "a distance of ten miles across country,” on the Virginia side. There he held several days' almost continuous services in the barn of Daniel Roush, preaching to the older Germans of the community and giving religious instruction to the younger members of the families. A Lutheran organization was effected, which was the first permanent church organization in not only the Boot-shaped Bend but in the entire region west of the Alleghenies. After the missionary's departure regular meetings were continued in the barn or in private homes until a church building was acquired. (See THINGS OF THE MIND AND THE SOUL, farther on)26. 26. The book, THE ROUSH FAMILY OF AMERICA, gives much interesting detail concerning the Reverned Henckel's work among the Roush and other German families settled farther down the River. ITINERANT PREACHING.- The Methodist church appears to have been the first to send itinerant preachers to the Boot-shaped Bend, the home of Daniel Rathburn, six or eight miles up the Creek, being at the regular meeting place for their appointments. About 1807 or '08, however, the Reverend Eli Stedman, a Free Will Baptist originally from Vermont, began including services in the Denny school �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 39 house in his itinerancy work throughout the county. It is not at all unreasonable to assume that the settlers around the mouth of the Creek attended those meetings. For those settlers farther up in the 'Bootshaped Bend-those at Wolfe's bottom and at Letart bottom-again it is reasonably certain that there were appointments in private homes or barns. They were all deeply religious, those early boot-shaped bend settlers. MARRIAGES.-Marrying and giving in marriage met few if any obstacles in the pre-1816 life of the "Boot-shaped Bend. By 1805 a new Jones family had been founded by the marriage of Philip Jones and Mary Higley, daughter of Joel Higley of Rutland; two new Smith families by James Smith's sons James and John; and doubtless several others. The new names on John Gaston's school enrollment implies that the population around and up the mouth of the Creek was rapidly growing. The Kerr-Niswonger and Jones-Higley marriages were instances of the "marvelous race mixture" to which Dr. Hulbert attributes so much of the advancement of the Ohio Valley-German and Scotch in the first instance, Welsh and English in the second. Then there was the French-German mixture in the marriage of Peter La Launce and Katherina (Catherine) Roush, third child of Jacob Roush. This latter marriage had a romantic side a record of which has been preserved by a descendant27. Peter La Launce had come with 27. Mrs. John Rush Philson, stepgranddaugher of Peter La Launce and Katherina Roush contributed the record of this marriage to the compilers of Larkins' History of Meigs County. his widowed mother and a sister to Marietta from France. During the Indian wars of 1791-95 they had lived in one of the Campus �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 40 Martius blockhouses, where Peter's sister married Robert Warth. Two of Warth's brothers transported United States mail from Marietta to Gallipolis in canoes (See Footnote). When Peter was old enough he quite frequently accompanied the Warths on their voyage to French Town. Now, the brothers were in the habit of stopping over night each trip at the home of Jacob Roush, then living in Graham Bottom, Virginia. Jacob Roush had slaves; he also had a pretty daughter, who forthwith captivated the heart of young La Launce. But Peter, being French, didn't presume to propose to Katherina Rousch until he had talked with his Mother at Marietta. His argument, "She is pretty," seemed to have satisfied Mother La Launce for she responded at once: "Bring her here; I can teach her." (What the girl was to be taught our source does not state). Peter then asked Jacob Rousch's permission to woo his daughter. "If she is villing," said Vater Rousch. Evidently she was, for very soon afterward Fraulein Rousch, accompanied by a trusty slave arrived at Marietta on a "mail boat." When the necessary teaching was accomplished Katherina Rousch was married to Peter La Launce at her father's home; and thus the five German-French children born to Peter La Launce and wife at their farm near Graham Station (Ohio) were the first of one-German-French line of the Roush progeny. Not even the inability to converse with each other hindered the marriage of Henry Roush, Junior, of Letart Bottom, and Anna Sayre, of Wright's Mills, Virginia. The groom could speak hardly a word of English, the bride knew even less of German. Just how the woo-ing was accomplished is not recorded. But the marriage turned out to be a happy one, and from the standpoint of propagation of mixed nationalities was a decided success; ten sons and two daughters �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 41 were given by Henry Roush, Jr., and wife to the population of Letart Bottom. Wedding ceremonies were performed either by a minister or by a justice of the peace. At the wedding of James Smith and Sallie Hubbell, which took place in Rutland at the bride's home (date not given in our source), Col. Niswonger officiated in his capacity of Justice of the Peace of Salisbury Township. Most weddings were occasions for bountiful suppers dancing (unless the families had religious scruples regarding dancing) and all manner of rural hilarity. At the wedding of John Siegrist and Elizabeth Frey (Fry), which took place at the bride's home in Roush Settlement, while the young folks for miles around were seated at the table one young man crept, under the table and stole the bride’s slipper, then sold it auction. The groom had to redeem the slipper at a high price, thereby furnishing the "treat money” for the boys. The next day the whole party rode horseback to the "infair" at the home of the groom's parents in Siegrist Bottom. When within a mile or two from the house part of the company started to race for the "laurals" waiting at the Siegrist home. What the laurels were in this particular case our source did not state. Usually the prize was a bottle, which was to be carried back to the rest of the party and offered first to the bride and groom. Generally both bride and groom had to wear wedding clothes made of home-spun. But not in all cases. When John Stowe came to the Creek in about 1803 he brought several bolts of broad cloth to exchange for clearing work. Philip Jones bought some of the cloth for his wedding suit. Many other grooms did likewise gladly. SOCIAL GATHERINGS.-These usually proceeded from matters of necessity. Neighbors were invited to the log-rolling when a new �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 42 cabin was to be built, and to the "raising" when the structure's height was beyond the reach of hand-lifting. Quiltings, corn huskings, the "stirring off" at sugar camps in early spring-all were occasions for merry-making after the day's work was over, the guests remaining a large part of the night. Boys had "lots of fun" hunting the hogs that ran wild in the woods until needed. The Fourth of July was duly celebrated by the Boot-shaped Bend settlers, especially by the New Englanders on Leading Creek. One celebration that has left a fairly good record of itself is that of the year 1805.28 That was just thirty years after Concord and 28. This record is a letter from Brewster Ripley, Jr., to "Log Cabin Reminiscences," published in the Pomeroy Leader in 1897-99 (See SOURCE MATERIAL). Lexington and Bunker Hill, events which were “fraught with many sacred memories" for some of the settlers. The celebration took place in a grove near the Rutland settlement. The underbrush had been cleared away, seats had been put in place; the families from all along the Creek came with well-filled baskets of bear meat, venison, wild turkey, fish, honey, and other native foods. The orator of the day was Samuel Denny, who was fully capable of stirring to its depths the patriotism of his listeners, among whom most certainly were (though the letter does not so state) Brewster Higley, Sr., Major Joel Higley, Col. Niswonger, Lieut. James Smith and whatever other Revolutionary soldiers were living on Leading Creek and vicinity. Likewise at Roush settlement up the River on the Virginia side, though no actual records were found, we can be sure that George, Jonas and Daniel Roush, each of whom is known to have been a Revolutionary soldier, led their families and kindred in some kind of �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 43 Independence Day celebration every year29. 29. Pension lists and various other legal documents establish the fact that seven of the ten Roush brothers fought in the Revolution. As to the three remaining, there are indisputable traditions regarding their service, also, in the War for American Independence. (See THE ROUSH FAMILY IN AMERICA for further details). COMMUNICATION WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD.-Whatever fireside entertainment those pre-1816 Boot-shaped Bend settlers may have had, it did not often include the reading of letters from the old home or of the home-town newspaper. Their nearest post office during that period was at Athens, Ohio, twenty to forty miles inland-depending on the settler's location in the "Bend or Point Pleasant, Virginia, sixteen miles down the River from the Bend's western extremity. Inasmuch as letters and newspapers had been far from daily visitors even in the old home, they were not missed as much, perhaps, as one at this distant date might be inclined to think30. 30. The Warth brothers’ mail service between Gallipolis and Marietta, as indicated above was a section of the Government Service established in 1794 between the armies on the frontier and the seat of Government. The Gallipolis-Marietta section was a part of the Ohio River route, which connected Limestone, Kentucky, with the East at Wheeling.Hildreth's Early Settlers of Ohio, p.112 And yet, news of all notable happenings in the East did in time and by one means or other reach the Bend. One means was the numerous flatboats passing down the River from Pittsburgh, the flatboatmen shouting the news to anyone they happened to see within earshot. But when the War of 1812 opened, the information came more directly. General Tupper, of Marietta, had been sent down the River to organize a company of Western volunteers at Gallipolis, county seat of Gallia county, of which the Boot-shaped Bend's north shore was still a part. John Bailey, Robert Bailey, and Samuel Ervin soon �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 44 thereafter met in the cabin of Ervin in the horseshoe Narrows and the three men decided to offer their services to General Tupper. They were among the first volunteers in the West. Philip Jones, also, volunteered and in a manner that was as premeditated as it was patriotic. While he was out hunting one day with a neighbor the two men met a squad of recruiters who told them of Hull's surrender at Detroit. Whereupon Jones handed his string of squirrels to his companion, hastily asking him to tell his (Jones's) wife to keep plenty of wood in the house to keep the fire burning so exclaiming, that wolves couldn't get in, exclaiming "I'm going to help thrash the British; I'll be darned if I can stay here and hear that kind of news and not pitch in and fight!"31 31. Taken from "Personal Recollections,” a paper, prepared by Mrs. Will J. Hudson (See Footnote above.) Over on the Virginia side at Roush Settlement the news of the war with England moved Abraham Roush (son of Jonas Roush) to go to Point Pleasant, four days after his marriage, to enlist in Capt. A. Van Sickle's company of Virginia volunteers. He was accompanied by his cousins Daniel and Lewis (sons of George Roush) and Michael Rickard. MORTALITY.-Though the boot-shaped bend's pre-1816 life was not without its joys, neither was it without sorrows. Cold, damp sleeping quarters, heavy greasy food, exposure, lack of proper care of the bodythese things may have helped to produce the rugged constitutions and the longevity so characteristic of the times but there's no denying the fact that they often caused sickness and that the sickness frequently proved fatal. Doctors, who had to be brought from one of the far-away towns, were usually not sum- �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 45 moned until the various "home remedies" failed to cure. It should not be surprising, therefore, that funerals, especially children's funerals, were by no means uncommon in that early period. On such occasions a discourse was an absolute necessity though a minister had to come miles to make it and never dreamed of expecting pay for it. The family conveyance, whether it was an ox cart or one-horse or twohorse wagon (if the family had neither then a kind neighbor, several miles distant, loaned his) transported the home-made coffin to the grave that had been hollowed out by neighborly hands. The larger land owners had their own burying grounds others laid their dead away in plots of ground not privately owned or sometimes in whatever private burying plot happened to be near. Grave markers were of necessity homemade, often merely of wood. Those who wished something more lasting at the graves of loved ones made markers of slabs of stone. With a flint and abundant patience they succeeded in getting at least the name and date out into the stone. Mrs. Hudson tells us that her greatgrandfather Seth Jones spent months carving "Sarah Pitt Jones, 1810," and hewing a rough edge on the headstone for his wife's grave32. 32. Mrs. Jones was buried in what is now (1936) the beautiful little cemetary just above the village of Letart Falls, Ohio. The inscription on the marker at her grave is still quite legible. In that same cemetary are graves with headstones of much earlier date; but the names accompanying them are so nearly obliterated that they cannont be read. THE RIVER.-In the lives of the boot-shaped bend's first settlers the Ohio River was a most significant factor. The River had brought them to their new Western home; it continued to bring others to their own locality, to carry ever-increasing numbers to localities still farther westward. Flatboats of all descriptions, �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 46 from the mere raft with a shed for the emigrant's cattle and a small cabin for his family, to the strongly bulwarked and wholly roofed craft with comfortable and well-furnished cabin, passed through the bend daily, ofttimes hourly, in the spring and fall. Of this vast westward moving tide the Boot-shaped Bend settlers could scarcely have helped feeling themselves a part. They welcomed the weird notes of the flatboatman's horn as from time to time he announced his presence on the River, whether he was propelling his own family or was in the employ of another migrating family; or possibly conveying a trading flatbot on its annual trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans with products from the Monongahela Country," such as "pork, beef, beans, whiskey, cyder, peach brandy, iron, glass, etc." Besides the flatboat-often called broadhorn or Kentucky boat-many other kinds of boats were observed by the boot-shaped bend settlers: canoes, pirogues, dug-outs, arks, skiffs, rafts; for, while the "flat" was the preferred craft for down-stream traveling, every available conveyance that would float could be seen at one time or another bearing human beings or freight, or both, westward. Occasionally, too, one of the up-stream craft, the long, narrow and shallow keel-boat with pointed prow and stern, was watched with especial interest by bend dwellers as it worked its way laboriously along the shore. The cry of the steersman, or captain, could be heard commanding the crew on the running boards along the side of the boat, now to "Lift!" and, after a short interval, to "Set!" the long sharply shod poles with which they literally pushed the boat forward as they slowly advanced from prow to stern. Perhaps the boat was carrying in the enclosed space between �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 47 the running-boards twenty-five or thirty tons of salt which the crew was conveying from Kanawha Salines to Marietta or Pittsburgh. Or the up-going craft might have been one of the twenty or more larger covered boats, known as barges, that plied the River, These descended the Ohio and the Mississippi as far as New Orleans with the usual manufactured products and returned with coffee and sugar and molasses. To bring these heavy boats up-stream every power then known was employed at one time or another on the voyage: oars, sail's, poles, tow-line. If the boat was passing through the Bend, say in August, it had left New Orleans probably on the first of March or even early in February, so great was the speed made by that kind of boat! About twice a month the earliest dweller in the Boot-shaped Bend could see a galley-boat (a keel-boat with covered deck) carrying passengers and mail between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. Such bi-monthly service was established as early as 1793 by Jacob Myers, who announced his new venture in "The Sentinal of the Northest Territory, proclaiming that he had been influenced by love of philanthropy and desire to be of service to the public," and assured said public "No danger need be apprehended from the (Indian) enemy, as every person on board will be under cover, made proof against rifle or musquet balls, and port holes for firing out of. Each boat is armed with six pieces carrying a pound ball; also a good number of musquets, and amply supplied with ammunition, strongly manned with choice hands, and the masters of approved knowledge." Mr. Myers' solicitation for the comfort and convenience of his passengers was equal to that for their safety, for he announced further that "Passengers are supplied with provisions and liquors of first quality, at the most reasonable rates �Possible… Persons may work their passage. An office for insuring at moderate rates the property carried will be kept at moderate rates at Cincinnati, Limestone, and at Pittsburgh." Those first settlers, and they alone, had the opportunity to witness the unusual spectacle of ocean-rigged vessels sailing down the Ohio River. Probably the first of such craft to weigh anchor on the River was the brig St. Clair, which was built at Marietta… With a cargo of flour and pork the vessel cleared Marietta for havanna in May, 1800; and in the following August sailed from the Cuban capital with a cargo of sugar for Philadelphia. Boatyards at Pittsburgh and other Ohio River points began at once to build ships instead of flatboats. By 1808 nineteen ships had been completed. But by that time it was becoming evident that the Ohio, with its floods and variable winds and sand-bars and snags, was not quite favorable to the deep-bottomed ocean-going vessel; and so, for these reasons and for others, few, if any, ships were built on the Ohio after that year. A NEW ERA.-In the fall of the year 1809 an unusually fine flatboat, or barge, passed through the Boot-shaped 'Bend on a journey from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. If any of the Bend's inhabitants saw the boat they must have been awed not a little by its elegant appearance. How thrilled they were, too, if by chance they learned that it had on board a couple of newly-weds! The groom was NICHOLAS J. ROOSEVELT, noted civil engineer, great uncle of Theodore Roosevelt and distant cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sent down the Ohio River by Robert Fulton and Ex-Chancellor Robert Livingston to ascertain whether the western waterway was navigable for steamboats, Mr. Roosevelt decided to make the trip a wedding- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 49 tour as well. Of the boat and trip Mrs. Roosevelt wrote later to her brother, J.H.B. Latrobe, as follows:"…The journey in the flatboat began at Pittsburgh, where Mr. Roosevelt had it [the boat] built-a huge box containing a comfortable bedroom, dining room, pantry, and a room in front for the crew, with a fireplace, where the cooking was done. The top of the boat was flat, with seats and awning. We had on board a pilot, three hands and a man cook. We always stopped at night, lashing the boat to the shore. The rowboat was a large one, in which Mr. Roosevelt went constantly with two or three of the men to ascertain the rapidity of the current and the ripples. It was in this rowboat that we went from Natchez to New Orleans with the same crew… We reached New Orleans about the first of December, 1809, and took passage for New York in the first vessel we found ready to sail. We had a terrible voyage of a month with a sick captain. The yellow fever was on board. A passenger died with it. Mr. Roosevelt and myself were taken off the ship by a pilot boat and landed at Old Point Comfort. From thence we went to New York by stage, reaching there the middle of January, 1810, after an absence of nine months33. 33. Taken from "The First Steamboat on Western Waters,” by J.H.B. Latrobe (brother of Mrs. Nicholas Roosevelt), published at Baltimore October, 1871. Most women would have added, "Never again!" But not Mrs. Nicholas Roosevelt. Two years afterward, in spite of the pleadings of her friends and the criticisms of Mr. Roosevelt for endangering his wife's life, she started with her husband on a second trip over the same route but in an entirely new kind of craft. This time the Roosevelt boat had masts and a deep hull like that of a ship; but on each side in plain sight was a large paddle wheel34. And on �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 50 34. "The sidewheel boat is Nicholas Roosevelt's invention, as can be shown by letters of Chancellor Livingston to Roosevelt,”-so wrote someone in the Sept. 11, 1895 issue of The Meigs County Telegraph in answer to a question as to whether the first steamboat on the Ohio River was a side-wheel or stern-wheel boat. The letters were not available for this work. top there was a tall cylindrical object out of which rose thick curling smoke. As the strange-looking, sky-blue vessel with its queer chugging sound-"so loud it could be heard five miles in the country"-hove into sight from around each turn in the Boot-shaped Bend, what must have been the amazement, the consternation, of the residents who happened to see it! No newspaper had reached them to tell them that the steamboat Orleans35, built at Pittsburgh 35. "The steamboat, “Orleans,” arrived here Wednesday last…" said the Cincinnati Gazette in its issue of December 11, 1811. Two early sources consulted: The West: Commerce and Navigation (1848) and Lloyd’s Steamboat Directory (1855), each in quoting writers of the 1820s speak of the boat as the Orleans. It seems, therefore, that our present day historians either are in error regarding the name of the first steamboat on the Ohio or the boat was renamed New Orleans at a later date. recently was to begin her experimental voyage down the Ohio on September 27, 1811. No record of their impressions, except the above quotation in regard to the loudness of the chugging, has been left us. If there were any they would doubtless read somewhat similar to the ones preserved from other places. At Point Pleasant, for instance, where to boat stopped to beg the keeper of "Travelers' Rest Inn" for a supply of cord wood, one of the town's hundred inhabitants, all of whom were gathered on the shore, was sure the craft was an invention of the Devil; another thought such a daring attempt to chain Nature's forces could end in nothing less than disaster to both crew and owners. While the Orleans was stopping at Cincinnati a babe was born �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 51 to Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Roosevelt. A short distance below Louisville all on board experienced a few moments of anxiety from a light earthquake. The Orleans reached the Crescent City just fourteen days after she left Pittsburgh. An astounding speed for those days! But that was a down-stream voyage. A careful search for the name of the first steamboat to pass UP through the Boot-shaped Bend revealed a surprising fact: that before the year 1817 only one of the four steamboats built since 1811 had come up-stream from New Orleans and that one (the Enterprise) only as far as Louisville. Their deep hulls and the heavy machinery in their holds made it impossible for those first steamboats to travel against the strong currents of the Mississippi and the Lower Ohio. Hence they remained in the New OrleansNatchez region, where the deep, almost currentless water made plying down-stream and up-stream possible. It seems, then, that a certain writer was right when he stated in the Western Monthly Magazine that "As late as 1816 the practibility of navigating the Ohio with steamboats was extremely doubtful." On the other hand, the, one who watched one of those four steamboats trying to ascend a ripple was wrong in concluding that "As far as steam navigation is concerned the Ohio must wait for some more happy century of inventions." For, during the autumn of that very year of 1816 the steamboat that was destined to solve the problem of western-river navigation passed through the boot-shaped bend on her way to New Orleans, the Mecca of steamboats from the first. That boat was the George Washington, built at Wheeling, Virginia, by Henry Shreve, experienced captain and owner of barges, flatboats and keelboats. Captain Shreve's new boat was a striking departure from her predecessors. She had neither sails nor masts for use in an emergency; she had �A.F. Lederer, Pomeroy Bend, 52 two smoke-stacks instead of one and she had two decks. Furthermore, she had a rather flat, shallow hull which seemed to be meant for running ON the water instead of IN it; and-most startling feature of all, perhapsher engine, an exceedingly light one-was not in the hold of the vessel, it was on the deck! (See Eskew's Pageant of the Packets, page 47.) In short, the George Washington was the materialized product of Captain Shreve's dream of a boat that would run against the current as well as it would run with the current. The proof of that materialized dream was to be in the return trip from the Crescent City. Unfortunately, upon their arrival at the New Orleans levee materialized dream and dreamer thereof were both seized by local authorities on the charge of navigating the Lower Mississippi with steam craft, a right claimed by the successors of Robert Livingston to belong exclusively to themselves. By March, 1817, however, Captain Shreve's determined stand for free trade had cleared up matters sufficiently to permit the George Washington and her owner to start on the decisive up-stream voyage. That voyage demonstrated the correctness of Shreve's theory of western-river steamboat building, thereby settling once and for all the question of the steamboat's usefulness as a mode of river navigation. Thereupon steamboat building began with a vengeance. Boatyards sprang up at Pittsburgh. Cincinnati, New Orleans-to say nothing of various other points on the Upper Ohio. By 1820 not fewer than forty boats, some built on the George Washington plan, some seeming to be a cross between the new and the old idea, had gone through the Bootshaped Bend on their way to New Orleans, which still remained the drawing card for all river traffic. The coming of the George Washington in the year 1816 was as the dawn of a NEW ERA to the Ohio River. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 53 (ACT ONE) (Aprox. 1816-1851) A KING COMES ON THE CALL FROM UNDERGROUND At the very time that the Orleans and the George Washington were ushering in the Steamboat Era on the Ohio River, another force was at work which was soon to bring to the Boot-shaped-Bend an era of its own. The new force was the Rising Demand for Coal; The Bend's new era was to be THE KING COAL ERA. It is claimed by one source that as early as 1805 or ‘06 one Timothy Smith opened a coal bank (as coal mines were called then) in the western end of the boot-shaped bend and very soon was sending large numbers of flatboats loaded with coal to the little mill and factories and foundries at Louisville, Cincinnati, and Limestone (now Maysville, Ky.). Another source, namely, Howe’s Historical Collections of Ohio, states that in 1805 or '06 two men, Hoover and Cashell-their first names were not given-opened a coal bank in the western part of the Horseshoe Narrows but that they abandoned the undertaking after exporting one small load of coal; they had found the business unprofitable. While it is true that Timothy Smith did at one time carry on a rather extensive coal business at the above-named place, it was at a much later time than the one given by our source. For the truth is that in those down-River towns the demand for coal was almost negligible until about the year 1815. Though their industries had increased greatly in number even before that year, their owners �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 54 were slow in learning the value of the new fuel used by Eastern manufacturers; the forests were still too easily accessible for those Western industrialists. But with the close of the War of 1812 came an industrial awakening and with it a realization by western manufacturers of the advantages of the new fuel over wood. Cincinnati, Louisville, Maysville-all began to call for coal. Pittsburgh flatboat owners began occasionally to risk the dangers of the Upper Ohio to heavily loaded flatboats by sending coal to those western cities. Under such circumstances it is not surprising that the rich coal deposits in "them thar hills" around the two sides of the Horseshoe Bend clammored, as it were, for release-clammored so loudly that their call was heard on the East coast. It is a well established fact that the first response to that call came from the north side of the Horseshoe Bend; in other words, from the Horseshoe Narrows. But who it was that first responded is another unanswered question. Henry Howe says that one David Bradshaw opened the first coal bank there in 1819, and that one Bentley exported the first coal (date not given). Concerning those two men not another fact could be learned. But concerning several other men who came to these narrows about that time, a number of facts were discovered. These facts follow: In the spring of 1817 SAMUEL GRANT, with his wife and eight children, his father and mother, two brothers and their families, a brother-in-law and his family-the whole colony numbering twenty-fiveleft Maine for the West in two two-horse wagons. By the time the party reached Wellsburg, Virginia, (the men, and also twelve-year-old Royal Grant having walked much of the distance), horses and wagons were worn out; and so the men built a flatboat for the �A.F. Lederer. POMEROY BEND, 55 completing of the journey. Eleven weeks after leaving Maine the Grant Colony landed below Leading Creek and took temporary shelter in an old blacksmith shop without floor or windows. Here the party divided. Samuel Grant took his family to Rutland, later to Chester; JOHN KNIGHT, the brother-in-law, moved his family to the Joel Smith farm just above the mouth of the Creek; the next year he moved to the Ben Smith farm; by 1820 he had his family domiciled in the Ervin cabin at the mouth of Nailor's Run and he himself had opened a coal bank up in the Run. Two or three years later he rented a tract of coal land in the southwest quarter of Section 8, Township 2, Range 13 (See Map). Meigs County records show that by 1826 John Knight owned thirty-three acres of Lot 303, below Sugar Run. From each of these three localitiesNailor's Run, Section 8 and Lot 303-this roving pioneer shipped coal down the Ohio. From this fact researchers have drawn the conclusion that John Knight was the Horseshoe Bend's first coal exporter1. 1. The above information on the Grant Migration was obtained partly from Samuel Grant's obituary in the March 28, 1868 Meigs County Telegraph, partly from J.M. Evans's history of Meigs county in Hardesty (See SOURCE MATERIAL); that on the various land purchases came from the aforesaid Deed Books. In the year 1818 RANDALL STIVERS (See further details below) bought six hundred acres of the southeast corner of the aforesaid Section 8, opened a coal bank; but three years later sold his land to MAJOR JOSIAH DILL of Marietta, who started a tavern at the mouth Kerr's Run, the first tavern in The Narrows. On July 25, 1825, Samuel Grant, having moved in from Chester in '22 and built a cabin in the southwest corner of Section 8, entered eighty acres there and opened a coal bank. Within the next few years QUARTUS BRIDGEMAN was operating a bank up in a small creek east of Kerr's Run. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 56 Heyden Brothers had one up in the next creek on Nahum Ward's land; and William Carleton was taking coal out of the ravine still farther up in the horseshoe narrows. Meanwhile, those Horseshoe Narrows had become specifically THE NARROWS. Meanwhile, too, another Marietta man, COL. NIAL NYE, had bought of Major Dill on July 1, 1826, the high ground on the west of the mouth of Kerr's Run (including the Dill tavern) and in a few weeks the general merchandise store of Nial Nye & Sons occupied the site of the second Ervin cabin; the same company's saw- and grist-mill began operations on the River bank; Nye's Landing was taking care of all goods shipped by steamboat to Chester, the new inland town2; and finally, in 1827, 2. Chester was a small settlement around Levi Stedman's saw- and grist-mill (Stedman's Mills) on Shade river, about halfway between the two extremities of the boot-shaped bend. In the year 1819, as the result of long and intense lobbying at Columbus-James E. Phelps prominent Leading Creek farmer, being arch lobbyist-a new Ohio county, Meigs County, came into being, the peninsula ·formed by the River's boot-shaped bend constituting about a third of said new county. Creating the county involved the founding of a county seat of justice by a State-appointed Commission. Benjamin Smith offered the Commission twenty acres of 100-acre Lot No. 313 for the prospective new county capital. The offer was accepted and Ely Sigler was appointed to buy the land and lay out the new town. Sigler had the deed duly drawn up, signed by Ben Smith and wife "Almy Smith, her mark, X,” acknowledged before James E. Phelps (one of the associate judges), and recorded on July 2, 1821, by Recorder R.C. Barton. (See Meigs County Records, Vol. 1, pp. 200-202). But when Ely Sigler asked permission to sell lots in the town he had laid out the Court refused it; and in April, 1822, the Commission made Chester the county seat! Our sources do not definitely state the cause of this startling change of location, but some of the "happenings" of that 1819-22 period are suggestive: 1st , when several vacancies occurred in the County Court, each was promptly filled by a man from the eastern part of the county; 2nd, when the temporary court house at Leading Creek (the log school house) burned down early in 1821, a special Legislative Act decreed, Jan. 21, 1821, that "until there be erected a suitable court house in the county of Meigs or otherwise provided for at the seat of justice of said county the courts of said county shall be holden at the house of Levi Stedman in the 3d Township of the 12th Range of said county." On, Jan. 21, 1822 the Legislature appointed a new Commission, this commission meeting also at Stedman's house when in the following April it made Chester the county seat. Levi Stedman gave thirty acres of new land to the new capital. -Deed Books, Meigs County Recorder’s Office; also James M. Evans’s “Meigs County” in Hardesty �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 57 to the colonel's other responsibilities-those of miller, wharf-master, storekeeper, innkeeper, commission merchant, colonel of militia-were added the duties of postmaster of the new post office, Nyesville, established in the Nye store room on February 19th of that year. On August 3d of the same year the plat of a new town was recorded in the court house at Chester, the plat being "a true copy of a survey" made by the county surveyor for Major Josiah Dill. The name of the new town was to be Dillsburgh, the town itself was located on that part of the Dill tract lying west of the Nye store and dwelling. Nineteen lots had been laid off and were awaiting purchasers. In the year 1829 Samuel Grant with his son: Oliver Grant, Randall Stivers, Benjamin Knight, Nial Nye, and Stephen Root organized the UNION STEAM MILL COMPANY. Then he sold to the company the southwest corner 'of the southwest quarter of Section 8-which was part of his eighty acres. The Company procured from a Graham Station farmer the framework of a treadmill; bought at Maysville, Ky., "an old-fashioned engine with upright cylinder and walking beam," and hired an engineer there. When engine and engineer arrived the mill was set up in a log building on the recently purchased lot. Samuel Grant, who had learned milling in Maine, took charge of operations at this the FIRST STEAM MILL in the boot-shaped bend. It was both saw- and grist-mill. In April, 1832, Samuel Grant caused to be placed on the county records the plat of Grantsburgh3, which covered three acres of his eighty-acre tract of land. 3. Copies of the Dillsburgh and Grantsburgh plats can be found in Deed Book 5, Meigs County Recorder's office. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 58 Industrialism, it will be seen, had secured a foothold in the Horseshoe Bend by 1830. But let the reader not try to visualize those "towns" in The Narrows by calling to mind some thriving modern mining town. Such a comparison would be wholly misleading. First, it must be recalled that there were by 1830 only twelve families living above and below the mouth of Kerr's Run: at Nyesville, Dillsburgh, Grantsburgh. None of those early exporters had either the knowledge or the facilities for real mining or transportation. With picks or crowbars they, with their sons, if any, dug a few hundred bushels of coal out of the hillside, hauled it in wheelbarrows or with oxen from the bank, dumped it into chutes that carried it to the water's edge. There they shoveled it onto log rafts equipped with wild grape-vines for check lines, floated it to Cincinnati or to Louisville, where they sold the coal for six or seven cents a bushel (cash or merchandise) and the raft for whatever it would bring. Then they either footed it back home or waited for a passing keelboat. By 1830, however, coalboats were taking the place of rafts, men were employed to dig coal and to pilot the boats. By that year, LARGE SCALE DEVELOPMENT had come into the wings of the stage to await its cue. Before it makes its appearance let us look at some parts of the Boot-shaped Bend that could not answer the underground call. First, there was the bottom opposite the unsuccessful Graham settlement in Virginia. In that bottom by 1817 the farmers were numerous enough to effect township organization and by 1819 to secure a post office. (They named the township Sutton, misnamed the post office Graham Station. Their first postmaster was Andrew Donnally). But industrial activity by means of coal was far from their minds. The coal was there, as some of those Sutton inhabitants probably �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 59 knew, but it was thought to be inaccessible. While in The Narrows the coal vein lay close enough to the surface to be reached with little difficulty, in the Graham bottom region because of the vein's dip southeastward the coal was eighty feet or more below the surface. And so that section of the Boot-shaped Bend was destined to wait for its coal development period until slope mining and shaft mining became practicable. One enterprising settler of that region did not wait for coal. In 1832 LUCIUS CROSS, recently married at Marietta, came with his wife, took up a large tract some eight miles from The Narrows, built a log cabin about two miles inland. Along the creek that ran through his land (Bowman's Run) he put up a tannery. From his farm he began sending pressed hay and other farm products to the rapidly growing markets farther south. In 1836 he dammed the creek and put up a saw- and gristmill. Then on the beach at the mouth of the Run he began building the flatboats needed for carrying on his southern trade. These industries required the hiring of many hands; and the families of those employees needed a trading place; therefore, for their accommodation Mrs. Cross opened a little store on the Cross farm about the year 1840. Down about the mouth of Leading Creek it was the coal vein's height that made mining impracticable; the mine's "roof" of slate was in many places too thin for safety. Someone began taking coal out of the hillside of Philip Jones's extensive farm some time during the late 1820s or '30s. But no coal was exported from that mine. Some was sold to local residents, who, it is believed, were among the first people along the Ohio to use coal for domestic purposes. This is not at all improbable. The population around the mouth of Leading Creek was growing steadily (by May, 1825 it was large enough to merit a post office) and wood was growing very scarce. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 60 Salisbury, the name used in early deeds to designate the region at the mouth of the Creek (origin of the name was not available) was the name given to that region's post office. Andrew Donnally having recently moved down from Sutton Township, was made Salisbury’s first postmaster. One more section that did not answer the underground call during the 1820s was Letart Bottom, still farther up the River and its coal correspondingly deeper. That bottom, like the Graham Bottom, had a growing population of prosperous farmers, it had a mill and a general merchandise store; and on January 3, 1826, a post office named Letart Falls was opened in that store, with George Burns, land owner and proprietor of mill and store, as postmaster4. 4. These four post offices-Graham Station, Salisbury, Letart Falls, Nyesville (named chronologically)-were the boot-shaped bend's first benefits from the establishment in 1815 of Ohio's first regular mail delivery system, the latter made feasible by the building of Cumberland Road, or The National Pike. When the Road was completed as far a Wheeling (1818), Eastern mail was brought to that point by stage coach, there redistributed to certain larger offices, thence to smaller ones. The Boot-shaped Bend was served by post rider from Athens on the Gallipolis-Marietta State Road, which had been “built” about 1810, mainly by blazing trees along the proposed route. Four kinds of routes were provided by the system: routes of three mails, of two mails, and of one mail per week and bi-weekly mails. The Boot-shaped Bend was in the bi-weekly class. In the hills on the Virginia side of the Horseshoe Bend the underground call was just as loud as it was in The Narrows; but the Virginia land owners in that early day were not as disposed to heed 1t. Development on that side was wholly agricultural, with slavery as its basis. Several new plantations arose farther up in the boot-shaped bend, one of them owned by John Warth. Former forest ranger for Fort Harmer, later mail carrier for the first Government mail service (see above), still later engaged in salt-making on the Kanawha river, Warth in the year 1818 bought 1400 acres of the lower �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 61 Washington tract and began farming by the usual Virginia method- with one notable difference: In spite of his state's law to the contrary, John Warth taught his slaves to read and write. NEW ENGLAND RESPONDS It is not improbable that John Knight's reason for abandoning his Nailor's Run coal bank was that he learned it was on private property. (No record of his buying it could be found). Nor is it unlikely that rumors of the owner's intention to begin extensive development of his coal land in The Narrows had reached that locality at some time ding the 1820s. For there were foundations for such rumors. SAMUEL WYLLYS POMEROY, wealthy Boston merchant, had purchased that land in 18045. As 5. S.W. Pomeroy bought two full shares of Ohio Company land, one of Christopher Marshall in 1802, the second of Elbridge Gerry in 1804. Only the 262-acre tract-Fraction 10 “annexed to Section 10"-was in The Narrows. Section 10, or the Mile Square (640 acres), was located in Sutton Township, Range 12, Township 2 (See map page) the Ohio Company knew very little about the western part of its domain at that time, the Pomeroy purchase was a pig-in-a-poke venture. By the year 1818, however, having learned that his Western lands lay within limits of the “Coal Measures,” S.W. Pomeroy's interest in that land had been aroused to such a degree that he was impelled to write to a Cincinnati merchant asking for an estimate of the amount of coal used along the Ohio River between his land and the "Falls" (Louisville). The reply listed five mills and factories in Cincinnati, and also the amount of coal used and sold in Louisville, Cincinnati and Maysville. The total was 116,000 bushels annually6. 6. See Howe's Historical Collections of Ohio, page 113. The maximum capacity of a flatboat was about 2500 bushels; hence about fifty flatboats-guessing very roughly-went down the River with coal annually at that time. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 62 But S.W. Pomeroy did not go west immediately; he did not go until twelve years later when he was influenced by a young man who was then a stranger to him. The young man was VALENTINE BAXTER HORTON, Vermont law student admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in the early 1820s. While he was practicing his profession in Pittsburgh, V.B. Horton, Esq., heard about The Narrows, made inquiries; rode down to them on horseback, took lodging with the John Knight family; hired Thomas Goulding (allegedly the current occupant of the Kerr sycamore.) to help him dig around in the hills of Fraction 10, west of the Grant coal bank. On a second visit, after more investigating he and Goulding made a raft, loaded it with bags of coal to be sent to New Orleans and thence to Boston to be tested. When the raft foundered before it got started, the dauntless lawyer-prospector rode off to Boston with pieces of coal in his saddlebags7. 7. C.A. Hartley (See SOURCE MATERIAL) furnished these incidents; the late Horace M. Horton supplied the name of the pioneer helper. That V.B. Horton found the owner of Fraction 10 in Boston is borne out by the fact that in 1830 he was with S.W. Pomeroy in Gallipolis witnessing deeds which his elderly companion was acknowledging for the sale of some of his Sutton Township land. In 1832 V.B. Horton was again in The Narrows buying more coal land for S.W. Pomeroy and also some for himself, land east of Fraction 10 and land west of Fraction 10 (some of it for eighteen cents and acre); while S.W. Pomeroy himself was now in Cincinnati making over to his son C.R. Pomeroy, to his son-in-law C.W. Dabney, and to his prospective son-in-law Valentine B. Horton, each "Their fifth parts" of Fraction 10, Town 2, Range 13. (V.B. Horton, you see, while pleading the cause of the Boston merchant's coal land had found in the Pomeroy home and had pleaded with like success a cause of a very different nature.) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 63 By the autumn of 1833-the Pomeroy family and V.B. Horton by this time residing in Cincinnati8-the elder S.W. Pomeroy. (for S.W. Pomeroy 8. In his 1831 and 1832 deeds Mr. Pomeroy wrote, "I, Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy, of Boston," but on June 12, 1832, he gave Cincinnati as his place of residence. On the other hand, "I, V.B. Horton, of Pittsburgh” did not change to "I, V.B. Horton, of Cincinnati," until March 5, 1833 entries. A deed dated October 12, 1833, gives Cincinnati as C.R. Pomeroy's place of residence; but S.W. Pomeroy, Jr. did not live in Cincinnati until 1834, the records show. (See Deed Book 6) the younger, see below) had organized the firm of POMEROY, SONS & COMPANY for the purpose of carrying a systematic coal business in The Narrows. But the "Sons" of the firm were not yet ready to take an active part; and C.W. Dabney, a son-in-law; was living in Fayal, Azores Islands, serving as United States Consul. It devolved then upon the elder S.W. Pomeroy and V.B. Horton, the other half of the "Company," to get the new venture going. And so, a few days after their marriage on November 30, 1833, V.B. Horton and Clara Pomeroy Horton boarded a steamboat at Cincinnati, bound for their future home in The Narrows. As he led his bride down the steamer's gangplank at Nye's Landing, the groom, taking in the whole Narrows with a dramatic sweep of his arm, exclaimed: "I christen the future city to be located here, POMEROY, in honor of my bride, the Royal Apple of the Ohio Valley!" (Another incident from the C.W. Hartley Notes. For the meaning of "Royal Apple" see ***) By early spring of the next year (1834) V.B. Horton had had a little steam saw-mill built, also two dwelling houses. The saw-mill erected at the foot of the first hill spur east of Nailor's Run (The later Point Lookout), was named Salisbury Mill; V.B. Horton's Cottage stood on the west side of the Run, while the other dwelling was built a short distance east of the saw-mill. In response to advertisements in the East, miners, blacksmiths, �A.F Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 64 carpenters and other workmen came flocking into The Narrows. John Jones and James Jones were among the first, if not THE FIRST Welsh to arrive. John Jones, blacksmith, had landed with his wife in New York some time in 1833 and came directly to The Narrows. James Jones, miner, arrived in 1835 from the Pennsylvania coal mines. Meanwhile the opening of coal banks had begun, the first one up near the east line of Fraction 10. That bank at once became the "Golden Bank" in the popular mind, because Thomas Goulding had had charge of its opening and probably of its operating. The second bank was opened on Lot 304, a few rods below the creek later dubbed Monkey Run. (See below for origin of name.) While this work was going on the venerable "S.W. Pomeroy, Sen'r" was busy selling land and giving away land. On September 18, 1834, he deeded to Mrs. V.B. Horton, "for one dollar in hand…and mote especially for the love I feel for said daughter…and her filial duty always manifested toward her parents," a large part of Fraction 10, “on which tract a dwelling house, or cottage, has been erected the present year." On March 5, 1835, he conveyed to "S.W. Pomeroy, Jun'r," of Cincinnati, "one undivided fifth" of each of the tracts owned by "C.R. Pomeroy & Company," namely, the sites of the two new coal banks. (In Mr. Pomeroy's deeds, Pomeroy, Sons & Company always appeared as "C.R. Pomeroy & Company," no reason given.) On September 17, 1846, by deed somewhat more formal and brief than the one for Mrs. V.B. Horton, he gave to his daughter Mary (just married to Thomas Irvin) a large tract on the west side of Sugar Run. These deeds were all acknowledged personally by "Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy, of Cincinnati," the first two at Chester and the last one at "Butternut Cottage, the residence of my son in-law V.B. Horton, near Pomeroy's Landing." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 65 P., S. & Company's new industrial center very soon drew minor business venturers from various parts of the country. One of the first to arrive was V.B. Horton's brother Horace S. Horton, who resigned his work as school teacher in Mississippi to open a general store at Point Lookout. Amos Dunham brought his wife and daughter from Washington County, Ohio, and opened a tavern in the P., S. & Company's new house near the Salisbury Mill. Uriah Tracy Howe, Esq., and his brother Dr. Estes Howe, not knowing that Ohio's canal-building period was nearing its end, came from Boston and built a shovel factory several lots east of the Dunham tavern. John McMaster came and built a dwelling house on the east side of the tavern, then began making furniture in the house. John Sprague, another new-comer, started a foundry just east of the shovel factory. Pomeroy's Landing was near the "Golden" coalbank. Not far east of that bank lay Grantsburgh with its steam flour mill and its coal bank. Near the mill A.V. Dudre for several years had been making barrels for the mill. Also in the neighborhood of the mill were Royal Grant's tannery and Stephen Root's shoe-making business which he carried on in one room of his dwelling. Not far above the flour mill were Dillsburgh’s few scattered dwellings and Nye's Inn (originally Dill's Inn). Between the east line of Dillsburgh and the mouth of Kerr's Run was Nyesville, where Nial R. Nye was continuing his father's general store, where William Prall recently had located to make coffins, and Lyman Stacy to prescribe medicine, to extract teeth and to manage the Nyesville wharfboat. By 1840 all The Narrows east of Nailor's Run was practically one community, with its post office still at Nyesville. Meanwhile, V.B. Horton on August 19, 1837, had bought of Philip Jones a tract of land extending from Rutland Road to Lot 308, the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 66 terms of purchase including the right to open a coal bank. Mr. Horton had part of the tract laid out in town lots and a copy of the town plat entered on the Meigs County records “on this 12th day of July, 1839," the plat bearing the title, "TOWN OF COALPORT.” With this event the control of nearly all the coal land from the east line of Section 8 to Rutland Road, (the western end of The Narrows) was secured to Pomeroy, Sons & Company nominally and to V.B. Horton eventually (See P., S. & CO. failure below). Close upon the founding of Coalport in one end of that curve of land came the incorporation of the town already founded in practically the remainder of The Narrows. On February 19, 1840, the Ohio Assembly passed the Act which gave THE TOWN OF POMEROY official status. That V.B. Horton was the leading spirit in the incorporation movement is beyond question; that such incorporation and the founding of Coalport were steps toward the realizing of his dream of a future city in The Narrows is equally unquestionable. The foundation of that city had been laid; provision for its expansion had been made; only one thing lacked to make V.B. Horton's dream come true: the county court house. Exactly when and through what influence the Ohio General Assembly decided to move Meigs County's capital from Chester to some place on the Ohio River was not stated in our source (O.B. Chapman's Personal Recollections). Mr. Chapman does say, however, that it was Col. Andrew Donnally, the county's representative during the latter 1830s, who put through the Legislature the resolution to send a committee of legislators down to the River to decide upon a site which, in their opinion, would serve the needs of the entire county. Now, it so happened that recent developments down near the mouth of �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 67 of Leading Creek were assisting Nature in making that broad, level bottom an ideal site for a county seat. Philip Jones, who through inheritance and piecemeal purchases now owned all the land from Lot 306 to Ben Smith's Lot 312 and over half of that, in 1836 in company with his son-in-law Oliver Grant put up a large steam flour mill on the southeast corner of Lot 312. In that same year Benjamin Smith “Jun'r" and his brother-in-law W,B. VanDuyn bought of Ben Smith (Sr.) thirtyeight acres of Lot 313 and forty-three acres of Lot 312 (See Deed Book 5, p. 101), built a store and laid out twenty-eight town lots. The map of this new town was recorded on January 17, 1837, as the town of Vinton; but before long the deeds for lots sold in that town were recorded as being "in the town of Sheffield.” (See Deed Book 7 for many such records). By 1840 all the land east of the Creek not owned by Philip Jones or Ben Smith, and also much of the Ministerial Section, had been sold in tracts of varying sizes. And the whole region, from Rutland Road to the Creek, became known as Sheffield even though only a small part of it was incorporated under that name. Therefore, when our sources told of Legislator Donnally's work in behalf of the removal of his county's court house down to the River, our natural conclusion was that he secretly hoped , possibly had reason to expect ; that the mouth of Leading Creek would be the Committee's choice of the River sites. For, although he was one of Sutton Township's founders, Andrew Donnally had removed to Salisbury in 1821, had bought land at the mouth of the Creek in '24, had been appointed Salisbury's first postmaster in '26; had resided there while serving as county sheriff in the latter 1820s; had bought several lots in Sheffield as soon as that town was laid out and had built a home there. In short, he was one of the most prominent residents of Sheffield. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 68 As soon as it became known that the court house was to come to the River each of the four settlements in the boot-shaped bend got into the race for the prize. John Wolfe, Peter Lallance and Adam Lallance (original name, La Launce) laid out seventy town lots on the higher ground near Graham Station post office and the farmers in the vicinity subscribed $4,000 toward the building of a court house. Letart Falls added eighteen lots to the plat which George Burns had recorded in 1830. Col. Andrew Donnally entertained the Committee at his spacious home in Sheffield and-we can be sure, though actual records are lacking-offered a generous inducement. The Committee called on V.B. Horton last of all. He had just moved his family into a fine new residence on the knoll west of the mouth of Nailor's Run. Of that call likewise no records are available. "Perhaps it was Mr. Horton's charming way of presenting his arguments, or perhaps it was the superior attractions of Pomeroy that made the court house an assured thing for Pomeroy after that visit," opined O.B. Chapman (who, by the way, was an ardent admirer of V.B. Horton). Be that as it may, the result of the contest was that in June 1841,9 9. The exact day is not discoverable because the Commissioners' Journal covering approximately the period of 1837-1850 is lost. the County of Meigs moved its housekeeping paraphernalia into a twostory frame structure recently provided by V.B. Horton. There the County was to reside, rent free, until a new court house could be erected on the five lots-Nos. 154, 155, 156, 157, 158-deeded to it on October 20, 1841 by “John C. Wright, U. Tracy Howe, and Thomas Irvin, Trustees of the Pomeroy, Sons & Company, on behalf of the proprietors.” Thus was ended the Leading Creek section's second dream of becoming the capital of Meigs County. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 69 In Deed Book 8 may be found a copy of the Map of Pomeroy accompanied by an explanatory entry a part of which reads: State of Ohio, Meigs County… Be it remembered that on this day the 6th of August, A.D. 1841, Thomas Irvin and U. Tracy Howe, Esquires, appeared before me the subscriber, Mayor of the Town of Pomeroy, and acknowledged this Map of Pomeroy to be their Act and Deed. -Horace S. Horton, Mayor Said map reveals that Nyesville, Dillsburgh and Grantsburgh, none of which had been incorporated, were merged with Pomeroy in 1841. It reveals furthermore, "Believe It or Not," that the surveyor who made the map made possible for Pomeroy the future distinction of having no cross streets10. 10. Several years ago Robert Ripley's Believe It or Not newspaper feature mentioned this Pomeroy peculiarity. A reader of a Columbus, Ohio, newspaper doubted the truth of the statement, made a wager with a friend who once lived in that Ohio River town. Then he drove the hundred miles down to the River, inspected Pomeroy's twenty-seven or more miles of streets, went back to Columbus to report that he had lost the bet-which was that he and his wife feed the friend's goldfish and cat for the next three months. The map does not show, however, that a goodly number of the lots in the west end of Pomeroy were to be contingent on future improvement; for it does not show that Sugar Run was then a very-much-alive part of the town site. It does not show that a stone bridge (county) crossed the mouth of the Run on Front street, nor that the banks of the stream beyond Front street were still largely forset-covered and often watercovered. Consequently it does not reveal that some of the Front street lots, many of those on Second street and nearly all those on Mulberry. Mechanic and Butternut streets existed, as immediately usable land, only on paper. More than that. If the Map of 1841 had shown the location of Pomeroy's dwelling houses and other buildings there would have been not more than eight substantial structures noted below Nailor's �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 70 Run; V.B. Horton's new residence on Lot 82 (Mrs. Horton's recently acquired estate); Dr. Estes Howe's dwelling on Lot 84; the temporary court house on the east corner of Linn and Second streets; the S.W. Pomeroy residence on the) knoll back of the five County lots; the Morgan Ball tavern near the west corner of Front and Linn; the Thomas Irvin residence on the hillside west of Butternut and Second streets (that hill being part of Mrs. Irvin's extensive Lot 198); and probably Richard Stephenson's hotel, or so-called "Mansion House," on Front street some distance below Butternut. Several cabins, also, could have been marked on the map; as, the "shanty" that Elisha Barringer recently had put up somewhere in the vacant space between Linn street and Lot 84; also, the Fugate, Joachim and Hysell cabins along the hillside farther out in Sugar Run-each of the cabins in the midst of, or flanked by, its own individual "patch." The space in which the Barringer cabin had been built was remembered by one reminiscer as "a big cornfield.” By 1845, BUSINESS ACTIVITY was on in earnest in the Sugar Run, or court-house section of Pomeroy. Dwelling houses with store room front were rising here and there on Front street both east and west of Linn street. On Second street near the court house dwellings were going up. On November 1, 1843 in the basement of the Morgan Ball tavern had been published the first issue of The Weekly Times by one L. Beatty from the northern part of the State. In 1845 Mr. Beatty sold his paper to M.T. Van Horn and O.B. Chapman, who immediately changed the name of the publication to The Meigs County Times. Nonetheless, in 1845 that part of Pomeroy above Nailor’s Run was still the main part of the county's new capital. That the town was not particularly attractive to new arrivals may be inferred from the reading of several extracts taken from O.B. Chapman's PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS (See SOURCE MATERIAL): �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 71 I had my first view of Pomeroy (wrote Mr. Chapman) on a bright, sunny day of April, 1845, from the upper deck of the sternwheeler The Arrow, from Marietta. I was put on shore at the stone pier (of the latter part of the century) about half way up the front of the town, from a yawl boat, the steamer not venturing to land. I made my way to the Dunham House, the nearest inn, and was met by Dunham's daughter Amanda… Pomeroy from the steamboat had a sorry appearance. Its two sawmills, one at the uppper end (Nye's mill) and one in the middle of the town (Salisbury Mill) only_made a litter of the natural beauty… The Coalridge flour mill (UNION MILL COMPANY's mill) was then in the hands of two eastern men (Haven & Stackpole) who were incompetent and financially at the end of their capital. A small foundry (the former Sprague foundry) just above the shovel factory had no capital, did little business. The shovel factory was closed up, its owners (The Howe brothers) had become bankrupt and gone back to Boston… Cooley's tin shop above the flour mill was the only visible live industry… William Prall's cabinet and coffin shop at Kerr's Run and R.C. Grant's tan-yard above the flour mill may well have been dead enough to escape Mr. Chapman's notice. The only stores sufficiently alive to be noted by him appear to have been those of W.H. Remington and James Crary "near the tin shop" and Wm McAboy's store (originally Horace S. Horton’s) "just above the Nailor's Run bridge." Of Pomeroy's "twenty dwellings all told," Mr. Chapman points out "the substantial two-story house of N.R. Nye" at the mouth of Kerr's Run; the Aaron Murdock, W.H. Remington, Milton Cooley and Dr. Fuller residences "one fourth-mile below; Lawyer Howe's pretentious but vacant house "back near the rocks"; C.R. Pomeroy's commodious dwelling and H.S. Horton's "pretty home" just below; the Austin House one door above the Dunham House, the Probst dwelling and cabinet shop combined. The "many inferior tenement buildings on Condor street near the shovel factory" and the "several tumble-down tenements on Front just below Kerr's Run" seem to make up the rest of the twenty. One wonders why Mr. Chapman so completely overlooked those below Nailor's Run-those hereinbefore mentioned. Pomeroy began its MUNICIPAL CAREER the very next day after the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 72 passing of the Incorporation Act. The first entry in the Town Council's first Record Book (still preserved in the Mayor's office) reads: "Abstract of the Poll Book of the Corporation Election held in the Town of Pomeroy for the office of one Mayor, one Recorder, and five Trustees. Amos Dunham and Abraham Dudre, Judges, and C.R. Pomeroy, Clerk, were severly sworn according to law previous to entering upon the duties of their respective offices. April 20th, A.D. 1840. It is by us certified that the number of electors at this election amounts to forty-nine. Amos Dunham) Attest, Abraham Dudre) Judges C.R. Pomeroy, Clerk We do hereby certify that S.S, Paine had thirty-four votes and Amos Dunham thirteen votes for Mayor. Estes Howe forty-six votes and H.S. Horton two votes for Recorder Royal Grant forty-six votes and L.S. Nye forty-six votes, L. Stacy twenty-three votes, U.T. Howe forty-eight votes and V.B. Horton thirty-three votes; E. Williamson nine votes, I.B. Dudre six votes, J. McMaster six votes, Stephen Root ten votes, T. Irvin two votes and A.V. Tudre five votes for Trustees. Amos Dunham) Attest, C.R. Pomeroy Abraham Dudre) Judges A true copy of the original Poll Book except the names of the electors and the tally of votes. I also certify that the above election was advertised on the 9th day of April in three public places, the advertisement signed by six of the Corporators. Attest, Estes Howe, Recorder. A tally of those votes would have shown that Pomeroy's first mayor was to be Samuel S. Paine, its first Recorder Dr. Estes Howe; the members of its first Council, Royal Grant, Lewis S. Nye, Lyman Stacy, Uriah Howe and V.B. Horton. The next year's election is more completely recorded. In that same Record Book may be found the following entry: The Poll Book of the Election held in the Town of Pomeroy, County of Meigs, on the 20th day of April in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty-one. A list of the "electors" (voters) -fifty-six names-then follows; following this with the introductory "We do hereby certify," are �recorded the names of the candidates for each of the various offices with the number of votes cast for each. Next, this closing paragraph: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 73 And it appearing that George Knight and U.T. Howe had an equal number of votes, while but one could hold the office of Trustee, the judges proceeded to draw lots and the lot fell to George Knight. Here too no tally votes were recorded. The other four successful candidates for the office of Trustee were R.C. Grant, V.B. Horton, L.S. Nye and L. Stacy. The offices of Mayor and Recorder fell to H.S. Horton and C.R. Pomeroy, the record showed. No political party system appears to have developed during the first two years, hence there probably was no formal nomination of candidates; the candidate receiving the largest number of votes got the office. In '41 there were thirteen Trusteeship candidates. The first regular meeting of the "Council of Pomeroy" was held on May 1, 1840, at R.C. Grant's store (above the flour mill). After the Mayor was sworn "in the usual form" by R.C. Grant, Esq., and the oath of office administered to the Recorder and the Trustees by the Mayor, the Council elected a Treasurer (H.S. Horton), appointed a committee (U.T. Howe and V.B. Horton) to prepare Bye [sic] Laws, and elected a Marshal (John Grant). During the years 1840 and '41 the Pomeroy Council passed ordinances to prevent (a) breach of the Sabbath, (b) immoral practices, (c) the selling of spirituous liquors on Sunday (except to travelers on their journey, (d) the selling of spirituous liquors to be drank [sic] where sold, (e) the running of swine at large, the ordinance making provision for a "hog pound." At the May 15, 1840 meeting three school directors were appointed for the "District composed of Pomeroy." In the following September the Council resolved "that a tax of $600 be levied for the purpose of purchasing a site and for building and finishing and furnishing a school house; also a tax not exceeding $40 for renting rooms and furnishing them for the coming winter schools. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 74 On January 9, 1843 a deed for Lot No. 3, "used as a Burying Ground," was presented by E. Howe to the Council and was accepted. At the same meeting and ordinance was passed appointing a "superintendent of the Pomeroy Burrying Ground." Other meeting places of the Council before 1850 were: the offices of Howe & Co., the school house Coalridge Mill, V.B. Horton's office, the Mayor's house (in '45 and '46 when Amos Dunham was Mayor). At the April 26, 1850 meeting the Council "resolved to meet at the Court House the ensuing year." By that time the new court house had been built and that edifice's neighborhood had become the main part of the town. The majority of the fifty-six voters in Pomeroy's 1841 election presumably were family heads, indicating roughly an increase of forty or more families since 1832. But these did not include Pomeroy's entire population. Farther out in Sugar Run along the hill sides lived the Joachims, Fugates, Hysells and several other families. The heads of these families, like nearly all the other male inhabitants of Pomeroy, were employees of Pomeroy, Sons & Company-coal diggers, flatboatmen, carpenters, blacksmiths, etc. but none of them had voted in the 1841 election. The names of those who did vote in that election were: V.B. Horton, W.J.T. Wright, Aaron Murdock, Thomas Irvin, R.N. Fuller, Isaac Behan, O. Shirman, Thayer Horton, B.C. Hoyt, Joel Woodruff, George Rasp, John Lyons, Wm. Grant, David Varian, George Knight, Jackson White, Lewis Batterson, Geo. W. Warner, Estes Howe, John Launders, John Tucker, Alva Bosworth, John McMaster, Charles Church, J.W.G. Stackpole, Daniel Tewksbury, N.R. Nye, A. Willis, Benj. Stivers, James McCormick, Eben Nye, Wm. Williamson, Stephen C. Harper, James Boyd, Sam’l J. Paine, Thos. Everton, Lewis V. Stanford, Horace Adkins, Peter Jerrolman, John P. Austin, Christian Singhose, Stephen Root, Edmund Williamson, Royal C. Grant, Nehimiah Shirman, Horace S. Horton, Lyman Stacy, A.V. Dudre, Chas. R. Pomeroy, James Corkram, David Redford, Amos Dunham, E. Benedict Davis, James Kallam, James Mead, Slater B. Moore �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 75 THE LEADING CREFK REGION was noted by Henry Howe in 1846 only briefly, as follows: Immediately below Coalport is the town of Middleport, lately laid out by Philip Jones, which contains several stores and is building up fast. Adjoining Middleport is Sheffield, a pleasant town, which bids fair to become a place of business. To be more exact, it was shortly before the court-house decision in April 1841, if Meigs County records do not err-that Philip Jones had the county surveyor lay out a small portion of his farm into town lots. Not until October 24, 1844, was the first plat recorded. On March 4, 1847, with twenty lots added, the plat was recorded again, because “the description which accompanied the former plat of that village was on a separate sheet and must of [sic] been misplaced before it was recorded,"-so wrote Recorder S.S. Paine in "Plats and Minutes of Middleport," on the opposite page. Some of Philip Jones's friends suggested that he call his town Jonesboro. To this Mr. Jones replied with a smile, "I'll not blow up my own name,” adding that the town already had named itself. By this he meant the town's location. The Jones farm happened to be situated in view of the point in the River where in the then vanishing flatboat days Philip Jones perhaps still occasionally saw a heavily loaded Pittsburgh-bound keelboat meet and exchange crews with a flatboat carrying merchandise to southern points. That point (erroneously believed to be mid-way between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati), had been agreed upon by shippers of the two cities, the object of the exchange being to lighten the arduous labor of the men propelling the up-stream boat. This custom, in Philip Jones's opinion was more worth commemorating than his own name, and so he called his town MIDDLEPORT. HORTON'S UPPER BANK was the name of a little mining settlement just beyond the east boundary line of Pomeroy. The bank either was �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 76 opened in the latter 1840s or was bought from a former owner. The cottages around it were occupied by Welsh miners one of whom was William Williams; its storekeeper was V.B. Horton, Jr., a nephew of THE V.B. Horton. By the spring of 1851 this little community was approaching municipal independence; a post office was actually in sight. (The office was established in 1852, was named Minersville, and placed in charge of V.B. Horton Jr.) Such had been the positive and practical response of New England to the underground call from the Horseshoe Bend. While it true that many of the settlers on the Ohio side were Virginians and that nearly all the miners themselves were either German or Welsh "foreigners," yet the greater number, especially of those who took the lead in the industrial development, came either directly or originally from some one of the New England states. New England's voice unquestionably had been the first stabilizing force in the Boot-shaped Bend. THE SOUTH SIDE'S TARDY RESPONSE The indifference shown during the late 1810s and the entire 1820s by the Virginia land owners to the underground call continued until almost the close of the first half-century. The Waggener colony, which came to the Horseshoe Bottom in the late autumn of 1815, failed after only a short struggle with pioneer life. Mrs. McIntyre (See Footnote 19, The Stage) gives the reasons for what she terms the proverbial fall of that colony. Describing the three Waggener men as "typical Virginia gentlemen of the old school, cultured, refined, hospitable to a fault, ignorant any form of manual labor," she states further that having been �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 77 used to luxurious living regardless of expense, they with their families continued even in their cabin home to surround themselves as far as possible with accustomed luxuries. From a direct descendant of John Sehon (see next paragraph) this writer learned of an incident which throws much light of Major Waggener's financial troubles during the 1820s. The Major's overseer at that time was Gander, a most capable and trustworthy slave upon whom his master bestowed not only special material favors but even affection. It came as a severe shock to the Major's friends, therefore, when they learned that Gander had been sold! Sold, not to another Virginia slave owner but sold "down the river"-that is, to a slave dealer buying up slaves for fabulous sums for Southern plantation owners. The Major's friends knew then that what they had long suspected was true: that the Major was in serious financial straits. Their sympathies went out to the man whom they knew to be a large-hearted and humane master, one who would not have taken such a step if there had been any other way out of his difficulties. But no less-in some instances perhaps more--did they sympathize with the hapless Gander, for being sold "down the river" was a fate that most slaves had heard about and therefore considered worse than death; they knew of the kind of treatment that was meted out by the notoriously cruel overseers of the large Southern cotton plantations. Some time during the 1820s Major Waggener had begun selling parts of his land. Mason County records show that in the year 1830 he owned only 2025 3/4 acres of his original Horseshoe Bottom inheritance, that in 1831 he sold 1000 acres to Ezekiel McDaniel and in 1832, 1003 acres John, John Jr., Edmund and James Sehon. The McDaniel family came from Washington, D.C., and the Sehons were members of �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 78 a "Pennsylvania Dutch" family living at that time in western Virginia. Before long the McDaniels and the Sehons each sold portions of their land, some of the new purchasers sold again to others. By the late 1840s there were in the eastern part of Waggener’s Bottom the still extensive Sehon and McDaniel farms besides several smaller ones; and in the western part lay the three large farms of Robert Adams, John Brown and Frank Anderson in the order named. Major Waggener had moved his family to Point Pleasant in the late 1820s, where by 1830 he was serving as a Justice of Peace in Mason County. His brother James Waggener and several younger Waggener families still were living in Waggener's Bottom in the 1840s. As could be expected, the Virginia side's first coal-exporting venture arose in the Horseshoe Bend. But that it was not made by one of the several Virginia land owners could be an almost foregone conclusion. To a Scotch-Irish immigrant, in fact, the credit for that venture is due. Some time in the late 1820s GEORGE BURTHISTLE had married Frances Behan, the daughter of a Dublin hotel proprietor. Immediately after the wedding (which had taken place at the hotel) the newly wedded couple had sailed for America, "the land where all you had to do was 'gather your own tea, make your own sugar, and drink away." Upon landing at New York after their seven weeks' voyage, Mr. and Mrs. Burthistle with their several trunks had continued their Journey by oxteam over the mountains to the Ohio River, thence by steamboat to their destination, Meigs County, Ohio. There, in Sutton Township, Mr. Burthistle had bought at tract of land but had sold it to S.W. Pomeroy on Feb. 24, 1832. Then he had bought another tract on Leading Creek, which he had sold to Isaac Behan �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 79 (by deed of July 14, 1837), evidently with the intention of buying land on the opposite side of the River and opening a coal-merchandising business there; for, either in 1841 or '42, the Burthistle family moved into a log cabin on a tract of land adjoining the Frank Anderson farm on the west, and George Burthistle put miners to work digging the coal out of his hills. As soon as he had a sufficient quantity ready he took it in coalboats to Cincinnati and brought back sugar by the hogsheads and large quantities of other merchandise to sell to his employees and others. Soon he had in operation a flourishing business. Presumably he had built on his land houses for his coal diggers and farm hands, and also a store room. The Virginia side's second recorded coal business was begun in the narrows just beyond-that is, southwest-of the Burthistle farm. In those narrows (once a part of the Muse grant) was Ice Creek Hollow-the "Ice" coming from no one knows where-and it was in those narrows that Washington saw, according to local tradition, "a coal hill which is always on fire," but according to his DIARIES, "Hills wch. the Indians say is always afire." In 1847 only three families lived in those narrows; yet, on November 18 of that year a post office was established there for the convenience of the farmers in the bottom lands below and above the narrows and back of the hills. The post office was named WEST COLUMBIA, its postmaster was MOSES MICHAEL. Now, either immediately before or very soon after the establishment of that post office a coal bank was opened on the west side of Ice Creek by JAMES FOLEY and GRIFFITH B. THOMAS, two Welshmen from Point Pleasant. In the year 1849, so say Mason County records, the two men bought a piece of land on that side of the creek, their purpose being to lay out a town. The prospective town was to be called Minersburg. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 80 Some coal is said to have been exported by Messrs. Thomas and Foley yet in a little less than two years their coal business had been sold to two Cincinnati men, Burnet and Worcester by name. What the new proprietors did in the way of industrial development and what other companies did on the Virginia side after the start made at West Columbia belongs to the next Act of the drama. THE ZEITGEIST STILL AT WORK It goes without saying that in this living drama all the change of scenery are taking place naturally, as a part of the action itself. The reader is supposed to have seen with his mind's eye the gradual disappearing of the boot-shape bend's forest, now here now there; to have visualized the clearing, the farm, the rural community, the industrial center each taking its respective place in the gradual resetting of the drama's stage. He has not yet, however, been reminded that along with this natural scenery shifting, the Spirit of the Age, that potent, ever-present force that had impelled the Boot-shaped Bend's settlers to migrate to the West, was still at work driving them on to new kinds of industries, new modes of living, new mental attitudes, all of which effected further changes in the stage's setting. These changes may now be seen in three groups, the first of which will beNEW BUSINESS VENTURES-At the first dawn of the Steamboat Era a hitherto unknown kind of business plant began to appear here and there on the shores of the boot-shaped bend. This was the so-called "woodboat," which was nothing more than a small flatboat loaded with cordwood and rowed out to passing steamboats. Such wood was in great demand by the ever-increasing number of steamboats plying up and down the River. Wood was exclusively for heating the boilers, but on account of *** could not be carried in sufficient �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 81 quantities for more than a small part of the journey. Relying wholly on the River shore for wood, the steamer often had to be landed and the crew sent out to gather up old logs, brush, fence-rails-anything that would burn. Land owners were not slow to take advantage of that situation by preparing timber or having it prepared for sale to passing steamboats. The father of one "Log Cabin" contributor (whose letters are signed "Grandma") began about 1820 to furnish the "lower trade" boats with wood from the narrows directly opposite the mouth of Leading Creek. When a northbound boat signed for wood, “Grandma’s" father took his wood-boat out to the steamer, which dragged it alongside for unloading. Southbound steamers usually "laid in" for wood. Selling wood in that manner was practiced until the late 1840s. "More than one farm,” says a Larkins contributor, "was paid for by cordwood cut and sold to steamboats for fuel." For, surprising as it may be to some readers, the steamboats did not use coal for fuel before the 1840s; nor did they convey to the down-River cities the many flatboat loads of potatoes and cabbages and apples and other farm produce that the farmers of the Siegrist and Roush and Brinker bottoms in the former Graham bottom on the Virginia side and those of the Wolfe and Letart bottoms on the Ohio side were sending to those rapidly growing markets. The steamboat until 1837 or '38 carried only passengers and such freight as could be loaded on its decks. Its further possibilities for transportation were to be evolved in the Boot-shaped Bend. They were to be the brain-child of V.B. Horton. When Pomeroy, Sons & Company began its coal exporting business in The Narrows, V.B. Horton put into practice all the most up-to-date ideas then prevailing for such business. At its several mines, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 82 where the horizontal shafts, or "drifts," had to start into the hill at a height of from seventy-five to a hundred feet or more from the bed of the river, tramways were constructed for bringing the coal out of the bank in oars and emptying it successively from one grade to the cars on a grade below, until it finally reached the flatboats that were waiting along the shore to receive it for transportation down the River. Flatboats were used for the simple reason that no other method of transportation had been devised. But V.B. Horton soon became dissatisfied with that slow and expensive method-expensive because the flat could not be brought back up the River. The idea of using a steamboat to pull, or tow, containers full of coal down the River to their destination and bringing them back empty to be used over and over again-such an idea began to agitate V.B. Horton's mind; and it continued to do so until finally in 1836 he had made arrangements for the building of a side-wheel steamer in Cincinnati11, and 11. Some reminiscers state that the boat was built at Pomeroy; but the late Horace M. Horton maintained that it was built at Cincinnati. on April 10, 1837, the following advertisement appeared in the Gallipolis Weekly Journal & the Gallia, Meigs & Lawrence County Advertiser: TO THE PUBLIC The Steamboat Condor having commenced regular trips between Pomeroy's Landing and Cincinnati, will perform said trip regularly every six days, when sufficient water to admit running at night. The proprietors have had ladies especially, so are now gentlemen which accommodation the Ohio River. The number of gentlemen. a new arrangement of cabin calculated for prepared to accommodate ladies and shall be equal if not superior to any on berths is calculated for 8 ladies and 12 The Condor will stop wherever hailed either for freight or passengers. Will take freight for above and intermediate points, even to Louisville, reserving the privilege of reshipping by every line of packets running from Cincinnati *** last place. �The difference of time will vary *** little as she will make no stop for fuel. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 83 As soon as the River will admit, she will have an additional boiler together with a new set of tow boats for the purpose she is intended for. She will not be detained either by wind or stormy weather, having sufficient power to resist either. Finally, the master of said boat insures the public in general that there shall be no pains on his part spared to render comfortable those who may favor his boat with their custom. Edmund Gray, Master. Pomeroy's Landing, Oct. 20, 1836. The phrase, "for the purpose she is intended for," undoubtedly means the conveying of coal; for the next year the Condor did take a ton of coal to Cincinnati in a special container, or so-called "tow boat," (thought to have been an ordinary, small-size flatboat) and thereafter continued to take coal in that manner on her regular trips down the River, selling small quantities at intermediate points when it was desired, just as was done by the coal-carrying flatboats. One fact to be noted here is that the Condor, a side-wheeler, almost literally TOWED those “tow boats,”-meaning that she pulled, or dragged them. Not a long string, or fleet, to be sure, but two, three, at most four, fastened end to end alone: each side of the steamboat12. 12. Captain Sam DeWolf, in a letter to the Pomeroy Leader, March 3 1897, is our authority for this statement. Capt. DeWolf began his river career in the 1830s as an employee of V.B. Horton. Other rivermen of the early days also attested to such towing of barges, or coal containers, by side-wheel steamboats. The barges were said to have "been fastened by long lines to a capstan on the front of the boat. Hidden away in the Condor's advertisement is another statement, brief but of great significance: "as she will make no stop for fuel” meaning that coal was to be used for the generating of steam. The very few steamboatmen who before that time had tried coal had thought it destroyed the grate bars of the furnace; that it made the boat too uncomfortable for the passengers; that, in short, it was altogether impracticable. Mr. Horton experimented with coal long enough �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 84 to find that it was a decided advantage in every way. Other steamboatmen soon saw the he was right; and the result was that the coal trade immediately experienced a tremendous boost. But the woodboat's trade experienced a corresponding set-back; in fact, the woodboat very soon was forced to withdraw permanently from the boot-shaped bend stage. Its trade had vanished. These two innovations, the steam towboat and the use of coal for fuel on steamboats, revolutionized transportation methods not only on the Ohio but on all western waters. For both of them our county is indebted to the progressive spirit of V.B. Horton. The word towboat, however, was not used until somewhat later. (See below). With the assurance of a steady supply of coal from Pomeroy, the coal trade received its second great boost. People in the larger downRiver towns began to use coal in their homes, thus increasing still more the demand for the commodity. In an 1838 number of the "Hesperion," or "Western Monthly Magazine," a writer discoursing on the subject of coal said: "A number of banks have been opened in different parts of the mineral district… The largest are at Pomeroy, on the Ohio River, 180 miles above Cincinnati. The "Pomeroy Coal" is greatly esteemed for domestic use in the towns and cities from Portsmouth to New Orleans. It burns readily, is coarser than most of the coals which descend the Ohio and has a less disagreeable smell than most of them. It is used in dwelling houses in Cincinnati, Louisville and New Orleans more commonly than any other coal; and millions of bushels of it are floated to each of these cities every year, where it sells for 12, 25, and 37 cents… At the banks it is now worth from 3¢ to 5¢ per bushel…” The writer of that article, although he had been misinformed on several points, as for instance, the distance between Pomeroy and Cincinnati, and perhaps the amount of coal sent annually from Pomeroy to the cities he names (however, we must admit that we have no actual records to the contrary). Nevertheless the quotation is of especial interest and value here because it helps to make clear the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 85 fact that by the end of the third decade of the 1800s Industrialism secured a firm foothold on the Ohio side of the Horseshoe Bend and that its ruler unquestionably was KING COAL. From all of which one would naturally conclude that the coal business of Pomeroy, Sons & Company, which was the only really active coal business in The Bend, was in a most flourishing condition. However, a perusal of Deed Books 7 and 8 revealed a very different situation. The first hint of reverses came with the finding of a mortgage deed given in August, 1837, by “S.W. Pomeroy, et al," (meaning P., S., & CO., or C.R. Pomeroy & Company), to the Ohio Life Insurance Company for $8,981, on all the easterly parts of Fraction 10 previously deeded by S.W. Pomeroy, Sr. to the Company. Soon thereupon followed a deed by "S.W. Pomeroy & Others" conveying to John C. Wright, Thomas Irvin and U, Tracy Howe, for $4,000, the lot and house occupied by C.R. Pomeroy, "In Trust for the benefit of the creditors of Pomeroy, Sons & Company," Finally came the deed, dated August 1, 1839, making over to "J.C. Wright, et al" for $100,000 all the Company's land in Fraction 10 and all it had purchased in Grantsburgh and Dillsburgh and elsewhere in Section 8; and on the same date deeds by V.B. Horton to the same J.C. Wright et al, conveying all the land he had purchased of VanDuyn and Smith and of Philip Jones, including the site of his recently founded Town of Coalport- all "In Trust" for the benefit of the creditors of P., S. & Co. In short, it was evident to this researcher that Pomeroy, Sons & Company had collapsed. The Financial Panic of 1837 and the absolute lack of business experience on the part of its head man, V.B. Horton, had combined to bring about the unfortunate event. V.B. Horton and C.R. Pomeroy together undertook at once the arduous task of continuing the business and the liquidating of its �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 86 debts. Because shipping and other facilities appeared better at Coalport, they made that place their shipping center, taking coal mainly from Coalport's Diamond Hollow mine and the mine on Lot 304 a short distance above Diamond Hollow. By 1845 the Horton-Pomeroy partnership had succeeded in organizing The POMEROY COAL COMPANY; and so promising was its outlook that V.B. Horton-who was virtually The Company-decided to establish a boatyard. Accordingly, Ben F. Wadman, a Scotch carpenter then living in Nova Scotia, was persuaded to come to Pomeroy and take charge of the new industrial plant. The place selected for the boatyard was the River front at the mouth of Nailor's Run; the first important piece of work was to be a steamboat to take the place of the P., S. & Company's now practically worn-out Condor. The timber for the framework of the new Condor was brought from the hills about two miles back of town; it consisted solely of young, thrifty white oaks dug up by the roots, stripped of bark and roughhewed in the woods so as to make hauling as light as possible. The purpose of getting trees by the roots was to secure a natural bend at one end of each piece of timber, thus enabling the workmen to avoid joints at the corners, where the greatest strain would be. Every tree was carefully selected, the least defect causing it to be rejected. The framework of the boat when completed looked like a solid piece of timber. The engine, though second-hand, was strong and powerful; it had been made for a boat nearly twice the size of Condor No. 213. –Q.B. Chapman’s long account condensed 13. Condor No. 2 was built in either 1846 or '47. Elisha Barringer, pilot on Condor No. 1 since 1840, was transferred to the new boat. Hitherto a steamboat's pilot house was not heated in wintertime, hence pilots often had to “bundle up" to keep warm. Pilot Barringer introduced an innovation that was warmly approved by all river pilots: He had a stove put in the pilot house of Condor No. 2. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 87 In the year 1849 The Pomeroy Coal Company contracted with James Jones for the opening of a new coal bank a short distance below the mouth of Sugar Run. The striking irridescence of the coal from the new bank suggested to someone the name of Peacock for that bank, and so it became the Peacock Bank. James Jones was the Peacock's first bank boss. In 1848 or '49 the Howe brothers' abandoned shovel factory was converted into a rolling mill by the recently organized Rolling Mill Company. Of that company V.B. Horton was president and C.R. Horton, Cyrus Grant, H.S. Horton and Martin Heckard were members. Martin Heckard was elected superintendent of the mill. Contractors John S. Davis and Samuel Morton were employed as pattern makers. By the spring of 1851 the several coal banks operating before the coming of P., S. &Co. do not appear any more in our references; the conclusion is that they were either defunct or of little importance. Horton & Pomeroy, or The Pomeroy Coal Company, by leasing the mines now belonging to “J.C. Wright et al,” was rapidly getting complete control of the coal business in the Horseshoe Bend. And so it appears that in spite of its "sorry appearance" in the spring of 1845, Pomeroy by the spring of 1851 was decidedly on the upgrade. Besides the Horton-Pomeroy coal business, the rolling mill and the boatyard, several other industries were flourishing again. The Union Mill Company's steam mill, bought by V.B. Horton in 1836, by Estes Howe in '38 (who replaced the log building with a frame and who is believed to have given it the name Coal Ridge), was taking on new life under the management of Aaron Murdock & Lewis Nye. The Glidden & Heckard Foundry, now owned by McAboy & Spalding, and R.R. Grant's Foundry below Sugar Run were both making "machinery of every kind, including steam engines." J.M. Miles's Tannery on Butternut street; David Geyer’s Lard Oil Factory and �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 88 Jenkins & Patten's Carding Machine, both on Sugar Run, the latter near the Court House- all these both old and new industries in 1851 considered themselves sufficiently important to make their existence known through the advertising pages of the Meigs County Telegraph (See below). New Mercantile Establishments had followed, nearly all of them locating in the new part of Pomeroy between Butternut and Sycamore streets. The four noted by O.B. Chapman in 1845 were now competing with a dozen or more new-comers. W.H. Remington had left the Flour Mill vicinity and from a large frame building (painted to imitate brick) on the west side of Front and Lind [sic] streets was advertising "Dry Goods, Groceries, Hardware, Iron Ware, Stone Ware, Queens Ware, Hats, Caps, Boots, Shoes, Window Glass, Looking Glasses, Clocks, Watches, Iron, Nails, Steel, Leather, Manila Ropes, Oils, Fish, Provisions, Cotton Yarns, Carpet Yarns, Carpets, Mill Saws, White Lime, Plaster Paris, &C, &C [sic]. N.B.--Molasses and Sugar direct from New Orleans, by the hoghead, barrel, half-barrel, or retail.” E.S. Edwards & Brother were now occupying the new building "at the stone bridge"-that is, on the east side of the mouth of Sugar Run, and were specializing in "Dry Goods, Silks watered and figured, Grenadines, Marinoes, Bonnet Silks and Satins, Jenny Lind Trimmings, Needle-Wrought Capes." But they sold also, "Hosiery, Lace Boots, Bonnets of all kinds and braids, Gloves, Garters, Cap Paper, Groceries, Powder (Blasting and Rifle), Plows, Nails, Teas," and various other things. On the west side of Court street, one door above Reed & Brother, L.S. Crofoot made "Saddles, Harness, Saddle Bags, Whips, Trunks and so forth.” Several doors farther up and on the same side of Court, Daniel Flannagin made "Boots and Shoes." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 89 On the east side of Court, about four doors from the corner and "at the sign of the Gold Watch," was George Lee's Watch Shop; between the Watch Shop and the corner was the Tailor Shop of L. Norgan & Brother and also O. Branch & Company's Dry Goods Store. On the east corner of Court and Front, Ralston & Stivers had opened their "Dry Goods Establishment"; two doors east of Ralston & Stivers on Front, Harrison Cohen sold “Ready Made Clothing,” besides "Dry Goods and Groceries." In part of the Cohen building J.P. Fleming had a Drug Store. Four doors farther east in the same block Darius Reed, who in 1848 had established Pomeroy's first drug store, was selling "Drugs and Medicines, Wholesale and Retail"; also Chemicals, Varnishes, Dyestuffs, Brushes, Surgical Instruments, Paper, Ink, Pens, Stationery" and "Choice Groceries." Recently he had added “2,000 pieces of Paper Hangings, 300 Oil and Paper Window Shades, consisting of [meaning decorated to simulate] Arches, Landscapes, and those Chinese and Gothic Orders." Adjoining the Cohen Clothing House, the new Bosworth Hotel, with its stables in the rear, was serving the travelling public; as was also the Riheldarfer (the former Morgan's Tavern) one door below the Remington Store. In the basement of the Riheldarfer Hotel "That Cheap Stove Man, Bill Prall," was "on hand again with the largest stock of stoves ever brought to this market…" Also, "Custom Made Tinware" was advertised by J.W. Prall. On the west side of the Riheldarfer, George Hossick sold "Foreign and Domestic Fruits, Nuts, Confectionary, Wholesale and Retail." On the east corner of Linn and Front (across from the Remington store) Andy Laubner had his "New Dry Goods and Grocery Store;" and “A few doors above Lind [sic] R.A. Sidebottom had opened his “New �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 90 Confectionary." Farther up, on the corner of Sycamore and Front, Mrs. P.E. Williams, Seamstress, did "all kinds of Sewing." Somewhere on Second street (exact location not given) Wendel Joachim was selling "Fresh Meat." On the second floor of a two-story dwelling house standing one door east of the Bosworth Hotel was the Printing Office. By the spring of that year of 1851, M.T. Van Horn had become sole owner of The Meigs County Times (see above) and had changed the name of the paper to THE MEIGS COUNTY TELEGRAPH. In the Telegraph's office the new firm of Davis & Morton, Builders & Contractors, had its headquarters. There were several other dwelling houses on Front street, an especially attractive one being the Samuel Halliday residence on the east side of the Edwards & Brother store, "near the stone bridge." All these buildings were wooden structures, most of them combinations of store-room and dwelling, with a high square front for sign-board uses. On the River shore at the foot of Court street, the recently established WHARF BOAT of James Martin "was newly fitted up" and was prepared to receive and to forward all kinds of goods, produce, &C [sic] up and down the River"; furthermore "families removing West" could be accommodated temporarily on board the new boat. And on the north side of Second street, perched on the hillside, from which it looked Riverward through the street that had been named for it when to town was laid out, stood the new brick edifice that had made possible a Greater Pomeroy: the MEIGS COUNTY COURTHOUSE, that had been erected during the fall and winter of 1845-46 under the supervision of Samuel Bergin. Branch's brickyard and Ben Knight’s, both on Sugar Run, had furnished the bricks and John Davis and Samuel M***, it is thought, did the carpenter work on the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 91 new structure. Just across Butternut street, on the hillside, stood the Thomas Irvin residence, approached from Front street through a beautifully kept avenue and from Butternut by a flight of stone steps. Farther down on Front was H.B. Smith's brick residence, still farther down the Marcus Bosworth residence and, R. Stevenson's "Mansion House" (see above) and several small dwellings. Somewhere below Butternut was the R.C. Grant Tannery, recently moved down from its original location above the rolling mill. An Ordinance of September, 1849 fixed a grade for that part of Front street extending "from Edwards' store [that is, from the stone bridge] to Lot 84;” also required lot owners of that part of Front street to construct and keep in repair sidewalks of wood, brick or stone, said walk to be of the same grade as that of the street. It is to be inferred from an item quoted farther on that wood was the material used by the great majority of said lot owners; and that some of them deferred the construction of their walks quite a long time; also, that after the walks were laid they were not always shown the proper amount of consideration by horses, buggies and carriages, thus making it necessary in November, 1859, for the Town Council to pass an "Ordinance to Protect Sidewalks" from the aforementioned powers of destruction. Keeping in repair the three County bridges that were within the town's limits (the Sugar Run, Nailor's Run and Kerr's Run bridges) required the passing of several tax-levying ordinances before 1851. The Sugar Run stone bridge (which was much lower than the grade established for that part of Front street) was provided with a sidewalk and railing. Ordinances for repairing the "county roads in the upper part of town" and for "improving the wharf, or public landing" also were passed. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 92 On May 22, 1849, as an aid in the administration of local government the Council divided the town into three wards, thus: The First Ward included all that portion lying east of the west line of Section 8; the Second Ward, all that portion between the west line of Section 8 and the east line of Town Lot 2- which line coincided with Spring street on the town map; the Third Ward, all that section extending from the east line of Lot 2 to the west corporation line. As a business center the First Ward was now reduced to second or third place. William Prall still made coffins at Kerr's Run, his shop had become an "Undertaking Establishment"; John Strider and Capt. Edmund Williamson (one of the Waggener’s Bottom Williamsons) supplied the First Ward households with groceries and dry goods, the Captain specializing in New Orleans Molasses whenever he brought it by the hundred barrels or more from the Crescent City on his return trips. Benjamin Stivers, Blacksmith, a few doors below the Nye Saw Mill," advertised also Buggies for sale. Second Ward business men found the vicinity of the infant Rolling Mill a good location. H.B. Smith had been advertising "Dry Goods, Groceries, Coal Stoves, Flour, Cider (Curtis's Best), Shoe Findings," and other things in the "first house above the Rolling Mill," since 1849. And "on the corner above the Rolling Mill," O.B. Chapman now (1851) operated-and doubtless owned-Pomeroy's first "Magnetic Telegraph Office." Schaeffer’s Brewery, also in the vicinity of the rolling mill, had been in operation there since 1847 or '48. The Cabinet Shop of John Probst, in the west end of the Second Ward, had grown to be the "John Probst & Company Chair Factory and Cabinet Ware House,” and was advertising "Articles Made to Order, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 93 Marble Top Furniture, Conversation Chairs, Reception Chairs, Ottomans," and also "Coffins of every Description manufactured promptly to the Time." "Near the Nailor's Run Bridge" was also the small store of William McAboy. But H.S. Horton's general merchandise store appears to have disappeared from Mt. Lookout. COALPORT, the name including, by the spring of 1851, the entire western end of The Narrows-from Monkey Run to Rutland Road-was now the high spot of King Coal's activities. In it were the two mines controlled by Horton & Pomeroy-or, The Pomeroy Coal Company- namely, the one on Lot 304 and V.B. Horton's Diamond Hollow mine. Near the former was the Company's general merchandise store, under the management of V.B. Horton's brother Thayer Horton; also Duncan Sloan's store "near Coalport Landing." Down near the Diamond mine C.W. Cooper & Company advertised their general merchandise store. AT MIDDLEPORT there was one coal mine at least; this is clearly indicated by two deeds, each dated January 18, 1844. In one of those deeds Philip Jones made over to his son-in-law Oliver Grant a part of 100-acre Lot 312 (on which stood the Jones-Grant Flouring Mill), and also the undivided half of "the coal in the bank for the use of the house of said Grant and for the use of the mill… and also a Right of Way in common with John and C.W.T. Grant… from the Mill to the Coal Bank in such place as shall be agreed upon by both parties." By the second deed “Thompson and John Grant" are made owners, for the sum of $2,349, of the "undivided half of Lot 312… also coal in the bank for the use of said mill and dwelling for twenty years, also undivided half of the blacksmith shop…” The coal bank mentioned in the first deed probably was the one operated by John Fisher soon after he migrated with his wife from England to Middleport in 1845. One of the Philip Jones descendants �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 94 told this writer that "Grandfather didn't know how to get the coal out of the hill till an Englishman named John Fisher showed him." This, we think, confirms the opinion that very, little, if any, coal was sold from the Jones bank before John Fisher took charge of it. He it was, evidently, who laid the track to the River- the track recalled by one reminiscer. By the spring of 1851 Middleport had also a Cotton Factory, a five story brick building "with tapering roof and a spire," which Philip Jones had put up in 1847 a short distance northeast of the flour mill. The town had also Philip Jones's recently founded BRICKYARD, where the bricks for the factory were made. Middleport's first business street was RUTLAND ROAD. On that road by 1847 were located the general merchandise stores of H.R. Wilson, A.M. Barlow, George Womeldorff; and also Hugh Kennedy's Drug Store. On the corner of Rutland Road and First street stood Jacob Fultz’s Inn. By the spring of 1851 Middleport's business center had spread to Main street and to Front. On the corner of Main and Front were located the Wholesale Grocers E.H. & A. Stedman; on Front were J.W. & W.C. Eagle, Wholesale and Retail Grocers; also on Front was the Wholesale and Retail Drug Store of Dr. I.N. Davis. On the corner of Coal and Front streets stood J.W. Mathews's newly built Hotel. Not yet incorporated, Middleport still was part of Sheffield in the public mind; the Grant mill still was called “Sheffield Mill.” Business competitors in Sheffield proper, if any in '51, did not make their business known through the county newspaper. Only Charles Maddy, Dentist and Physician, did so. In a spacious advertisement Dr. Maddy described all the many and varied services he was ready to render "in his home in Sheffield." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 95 By spring of 1851, therefore, business and industry may be said to have had a good foundation in the Horseshoe Bend. The demand for coal by the "towns this side of the Falls of the Ohio" and also by steamboats plying the River, had grown greater rapidly. The increased output of coal thus made necessary drew to The Bend experienced English, German, Scotch, and Welsh miners-especially Welsh. This growing population called in turn for more mercantile and other minor businesses. "In 1850 the population of Pomeroy and its immediate vicinity [on the Ohio side] was 3,480”-so wrote V.B. Horton in 1853 (see below). Also beyond the Bend, eight, ten, and more miles up in the main part of the Boot-shaped Bend, on the Ohio side, business had a foot-hold. There was Graham Station with the Flour Mill of Robert Campbell and Jeremiah J. Petral; M.C. Greenlee’s Chair, Cabinet and Tailor Shop "in a corner house in the most public part of Graham Station"; and Robert Sidebottom’s Coverlid and Carpet-Weaving Establishment; its Lucius Cross Store (moved in from the farm); and with its “Many Citizens" signing a petition to present to the next Ohio Legislature for a new name, the name RACINE. (The petition was granted early in 1852 and on the following July 24, the name of the town's post office also was changed to Racine, with Jeremiah Petral as first postmaster.) Then there was Antiquity Mills in the narrows two miles above Racine. Those narrows long had been called Antiquity because of the pictured rock along their shore-pictures believed by some early traveler to have been the work of an ancient race of men. About 1842 or '43 young William Harpold, fifth son of pioneer Adam Harpold, came from Letart bottoms to Antiquity narrows and built a sawmill. By the spring of ’51 William Harpold had married Susan Bibbee �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 96 of Apple Grove (just east of Letart Falls) and had prospered to such a degree that he owned also a grist-mill, twenty-eight acres of land eighteen of which were cleared, an orchard of 125 trees of grafted fruit, and a boatyard. He had also six dwelling houses on his farm, the houses built presumably for his employees on the farm, at the mills and at his boatyard on the River shore. Each of these and several still smaller business centers farther up the River had its own boat landing- which was merely an opening in the dense mass of tangled vines and shrubs and trees along the shore, the opening having been made at a place supposedly deep enough to permit a steamboat to land. The second group of changes effected in the stage's setting by the Zeitgeist comes under the head of CREATURE COMFORTS The one-room, round-log cabin continued in use here and there in the Boot-shaped Bend until well in the 1830s. The Abraham Joachim family when it came to Pomeroy in 1837 moved into a one-room cabin out on Sugar Run. Even hollow trees were not yet passe in 1830; in that year the noted Kerr sycamore below Kerr's Run was the abode of the Decker family: father, mother and two children, the latter having been born in the "house not made with hands"- -quoting Mrs. McIntyre, who, when she was still Betty Williamson knew the Decker family well. To most Boot-shaped Bend settlers even a slight degree of prosperity brought with it the desire to live more comfortably-that is, the desire for BETTER DWELLINGS. The one-room cabin might be enlarged by one or more additions; or perhaps a new two-story hewed-log house with well-made fireplace took the place of the cabin. The first frame building in the boot-shaped bend is said to have �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 97 been erected near the Graham Station settlement (Ohio’s) in 1808, but the first frame residence in the Horseshoe Bend is known to have been built by Philip Jones in 1826. In his own forest that enterprising pioneer farmer felled and rough-hewed trees and at his treadmill on the River's bank sawed them into shape. Then he went to Marietta, bought all the necessary planed wood, made it into a raft and floated it down to his farm. The site selected for the new dwelling was near the River and also his farm's southern boundary- on the not-yet-imagined town of Middleport's First street (1847 plat). There Mr. Jones himself built a two-story house with a long one-story extension at the back, two rooms in the second story. There were also two side porches. When the house was completed people came from miles away, even from Chester, to see the new wonder and to pass judgment upon it. Some thought the house would be freezing cold in winter and roasting hot in summer; others were sure it would be blown away by the first strong wind. Still others wondered what the Jones family [Mr. Jones, wife, nine daughters, one son, several motherless nieces and nephews] would do with so many rooms! All seemed to agree with the wag who dubbed the new-style dwelling “Jones's Folly."14 14. This description is based on that of Mrs. Hudson in her "Personal Recollections." (See SOURCE MATERIAL.) Nonetheless it was only a very short time until others were risking the dangers of the frame dwelling. Only two years later, Samuel Grant had a two-story frame residence built on or near the site of his log cabin; this was the first frame house in Pomeroy. About the same time Ben Knight had such a dwelling put up on the east side of the Union Mill Company's flouring mill; Major Dill and Col. Nye each replaced his log cabin near Kerr's Run with a commodious frame �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 98 residence. Others were rapidly following suit. Evidently it was because Pomeroy's two steam saw-mills (Union Mill Co. & P., S & CO.) could more easily and rapidly supply the strong timbers for the frameworks that after the early 1830s not only dwellings but stores in The Narrows were for the most part frame structures. V.B. Horton’s above -mentioned "Butternut Cottage" was dubbed "shanty" by one reminiscer; the inference is that it was an "up-and -down" plank or clapboard house. But Mr. Horton's second residence, built about 1840; the S.W. Pomeroy residence; the C.R. Pomeroy, H.S Horton and the two Howe residences (locations given above) were each substantially built frames. Their builders probably were John McMaster with his apprentices Robert Winkleblack and Wendel Kautz or the partners John Davis & Samuel Morton, who had become Pomeroy's prominent builders and contractors during this decade. (Since there was as yet no planing mill in The Bend it is presumed that all planed wood still had to be brought from distant points.) The Virginians across the River were not so ready to discard logs as building material. The John Brown dwelling, built in the early 1840s on the Brown farm directly across from Pomeroy, was a "two-storied, hewed-log house forty feet long with a partition through the middle, a brick chimney at each end and a porch the whole length of the house”just a very large-size double cabin, it appears–John Sehon's home on his 1000-acre farm in the upper part of Waggener's Bottom was a log structure, either a new one or one of the vacated Waggener dwellings remodeled. The first brick residence in the boot-shaped bend quit probably was the one built by Michael Siegrist (see above). Information found in Mrs. McIntyre's reminiscences, namely, that the Siegrist brick house "had port holes, having been built when the Indians �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 99 still roamed," supports the opinion that it was built very soon after Mr. Siegrist bought his first 100 acres from the Reverend William Graham. If so, the bricks for the house were probably brought from the East. The aforementioned brick house built by Hamilton Kerr below Leading Creek was sold in 1826 by Mr. Kerr's widow to Melzar Nye, brother of Kerr's Run's new storekeeper Col. Nial Nye. In the attic of the Kerr brick house the Nye family found a large sign-board with a bald eagle painted on one side and the sign, "Kerr's Hotel," the other. Evidently the erstwhile scout and later farmer had been also an inn-keeper before he died. A brick school house at Graham Station (Ohio side) is mentioned in several sources. In the year 1825 the voting place in Sutton Township was changed from Soloman Wolfe's dwelling house to “the brick school house at Graham Station," writes one; another says, "I attended school a short time at the brick school house at Graham Station about 1832." Mention is made also of "Jacob Wolfe's new brick house, the first of its kind in Graham Station," as one of the residences in Sutton Township in 1832. Circumstantial evidence points to Randall Stivers as the man who made the bricks for the school house and also as the first skilled brickmaker in the Boot-shaped Bend. Mr. Stivers was a brickmaker by trade. On his way from New York to the West in 18l6, he stopped at Graham Station with the raft of pine lumber on which he was travelling with his family, and remained there two years to make bricks. (So wrote a contributor to Larkins's Meigs County Pioneer History.) During the 1840s, brickyards, and consequently brick buildings, became more common. About 1844 or '45 Philip Jones, on one of his several trips to Cincinnati, brought back with him a skilled brick- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 100 maker to start a brickyard for him. After the proper kind of clay was found and the brickyard was ready to operate, Mr. Jones had a New York architect to draw a plan for a brick residence. The house when finished was a handsome two-story structure "with double porches around three sides; and every window opened out on the porch, through French doors. Like all Eastern houses, this one had no front yard and a very small back yard,” writes Mrs. Hudson in her “Personal Recollect ions." The house stood near the River, not far from the Jones frame house. It was promptly styled "Jones’s Mansion" by the admiring public. It was about this same time that Philip Jones had his five-story factory built-the one to which reference was made in the section on New Business Ventures. In the early 1840s Peter Root, shoemaker, had a small brick building erected on what in that period was Middleport’s First street. The building was used as a shoe-making shop. Franklin Downing in the later 1840s made bricks and constructed with them a residence with a store-room in front. This building was on the corner of the First and Main streets of the 1840s. With three brickyards known to have been established within the limits of Pomeroy before the year 1851, those of Joseph Branch and Ben Knight on Sugar Run and Thomas Goulding's near Kerr's Run, the county seat must have had a liberal sprinkling of brick structures by 1851. Yet, only three besides the Court House were definitely located by this researcher: a two-room brick school house on Second street between Court and Linn streets, north side; H.B. Smith's brick residence on Front, some distance below Sugar Run; and the foundry building of Glidden & Heckard (McAboy & Spalding by 1851) A possible, even probable, fourth brick structure was Richard Stevenson's �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 101 hotel, or so-called "Mansion House," somewhere on Front street below Sugar Run. On the Virginia side of the boot-shaped bend not another brick structure beside the above-described Siegrist residence could be discovered. INTERIOR DECORATING found its first expression in the festooning of the otherwise bare cabin walls with fantastic strings of dried peppers, dried apples, dried pumpkins and dried bouquets of medicinal herbs. “As time went on," wrote Mrs. McIntyre, "the women made band-boxes and other containers of braided straw and hickory sprouts, ornamenting them with geometric designs colored with pokeberry juice or dragon's blood. And still later came husk rugs and braided mats for the floors." Made-to-order Furniture probably did not come into general use until William McMaster opened his cabinet shop above Nailor's Run in the late 1830s. By the middle of the next decade (1840s), William Prall, cabinet-maker, was advertising his Kerr's Run shop in the Weekly Times; and very soon afterwards John Probst was doing the same thing for his cabinet business just begun near the mouth of Nailor's Run. Much of the furniture in V.B. Horton' s new residence (1838 or '39) came from Cincinnati, as did also the six chairs "covered with black horsehair" that were bought by Philip Jones for his new brick house during the middle '40s (see above). Still holding its own from earlier days was the trundle bed, "two for all the children, no matter how many;" but its base, and also that of the big bedstead if it was a home-made one, had been made more springy by the substitution of a network of stout cords, or ropes, in place of clapboards. Still standing just outside the kitchen door of many homes was the wooden bench with its tin wash basin on it for the ablutions of the whole family. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 102 Pine knots and home-made tallow candles had few if any rivals before 1840. Here, also, Philip Jones was one of the innovators. "Grandfather on one of his trips to Cincinnati," wrote Mrs. Hudson, “had brought home two wonderful lamps and a barrel of oil, which were the first oil lamps in Meigs county. People came miles to see them… They stood on each side of the mantel of the brick house, which was very high, with cupboards on each side from ceiling to floor. The oil bowl was very large and all around it hung beautiful glass prisms that showed the prismatic colors.” It is almost inconceivable that V.B. Horton did not have oil lamps in the handsome new residence he had built in the late 1830s; but definite corroborative statements regarding them are wanting. Lamp "chimnies" [sic] were advertised by Flemming, a Pomeroy druggist, very early in 1851, hence oil lamps must have been fairly common by that time. FARM LIFE during this period is lucidly depicted in a letter written in 1878 by Mrs. Lura Weldon, a daughter of Philip Jones, to Mrs. Hudson's mother, Mrs. Will Probst. Mrs. Weldon says that while her father worked out in the field with the hired hands his nine daughters helped their mother with the cooking and sewing and spinning and weaving and the several other little tasks incident to farm life at that time, "Every morning,” she wrote, "mother would plan and share out the day's work, one to spin, others to pick wool-oh, how we hated that work! -some to weave. Polly [the oldest daughter, the later Mrs. Oliver Grant] "cooked, made butter, picked geese, worked in the garden, sewed. Patty wove the woolen blankets and yard goods for the winter clothing, the linen sheets and table -cloths, also carpets, from carpet-rags sewed by the others, no idle hands were allowed in that home! --except the only son's." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 103 On the other large farms on the Ohio side of the boot-shaped bend the Lucius Cross farm back of Graham Station, the Roush, Alexander, Sayre, Harpold, and other farms in the Letart bottoms- the daughters, if there were any, probably spent their time in much the same way as did the Jones girls. But on the Virginia side, at the Warth farm below Ravenswood, the Sehon and McDaniel and Waggener farms across the River from Kerr's Run, the main responsibility of the "women-folks" was the training and supervising of the house-hold slaves---a by no means easy task. Things that were considered luxuries during the first fifteen or twenty years became household necessities after the TRADE BOATS on their annual trips down the River began stopping at one or more of the little boot-shaped bend settlements. By and by the arrival of the socalled boat-store became a sort of holiday especially for those who lived several miles distant. As soon as the spring weather became settled enough for the boat to start on its down-River trip, the people in The Bend began to listen for the bugle call (or conch-shell call perhaps), by which the boat owner announced his coming. Then women and men would flock to the landing---Cross's or Nye's or Jones's-with their baskets or sacks of produce, to be used as money, and spend the greater part of the day laying in a summer's or winter's supply of groceries, dry goods, crockery, china ware, cutlery, boots, shoes, hats, caps, and all the various other wares the boat carried. The opening of Nial Nye’s store at Kerr’s Run in 1826 (see above) although it “kept only the necessities of life, including tobacco," was a welcome addition to the boat store. Then when Horace S. Horton opened his general merchandise store at Point Lookout in 1834 and VanDuyn & Smith opened a similar one at Sheffield in '37, the inhabitants of the entire �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 104 Horseshoe Bend, both sides of the River, still had their going-tostore days. Once a year the storekeeper got a new stock of goods, by steamboat; and on the day the goods came, even for several days afterward, the store was filled with customers. Few, if any of them, left the store without an ample supply of New Orleans molasses (along with a load of other goods) which had become a household necessity. By 1851 there were enough stores on the Ohio side of the bend, from Sheffiled to Letart Falls (called Letartsville by some), to meet the needs of the inhabitants on the Virginia side as well as of those on their own side. These were all general-merchandise stores, the Edwards Brothers' store at Pomeroy being a notable exception. It sold only dry goods. GOING TO MILL became a periodical necessity after mills were sufficiently numerous and accessible. Higley’s Mill up Leading Creek, Stedman’s at Chester, Wright's Mills eight or ten miles up Mill Creek, Virginia, the Floating Mill at Letart Falls-one of the other of these could be reached by any Bend settler. The trip to Stedman's or to Wright's had to be made by wagon or on horseback over roads that were almost impassable. At the mills each arrival had to wait his turn, which waiting kept him sometimes till far into the night or the next morning. The trip to Letart Falls, thought likewise long and tiresome for some, as on the whole really enjoyable, if the Waggener journey described by Mrs. McIntyre was typical. In October of 1816 Major Waggener with a little company of neighbors (doubtless from the Ohio side, as he had no Virginia neighbors at that time), made a trip to the Letart Floating Mill. Clad in homespun suits and hickory shirts, armed with guns and accompanied by dogs, the party set out in birch and poplar �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 105 canoes laden with corn. At the mill they met other pioneers and "after disposing of an enormous corn pone, accompanied by sweet milk proffered by a Mr. Wolfe, who either owned the mill or had an interest in it,” the men exchanged views, asked questions, told anecdotes of border life-of hunting and trapping, tales of Indian massacres, heroic deeds of frontier life, the story of Mad Ann Bailey, etc., the "magic circle of tobacco juice" growing larger and ever larger. This is the only instance found in this writer's sources of a trip to the Floating Mill. Soon after that trip, however, settlers from Waggener's Bottom and from up Leading Creek are discovered going to the tread mill, or horse-power mill, of Timothy Smith a few miles below the Creek. In the year 1820 Betty Williamson, then twelve years old, made a journey from her home in Waggener's Bottom to the Smith mill, accompanied only by a younger brother. The need for that trip was occasioned by the illness of Betty's father, mother and an older brother. "Wheaten" biscuits being regarded by the Virginians as almost indispensable in cases of sickness, it appears to have devolved upon Betty to secure some wheat flour. Therefore she loaded a bushel of wheat and her little brother into a canoe, paddled down to the Smith Mill17 and had the wheat ground into flour. When it is recalled The Bend at that time was still an almost unbroken wilderness where in "owls could be heard hooting in the day time," that little girl’s undertaking is seen to have been a very brave one15. 15. James M. Evans in his History of Meigs County (Hardesty) tells how this mill caused Timothy Smith's financial ruin. Smith had bought the machinery for the mill on time from a Cincinnati firm. When he called for his notes the firm claimed to have lost them; then several years afterwards it sued Smith for payment. After long litigation Mr. Smith had to pay not only for the mill but for the accumulated interest on the debt. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 106 "Sometimes," Mrs. McIntyre writes, "our grain was taken in saddle_ bags on horseback to Hogg's wind-mill back of Eight Mile Island [in the "Lower Flats”]. That was a still longer journey and especially dangerous in bad weather." With the advent of the Union Steam Mill Company's flouring mill at Grantsburgh (see above) and of George Bell’s steam saw-and-grist mill back of Graham Station about 1832, the water mills and treadmills soon passed out of the scene. Michael Zirkel's steam mill, built in the "Dutch Flats" in 1836, received most of the patronage of Virginia farmers thereafter, it is thought. FOOD, like everything else, gradually improved. Hot cakes (buckwheat or corn) with New Orleans molasses, salt pork and coffee (home-roasted, home-ground) constituted the ordinary breakfast as late as 1840. The spring fever prevailing after the winter's daily menus of "hog and hominy," fried mush, corn bread and butter, with such dried fruits as wild grapes, wild plums, crab apples16-and no 16. Johnny Appleseed, famed apple-tree-planting mystic of the 1820s is known to have landed his canoe in The Bend several times to plant apple trees along The Bend's public highway. To what extent the fruit of those trees was used was not told in our sources. vegetables-was combatted with a course of rhubarb root or blue mass and calomel. "Salt-rising" bread and salaratus biscuits, the earliest wheatflour luxuries in homes of Eastern and of Southern origin respectively, became more common as mills increased in number in the Boot-shaped Bend. Farmers began raising more wheat when the difficulty of getting it ground into flour was thus gradually overcome. "In 1837," wrote George Joachim (see SOURCE MATERIAL). "my mother baked bread in a big skillet before an old-fashioned fireplace." An so did many other mothers. But a few stoves had appeared by that time and by the end of ??? every substantial home had �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 107 in it a cooking stove. Bakers' advertisements in the 1851 Meigs County Telegraph (see Act II.) listed foreign and domestic fruits along with bread and cakes; while as far back as September, 1846, The Meigs County Times had contained the following advertisement: "R. Stevenson, Dealer in ICE, at the Mansion House." By 1851, at the latest, both the food itself and the methods of preparation had started toward more wholesome standards in the homes of the more prosperous farmers and townspeople. SUGAR appears to have been one of the Waggener Colony's first problems. The horseback journey to Point Pleasant, their nearest shopping place, proved to be "weary and perilous, supplies costly…a four-pound block of loaf sugar costing one dollar." Archibald Williamson decided to find a substitute for the expensive sugar loaf. Shouldering his ax one morning in the spring of 1816, he started out with his dog to find a maple grove. On the hillside at the end of the lane leading out from his cabin, directly opposite Kerr's Run, he found such a grove. During the next few days he, with the aid of a slave or two, fashioned trees into troughs to be placed at the foot of the trees, bored holes obliquely into the trees, then inserted elder stalks into the holes. And “soon the maple's blood sweetly from its veins was flowing," wrote poetically inclined "Pioneer's Daughter" for her Grandmother McIntyre. From the troughs the sap was emptied into a large kettle under which a brisk fire burned. When the sap reached the consistency of syrup some of it was taken out to be used in that form on the table, some to be made into vinegar. The rest was boiled down and poured into moulds to crystallize into maple sugar. Farmers and settlers who did not own maple groves were likely to take up sugar camps on unoccupied land. During the 1820s and ‘30s �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 108 several such "squatter camps" were in operation every spring in the various narrows on the Ohio side of the boot-shaped bend and possibly on the Virginia side as well. By 1851 New Orleans molasses and sugar had replaced, or at least was on par with, the maple tree product in town homes; not granulated sugar, however, nor even the light brown sugar of the 1870s and '80s; it was dark brown raw sugar or at best the loaf sugar that graced the tables of the Waggeners when they came West in 1815. LIQUOR, in colonial days one of life's necessities, continued to be so regarded in the Boot-shaped Bend until well into the 1830s. Every man's home was an inn, in a sense; travelers not only were made welcome but were sure to find a demijohn or a jug of brandy or old rye or other liquor offered to quench their thirst. This was notably true of the Virginia planters' homes across the River, more notably true of Major Waggener's home. The Major entertained extravagantly; his home was rarely without guests from Point Pleasant, Lower Flats, or elsewhere. To keep his table well supplied with fine liquors and other viands he made a yearly trip to Baltimore. But the Major's outlay for entertaining and for the feeding and clothing of his slaves was much greater than his income from his land; and so, in a few years he began "eating up his slaves” as observing neighbors were wont to say whenever the Major sold a slave, valued at l,000 or more, just before starting on a trip to the East. Finally, in the year, 1822, when his peach crop was unusually abundant, Major Waggener, "in a spirit of economy," decided to set up a still and make his own brandy. The place selected for the still was an unused acre of cleared ground directly opposite Kerr's Run. The Major rented a "worm" from Captain Van Sickle at Lower Flats, then had Archibald Williamson make the tube and set up the apparatus. “With his usual la??-heartedness” he invited all �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 109 his neighbors to bring their fruit and make it into brandy in his still free of charge. "Thus was the first still planted on our banks by a good man with a good object; and, though it remained only one season, its effects are felt even at this day [April 6,1898]” lamented Mrs. McIntyre. The following record, found among Levi Stedman's papers after his death and included in Larkins's Pioneer History of Meigs County, is evidence of the fact that there were other methods and other sources available for securing liquor besides going East or making one's own: "Aug. 29, 1820. Order from M. Siegrist to Mr. Levi Stedman, Shade River, Ohio. Let Thomas Haywalt have three gals of Whiskey in exchange for Rye to be delivered at Ferry and oblige Yours Resp'y Michael Siegrist Mason, Va” (Thus the note appears in the Larkins book. It is quite safe to assume, however, that the original was not so well provided with punctuation marks and properly placed capital letters.) Mrs. McIntyre tells also of a unique drink made by James Roseberry, who lived in the narrows where in later years was opened by Thomas & Foley coal bank and the West Columbia post office (see above). Mr. Roseberry gathered the ripe pawpaws from the pawpaw thickets that covered the river-banks of those narrows, let them ferment in the sun and at a certain stage of fermentation obtained from them pawpaw beer. This beer he often distilled into pawpaw brandy. The Temperence Movement which set in about 1830 was not long in reaching the boot-shaped bend. By 1851 it had worked a change in the drinking habits17 of the region, some details of which are given farther on in this Act. 17. See Howe's Historical Collections of Ohio, Vol. II., pp. 827 a 828 for a humorous yet highly illuminating dissertation on OLD-TIME DRINKING HABITS. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 110 CLOTHING.-"Fifty years ago pure enjoyment was to kill a fat buck or turkey during the day, grind corn for supper or breakfast on a handmill in the early evening, put on one's best pantaloons and mocassins, visit a pretty barefooted young woman dressed in copperas-colored petticoat and short gown and be welcomed with a smile,"- thus reminisced Amos Dunham, President of the Pioneer Meeting at Rutland on July the Fourth, 1851. Those of Mr. Dunham's listeners whose minds' eyes could look back to those early years doubtless marveled at the progress made since then. They could see themselves gradually, very gradually, replacing their worn-out garments of buckskin and deerskin and homespun with suits and dresses made of factory-woven cloth and with "custom-made" boots and shoes. If Randall Stivers was there and wearing the high, broad-brimmed "stove-pipe" hat of the day, he may have recalled with mirth that the first hat he ever wore was made of pig-skin. Elizabeth Williamson (by that time living near West Columbia as Mrs. McIntyre) might have been there, too; but if so, the sixteen-dollar Leghorn hat she had brought from the old Virginia home, though seldom worn and long kept in one of the home-made bandboxes, certainly by now had been considered too old-fashioned and had been replaced by one of the coalscuttle bonnets of the 1840s. The New Style Clothing was made available in some degree by the boat-store; then later in a much greater degree by the local storekeeper. In the September 9, 1846 number of The Meigs County Times appeared the advertisements of: H. Adkins, Tailor; H. McCann, Boot & Shoe Factory [so-styled]; Hecox & Russell, General Merchants; Mrs. Riheldarfer, Millinery. All these businesses were located in Pomeroy (but no addresses were given). By 1851 the number had grown as indicated in the section, New Business Ventures (see above): and �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 111 besides, Gody's Lady's Book, the renowned Eastern authority on the period’s fashions for women, was procurable in Pomeroy (though the announcement thereof does not state where); so that women who could afford to buy Edwards Brothers' elegant silks and satins, also could have them made up in the latest styles. They could learn, too, whether the capes and shawls-the latter worn by men, also—that the Edwards store advertised were of the most up-to-date materials and designs. MAIL SERVICE.-Speaking of Gody's, the Editor's item calling attention to that magazine's many attractive features (the item included also Graham's Magazine) may have been intended merely to advertise the Editor's own acquaintance with such publications. Mailing facilities at that time were not such as to encourage the circulation of magazines in the Boot-shaped Bend. Postage still was rated not on distance but on the number of sheets of paper. Publishers of periodicals had to pay l 1/2 cents per sheet for every hundred miles their publications were sent. Letter-writing, too, was expensive. In 1831 the rates established for a letter composed of one sheet of paper were: 6¢ for thirty miles; 10¢ for eighty miles; 12¢ for 150 miles; 18¢ for 400 miles; 25¢ for any distance over 400 miles. Envelopes, however, cost nothing for they were not in existence. The paper on which the letter was written made its own envelope by being doubled up and sealed with a wafer. If a sender of a letter prepaid the postage, the postmaster wrote "Paid" on the letter or stamped it with a hand stamp of perhaps his own make. When the postage was not prepaid- and usually it was not-then the amount due was marked on the letter and the sendee had to pay it before he could get his letter. As there was �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 112 almost no money in circulation, the barter system being still prevalent, the payment of a mere one-page letter sometimes caused great inconvenience. Business men, especially, experienced much annoyance. On one occasion V.B. Horton had to spend nearly a week raising the twentyfive cents postage due on an important business letter. In 1847 the Federal Government issued adhesive stamps for the payment of postage; but their use was not made compulsory in that year, nor for several years. (See next Act). The earliest method of mail distribution through Ohio has been shown in Footnote 4, of Underground Call. By 1840 two other important roads connected the River with the East; the James River & Kanawha Turnpike and the Northwestern Turnpike, the former tapping the Ohio River at Guyandotte and the latter at Parkersburg. Steamboats were used by some mail contractors for distributing mail from those points but no steamers brought mail to the Boot-shaped Bend. The first bridle-path through the Horseshoe Bend, due to P, S & Co. developments, was passable to vehicles by 1838 and in several deeds was called the Marietta Post Road. But no basis could be found for concluding that mail came directly to The Bend from Marietta; it still came indirectly from Athens. But Pomeroy by this time was a distributing office for the whole Boot-shaped trend. (More on this in next Act). Early Post Offices were simple affairs. A letter appearing in Brick Pomeroy's Denver paper, The Great West, on February 16, 1881, (and copied in The Telegraph), said of the Nyesville post office and its first postmaster: "The old colonel would adjust his 'specs', empty out the contents of an old basket on the store counter and ask you to assist among the few letters and papers to see if there was any mail for you." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 113 The name of The Narrows' post office was changed from Nyesville to Pomeroy on October 29, 1840, but the office was not moved down town until James Ralston became postmaster in 1844. From that time on until the Fire of '51 (see Act II.), Pomeroy people called for their mail at the Ralston & Stivers store on the east corner of Front and Court streets. By that time, presumably, the Pomeroy office had advanced beyond the basket stage of Col. Nye’s day. Mails came more frequently but were not yet daily occurrences; and they still came over the old land routes. The Athens & Pomeroy Stage Coach Line brought the mail from the interior over the Athens Road, which at that time passed through Sugar Run. The Pittsburgh & Cincinnati Packet Line’s boats (see farther on) carried mail but only to the few large distributing offices. Before the Salisbury office was moved from the mouth of Leading Creek to Sheffield (supposedly by Elias Cole in 1839; see Footnote, Act II.), the Jones, Smith, Behan and several other families living up that way had a box fastened somewhere along the River road for the depositing of incoming and outgoing mail; and travelers passing by the box on their way to and from the Salisbury office obligingly took care of the neighborhood mail. On the South side of the Boot-shaped Bend there were in 1851 only two post offices; namely, West Columbia and Ravenswood18. Virginians who lived too far from either one, used the nearest Ohio office for their mailing addresses when they needed one. 18. Ravenswood was a prosperous little town lying in the George Washington 6843-acre tract (See above), hence were wholly outside of the coal and salt strata. The town had been founded in 1835 or '36 by two of Washington's six grand-nieces, who were his only heirs. THE RIVER.--Just as the Ohio river itself was the Sine Qua Non in the Boot-shaped Bend's settling, so also was the steamboat a necessary factor in the industrial period's oncoming. Yet, it must be �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 114 kept in mind that the flatboat, keelboat, pirogue and similar craft did not depart from the scene immediately upon the steamboat's advent. As late as 1829 the Union Mill Company brought its steam engine from Maysville, Ky., on a pirogue even though eight men and two weeks' time were required to do so. The smaller coal exporters sent their coal to market in flatboats, or coalboats, during practically the whole third and fourth decades of the 19th century. V.B. Horton himself was slow in discarding completely the hand-propelled boats after he had put the Condor into service. Coalboats were made large enough and supposedly strong enough to carry from 5,000 to 6,000 bushels of coal (one source says some carried 10,000 bushels). They were provided with long sweeps, or oars, for keeping the boat in the channel, and a caboose for kitchen and bedroom use. Usually two boats were lashed side by side and operated by the same crew-pilots, cooks, "hands”-ten or twelve in all. Daniel Dewolf, who piloted flatboats for V.B. Horton three years, wrote of Mr. Horton (in the Pomeroy Leader, Feb. 18, 1897,) that he far outdid his competitors in the matter of providing comforts for his men, such as tents of the best waterproof material, stoves, cots, stools, etc. When the boat reached its destination Mr. Horton's first command was: "Boys, tear the shanty down." “Tents, stoves, cots, were shipped back to Pomeroy on the first up-river packet. The men chose their own way of returning-which often was on that same packet. From 1838 until the Condor No. 2 was ready for service (about 1853?) the first Condor was used by the Pomeroy Coal Company for transporting coal. By l846 it was towing-still literally towing,-from four to six loaded coalboats, or barges19, down to Cincinnati and from �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 115 19. The coalboats, being larger and stronger than flatboats, were often called barges. But the "boats or barges" said by Howe to have been used by the Condor in '46 could not have been coalboats, since the latter were hand-propelled. Evidently they were the coal barge used in the latter 19th century, for the first builder of which see below. eight to twelve empties back, making the round trip in a week and consuming 2,000 bushels of coal in the process. About twenty-five barges were employed by the Company, each averaging perhaps 4,000 bushels of coal (see Howe, Vol. II., page 215). Not long after V.B. Horton put his new method of transporting coal by steamboat into operation, Pittsburgh coal operators got wind of it. They ridiculed the idea, didn't believe it could be done; or if it could, it would be at great risk and loss. Curiosity brought some of them down to Pomeroy to see for themselves. And when they saw, they knew they were right-as far as sending coal out from Pittsburgh by the new method was concerned. They saw that transporting coal by steamboat was not for the Upper Ohio River; that its narrowness, its swifter current, its many little islands and other obstructions would indeed present risks that no Pittsburgh shipper was yet prepared to take. But some time during the third decade the United States Government began to do something in the way of removing some of the thousand obstructions in the River, and by the middle of the next decade had accomplished enough to make navigation of the Upper Ohio at least seem less dangerous. In addition, boat-builders had begun during the 1830s to make larger and stronger steamboats with greatly improved machinery; and steamboat captains and pilots and mates (most of them ex-flatboat men and ex-keelboatmen) had begun to realize that a knowledge of how a steamboat engine works was necessary for its successful operation. And so, encouraged by this general progress �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 116 One Pittsburgh shipper in 1845 sent the Walter Forward out from Pittsburg with several boats in tow for the down-River markets. This was the first coal ever shipped out from that city by steamboat. Other steamers followed the Forward but not yet in remarkably great numbers. When V.B. Horton came to The Narrows on horseback in the late 1820s he probably did not use that method of travel with the conscious purpose of casting reflections on the steamboat. Nonetheless he would have been fully justified in doing so,-for steamboat traveling in the 1820s had some disadvantages. First, the boat's time of departure from the starting point (Pittsburg or New Orleans) depended on how soon, in the opinion of the captain, the freight consignments and the passenger list were large enough to justify the trip. Then, too, steamboats had an uncanny way of getting hung up on a snag occasionally, or blowing out a cylinder or bursting a boiler at the most inopportune time or place. The truth is that the number of steamboat disasters recorded for the 1820s and a part of the 1830s is appalling. (Reasons therefor can easily be deduced from statements in the preceding paragraph). But it so happened that of all those terrible disasters only three or four of them took place in that part of the Ohio above Cincinnati. That fact may explain why Mr. Horton did not hesitate, apparently, to take his newly acquired bride on a steamboat from Cincinnati to their new home in the Boot-shaped Bend (as herein before stated). When the sixty-nine-year-old Mrs. Pomeroy came to Pomeroy in 1838 or '39 it is presumed, though not recorded, that she traveled on the P., S & Company's new steamboat, Condor. By referring to the Condor's advertisement (see above) one can see that her passengers were encouraged to expect safe and comfortable travelling. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 117 The Condor, however, did not continue passenger service very long, if at all, after the revived P., S & CO. became The Pomeroy Coal Company. The new company's coal trade was too brisk for speedy travelling; furthermore, the packet boats (steamers that carried only freight and passengers) that in the early 1820s had begun to ply regularly up and down the Ohio between Cincinnati and Pittsburg were steadily increasing in number. Passengers preferred the packets because they were faster, more comfortable, and more attractive both inside and outside. In fact, so ornate had such boats become by the late thirties that they were called floating palaces. Steam whistles had taken the place of the old flatboat horns; and “the pride of every steamboat captain,” Dr. Hulbert says, "was to have his boat equipped with a sweet-sounding bell.” So great had the demand for bells grown that bell foundries could hardly be established fast enough. In Cincinnati alone, by 1845, the number had increased from eight to twelve since 1840! Charles Dickens in his American Notes gives a less attractive picture of the American steamboat of 1842. Arriving at Pittsburgh from the East for the purpose of making a steamboat trip to Cincinnati, the noted English visitor's first business was to select a boat. "Western steamboats usually blow up one or two a week in a season," he wrote, “so it was advisable to get opinions as to the comparative safety of the vessels" lined up along the shore. “One called the Messenger was the best recommended." This boat had been "advertised to start positively every day for a fortnight or so," but was not gone yet, “nor did the captain seem to have any fixed intention on the subject. But this is custom! For if the law were to bind down a free and independent citizen to keep his word with the public, what would become of the liberty of the subject?" Dickens asks ironically. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 118 The "native packets," our English critic informs us, "have no mast, no cordage, no tackle, rigging, or other such boat-like gear… nothing in their shape to suggest the boat's head, stem, side, keel… they display a couple of paddle-boxes yet might be intended, for all appearance to the contrary, to perform service on a mountain top."… And farther on the Notes say: "Passing one of the boats at night seeing the great body of fire, exposed as described, that rages and roars beneath the frail pile of painted wood; machinery not guarded in any way, doing its work amidst a crowd of idlers and emigrants and children who throng the lower deck-under management, too, of men reckless, whose acquaintance with its mysteries may have been of six months' standing, one wonders that any journey is safely made." Dickens, in short, was too disgruntled with things American to see any good whatever in our steamboats. His description doubtless was correct for many of them, probably the majority. But a glance at a picture of the Messenger (to be found in Ambler's Transportation in the Ohio Valley) gives one the impression of a rather fine craft for the times. And so the Pittsburgh & Cincinnati Packet Line must have thought when a year or two later it added the Messenger to its six supposedly superior boats (see list farther on). By 1851 the two Marietta & Cincinnati packets, Ohio and Lady Bryan, the Pomeroy & Portsmouth packet Reveille, and the Governor Meigs were making regular stops at the newly established Pomeroy wharf-boat (see above), the first two twice a week the third once. The Messenger, Buckeye State, Keystone State, Cincinnati, Hibernia, Brilliant and Clipper, all Pittsburgh & Cincinnati packets, stopped when hailed or when carrying freight or passengers for Pomeroy and vicinity. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 119 IMMIGRATION.-The "emigrants" that Dickens saw on the Messenger’s lower deck when he journeyed down the Ohio were a part of the Great Westward Movement in its renewed strength and changed character of the 1830s and 1840s. The majority of such emigrants, both Easterners and foreigners, were headed for the newer West, the one beyond the Mississippi. Pomeroy and Middleport each got a comparatively large number of them. The first foreigners to stop at the Horseshoe Bend in a considerable number were Germans. Nearly every year between 1845 and 1850 brought larger or smaller groups of Germans. Not all remained in The Bend, however; some bought farms in the hinterland of Sutton Township. Most of those who remained found employment at the several coal-banks. A few went into business, (See next Act). The Welsh did not begin to come in great numbers to the Horse-shoe Bend until 1844 or '46. The majority of those who came had been miners from their youth and thus were a valuable acquisition to the Coalport, Peacock and Minersville coal-banks. These foreign newcomers differed in some respects from the first immigrants to the Horseshoe Bend. They came to find jobs, not land Coming by steamboat to a practically settled region, they had not the materials ready to hand for putting up their own abodes immediately. They were compelled to reside temporarily at some boarding house or inn. The Abraham Joachim family when it landed at Kerr’s Run Landing on an August evening in 1837, "camped in the pawpaw bushes along the road and the next day put up at Amos Dunham's tavern," we are told by George Joachim. (See SOURCE MATERIAL). It is easy to see that those “strangers in a strange land" could not have found the Dunham House a wholly happy place and therefore sought a home of their own as soon as possible. There Joachims found one, a one-room-and-annex log cabin out ?? Sugar Run (on the later Ben �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 120 Biggs residence site). The cabin held not only the Joachim family's own five members but two fellow immigrants as well, the latter being separated from their host's family by a heavy chalk mark drawn through the room. These families were not poor. They were thrifty German pioneers risking their life's savings on a new country's promises exactly as many of the earlier pioneers had done, meeting its unexpected hardships with the same indomitable spirit, the same resourcefulness. TRAVELING.-The means for getting from one locality to another had, like many other things, been greatly facilitated in the Boot-shaped Bend by 1851. The improved opportunities, for river travel have been pointed out above. Direct communication with the interior and the northern part of Ohio was announced in the September 9, 1846 number of The Meigs County Weekly Times by the advertisement of Hiram Hewlett, Manager of the Athens & Pomeroy Coach Line, stating that his line connected with the Lancaster Coach Line and the canal boats for the northern part of the State. Travel into Gallia County had been facilitated during the 1840s by the building of a toll bridge across the mouth of Leading Creek. This was a covered bridge and was built by the Leading Creek Toll Bridge Company (inc. 1839). BOARDING HOUSES, it goes without saying, came into the scene almost with the founding of the first town in the boot-shaped bend. The most popular boarding house in the late 1830s and the '40s was the so-called Dunham Tavern. Amos Dunham, the proprietor, was, in O.B. Chapman's opinion, a "veritable Toby"; and in the opinion of Henry Howe, who made Dunham House his headquarters in the summer of 1846, "just the sort of person I wanted to talk to.” John Cartright, rising young lawyer and “delightful companion,” boarded there. “And when �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 121 Court met, what an assembly of legal talent gathered in that sitting room!" exclaims Mr. Chapman reminiscently, naming all the legal lights from Marietta to Gallipolis and telling how one John Welch would play the fiddle and sing delightful old songs. William Prall cabinet and coffin maker, and Henry Wilson, worker at the Stackpole & Heckard Foundry, were two of the boarders at that "happy place." Our House, opened by Alfred Austin, later run by George K. Webster, was one door above Dunham's. At Middleport Jacob Fultz and J.W. Mathews each had an inn in operation in the late 1840s. At Coalport and at Pomeroy some miners accommodated boarders in their two- or three-room cottages, so great had grown the demand for lodging in The Bend. As late as 1832 or '33 the usual means of local travel were the horse, the ox-cart, or one's own pedal extremities (Shank's mare). Only wealthy farmers owned wagons which they could seldom use because roads were so bad. “The nearest doctor was at Point Pleasant” wrote Mrs. Mary Waggener Wolf (see above), "and there was no way to go for him but on horseback and it took six hours to make the trip." After 1831, anyone in the upper part of the Boot-shaped bend could have written, "The nearest doctor was at Letart"; for in that year Dr. Jeremiah Ackley located at Letart Falls, Ohio, to practice on both sides of the River. From about 1837 to 1845 Pomeroy had Dr. Estes Howe and by 1846 Dr. G.S. Guthrie. Since 1843, Sheffield and vicinity had its Dr. William VanDuyn, who, after some heavy financial reverses, had given up store-keeping to practice medicine, his self-taught profession. Those who lived within short distances, say six or seven miles, of any one of these physicians thought nothing of making the trip on foot when in need of his services; nor, for that matter, did anyone mind such distances for any other purpose. In the very early days, before Coalport was settled, the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 122 "intervening fields and patches of underbrush canopied with grapevines" between Sheffieild and Pomeroy did, it is true, cause summer foottravelers some misgivings and occasionally unpleasant experiences; for that stretch was known to be infested with rattlesnakes. By 1840 came the dawn of "horse and buggy days" with their promise of a more agreeable mode of travel. By the spring of 1851 a new advertisement, "Buggies Sold by Benjamin Stivers," made certain that those days had arrived in the Horseshoe Bend. FLOODS.-The earliest flood in the boot-shaped bend of which there is definite mention is the one of February, 1814. Thomas Ervin, son of Samuel Ervin, records in Larkins' Pioneer History of Meigs County that the Ervin family had to live in a cave seven days because of that flood. That statement gives little light as to the height of that flood, however. The River bank along The Narrows at that time "rose in benches, rough, uneven, ploughed by deep gullies down which the water tumbled. Huge boulders lay scattered here and there, ledges of rock thrust their heads high up through the soil in grotesque positions"-so wrote Betty Williamson McIntyre of the Ohio shore's appearance opposite the Waggener Settlement in 18l6. The cave which served the Ervins as a refuge may or may not have been very high above what is now (1936) considered as flood stage. The 1832 flood has left a slightly better record. Of that visitation Mrs. Mary Webster Roller wrote in the Tribune-Telegraph's March 20, 1895 issue: "I then lived on the Capehart & Rogers farm" [Northern part of Siegrist's Bottom]. "The house was carried away. We stowed our household goods in a cave in the lower end of Sliding Hill. In Jacob Wolfe's new brick house at Graham Station the water stood nine feet." And from Mrs. Mary E ?? who was a daughter of James Waggener �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 123 we get (from May 18, Leader) the following: "In the high water of 1832 we had to leave our cabins. One cabin went off with all our best things.” On the 1847 freshet O.B. Chapman gives some interesting sidelights. Mr. Chapman was editor and proprietor of The Meigs County Weekly Times that year. "The printing office," wrote Editor Chapman, "was in the second story of the building one door east of the Gibson House" [meaning, of course, the Gibson House of later years]… "A widow lived on the first floor of the building. Ongoing to the office on the second or third day of the rise, I found the old lady and her children, with about two dozen chickens, in possession of the room, the chickens perched on racks, cases, gallies, perfectly at home. I didn't utter a single cuss word but had a sweet time cleaning up cases after the widow and her chickens were in their own quarters.” Also from O.B. Chapman: "John Strider had a rather fine two-story store boat moored to the shore about one hundred yards above the Coal Ridge Flour Mill. During the rise, the boat was lifted up until it was clear across Front street, then rested as far back as the ordinary buildings there. Mr. Strider intended to occupy his old stand after the waters receded, but the fall of the river began in the early evening and at the next daybreak the boat was securely stranded on a vacant lot on the north side of Front street, and could not possibly be moved as there was no kind of machinery for such purposes in Pomeroy then. Mr. Strider had to buy the lot, nor could he haggle about the price. Mr. Remington's dry goods and grocery store thus found an opposition store undesirably near, for, Mr. Strider continued business at the new stand, in the river store boat, his family residing in the low second story of the same20." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 124 20. From his storeboat Mr. Strider sold provisions to the passing steamboats. It was shortly after the above incident-that is, in the spring of 1847-that W.R. Remington moved his store down town to the corner of Linn and Front. And now, under the title THINGS MENTAL, MORAL and SPIRITUAL, will be show the final touches to the resetting of the stage for the drama's continuance during the first half of the nineteenth century. EDUCATION SCHOOL LAWS BEFORE 1851.-"It has been truly said that schools worthy of remembrance between 1802 and 1820 were known only in the most enterprising towns,'--so wrote George B. Knight, Professor of History and Political Science at Ohio State University, in his "History of Educational Progress in Ohio," one of the chapters of Henry Howe's Work. By 1825, something had been done about Ohio's School Situation. Four years before, - that is, in 1821--a law had been passed authorizing, or permitting, the levying of a tax for the support of public schools. The 1825 law made such levying compulsory and also provided for the appointing of school examiners. "With these laws schools began to improve; still, in 1837, twelve years later, there were few public schools in Ohio," Professor Knight asserts. In the latter year provision was made for a state superintendent of free schools and for a uniform system of schools with county superintendents and township inspectors. Then in 1848 a law was passed making possible an appropriation of money in each county for the conducting of teachers' institutes; and in ?? came the law (1) enabling any town of two �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 125 hundred inhabitants to establish "an adequate number" of primary schools "conveniently located," and a school or schools of higher grade or grades; (2) providing for the free admission of all white children; and (3) requiring that schools be kept open not less than thirty-six weeks in each year. In Virginia, an Act was passed in 1836 providing that the income from the "Literary Fund" established in 1805 be distributed to the several counties of the State according to the population, the fund to be used for the education of poor children. And in March of the year, 1846 the Virginia Assembly passed another Act, an Act purporting to establish a "district public school system." The Act provided: that, upon petition of one third of the qualified voters of a county, a vote was to be taken upon the question of adopting a district school system; that, if two-thirds of the ballots cast were in favor of the system, then school commissioners were to be elected for the purpose of dividing the county into districts; that, after the county had been so divided, the voters of each district were to elect a district commission, which in turn was to appoint a Board of Trustees for each school in the district, the duty of the Board of Trustees being to select and purchase the site for the school building, attend to the building thereof, and appoint a teacher. So much for the School Laws of each of the two states up to the year 1851. Now for a picture (necessarily very incomplete) of actual conditions in the boot-shaped bend: SCHOOLS ON THE OHIO SIDE.-At Sutton Township's first election (November 21, 1817), David Gilman, David Curtis and Seth Jones were chosen as a commission "to visit all the schools kept in the township at the close of each quarter and to report at the next town �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 126 meeting the state and standing of each school and the proficiency of each of the pupils, to bring the best specimens of writing for inspection and to report the names of the teachers and what examples they have set before their pupils. "This, be it noted, was four years before Ohio's law authorizing public schools was passed. (The quotation is from James Evans, in Hardesty.) "In a sparsely settled neighborhood, with barely sufficient means of support, he built a school house and hired teachers" –so a contributor to Pioneer History of Meigs County wrote of Randall Stivers; and Randall Stivers himself said of The Narrows many years later, "…The nearest school house was across the River, about at German Firnace," (meaning the salt furnace built later on the site of Major Waggener's home.) Another source tells of a log school house about half a mile from the mouth of Kerr's Run. Now, inasmuch as the Stivers 600acre tract in Section 8 lay along the Run (as stated above), it is almost certain that the school house which Randall Stivers built in a sparsely settled neighborhood was the one that stood back some distance from the mouth of Kerr's Run. But Randall Stivers in 1822 moved from The Narrows to Chester and there "engaged in the manufacture of bricks": hence, if he made the bricks for Graham's Station's brick school house, as has been surmised, he did so either before 1819 or after 1822. Of the Kerr's Run structure Harvey Skinner writes in a "Log Cabin" letter that it was typical of all pioneer school houses: it had puncheon floors and seats, greased paper for window lights and so on; and that the New Testament was one of the text books. Mrs. Mary Webster Roller (in March 20, 1895 Tribune-Telegraph), says she attended school in the brick school house near Graham Station in the year 1832; that Philip Eliot, son of Judge Fuller Eliot, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 127 was the teacher and that books used were Webster's Spelling Book, McGuffey's Reader and Ray's Arithmetic; also that the older pupils studied grammar. The last statement indicates that Philip Eliot evidently was an unusually progressive teacher. Until 1838 Ohio teachers were examined only in reading, writing and arithmetic. George Jochim (See SOURCE MATERIAL) went to school whenever he "had a chance; got no further than the Eclectic Spelling Book and McGuffey's Reader, and received lickings every day." To him it seemed a part of the teacher's agreement with the School Board to whip rather than to teach. "None in that school went to Congress on the learning received from Old Lindy," Mr. Joachim concludes. This evidently was the school authorized by Pomeroy's first Council, and the same school to which O.B. Chapman refers when he says, "Old Lindly and Tom Boyer taught school back of the flour mill," when he arrived in Pomeroy 1n 1845. Evident it is, too, that Pomeroy's two-room brick school on Second street (See below) was not there when 0.B. Chapman came to Pomeroy. The building is known to have been in use in 1851, however; hence the late 1840s is the probable time of its erection. Cyrus Grant was one of that school's first teachers; in fact, he is believed to have been its first teacher. At Sheffield a school was opened in 1847. Its first teacher was "Professor" Barton. Like the others mentioned above, it was doubtless a public, or free school, and "as good as the place could afford," as was the Pomeroy school in George Joachim's opinion. Private or Select Schools began to flourish quite early in Pomeroy and Middleport. One of the first, if not THE first of such schools stood near the mouth of Nailor's Run. It was a log school house, according to Mrs. McIntyre, who comments further on it, "The �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 128 Run was often a rushing torrent during a storm. Children who came miles to this school placed their dinner pails among the rocks at the edge of the water to keep their milk fresh. Once during a storm, the stream rose and carried off their luncheons." The late Horace M. Horton is said to have attended that school. Mr. Horton was born in 1836, hence the school was there as early at least as 1842 and probably five or six years earlier. The Pomeroy Select School, with James M. Evans as teacher, opened in September, 1850, place not announced. The subjects to be taught were: "Reading, Writing, Arithmetic; Elementary Geography, Mental Arithmetic, Grammar, Geography, Philosophy, Chemistry, and Elementary Algebra; Book-keeping (double entry), Botany, Astronomy, Ancient Geography, and History, Physiology and Geology, Rhetoric, Logic, Higher Mathematics, Greek and Latin." Mr. Evans' readiness to undertake the teaching of any grade or subject was by no means astonishing at that time. The day of specialization in teaching was yet far in the future. The outstanding private school was the POMEROY ACADEMY. Details of that school's establishment are stated in the following paragraph which appeared in the April 7, 1893 issue of the Meigs County Telegraph: THE POMEROY ACADEMY: Lot 183, adjoining the Court House grounds and known as the Stout property, was deeded in 1848 by Clarissa Pomeroy to Thomas Irvin, as Trustee, until a board of trustees should be appointed and an organization completed; then the property was to be deeded to the trustees, who were to be known as Trustees of the Pomeroy Academy. The property was to be used for purposes of higher education. The first trustees were: Charles R. Pomeroy, Aaron Murdock, William McAboy, Thomas Dolly, Reed Adkinson, V.B. Horton, and Thomas Irvin. They met an organized in 1849. Clarissa Pomeroy was the widow of Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy (death noted farther on). Mrs. Pomeroy's purpose in founding the school was "to secure for the citizens of Pomeroy the advantage of educating �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 129 their children at home not only in the usual branches but in the more advanced branches at less expense." Lot 183 was the site of the S.W. Pomeroy residence, which since Mr. Pomeroy's death in 1841 had been occupied by tenants. Regular Academy work was begun in the residence in the spring of 1849, with C.C. Giles as Principal. How many of The Bend's foreign children attended the public and private schools can not be estimated. That some of them were learning English rapidly is unquestionable. In 1840, at the age of seven years, George Eiselstein was brought by his parents from Germany to Pomeroy. Five years later young George was clerking in the Ralston & Stivers store, east corner of Front and Court. "Seeing a small boy who could talk English to us and in the same breath turn and fling German at a customer of that nationality was a freak never fore beheld in our rural experience," was the comment of a writer in the Telegraph of February 11, 1891 regarding young George Eiselstein's proficiency. In regard to schools on the Virginia side there is a discouraging lack of source material, as well as of schools. In Mason County a move had been made but little accomplished toward securing a "district public school system" according to the complex provisions of the Virginia Act of 1846. There were private schools, however. From Betty Williamson we learned that the Waggeners built a log school house "near Hanging Rock" soon after their arrival. This, of course, was the school "across the river" to which Randall Stivers referred above. Mary Waggener Wolf, on the other hand, remembers that there were no school houses and that "people who were able hired a teacher to come to the house." This apparently, is a contradiction to Mrs. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 130 McIntyre's (Betty Williamson) statement quoted in the preceding paragraph. But by the time Mrs. Wolf, [born in 1826] was old enough to remember things, the Waggener reverses had set in and the land on which the Hanging Rock log school house stood had, in all likelihood been sold and the school closed. Mrs. Wolf herself "went to Point Pleasant to school," as did all the older Waggener and Williamson children. The Daniel Roush barn, long used by the Lutherans of Roush Settlement as a church, did duty still longer probably as a school house. In that building Aquila L. Knight (see below) taught subscription schools several years during the l840s. (Details of those schools farther on.) CULTURAL AND POLITICAL LIFE Pomeroy numbered among its earliest settlers a goodly list of educated young men. Besides the three Hortons (V.B., H.S. and Thayer), C.R. Pomeroy and Thomas Irvin (son-in-law of S.W. Pomeroy), there were Estes Howe and U. Tracy Howe, familiarly known as Doctor and Lawyer Howe; Dr. R.N. Fuller, Lawyer W.J.T. Wright, Amos Dunham, Martin Heckard, besides others; also a Mr. Perkins, who was a writer of some note. To break the monotony of their wilderness life some of these men organized a Public Debating Society, which met once a week, presumably the Court House, (the frame building at the east corner of Second and Linn streets). The debating was open to every one, but V.B. Horton, the two Howes and Mr. Perkins did practically all of it. Unfortunately for Pomeroy's cultural and social life this organization had come to an end by 1845. The Howes, both talented men but complete business failures, had returned to Boston; and Mr. Perkins, who professed to have sought Pomeroy as a sort of romantic retreat buy whose real interest there was the society of the Howe �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 131 brothers, left his alleged retreat soon after the departure of the Howes. Without those three the organization seemed to be unable to carry on22. 22. Dr. Howe, after his return to Boston became the world's most noted educator of the deaf, dumb and blind. It was he who awakened Laura Bridgeman to new life. V.B. Horton and Dr. Howe remained life-long friends. Mr. Perkins was the author of "The Annals of the West," though another's name was on the book. The work has considerable literary and historic merit. Mr. Perkins fell from a Cincinnati ferryboat and drowned. The fall was believed to have been premeditated. From O.B. Chapman's "Personal Recollections." A Singing School, Mr. Chapman recalls also, afforded some diversion during the latter part of the 1840s. A Mr. Thomas came twice a week on horseback from Jackson, Ohio, during several winter seasons to teach a singing class. The young folks, more interested in getting together than in learning to sing, attended faithfully. Mr. Thomas was short, broad, and extremely bulging below the waist line-"altogether comical in appearance." Outside of church tunes he knew two others: Chickadee and Bounding Billows-Chickadee for singing at intermissions and Bounding Billows for the closing of the night's performance. The Boot-shaped Bend's political education got its share of impetus from the mass meetings, processions and other unprecedented excitements of the Hard Cider Campaign of 1840. The boot-shaped bend-at least its Ohio side-was, it appears, decidedly Whig in its political sympathies. William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate, made a speech in Pomeroy. Two steamboats, the Elk and the Hope, brought Charleston, Virginia, Whigs to the meeting. The two boats, lashed together, carried a large house made of buckeye logs to represent Ohio, Harrison's home state. In the l84l campaign The Bend's citizens had opportunity to meet �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 132 the Whig candidate Henry Clay when the latter was returning from a trip to Philadelphia and New York. On the upper deck of a steamboat stopping at the Court House landing, the "Great Pacificator," majestic in long blue cloak, stood beside V.B. Horton. The venerable Samuel Grant, then of Sheffield, squeezed and shook Clay's hand like a pump handle. "Don't, don't, my friend!" implored Clay. Mr. Grant did not understand him, kept on pumping. Smiling resignedly Clay explained: "In this campaign I have to request my friends to consider themselves as young ladies and me as a young gentleman; it is my place to do the squeezing." -From O.B. Chapman's Letters. By the 1840s the Ohio Legislature was luring The Bend's aspiring pioneers. In 1846 the State Assembly and in 1847 the State Senate gave Horace S. Horton opportunity to serve his community from a higher plane than that of store-keeping. Col. Andrew Donnally's legislative service has been noted above. CHURCH SERVICES AND CHURCH-BUILDING Throughout the second and third decades of the nineteenth century religious services continued to be the responsibility of itinerant preachers, who held their meetings in barns, private homes, and school houses as in the earlier days. One of the most notable, perhaps THE most notable of such preachers during the late teens and the 1820s was Elder Elisha Rathburn, son of Daniel Rathburn, and early settler of the Leading Creek region. Mr. Rathburn early united with the Free Will Baptist church, was ordained as minister but never had a regular charge. His field of itinerancy was Meigs, Gallia and Mason (Virginia) counties. He "traveled on horseback, day or night, winter or summer, cold or hot, often over bare cow-paths blazed through the woods, to reach an appointment in an old log school house or pioneer's barn, or the house of mourning to give consolation �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 133 with a funeral discourse. All his services were given without a thought of compensation. In those days it simply never occurred to anyone to pay for a funeral discourse or a marriage ceremony. His living Elder Rathburn made by farming between times when he had no religious duties to perform. In Pomeroy up to 1838, there had been no preaching of any kind. However, the Methodist minister in charge of the Chester Circuit had been filling a Sunday afternoon appointment in the log school house on Kerr's Run, the one presumably built by Randall Stivers. In the fall of 1838 the Reverend M.M. Dustin was sent by the Ohio Methodist Conference to the Chester Circuit. On his first visit to the Kerr's Run appointment Mr. Dustin learned that the majority of his congregation was from Pomeroy and Nyesville. As the school house was literally in the woods and more than a mile from where the greater part of the congregation lived, the minister suggested that the appointment thereafter be at Pomeroy. The suggestion being received favorably, William McMasters, cabinet maker, at once offered his workshop as a meeting place. By the following Sunday the shop had been provided with seats, so that the regular preaching service could be held in it. And so, "in that cabinet shop I established the first regular preaching service in the city of Pomeroy," wrote the Reverend M.M. Dustin in a letter to a Pomeroy minister in the year 1891. During Mr. Dustin's second year in that charge two brothers named Dudre united with the church. The Dudre place of business, a cooper shop, being larger than the cabinet shop, the two men offered to the congregation; and thereafter Mr. Dustin preached in the Dudre coopershop near the Flour Mill instead of in the McMasters cabinet shop below the shovel factory. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 134 At the close of his second year and during his last service the Reverend M.M. Dustin announced that he would have no more appointments with that congregation. After dismissal, among the many who came forward to bid the minister good bye were Mr. and Mrs. S.W. Pomeroy Episcopalians, who had frequently attended the services. Mrs. Pomeroy expressed her warmest appreciation of the good accomplished by the minister while he worked in Pomeroy. The new Methodist Church (date of erection not found) was a small framed building and stood near the hill just back of the Union Steam Mill Company's flour mill. The church was named Wesley Chapel. Four German congregations developed in Pomeroy between the year 1840 and 1850 as a result of the large German immigration herein before mentioned. Lutherans, Evangelicals, Methodists, Catholics, each group had its own house of worship before 1851. The Lutherans were the first, having organized in 1844, incorporated in '46 and their church built the same year on the west corner of Second and Sycamore streets. V.B. Horton had donated the lot, which was large enough for a parsonage also. Wilhelm Seihler, George Rasp and George Abraham Joachim were three of the first members. The Evangelicals (sometimes miscalled German Presbyterians) when the new Court House was nearing completion were inspired to secure the old frame Temple of Justice and convert it into a Temple of God. Prominent among Evangelical first members were Peter Reibel, and John Dorst. The Reverend Lubert Theiss was one of their first, possibly their very first, minister. In 1848 the Catholic congregation numbered thirty-five family heads. Among them were John Laubner, John Schuler, Jacov Neutzling, Anthony Rappold, George Gloeckner. They built their church that year on a site which was at the time considered "way out" on Sugar Run. The Reverend F??? Albrinck came regularly from Gallipolis �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 135 to say mass for them. In April, 1847, James Ralston, Isaac Knapp, Elihu Stedman, Dr. Guthrie and Elder Marcus Bosworth, all leading Presbyterians, met in the assembly room of the new Court House to effect organization and to consider plans for the building of a church. Soon afterward the Front street lot on which Samuel Bergin's residence stood was secured and the church was erected-"a large barn-like structure close to the street, with two doors and two sets of high steps evidently meant to separate the sheep from the goats." The Reverend Reed Wilkinson was, the first Presbyterian minister to be permanently located in Pomeroy. (A church record supplied the information regarding V.B. Horton's gift of a lot to the Lutherans. That Mr. Horton was equally generous to all other church groups is not to be doubted. Records of other donations simply were not available for this researcher.) As early as March 17, 1838 the "Coal Ridge Church in Salisbury Township" was incorporated with S.W. Pomeroy, Thomas Irvin, Nial Nye, U.T. Howe, V.B. Horton and Royal Grant as members. Evidently this was an Episcopal organization, although not so named. The first Episcopal services noted by this writer were in the frame Court House on the corner of Linn and Second streets. No date was given in our source for these services but they must have been held before the new Court House was built--that is, before or during the winter of 1846-47. In 1846 or '47 Ben Wadman, aided by Isaac Behan, built a small chapel on the east side of Nailor's Run. It is quite probable that a Welsh church at Coalport antedated the Lutheran church at Pomeroy. John F. Davies is known to have helped Samuel Bergin to build a church on the hillside near Monkey Run about the year 1843, for the Welsh people living in the vicinity. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 136 SHEFFIELD and MIDDLEPORT CHURCHES. About a mile below the Grant Flouring Mill (Sheffield), near a place called Parker's Landing, stood Salisbury's first school house. In that building was organized the first Campbellite, or Christian Church in The Bend. The organizers were: Mary Jones, (wife of Philip Jones); William Parker, Lovina Parker, Lorina Parker; Ebenezar Grant, Sara Grant; Joel Davis, Cynthia Davis; Martha Kerr. Soon afterwards this congregation moved its meeting place up to the Sheffield school house. That the Methodists had church services either in Sheffield or Middleport during these early years can hardly be questioned; yet no actual records thereof could be found. A reliable source places the first regular Methodist Episcopal church organization in the very early 1850s. (See Heath Chapel, Act III.) A Presbyterian congregation, made up of a few families from below Leading Creek, from Sheffield and from Middleport, began in 1846 to have occasional preaching by the Reverend Reed Wilkinson, of Pomeroy. These services were held in the Sheffield school house. A church building was not within the means of the Presbyterian congregation until in the late 1850s. (See Act III.) It is a fairly well established fact that a Swedenborgian, or New Jerusalem, church was founded either in Sheffield or in Middleport during this decade. That church, in whatsoever decade founded, was one of the fruits of the semi-annual journeys made by John Chapman, the famed Johnny Appleseed, through The Bend. A devoted follower of Emanuel Swedenborg, the self-sacrificing idealist brought with him in his canoe, from his nurseries at Marietta, not only young apple trees and planting utensils and bags of seeds but also tracts that expounded the doctrines of Swedenborgianism. It appears that he was in the habit of stopping for rest and food at the cabins of �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 137 several Bend pioneers, one of them being the cabin of William Hobart, on Rutland Road. William Hobart's daughter Esther Hobart read the tracts, was converted to the new faith; and after her conversion, learning that there were other such converts in the vicinity, she took the lead in effecting a church organization. Whether this last step took place before or after Miss Hobart's marriage to William H. Grant, of Sheffield, was not stated in our source (Mrs. Hudson's "Personal Recollections"). In view of the fact that Johnny Appleseed was not seen in The Bend for several years before his death, which took place in 1848, it is almost certain that Middleport's Swedenborgian Church was founded before 1859. The finest newspaper notice of its meetings (see next Act) give W.H. Grant's home as the place of meeting. THE REMAINDER OF THE BOOT-SHAPED BEND (Ohio side) was still served by itinerant preachers. "In the upper, or northern, part of Sutton Township the Methodists held their meetings in the second story of Joseph Buffington's new frame house and also at the Quartus Bridgeman and William Crooks residences. At Graham Station their regular meetings took place at Adam Lallance's house and their Quarterly Meetings at the brick school house,"-thus Mary Webster Roller (See SOURCES) has recorded. "A Sabbath School, also, was held in an old structure back of Graham Station. Margaret Weldon and Philip Elliot were teachers there. Some of the teachers were: Carleton Young, Henry Harpold, Ed Weldon, Philip Pickens, Joseph and William Wolf, Jerry Petral, Washington Stivers, W.J. Prall," Mrs. Roller states further. For THE VIRGINIA SIDE, the picture must be drawn largely from inference as was necessary in regard to school conditions on that side. In Waggener's Bottom "we had preaching at the homes once a �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 138 month," wrote the above-quoted Mary Waggener Wolf. In the 1820s their preacher probably was Elder Elisha Rathburn from the Ohio side; later, when the footpath around Hanging Rock had become a fairly passable county road, a preacher from the Point Pleasant Circuit, (Methodist), probably came to Waggener's Bottom. By that time, however, there were several new land owners in that Bottom; these, the following O.B. Chapman paragraph suggests, attended church at Pomeroy. "Reverend Sehon, a brother of the Sehon on the Virginia shore opposite Pomeroy, was a great preacher. About 1846, while he was visiting the Virginia Sehons, he came to Pomeroy to preach in the church back of the Flour Mill and close to the hill. [probably the new Wesley Chapel]. He was accompanied by his nieces Margaret and Fanny Sehon. The party was rowed over by slaves." In 1820 the Reverend Gideon Henckel, foster son of John Roush of Point Pleasant, came to the Roush Settlement with the Reverend Paul Henckel (presumably an uncle) to revive the Lutheram organization founded there in 1806. A church twenty by twenty-four feet with a seating capacity of fifty was erected, the younger minister helping personally with the work. Abraham Roush, son of Jonas Roush, deeded fifty-six acres of land to the Trustees of the church. The site chosen for the building was on Broad Run, wherefore the church ever thereafter was known as the Broad Run Lutheran Church. During the early 1830s the Reverend Moses Michael, United Brethren minister, was holding services at various homes in the vicinity of Broad Run. On August 20, 1836, the old log barn that had served as the first Lutheran church was used by the United Brethren for a special service at which the Reverend J.R. Reinhart, Presiding Elder was present. On that day a church organization was effected and more than twenty additions were made to the church membership. This was the First United Brethren Church west of the Alleghenies. "Forty years ago," recalls one old-timer in the year 1884, "religious �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 139 Revivals were frequent and vehement. Preachers were bitter against each other. Their sermons were long, consisting of fifteen or twenty heads; the 'in conclusion's' each taking at least fifteen minutes; and prayers were long drawnout… Old ladies carried 'foot-stoves'—little tin boxes with metal drawers for live coals- to the meeting house. Only Episcopalians said church; others said meeting house." The writer forgot, or perhaps didn’t know, about the Germans, who said kirich or karich, the usual corruption of the word kirche, German for church. Neither the Episcopalians nor any of the German churches except the Methodist had revivals. THE GREAT TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT This movement (mentioned above under the sub-topic "Creature Comforts reached the boot-shaped bend about the year 1830. Lucius cross was its outstanding supporter. When Mr. Cross built his frame house in 1832 he sent word around that no liquor would be permitted at the "raisin'". Seeing one man approaching with a jug under his arm, Mr. Cross promptly ordered him to take himself and his jug back home and stay there. The Cross house got the reputation of being "the first house erected in Meigs county without whiskey or intoxicating liquor." One of the first evident results of the Temperance Movement was the rapidly growing opposition to the sale of liquor. Before 1850, men in Meigs county desiring to sell liquors were required to apply to the Court of Common Pleas for such permission. About the year 1849 a German man opened a sort of saloon in the upper part of Pomeroy without a license. He was promptly arrested, fined and ordered to jail until payment of a license. The man refused to go, whereupon he was seized by Martin Heckard and a Mr. Smith and promptly trundled off to the lock-up at Pomeroy. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 140 In November, 1850, Pomeroy's Council passed an Ordinance against the retailing of spirituous liquors, vinous or malt liquors, or cider, in any quantity less than a gallon, by: 1st, any person; 2d, by the keeper of a tavern or house of entertainment (not duly licensed for that purpose:, or the keeper of any coffee house, grocery, confectionary, store, wharfboat, or brewery, in any quantity whatever to be drunk in or about the places where sold or given away except for medicinal purposes. The ordinance soon became known as the "Gallon Ordinance." The fine for violation of said gallon ordinance was to be not more than twenty-five dollars not less than on dollar. Martin Heckard was Pomeroy's Mayor when that ordinance was passed. SLAVERY IN THE BOOT-SHAPED BEND It will be startling to some readers, perhaps, to learn that slavery of a sort existed on the Ohio side of the Boot-shped Bend in the early part of the nineteenth century. The following condensed copy of an entry in Meigs County Deed Book 1 explains itself: George Russell to James Phelps. George Russell in the town of Salisbury, County of Meigs, State of Ohio, by and with the consent of Daniel Rathburn Jun'r, one of the Justices of Peace is said county and township having put and placed and by these presents doth put and place Sarah Russell, daughter of said George Russell, she being of said township aged nine years and 3 months, servant to James Phelps of Salisbury Township in county of Meigs, with him to dwell and serve for the day of date of these presents until said servant shall have accomplished the full age of 18 years during all of which time said servant for said master faithfully shall serve… honestly and obediently demean and behave herself toward said master and all his, during said terms and said J.E. Phelps for himself his heirs and assigns doth consent and agree to and with the said George Russell his heirs and assigns… during all the term aforesaid… allow unto said servant competent and sufficient meat and drink and apparel, washing lodging and mending and all other things necessary and fit for a servant and shall cause such servant to be taught or instructed to read and write… and so provide for said servant the she be not a charge to said George Russell, Township of Salisbury or inhabitants or citizens thereof, … and a the end of time shall and will make allow provide and deliver unto said servant one comfortable Bed and Bedding Two suits of common every day clothes one suit of Holliday clothes and one spinning wheel. ��A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 141 This "Indenture" was acknowledged on March 21, 1820. Deed Book 6 records the Indenture of "George Knight a poor boy aged 14 years…son of Nowell Knight of state of New York" by the Trustees of Salisbury Township to Josiah Dill. Daniel DeWolf's personal experience as a semi-slave is told by himself in the February 19, 1897 Leader (Log Cabin Reminiscences). Daniel's father died at Graham Station while engages in teaching school. Daniel, then ten years of age, was bound out to Lucius Cross, who "lived on a big farm back of Graham station, and raised a large amount of agricultural products, especially hay…Mr. Cross and others built flatboats for transporting hay, potatoes, cabbage, etc., southward." In the fall of 1831 Daniel was sent out on one of Lucius Cross's flatboats to work at the oars. Daniel, already chafing under his "bounden" condition, managed to run away and find work with first one then another of the several coal bank owners- Jacob Lallance, William Carleton, Quartus Bridgeman--farther down the River. The real Slavery question, that of Negro slavery, put in an early appearance on this drama's stage. The slave-holders on the Viginia side of the boot-shaped bend were always in danger of losing their human property. Their slaves, looking over into the land of freedom, too often were inspired to plan a way to get across the River into that land and thence to Canada, where, they in some way or other had learned, they would not only be tolerated but would welcome. If they could manage to get across the Ohio they could be almost sure of getting help to the desired haven. Not that everyone in Ohio sympathized unreservedly with the Negro. In fact, that State's attitude toward the black man was in general inclined in the opposite direction. One of the first Acts of the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 142 State Legislature required Negroes and mulattoes before settling in Ohio to present a certificate of freedom from a United States Court; those already there were required to register within a specified time. The law stipulated also that anyone employing a colored person who had no certificate of freedom was subject to a fine. Still more, aiding fugitives to escape was made subject to a heavy fine. In 1807 the law was made still more stringent. A bond of five hundred dollars, signed by two freeholders, was required of any Negro or mulatto desiring to settle in the State. Now the Boot-shaped Bend Ohioans, being largely New Englanders, even though they lived in a southern county, would naturally be expected to oppose those so-called Black Laws. And so they did, especially those in the Leading Creek region; however, it was "with no intention to interfere with their Virginia neighbors' rights" and quite "unconsciously" that they gave food, clothing, information, and the like to run-away slaves. The first case of friction resulting from such innocently be stowed help is known as the "Kidnap Case of 1823." Hamilton Kerr, nephew of the famous scout, lived in Kentucky, where he engaged systematically in aiding fugitive slaves. One day in 1823 he came to the Leading Creek region and employed John Adams Smith, son of Timothy Smith, to guide eight Canada-bound Negroes as far as Columbus, Ohio. Immediately the slave-owners on the Kanawha and Ohio rivers joined forces, sent detectives out on both sides of the Ohio. In October, 1824 Smith was caught and put in jail at Point Pleasant; and notwithstanding his claim that he did not know the Negroes were runaway slaves he was not permitted to give bail. This act of violence aroused the Ohioans to fury, a Vigilance �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 143 Committee was formed, stations were established at Jones's Landing, at Smith's Landing (below Leading Creek) and at John Giles's residence in Rutland. By the sound of horns, signals were to be transmitted from station to station if any suspicious person or company were seen at any of those points. Then came the rumor that Smith was to be murdered -that one of the Waggeners had put a slave in jail with the promise of freedom if he, the slave, would murder Smith. John Giles immediately went to Point Pleasant, ostensibly to take some clothing to Smith but in fact to tell him to be ready at any moment to escape. A few evenings afterward a company of "black" men, armed to the teeth with hunting rifles and pistols, embarked in an old pirogue and with muffled oars floated down the Ohio to Point Pleasant. Taunts of Yankee cowardice because they hadn't carried out their threats of "taking Smith out" had fired the men to determination. The jail, a twostory frame structure with outside stairway leading up to the guardroom, stood about fifty yards from the River. On their arrival at "The Point" the party divided; one boldly rushed up the stairway with guns pointed at the guards while the other broke the prison door down with an ax, jerked Smith out of bed, pushed him through the door. By the time the jailor and guards realized what was happening the rescued and rescuers were getting into their boat. Shots were fired at the fleeing, party, the men in the boat had to lie down for a while to escape the angry bullets. The men got home safe. But in a very short time afterwards Giles, the leader, and two others in the party were arrested and placed in the care of the same jailor they had so recently defied. At the trial which followed, Giles and one other were found "not guilty," but the third man was fined thirty dollars-which he refused to pay; nor would he leave the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 144 jail until he was forced to do so. The Ohioans conceded, however, that the trial, at which Judge Summers of Charleston, Virginia, presided, was a perfectly fair one. Not very long after this incident another one took place which perhaps caused the Waggeners to realize, more fully the risks of slaveholding along the Ohio's shores. One of their Negroes, a woman, had succeeded in crossing the River and was about fifteen miles on her way to Canada when she was captured and started back to her owner. Another man met the two, questioned them, released the woman. Her captor proceeded on his way to inform the Waggeners; the rescuer followed the woman, hid her in an old brush fence under a shelving rock to remain until the search for her should cease. The Waggener men soon were scouring the country, offering rewards. A poor hunter, discovering the refugee, started eagerly to inform her owners. But he couldn't keep his secret, and unfortunately told it to the wrong person. The woman was quickly removed to safety and her husband, whom she was trying; to join in Canada, was found by communicating with Canadian authorities. Her rescuer prepared a wagon with a false bottom, hid the fugitive therein and started northward with a load of weaver's reeds to sell. At one point in the journey, when he was descending a steep hill, one of the Waggener men and his party passed him. Seeing the danger, the wagon was in, Mr. Waggener got off his horse and very obligingly helped the farmer down the hill. The fugitive reached her husband in safety. The Waggeners brought suit in the Court of Common Pleas at Chester to obtain the value of the woman from her rescuer.A verdict was given in favor of the plaintiffs. An appeal was taken. The Supreme Court held that the woman's admission to being the property of the Waggeners could not be accepted to prove her identity; �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 145 that if she was a competent witness she must be produced in court; being a slave she was not a competent witness. After the trial the Judge was heard to say, "An action of trover for recovery of stock might do in Virginia but not in Ohio unless the stock has more than two legs." By the early 1840s antislavery sentiment in the Leading CreekRutland region had crystallized into a systematically conducted "station" of the Underground Railroad. Throughout the decade, Negroes from the farms directly across the River and far above and below The Bend passed through that station on their way to freedom. Some, by some mysterious "grapevine" method, learned how and where to get help from private sources. At the residence of Horace S. Horton, for instance, "tapping at a certain window was recognized at once as an appeal from a fugitive and was met in some cases with as much as fifty dollars," so a grand-daughter of Mr. Horton informed this writer. Other prominent men, including some non-slaveholders on the Virginia side when they had opportunity, were equally ready to help fugitive slaves. However, assistance to run-away slaves was not always prompt by purely humane considerations. One incident illustrates this: Not far from Rutland two white men appeared with a Negro before a Justice of the Peace, the one a slave owner the other a slave captor. The owner requested a trial and written permission to remove his property from the State. The anti-slavery faction sent for Nathan Simpson, a local lawyer of rising fame. The master had all the necessary proof; but Simpson and his party as they were coming to the place of the trial invited people along the way to "come and see the fun." On his arrival at the court house Simpson began his plea. He began in an ordinary tone of voice; the court room began to fill up, Simpson's voice grew louder; the crowd in the room �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 146 grew larger. Simpson, totally disregarding correctness of language or of logic, combined extreme vocal energy with heartrending pathos; the crowd, filling the windows doors, and every available space began to look threateningly at the slave-owner. Slipping out of the door with his party, the latter was heard to mumble; "I'll never again follow a slave to Ohio; when they get here they're beyond reach." Then there is the instance that makes clear the nature of northern feeling toward the individual Negro. When O.B. Chapman came to Pomeroy in 1845 there was no barber in the town; but a year or two later a free Negro named Addison came and opened a barber shop some where on Front street. Chapman says the Negro was capable, tidy, genteel and cleanly. Yet on Sunday he was given a pew all to himself; no one would sit beside him, "though on week days they let him fondle their faces…" (Chapman fails to state what his own attitude was toward Addison. However, his implied criticism of the treatment of the Negro received from the Pomeroy people in general, implies also a sympathetic attitude on his own part). ROLL CALL AT THE NEXT CURTAIN RISING The gradual resetting of the stage for the next Act of this living drama is almost completed. There remains only to account, wherever possible, for the absence of some of the leading actors and to locate those remaining on the stage when the curtain rises again. Of the original Roush settlers, Henry, Daniel and George will not be on the stage. Henry will be lying in the family burying ground at Letart Bottom (the later Plants graveyard); Daniel in the churchyard adjoining the Lutheran church (White Church) in the Roush Settlement; George in the little village of Racine on the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 147 third terrace overlooking the beautiful Ohio…" where "His little tombstone, well preserved, bears the inscription, 'George Roush, a soldier of the Revolution, died May 31, 1845, aged 84 years23. 23. The two quotations are from the Roush Book. The date of burial given there in causes some perplexity because of an editorial item found in the August 23, 1853 Telegraph, which item reads: "HAVE WE A PATRIARCH AMONG US? There lives at this time in Virginia, opposite Letart Falls, an old gentleman named George Roush, who has, if we are correctly informed, nearly two hundred descendants living, as follows: twelve children, eighty-three grandchildren, ninety-six greatgrandchildren and six great-great-grandchildren. The old patriarch is ninety-three years of age yet full of life and animation, walks erectly and seems not over sixty. His chances appear good for twenty years longer. The last time we heard of him he was sporting with some ladies on a steamer, being on his way to visit some relatives in Wheeling. "He is perhaps the only Free Mason living who witnessed the initiation of George into the mysteries of Free Masonry. The above facts were learned from one of the ladies above. He promises to visit Pomeroy soon, when we hope to become better acquainted with gather from his lips some facts in the history of the past which may interest and amuse readers…" Washington mentioned him and to our Inasmuch as the date of birth, number of children and other items coincide so nearly with those of the above-named George Roush, the editorial is given here in its entirety by request as an incentive to further research into the Roush family history by anyone directly interested in clearing up the seeming contradiction. New generations of Roushes and Roush descendants will be on the stage, not only in the rural sections but as prominent citizens in towns already founded and in others waiting to be founded. James Smith’s body will be lying in Middleport’s pioneer burying ground, the present (1936) Gravel Hill cemetary. A headstone at Mr. Smith's grave will tell passers-by that it was placed there "In Memory of James Smith, died May 8, 1817, aged 75 years," and will admonish them thus: "Go home, dear friends, and shed no tears, I must lie here till Christ appears, �And when he comes I hope to have A joyous rising from the grave." Benjamin Smith, who died in 1836, at the age of sixty-six, will be lying in the same graveyard; on his tombstone a long epitaph �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 148 "In Memory of Benjamin Smith, Esquire," and ending with the lines, "Close thine eyes in peaceful sleep secure, No sleep so sweet, no rest so sure." Col. John Niswonger too will be reposing in the Gravel Hill burying ground, his tombstone bearing the simple inscription: "Sacred to the Memory of Col. John Niswonger, who departed this life July 13, 182124." 24. The superior quality and comparative newness of the Colonel's headstone was so striking-so unexpected in that old graveyard-that it incited this writer to further research regarding Col. Niswonger's death and burial. The result was the following: For many years the statement in the Larkins History of Meigs County that "No person now living can find the place of his burial was true. During those years there had been a tradition in the Niswonger family that some time after the colonel's burial a pioneer had appropriated the Niswonger headstone (which had meanwhile fallen down) to use for a hearthstone in the house he was building; and that later, when the house was torn down, the tombstone, inscribed as above, had been discovered but lost again. This tradition was proved to be authentic history in the year 1934 when a descendant of the Colonel, Mrs. Agnes Soles of Youngstown and Washington Court House, Ohio, succeeded in finding both stone and grave. "After much research," wrote Mrs. Soles, "following clue after clue with the help of the late Mr. Mahaffey and Mr. Ed Steele I was able to locate the stone… I found that from long exposure it had shaled and the inscription could not be read; also that a Civil War marker was on the grave…" (See Act V for details regarding the finding of the stone when the Old house was wrecked.) With the help of other descendants Mrs. Soles had a new stone made, inscribed as above, and placed on the grave. On Decoration Day of 1934 the local chapter of the D.A.R. with appropriate ceremonies unveiled the stone. Hamilton Kerr will not appear in the next Act. He will have departed on his final scouting expedition, into a wholly unexplored region-(and, regrettably for twentieth century research, the record of time and place of his departure will have become lost). But many of his descendants will take an active part, along with younger generations of Niswongers and of innumerable Smith and Jones descendants, in the new development already on the way in the boot-shaped bend. Major Waggener will be interested spectator at his new home �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 149 in Point Pleasant. His brother James Waggener will still be at the old home on the later (1890s) German Furnace site, with his youngest child, Mary, his youngest son, Charles, and perhaps several more of his ten children. In a few months, though (Nov. 21, 1851), he will be laid to rest in the walled graveyard on the old "Archibald Sugar Camp" site (the present Adamsville cemetary), alone; with other Waggeners who passed away before that time. Some members of the Williamson family will be there but on the Ohio side of the stage. There is good basis for concluding that the family moved to Kerr's Run when Major Waggener left Waggener Bottom (about 1832). Edmund and William, two of the younger Williamson sons, were recorded as voters in Pomeroy's 1841 election. By 1851 William had a store and a tin shop at the mouth of Kerr's Run; Edmund was a prominent steamboat pilot, having got his start by raft and flatboat piloting. Betty (or Betsy) Williamson also will be on the stage, her location, however, undetermined by this writer. In 1828, while still residing in Waggener Bottom, she was married to William McIntyre (whose sister Sallie was the "belle of Mason County"). The few facts learned: that Miss Williamson was staying at Nye's Inn (the former Dill Inn) when her marriage took place; that the license was procured at Chester; that the McIntyre family objected to the marriage-all these facts make the marriage of Betty Williamson and William McIntyre appear very much like an elopement. In the early forties the William McIntyre family was living "near West Columbia"- on a farm, of course, since there was no settlement on the Virginia side then. Presumably the family was still there in 1851. Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy will be absent. Though well advanced in years when he came to The Narrows in 1834, he yet lived long enough to see his town duly in***ated also, possibly, to see it �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 150 made the county seat. (See Footnote 9, Act l.) On June 5, 1841, at the age of seventy-seven Mr. Pomeroy died at the new home he so recently had erected. He was buried in the little family burying ground bordering on Nailor's Run. His grave was marked by an unpretentious marble shaft on which was inscribed: "He finished an honorable and useful life in this town, to which his name was given by its inhabitants as a testimony of their respect for his character." The New England Founder's son C.R. Pomeroy; his sons-in-law V.B. Horton and Thomas Irvin; Horace H. Horton, Thayer Horton, V.B. Horton, Jr. (cousin of V.B.H.) and other leaders will still be on the stage to continue, with the aid of King Coal's new ally (see next Act) the work begun by Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy. Philip Jones, Ben Smith, Jr., Samuel Grant, Andrew Donnally, Lucius Cross-all these and many other oldest and older residents will be on hand, some still vigorous and eager to join with their many descendants in the next Act of the drama, others because of declining years satisfied now to be silent on-lookers dreaming of their own past achievements. Many new leaders will have come on before the opening of the next Act. From other parts of the county, the State and the Nation; from England, Wales and Germany, they will arrive in time to take more or less active parts in the new development approaching The Bend. Only a few of that incoming throng of the late 1840s were identifiable. They were: Samuel Alexander Milton Moore. who on September 22, 1847, came riding into Pomeroy on the Athens-Pomeroy mail-hack driven by John Worley. Young Moore had come from Albany, Ohio, to enter into the employ of B.S. & G.W. Edwards (Edwards Brothers), who had just opened their general store in the "Building vacated by Beatty & Fesler. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 151 Darius Reed, whose father's family had migrated from New Hampshire to Tupper Plains in 1798. When Darius (b. 1818) was old enough he went “West” to teach school. In a few years he returned to Meigs county and in 1848 started in the apothecary business on Pomeroy's Front street, in a building "a few doors above Court street." Marcus Bosworth, native of Massachusetts (b. 1796). At the age of eighteen Marcus migrated to Marietta and taught school in that vicinity several years. Later we find him in Portsmouth, Ohio, working in the county clerk's office; still later, doing similar work at Meigs county's capital, Chester. In 1848 he moved to the new county seat, Pomeroy, there to continue his career as a county official. John Probst, Pennsylvanian of French lineage, born 1826. His father, George Probst, a "rolling stone" in early manhood, travelling with his family through Ohio, settled finally in Chester to make silk hats- “stove-pipes." John helped his father a while, worked a while at the Ben Knight brickyard in Pomeroy; at the age of sixteen went to Pittsburgh to bind himself for five years as cabinet maker's apprentice. In 1848 he came with his father and family to Pomeroy to open a furniture shop above Nailor's Run, the John Probst & Company establishment. William Downie, who in the year 1849 left Scotland for America. On the same vessel in which young Downie crossed the ocean was the Peter Crosbie family, also from Scotland. Ocean voyages in those days were leisurely-plenty of time to get acquainted with all the passengers. The Crosbies, after landing in New York, came on to their destination which was Pomeroy, Ohio. William Downie had intended to go elsewhere; but when he learned that Miss Susan Crosbie was to stop at Pomeroy he forthwith decided to stop there too. He got work at the Horton *** and Susan Crosbie were married �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 152 on August 28, 1850. Peter Crosbie opened a blacksmith shop on Mulberry street, opposite the Court House. James Crosbie, a son, had learned tailoring in Scotland, therefore he soon found employment at the "Brading Clothing Depot," in Pomeroy. Dr. Sebastian Rhem, German immigrant of 1846.Dr. Rhem had graduated from the University of Augsburg and had had several years' practice in Germany before coming to Pomeroy. Shortly after his arrival he married Miss Anna Katz and departed with her for Milwaukee. But the severe climate of Wisconsin combined with the bright prospects reported to them from The Bend, brought Dr. Rhem and his wife back to Pomeroy just in time for the opening of Act III. of this drama. Dr. Rhem located near the Rolling Mill. Philp Huber, graduate of Heidelburg University, Germany. After graduation from that institution Philip Huber entered a medical school to study medicine and dentistry. When he had completed four years of his six-year course he became involved in a duel the outcome of which made flight seem advisable. Arriving in Middleport in 1847 or '48, this young medical student, having learned clock- and watch-making before he entered Heidelburg, decided upon this latter as his vocation. He accordingly opened a shop on First street (plat of 1847) near Rutland Road. John Michael, miner, native of North Wales (b. 1805). Mr. Michael in 1845 came with his wife and about seven children to Middleport, where he was employed by John Fisher to superintend the work at the Fisher Coal Bank, or the “Sheffield Bank." The Famine in Ireland (1849) and the 1848-49 Revolutions in Europe brought hundreds of Irish and Germans to America. Many of these found their way to The Bend, some before 1851; some not until the next Act of this drama was well on its way. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 153 (ACT TWO) (Approx. 1851-1861) AN ALLY ENTERS BACK-STAGE PREPARATION Henry Howe, discoursing humorously on the subject of salt (Historical Collections of Ohio, page 219), says that its praise might be on every tongue-the tongue of man, the tongue of beast. What praises must have been on the tongues of the first trans-Allegheny pioneers whenever they chanced to find springs of even the most moderate degrees of brackishness! Salt was a vital necessity for them, not so much for seasoning as for a meat preservative. Yet, because salt had to be brought across the mountains on horseback or in wagons-either method involving great difficulty-the price of that commodity ranged from four to eight dollars the bushel. Few indeed were the pioneers who could buy a sufficient supply of salt at that rate. The first American salt makers were the Indians. The first white person to make salt west of the Alleghenies (and probably in the United States) was a woman named Mary Ingles. While the French and Indian war was in progress, the Shawanese on the Scioto were encouraged to attack any English frontier settlements they could find. In the summer of 1755 a band of Shawanese crept up the Kanawha Valley toward Draper's Meadow-a settlement of about six cabins on New River branch-and killed, wounded or captured every person there. Mrs. Ingles, her two boys, her new-born baby and her sister-in-law were among the captured. After the massacre the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 154 Indians started with their prey back to their village at the mouth of the Scioto. On the way down the Great Kanawha they stopped at a salt spring not far above the present site of Charleston, West Virginia, to feast on game which they knew would be plentiful there and to have some salt made. To Mrs. Ingles1 was assigned the task of making the salt. 1. A sketch of this brave and sturdy borderland woman's almost unbelievable subsequent experience may be found in Dr. John P. Hale's Trans-Allegheny Pioneers. Dr. Hale was a great-grandson of Mrs. Ingles. The boot-shaped bend's Virginian pioneers got their salt by crossing overland to a salt lick on the Kanawha river near the present site of Buffalo, West Virginia. But the others got their salt mainly from the famous Scioto Salt Licks about fifty miles to the west of the bend. Those springs were known to the buffalo and other wild animals and to the Indian long before they were discovered by white men. Herds of buffaloes coming at regular intervals to the licks had worn wellbeaten paths thither; Indians, too, made pilgrimages to them each summer, the men to kill game the squaws to make salt.2 2. The buffalo paths were recognizable as late as 1837. The pans used by the Indians for evaporating the brine remained imbedded in the soil of the region many years, the last one being blasted out in the year 1899. Bownbrocker's "Geological Survey of Ohio." By the end of the eighteenth century the white man, having completely displaced the buffalo and the aborigine, was making salt at the licks by digging shallow wells and drawing out the brine by means of ***nd-pole fastened to a sweep, then boiling the water thus obtained. It was a slow and tedious process. One pioneer �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 155 writes that his father worked a week to get a sack of salt. When Ohio became a state (1803) its legislature took over the regulating of that region. The Licks were at their zenith about 180608, at which time twenty furnaces were in action, producing from fifty to seventy-five bushels of salt per week. The furnaces were crude affairs consisting of iron kettles set in a row over a flue terminating at one end in a chimney. The brine was pumped from the wells into a wooden tank connected by wooden tubes with the kettles. After being boiled the brine was dipped out of the kettles into the cistern, where it was allowed to cool and settle. After settling, it was again conveyed to rows of kettles called grainers. Into these a small Quantity of clay was thrown; the clay collected the impurities remaining, which were skimmed off the top of the kettles. Further boiling, followed by cooling, then by draining in "drainers," then the salt was ready to be dumped into sheds called "the salt house"; there it was barrelled and marketed. The wells at these Licks were from twenty to thirty feet deep. The drilling was still the laborious spring-pole process, by which six feet could be considered a big day's work. The brine was correspondingly weak, six to eight hundred gallons being necessary for a bushel of salt. The product was dark and otherwise inferior, but being better than none it commanded a high price. When a better and cheaper product appeared on the market the Scioto Licks naturally began to languish. That superior product came from the Kanawha Salines on the Great Kanawha River. The first salt works on that river were started about 1808 at Malden, which was within a few hundred yards of where Mary Ingles made salt in 1755.3 �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 156 3. It is an interesting fact that a grandson and a great-grandson of Mrs. Ingles manufactured salt within sight of those licks. The grandson was Crocket Ingles, a Kanawha salt manufacturer. The great-grandson was the aforementioned Dr. Hale, who states that he had been "a salt manufacturer for more than thirty years within a few hundred yards of where she made salt in July, 1755." The brines there were much stronger than those of the Scioto Licks, hence the rapid growth of the Kanawha Salt works. In 1817 there were fifteen large furnaces in operation in the Kanawha Valley. It was in that year, too, that a Kanawha manufacturer began using coal instead of wood for heating his furnaces. Nearer home were the salt-making efforts of the early Vermont immigrants to the Leading Creek region. From brine which they found seeping out of the ground those settlers succeeded in extracting enough salt tor their own private uses. Later, during the early 1820s, when salt water was discovered in the soil about Bingham's Mills, a local company was formed, a well "bored," a furnace erected, and all preparations made for commercializing the industry. But after a few years the project had to be abandoned; the Rutland brine proved too weak to produce salt in sufficient quantities to compete with the Kanawha product. Commercial salt manufacturing might never have come to the Ohio River had not a method of deep-well drilling been invented. “Billy” Morrie bored wells for several years in the Kanawha Valley by means of a horse-mill which consisted of a shaft, a crank, a lever, a pump and a blind horse or mule. Finally, about 1840, "well-borer" Morris devised a simple little tool with which he succeeded in drilling deep into the earth to where the brine was much more abundant and much heavier than that obtained from the shallow wells. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 157 Though never patented, Billy Morris's "slips" (called "jars" in the oil regions) came immediately into general use for deep-well drilling; and when soon thereafter the heavy sinker and a few minor improvements were added, salt manufacturing received an impetus of such power as to drive it down to the Ohio River. INTO THE FOREGROUND Along with the Salt Industry's extension of its stage of action (or was it before such extension?) came a new idea, a new theory. This theory grew out of the vast heaps of unmarketable slack and top coal that lay dumped near every coal bank. Why not put up salt furnaces near the mines and fire the furnaces with such waste product, asked someone. The idea somehow got to the Ohio River. But how can one be sure that there is a bed of salt water under the Ohio, wondered someone else. Geologists believe, (was the reply), that the salt lake under the Kanawha Salines extends far up into the state of Ohio, passing directly under the Horseshoe Bend; but the only way to be sure of that is to drill down far enough to find out. And that is exactly what the above-mentioned Reverend Moses Michael, postmaster of the new post office in the Ice Creek narrows, set about doing. In the same year that the Thomas-Foley coal-bank was opened, he and two Point Pleasant men, John Hall and John McCullough, bought some four hundred area of land in the Ice Creek narrows, had a town laid out and also had Kanawha drillers Steele & Russell at work drilling a deep wekk just below the mouth of the creek. The drillers struck salt water at a depth of about 700 feet. But the next year Messrs. Michael, Hall and McCullough sold �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 158 the well, a furnace site and about thirty acres of adjacent coal land to William J. Stephens, who, with Thomas Friend and Abraham Williams as associates, had the well deepened to about 1000 feet and had a large salt furnace built; and during the year 1850 the Stephens, Friend & Williams Company began to manufacture salt. Messrs. Michael, Hall & McCullough in the meantime had kept on with their town-founding. Isaac Behan was the first builder and contractor to arrive, having moved down from Pomeroy in 1849. The founders offered ground and coal enough for the erecting and running of a grist-mill; also a lot for a foundry, two lots for a church and a school-house. Abednago Shearman put up the mill out on Ice Creek; Arthur Brook, a wealthy Canadian, built the foundry. The Reverend Moses Michael himself financed the building of the church and school, not as separate houses but as one large, three-story brick structure with the second story designed for religious services, the third to be used as a public hall, the first floor, or basement, for a school. Lemuel Harpold bought a site on the Creek for a tannery, the Russell Brothers took one on the River bank for a saw- and planing-mill. By the end of '51 a second brick building the Van Matre House, had been put up by O.H.P. Van Matre; and a large frame structure, the West Columbia Hotel, by Edward Biggs. These two hotels hoped to accommodate the many new-comers that were flocking daily to find work or to set up independent businesses. While the new town was thus rising, Messrs. Stephens, Williams & Friend made salt, had a coalbank opened, advertised in the MEIGS COUNTY TELEGRAPH for Salt Barrels, for Coopers, for Brickmakers. They had William Shank and other carpenters at work putting up Company houses. By the spring of 1852 they owned twenty tenements, all occupied. *** with large families and several boarders �A.F Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 159 besides. On May l, 1852, with a population of approximately five hundred, the new town in the Ice Creek narrows was incorporated by the Virginia Assembly as THE TOWN OF WEST COLUMBIA. William Shank is believed to have been its first mayor. The salt furnace that was built in the year 1850 within the limits of West Columbia had the distinction of being the first salt furnace on the Ohio River to put salt on the market. Very soon after its erection and ever afterwards it was known popularly as The Friend Furnace, because Thomas Friend was Superintendent of the Stephens-WilliamsFriend coal and salt works. But coal was still king in the Horseshoe Bend. A large group of capitalists was planning to enter the West Columbia scene, not as salt manufacturers primarily but as coal operators. The scarcity of coal was still a source of annoyance to Cincinnati, Louisville and other western cities. Cincinnati newspapers complained that the Youghiogheny coal could not be depended upon; that because of bad River conditions between Pittsburgh and Marietta most of the coal boats destined for the West never reached it. It was Robbins, of information part of Mr. such circumstances that induced one of the group, W.B. Covington, Ky., to write to V.B. Horton asking for regarding the coal situation in the vicinity of Pomeroy. A Horton's reply (dated November 26, 1851) follows: …We dig two to three million bushels of coal a year at our mines-say 2 ½ million on an average. Of that quantity we sell nearly one fourth to steamboats here. The reminder is sold to towns this side of the Falls of the Ohio. Steamboats pay us 5¢ per bushel at our landing. We pay miners l ¾¢ per bushel, we hauling it from his room in the bank, keep up roads, etc… I have considered establishments for the purpose of carrying on the coal business in this vicinity, with capital and conducted in a fair way, as not necessarily injurious to our business. I have re- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 160 peatedly expressed this opinion, probably to you as well as to others. I still think so. A number of strong companies would be likely to interfere with the coal business from the Monongahela and do what our company cannot do as to supplying the market… Thus encouraged, Mr. Robbins and eleven others (from Cincinnati, Covington, Boston, Hartford and New York), by February 25, 1852, had incorporated the WEST COLUMBIA MINING & MANUFACTURING COMPANY and had leased a large amount of coal land along Ice Creek, their tract including the Burnet-Worcester bank (the Thomas-Foley bank originally). The Company's organization, completed in the fall of 1852, consisted of W.B. Robbins, President; S.M. Mack, Secretary and Treasurer; Elisha Mack, Local Superintendent; and a Board of Directors. Messrs. Robbins, Mack and Mack came at once to West Columbia to get the work started. And now, while the W.C.M. & M. Company is establishing_ itself as industrial neighbor to the Stephens-Friend-Williams Company and then later is getting itself incorporated as the Cincinnati, & West Columbia Mining & Manufacturing Company (C. & W.C. M. & M. Co.) the time is opportune to look again at the rest of the Horseshoe Bend. The Stephens salt furnace was in operation little more than a year when local men of means considered the cheap-fuel and underground-saltlake theories as proved sufficiently to risk applying them. Within the next ten years five salt furnaces were making salt on the Ohio side of the Horseshoe Bend and three on the Virginia side. Not every coal bank had a salt furnace near it, but every furnace was the patron of one or more coal banks. White crystals and black diamonds had become industrial allies. For a presentation of the erecting of the remaining eight salt furnaces and the local changes effected thereby several scenes are necessary. The first of such scenes will show what happened at �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 161 In the year 1848 or '49 James Blundon, an experienced salt manufacturer from the Muskingum salt region, came to Pomeroy and began boring for brine on Front street, near the Peacock coal bank. With a turn-table, a gray mule (probably blind), and indomitable perseverance Mr. Blundon actually succeeded in reaching a depth of about six hundred feet. Unfortunately, however, he had not reached the salt stratum; and he couldn't proceed with the experiment because his crude machinery had given out and he had not the means for procuring better. Yet he felt sure there was brine in the region. V.B. Horton had wished Mr. Blundon well (one source says he had urged the Muskingum manufacturer to come to the Bend to test for brine) but had been too busy with his coal business to give the salt experiment any attention. Now, with success at West Columbia beyond question-well, the time had come to look at the Blundon obsession regarding his own locality from a practical view-point. By April 8, 1851, The Pomeroy Salt Company was organized, with V.B. Horton, Horace H. Horton, C.R. Pomeroy, Marcus Bosworth and a Cincinnati capitalist as stockholders and a capital stock of $25,000. The Company's purpose was to complete the Blundon well and to put up a salt furnace next to the Peacock coal-bank. Jabez Spinks was secured to finish the well and Thomas Scott to build the furnace. Both were experienced in their respective lines of work; both came from the Kanawha salt region. For the remainder of that year's accomplishment, read the editorial items of the Meigs County Telegraph of that year: [April 24] It has been learned that two companies were recently organized to engage in the salt business, one in Middleport and one in Pomeroy, both composed of the most substantial men of the vicinity… It will be but a brief time till Pomeroy salt will be �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 162 quoted throughout the Market Reports of the West. [June 12] The Pomeroy Salt Company have commenced boring. The site selected is the old well bored a few years since to a considerable depth and vacated for want of means. Prospects are very flattering. [July 3] POMEROY SALT.-The Salt question in Pomeroy is now fixed. The company has been completely successful in its experiment. The well is now 1,000 feet deep, giving forth a most abundant supply of water and is said by old manufacturers to be the strongest well west of the Alleghenies. The furnace is to be immediately erected. Our facilities are such that no works in the west can compete with us. [July 17] The Pomeroy Salt Company is preparing to bore another well a short distance from the site of the present one. [August 12] THE POMEROY SALT WELL; THE STRONGEST YET DISCOVERED. It is not generally understood that Pomeroy has the greatest salt well yet discovered in the United States… The well discharges an unbroken stream of 50 gallons per minute. It has been tried by the usual test and shown that it will produce one bushel of salt to 50 gallons of water; that is, one bushel of salt a minute or 240 bushels per day. The Pomeroy Company is constructing a furnace l50 feet long, which is intended for three wells, but it is feared that it is not of sufficient capacity to use the water of one well. The supply of water is supposed to be greater than anywhere else in the United States. [November 11.] The Pomeroy Salt Company started its furnace some days since and is now getting it properly under way. It will be the greatest furnace in the West. [November 19] The Pomeroy Salt Company now have their furnace in complete order. It works admirably. We will give a full account of the matter before long. [March 11, 1852] The Pomeroy Salt Company has made one shipment of about 300 barrels of salt. 400 barrels are ready for the market. An average of over 80 barrels per day is being added daily. The Company is putting up two more grainers to increase the daily output by 30 or 40 barrels. On July of the same year ('52) the Coal Ridge Salt Company was incorporated by A. Murdock, L.B. Smith, Wm. McAboy, James Crary, and L.S. Nye. Its furnace was put up just east of the mouth of Kerr's Run. The Middleport company built its furnace near V.B. Horton's Diamond coal bank. The site of the furnace belonged again to ��A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 163 Philip Jones, hence was in Middleport; yet the company called itself The Coalport Salt Company. Oliver Grant and Philip Jones were its organizers. (Incorporation, if any, is not recorded at Columbus.) Editor Van Horn's promised account, if published, was not found; but his successor, A. Thompson, on June 20, 1854 in a long editorial on The Salt Manufacture brought out these facts: 1st, that three furnaces were in successful operation on the Ohio side-The Pomeroy making 700 bushels of salt per day; the Coalport, 400 bushels; Coal ridge, 500. 2d, that at the Pomeroy well pumps were unnecessary, since the water rose to the surface spontaneously.4 3d, that the furnaces generally were near the entrance to a coal mine, where possible. 4. Shortly afterward pumps were put in, when the supply increased from 85 barrels per day to 120. -C.A. Hartley One month after the above account appeared (July 20, '54), the Sugar Run Salt Company, with Thomas Scott as Manager, Samuel Halliday as Secretary and Treasurer, T.A. Plants and four other stockholders, was incorporated. The furnace was put up "on the ground where the long row of old frame houses stand, just above the Pomeroy Salt Furnace. The houses are now being torn down." The next year ('55) The Dabney Salt Company, with V.B. Horton President, and E.J. Horton Secretary and Treasurer, built and put into operation its furnace in the eastern end of Coalport, just below the former Pomeroy, Sons & Company mine on Lot 304. Then furnace building on the Ohio side rested five years. By December, 1860, it had started again with the erection of the new Excelsior Salt Company’s furnace on the coal property of S.W. Pomeroy (*** of the first S.W. Pomeroy still living in Cincinnati. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 164 And now to the Virginia side, where "the orchard, melon patch, wheat and corn fields of our old friend Brown directly opposite our [Thompson's] office" likewise were undergoing a change. In the summer of '52 the news spread throughout the boot-shaped bend's rural regions that woodmen and teamsters were needed at the Brown farm. Forthwith from Roush Settlement came the twin brothers Samuel and Levi Mumaw, and Jacob Roush, the latter with horse and wagon. These three with one or two other men got the farm ready for the surveyors who came to lay it out in streets, alleys and lots. Richard Collins, John Davis, David Thomas, and others, came from Pomeroy; John Robinson and others from West Columbia, to "dig" coal; Soloman Stone, Benjamin Biggs and John Winkleblack came from Meigs county to build houses, make chairs, etc. But not until March 15, 1853 did the Telegraph have any news item about the new Virginia town across the River. On that date, however, it carried the following announcement: SALE OF REAL ESTATE:-We understand that Mr. Brown has sold his farm opposite Pomeroy to Messrs. Lovell and Smith, of Marietta, who intend immediately to commence the mining of coal and the manufacturing of salt and also of fire brick. In other words, they intend to "develop the resources" of the farm. The farm contains about 320 acres and was sold for $25,000. We hope and expect ere long to see a town of considerable size springing up on the opposite bank. No doubt the prospects for the termination of two railroads in this vicinity operated as an inducement to the purchasers. (All correct except “of Marietta.” Richard Channing Moore Lovell came from Charleston, Virginia, but had relatives living in Marietta, Georgia; and Mr. Levell's partner is believed to have been one of those relatives. The Telegraph editor seems to imply that Lovell and Smith came from Marietta, Ohio.) Two months later, on May 3, 1853 appeared the following advertisement: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 165 TOWN LOTS FOR SALE:-At auction, in the newly laid out town of Mason, on Wednesday, the 11th day of May next, a large number of lots adapted for private residences and for the erection of manufacturies. The streets are broad, there is ample room for public buildings and all the conveniences demanded by a large city. The Bottom on which the town is located is above high water, there is no low ground or marshy land near. Salt water, inexhaustable quantities of coal in the immediate vicinity, location on the beautiful Ohio, are facts enough to recommend the property for sale. Terms: 15% down, the remainder in equal instalments, 1, 2, 3 and 4 years. R.C.M. Lovell & Company. Here again we hand over the completion of the scene to Editor Thompson: [May 18.] SALE OF LOTS IN MASON CITY:-From our window (the lot sale was immediately opposite our office) we could see the large crowd of bidders. Many arrived too late. About thirty lots were sold at prices ranging from $70 to $225, the average being about $200. The object of the sale was to give the town a start. It is destined to be a flourishing city; it is elegantly laid out, with wire streets and ample public grounds. There are few better locations on the Ohio River. There is a fair prospect that the Manassas Gap Railroad will terminate there. There is coal and salt in abundance. Few men are more experienced in the manufacture of salt than Mr. Lovell. Also, the growth of Pomeroy and the difficulty of procuring building sites for residences here will be an aid to the new town. We wish Mr. Lovell success and hope soon to cross the River in a steam ferry to visit the new town. [June 12]-We were pleased to see the demonstrations made by the proprietors of the new city opposite our window. A brick kiln is in full operation, rafts of timber stop occasionally on the River shore, and every preparation for building is in constant progress. One building has been erected during our absence and we have been informed that men are employed cutting into the hill to open a mine. We like to see these demonstrations and will note their progress from time to time. [December 6.]-VISIT TO MASON CITY;-We visited the new and thriving town. From the window of our sanctum we have witnessed the principal developments, as the erection of new buildings, the improvements on the River bank. Not until our visit had we a conception of the beauty and permanency of the improvements. The coal mine is a considerable distance from the River, say one-half or three fourths of a mile. A railroad is in process of construction to the River, with a descent of about one degree from the mine to the River. The Company designs to use mules to convey the coal to the River; they estimate that the same amount of labor will be required to convey a loaded car to the River as to return the empty cars to the mine. The entrance to the mine is some distance from the hill and is neatly and substantially made from timber. About two hundred yards ��A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 166 from the entrance and near the hill is an opening from above, with steps to descend into the mine. A short distance from the mine are the cottages of the miners. We cannot refrain from an expression of commendation: for neatness, convenience, comfort and respectibility of appearance these cottages are vastly superior to the habitations furnished miners by other companies. They are one story, have two rooms in front, an arm, or wing, extending back, large enough for kitchen and dining room. The cottages are separated at a proper distance from each other allowing a nice yard and garden, and are intended for one family only. Eight are already completed. They are painted white and present a beautiful and cleanly appearance. The improvements on the River bank are quite extensive. Mr. Lovell was absent hence we were unable to ascertain his design in reference to future improvements. We understand, however, that a scarcity of materials has seriously retarded operations this season. A considerable quantity of coal has already been taken from the mine, which appears to be of excellent quality. In addition, several buildings have been erected by private individuals who have purchased property in the new city. Mr. Brown, the former proprietor of the land, has just completed a fine new brick dwelling for his future residence. Several other dwellings and stores have been built, but we did not learn by whom. Mr. Lovell, the principal proprietor, is a gentleman of energy and activity. Mr. Patrick, his agent, is a gentleman well qualified for his post. At our earliest convenience we intend to visit the new town near Sliding Hill and other points in the neighborhood, and to inform our county readers of the improvements that have been made. Before shifting the scent to Sliding Hill, however, a few more touches must be given to Editor Thompson's picture of the new town directly opposite his office, which then was "seven doors below Court street." The mouth of the Lovell-Smith coal-bank was in the ravine later known as "Leyer's Holler." In the fall of 1853 Edward Edwards, originally of Wales, more recently of Pennsylvania, came directly from Coalport to dig coal in the mine and in a few weeks was promoted to the position of "bank boss." The next year ('54) George Patrick and Philip Nicholson put up a saw-mill on the River bank directly opposite the east corner of Pomeroy's Linn street. Front street, expected to be THE business street, got a start as such when the Company built its store there-on the third lot east �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 167 of the coal-car track. Fitch & Welch chose a site on Center street one block from the eight cottages for a store. The saloon-keeper built his little "grocery" on Fourth or Back street, in the block that was directly in line with the coal-bank. On March 6, 1855, Editor Thompson told his readers thatA note from Mr. Lovell says that a post office has been established at Mason City. Citizens of Mason formerly received their mail through the Pomeroy post office. January 27. 1855 was the date of the opening of the post office in Mr. Lovell's town. The name given the office was Mason. Its first postmaster was Asa Brigham. Close upon the heels of that item-on May 5, to be exact-came another one of even greater public interest. It was signed, "R.C.M. Lovell, for the Mason City Salt Manufacturing Company," and announced that Proposals for Boring a Salt Well would be received at his office until May 15th. The company that authorized the announcement had been organized by Lemuel H. Sargeant, a Virginian then living in Cincinnati. Its salt furnace was to be built alongside the Lovell coalyard on the River bank. Fuel for the furnace was to be supplied by R.C.M. Lovell's coal works. On February 26 of the next year (1856) the Virginia Assembly passed an Act for the incorporating of the "Town of Mason in the county of Mason." The Act specified minutely the new town's boundary lines:-the Robert Adams line, the Ohio River, the Lewis Anderson line, the foot of the hills; it outlined the duties of its officers; named the day on which the election of the town's first five trustees should be held (all other officers were to be appointed by Five Trustees, or The Town Council; and it appointed John �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 168 Thomas, James W. Sheppard, Philip Nicholson, John A. Winkleblack and George Patrick to superintend the first election. Accordingly, Mason's first town election was held on the first Monday in April, 1856. George Patrick, it is believed, was appointed by the Council to be Mason's5 first Mayor. 5. Extensive research failed to reveal why both post office and town were named Mason in face of the fact that the town had been called Mason City from its beginning and that the new salt company had been given the same designation. The name Mason came, of course, from the county's name, which in turn had been so called in honor of George Mason, Virginian of Revolutionary fame. In the spring of the same year of Mason's incorporation the Mason City Salt Manufacturing Company made its first salt. The "Town Near Sliding Hill," which Editor Thompson meant to visit some time, was a sort of twin sister to Mason in that it came into being at nearly the same time. But the facts leading up to that town's beginning are somewhat more complicated and were more difficult to obtain. Several trips to Point Pleasant for the purpose of perusing early county records were rewarded with a mass of information more or less directly related to the object of the quest. That which is more directly related is here reproduced under two heads: 1st, Support for the contention that the site of the Town Near Sliding Hill was originally a part of the Andrew Waggener land grant. A deed was found concerning the sale of "a certain tract of land situate… and lying in waht is called Waggeners Bottom including the mouth of Sliding Hill Creek… being the same tract of land conveyed to said Zebulon Dyer by George W. Stribling, Special Commissioner, in virtue of a decree of the Circuit �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 169 Superior Court of Law and Chancery for Mason county rendered in a cause therein pending wherein the said Zebulon Dyer was Plaintiff and James Waggener and others Defendants…" A long, detailed description of said tract's boundary line follows, the substance of which is that the tract included all that part of "the whole original survey 4051 ½ acres called Waggeners Bottom" lying between the James Capehart land, which began just beyond Sliding Hill, and the John S. Sehon land. The deed from which the above quotations were taken is dated December 16, 1847. Through that deed Zebulon Dyer of Pendleton county, Virginia, "granted, bargained, sold, aliened and conveyed" to Nimrod Pumphrey of Ohio county and George Thompson of Mason county for "the sum of ten thousand dollars lawful money of the United States," the tract of land which he had secured in a law suit against James Waggener (as stated in said quotation.) Not long after the land was sold to Nimrod Pumphrey and George Thompson, the latter sold his share to Mr. Pumphrey. Thus Nimrod Pumphrey became owner of all the land lying between the John Sehon farm and the James Capehart farm just beyond Sliding Hill. (The date of this latter sale was inadvertantly omitted but is easily approximated from the following:) 2d, The exact boundaries of the tract of land destined to be the site of a new town, near Sliding Hill. On November 15, 1851, Nimrod Pumphrey sold to "William Burnett, Frederick I. Clarke and David Worcester, all of Cincinnati, for $9939.75 all that piece and parcel of land situated… in Waggeners Bottom… being a part of the tract of 1012 ¾ acres conveyed to Nimrod Pumphrey and George Dyer… described as follows to wit: Beginning at the mouth of Sliding Hill Creek… thence up said river [Ohio] with �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 170 its meandering… to two Beeches and a Sugar tree standing on the bank of the Ohio river originally at the corner of James Capehart's land… thence along division line between the James Capehart land and Nimrod Pumphrey land to… original back corner of the entire survey… thence with back line of survey… to such a point on said line as to make 540 acres by a strait line to the beginning point at the mouth of the Creek… together with all the Coal in said land lying south and east of the south fork of Sliding Hill Creek not embraced in the above boundaries.” The three men who bought that tract of land combined with several Eastern capitalists to form the MASON COUNTY MINING & MANUFACTURING COMPANY, with Samuel Coit, of Hartford, Connecticut, as president. The company was incorporated May 6, 1852. W.H. Healy, with his brother-inlaw George W. Moredock to assist him, was sent from Connecticut to have a town laid out near Sliding Hill, a coal bank opened and a salt plant built. Early in 1853 County Surveyor Thomas Hogg laid out the town, while Welsh miner Billy George with other miners began the mine and R.L. Winkleblack, Pomeroy contractor, had a force of carpenters at work on a row of cottages along the hillside. In the autumn of 1855 John Humphreys, Kanawha salt-maker, began supervising the erection of a furnace and late in 1856 he started to manufacture salt. The new town at Sliding Hill was given the name Hartford City, in honor of the M.C.M. & M. Company's president. In the year 1857 a branch company, The Union Salt Company, was organized. George W. Moredock, president of this company, sent George Wilding, Welsh miner, to the east side of Sliding Hill to open its mine (a slope mine, like that of the M.C.M. & M. Co.) The company planned to put up a furnace and lay out a town later. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 171 Meanwhile the mine with its handful of miners' cottages was simply The Slope, or Upper Slope, where George Wilding superintended the coaldigging and Henry Welton, of Connecticut, supervised all other Union Company activities. The Company's town when finally laid out was called New London by some. But New England sentiment prevailed to such a degree that the new town on the east side of Sliding Hill was given the name of Connecticut's other capital; namely, New Haven. Farther up on the Virginia side opposite Letart Falls, Ohio, “Chiselburg” made early efforts to establish relations with the salt industry. By 1854 W.T. Hayman and ---? Pilchard, still building flatboats and produce boats, had also a coopershop in operation for making barrels to be sold to the salt companies down the River. By '54 the population of the "burg" had increased sufficiently to justify the establishment of a Federal post office therein. Accordingly, on May 14 of that year, with Charles Wesley Sayres in charge and under the name of Letart the office was opened for business. Beginning in the January 9, 1855 issue of the Telegraph the following advertisement ran several successive weeks: LEADINGTON, New Town just below Leading Creek. Town Lots and Sites for Salt Wells. Apply to Columbia Downing, Esq., who will at all times be ready to exhibit the Town Plat and point out lots upon the ground. On July 17 of that year the Leadington Salt Company was reported to have one well completed and one boring, preparatory to the erection of a furnace. On June 5, 1855 an editorial on Pomeroy and its Environs told �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 172 the public that "Syracuse, or New Winchester, is growing apace. Two years ago it was not thought of." Yet, five years previously, on September 21, 1851, in the broad bottom above Minersville, the bottom wherein lay the Buffington, Bridgeman, Carleton, Watson and other farms, a post office had been opened (with John Capehart in charge) and named Syracuse. About 1851, Thomas E. Davis, of Syracuse, N.Y., and David F. Worcester of New York City (the latter also a member of the M.C.M. & M. Co.) had bought land in that bottom and in '53 had put down a salt well-wherefore, doubtless, the prospective town's two names, Worcester becoming corrupted into Winchester by the public. In 1854, Davis & Worcester, who had built no salt furnace, sold their property to the Syracuse Coal & Salt Company, a Connecticut organization with headquarters at Hartford Connecticut. This company had a shaft mine put down at once and the next year began mining and shipping coal. It did not build a salt furnace, however, until ten years later. At almost the ende of the decade Racine succeeded in getting into the new ally's-that is, salt's-stage of action. This is shown by the following letter, published on January 17, 1860: LETTER FROM RACINE:-Workmen employed to sink a shaft for the Racine Coal Company, a short distance above town, reached a very fine vain. The original mover of the enterprise was W.H.B. Page, of Middleport. During the winter of 1855-56, Mr. Page presented the subject to the community; in the spring of '57 Page's shaft on the Thomas Pickens land just above town went 70 feet, found no coal… Early in '59 he formed a company composed of Thayer Horton, R.R. Hudson, Carleton Young, Thomas Pickens and himself. Operations were resumed but the shaft was located a little farther up the River. Eighty-four acres of land was purchased by the Company from A. Weaver of Letart, and contract given for shaft. Result, a vein 5 ½ feet thick, of superior quality. The shaft is close to the River, where there is plenty of water the year around; also a first-rate landing. The Company has also 1500 to 2000 acres secured from surrounding land owners. Tuesday the men who opened the mine gave the Company a miners' welcome. “Old Zack” was there… from Pomeroy… hills and valleys rang with echoes… [Omissions are due to worn places in the newspaper.] �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 173 The Racine Coal Company expected a salt furnace to be in operation in the vicinity of the coal mine before very long. The furnace was delayed; but the probability of its coming showed the stage to be extending beyond the Horseshoe Bend. THE HORSESHOE BEND GROWS CITIFIED As a result of the many industrial ventures in coal and other things, The Bend lost much of its natural beauty. And yet, up to the middle of the nineteenth century that Bend remained predominantly rural in appearance. None of the villages, not excepting Pomeroy, were solid communities. Anywhere from Sheffield to Minersville lay cornfields, wheatfields, orchards, vegetable gardens, clumps of virgin forest, each in smug neighborliness to general store, coal-bank, or other business or industrial establishment. Willows and shrubs still outlined the River shore. And the Virginia side, be it recalled, was still intermingled farm and forest except at the very small Burthistle coalexporting plant and the one west of Ice Creek. But during the next decade the passing of its rural characteristics took on a much more rapid pace. By the opening of the Civil War (April 9, 1861) The Bend was decidedly urban in appearance- measured by urban standards of the 1850s. The cause of the rapid transformation was the entrance of King coal's new ally, Salt, upon the stage. As if it had been assigned the role of Zeitgeist itself, this new force seems to have imbued everyone and everything with a new attitude. Inspired by its first experiment with salt-manufacturing, each town was further moved by the spirit of �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 174 INDUSTRIALISM:-the ambition to acquire as many industries as possible, and, consequently, to become urbanized. Therefore we see the five salt furnaces at Pomeroy acting as a spur to the other industries already there and also to the establishing of new industries. THE POMEROY COAL COMPANY is an outstanding example. The "number of strong companies" that V.B. Horton in '52 thought desirable gave promise of materializing. But by 1861 not more than four were in the Bend. Of these, The Pomeroy Coal Company, with its Diamond, Dabney, Peacock and Minersville banks (leased) and its towboats Condor No. 3, Brooklyn and Windsor (Condor No. 2 renamed, it is thought) had by far the greater part of the Bend's coal business. In 1858 Messrs. Horton and Pomeroy transformed their partnership into a formal organization and strengthened it further by the addition of several new members. V.B. Horton was elected president, Horace S. Horton secretary and treasurer of the new Pomeroy Coal Company. Next in importance, industrially, was the Rolling Mill and Spike Mill. A Telegraph editorial of June 3, 1856, throws the necessary light on the subject of that double industry: Supt. Jennings says the mill now manufactures 100 tons of iron per week. A 100-foot addition was built last year and contains four new puddling furnaces. The new Spike Mill on the same grounds manufactures rail spikes mainly. The owners have other mills in operation at Pittsburgh, and Richmond (Va.), manufacturing nearly all the spikes used in the United States. Mr. Davis, the new foreman, is young and is favorably known. Mr. Jennings succeeded Judge Heckard as superintendent. Pomeroy iron always bears a high reputation, which fact is attributed to the superior quality of coal used. The Pomeroy Foundry, taken over entirely by William McAboy in November, '51, was "prepared to fill orders for Steam Engines and Machinery of every kind; also Stoves, Holloware, Grates, Salt Pans, &C." By 1861 it had become The Pomeroy Foundry & Ma- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 175 chine Shop, with J.W.C. Stackpole as proprietor. Coal Ridge Flour Mill was "greatly improved by the owners, Murdock & Nye," in '55. But by 1861 financial reverses had brought changes, the partnership had taken the name of Murdock & Williamson (W.C. Williamson.) A.C. Crowley, erstwhile partner of John Davis as Carpenter and Joiner, in December, '58 was “helping to make ‘up town’ a point of active business” by putting into operation a "new and extensive Planing Machine and Sash & Door Factory a few doors above the Rolling Mill." L.S. Nye's Steam Saw Mill at the mouth of Kerr's Run, west side, and was still doing an active business in '61, under Nial R. Nye. Thomas Goulding was making Fire Brick at his Brickyard southeast of the Run. Stewart & Gilliam, Blacksmiths, were selling Irving Wagons and Buggies "at B.F. Stivers' old stand." In February, '59, Michael Blaettnar, blacksmithing since 1854, advertised that he had begun making Wagons and Carriages at his new Wagon & Carriage Shop, corner of Plum and Front streets. C. Haag, Gun & Locksmith, advertised his "New Establishment above Mr. V.B. Horton's Lumber Yard, between Front and Second streets," in August, 1857. "Horton's Boatyard," with Ben Wadman as foreman, was still building barges and coalboats in '61. In 1853 the 3d Condor was built at the Boatyard. Some of the Third Ward's new industries by 1861 were: David Geyer's Soap & Candle Factory on Sugar Run, "near Mr. Miles' Tannery," was first advertised in August, 1852. In '61 it was still advertised. His Lard Oil Factory long ago had disappeared �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 176 from the Telegraph's advertising pages, however. Davis & Morton moved from the Telegraph office to the old foundry on Butternut street in the spring of '51, dissolved partnership in '57. After a year with A.G. Crowley, "a few doors above the Flouring Mill," J.S. Davis advertised the Davis Planing Mill No. 1 on Sugar Run." A.G. Crowley organized Crowley & Co. By 1861 Jenkins & Patton's Wool Carding Machine on Sugar Run had become "Sugar Run Mill & Carding Machines, near the Court House," and was owned by H.B. Smith and Joseph Rigg. By 1861 the J.M. Miles Tannery on Butternut was in the possession of George McQuigg & Company, Tanners & Curriers. In 1861 John Geyer & Company had a Broom Factory on Second. In January, 1858 Humphrey's Blacksmith Shop moved to its "new building back of the Bank"; in January, 69 Peter Crosbie's Wagon, Buggy & Carriage Manufactury was located on Mulberry, "west side, 3 doors from Back street"; Ben Stivers had moved his Blacksmith, Wagon & Carriage Shop to Mulberry street. In September, 1860, a Branch Establishment of the Premium Marble Works of Racine was opened "at the house formerly occupied by Judge Irvin as a law office, at the west end of Sugar Run Bridge," with J.V. Smith ex-county sheriff, in charge. A sketch of Pomeroy's Mercantile Establishments during the 1851-61 period involves two disastrous events. The first paper in the Telegraph File (See SOURCE MATERIAL), dated April 17, 1851, though badly worn here and there, presents one of the pictures: "…incidents have become stale and uninteresting to the public, yet in this our first issue since… county readers might reasonably be supposed… to give some account of its effects. The fire originated Saturday morning, the… of March at three o'clock. When discovered it had made little progress but being at a time when persons sleep profoundly, it had got beyond �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 177 control when the citizens were arroused. The flames were first discovered between Bosworth's Hotel and Cohen's Clothing Store… space not more than six inches. It was evidently the work of an incendiary… a great calamity… at the beginning of the spring season… But we feel assured that the energy and enterprise of our citizens will soon obliterate all traces of disaster and Phoenix-like she [Pomeroy] will spring from her ashes more beautiful than before. Thereupon follows a list of the sufferers; this consisted of the various owners and occupants of the eight store buildings and three dwellings that had stood between Court street and the Riheldarfer Hotel building. Marcus Bosworth lost his hotel building, stables, furniture, provisions, hay, grain, etc.; the Telegraph proprietor (M.T. Van Horn) lost press fixtures, an imposing stove, furniture, desks, etc.; H. Cohen, Clothing Store; Mrs. Love, dwelling house; D. Reed, Drug Store; Cyrus Russell, dwelling and store house; J.P. Flemming, Drug Store (in Cohen building); George Lee, Watchmaker, Ralston & Stivers, and Jas. Fish, merchants, each lost buildings and goods; O. Branch, building and goods; L.E. Norgan & Brother, building, tailor shop and stock." The only buildings in that block to escape the fire were the Remington store and Riheldarfer Hotel, a large vacant space being between the latter and the dwelling house occupied by the Printing Office. The aggregate loss was estimated as between $25,000 and $30,000. Some of the loss was covered by insurance, but not that of the Telegraph proprietor; his was a "tee-total burn-up; for whoever knew of a printer to have anything insured." There were “various conjectures as to the incendiaries, but nothing certain…” One of the first indications of "energy and enterprise" was the announcement, in that same issue, of the Telegraph's own enlargement to "extra double medium sheet, containing twenty-eight col- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 178 umns of printed matter"; of its new press "of beautiful pattern and superior workmanship," and of its new type. The printing office had found temporary location on "Second street, two doors west of the Court House." On May 18th appeared another item which indicated the energy and enterprise of Pomeroy citizens: We see that Mr. Seth Paine has erected a fine building on the corner of Court and Second streets, which is designed for a store and dwelling. Pomeroy is going ahead. And on November 11th following, another item that indicated still greater enterprise: The new three-story brick buildings of O. Branch & Company and Washington Stivers are up and soon to be occupied. Other buildings of the "old school" are going up lively. Said liveliness continued so energetically and enterprisingly that during the next five years (by August, 1856) the whole of Front street between the Edwards Building at the Stone Bridge and Sycamore street was fairly well up. The block between the Bridge and Reed Brothers' building seems to have been especially desirable. After the Fire, Ralston & Stivers dissolved partnership and James Ralston went into business by himself, the new RALSTON STORE (and the Post Office) being "next above the Crawford & Stiers Store on Front street." The BRADING CLOTHING DEPOT, four doors below Reed & Brothers' corner, had as competitor J. NORGAN, CLOTHER, in the "Dr. Train Building, five doors below the Post Office." In November, '51, Editor Van Horn announced that the Office of the Meigs County Telegraph had been removed to Dr. Train's new frame building on Front street, "three doors above Edwards' store-up stairs." By December, 1852 L. Crofoot had moved his Saddle Shop to "Front, two doors below Crawford & Stiers," the T.J. & D.A. SMITH SHOE SHOP had hung its "sign of the Black Boot" under the Telegraph �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 179 Office and W. Wallace had a SADDLE & HARNESS SHOP in the Reed & Brother building. By April, '54, ROBBIBS & HALLIDAY'S Wholesale and Retail GROCERY had displaced Crawford & Stiers "two doors below Court street"; L. Crofoot had been bought out by J.H. HAMPTON & COMPANY. The new DANIEL & RATHBURN BANK began business in 1852 in the Knapp Building on Front street (exact location nowhere given). The Misses Propter and Traugott, MILLINERS and MANTUA-MAKERS, located "one door below the Telegraph Office," and DR. WHALEY, SURGEON DENTIST, "next door to the Telegraph Office" in 1854. By June, 1856, Mrs. Sidebottom had moved her GROCERY and CONFECTIONERY from "a few doors above Linn" to the "next door below the Daniel & Rathburn Bank," HOWE & JENKINS and CURTIS & REED each had gone into business "a few doors below Court," the former with a Clothing Store the latter as Wholesale and Retail Grocers. Several new buildings went up on Court street, several on Front between Court and Linn. On the east corner of Front and Court "in Stivers' New Brick, between H.B. Smith & Brother's Shoe Store and Washington Stivers' Dry Goods Establishment" the JONES & Stivers GENTLEMEN'S FINDING STORE began business in '53; in '54 S.A.M. MOORE & Judge HENRY OSBORN opened a General Store 3 doors above. It was the irony of Fate that on August 5, 1856, just three days before the second calamity, Editor Thompson should comment at length on the great advance made by Pomeroy and vicinity since he took charge of the Telegraph four years before. After that August 5 issue no Telegraph was published until the following September 12, and then only half a sheet. The Printing Office had moved to the third floor of the Branch Building; the small paper it had been able to get out consisted mainly of advertisements, a plea for long overdue subscriptions, and these items: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 180 Our loss by the Fire left us just where we commenced four years ago… A stranger judging from outward appearances might mistake us for a miserable half-starved community of wreckers and fishermen. Neighboring villages look like cities in comparison. But a better day has dawned for Pomeroy. The terrible conflagrations of '51 and '56 exhibited our strength, wealth and importance… REBUILDING:-Our town, which was so recently destroyed, presents a busy scene at present. Most merchants are again selling goods in temporary buildings hastily erected, and all builders obtainable are constantly employed erecting substantial Bricks. At noon on the preceding August 8th the fires had broken out in the Murphy Building (Front, below Court) and had wiped out of existence the two blocks between the Edwards Building and Linn street, leaving only the walls of the Branch Brick. It had demolished the Brick next to the Branch Building and also the Stivers Brick on the corner. It had even crossed Second street and seriously shattered the Court House walls. Not until November 18 did the Telegraph resume its regular weekly appearance. On December 16 Editor Thompson was moved-as Editor Van Horn had been moved after the '51 Fire to visualize Pomeroy "rising Phoenixlike from its ashes, brighter and more beautiful than before." With this heartening introduction he proceeded to give a resume of what had been done toward the reconstruction of the town: The Court House walls have been straightened and repaired; the roof, cornice and cupola replaced, the outside painted. 1. Between the Court Hose and our office (3d floor of the Branch Building) instead of the former one small building there are three large frames, the first occupied by J.H. Hampton, Saddle & Harness Manufacturer; the second by George Lee's Jewelry Store and the Post Office; the third by Jesse Stafford's Grocery Store. 2. The Branch Building has been repaired and rendered fireproof by the addition of iron window frames, and iron shutters to be attached. Next summer another three-story brick is to be erected on the vacant lot above us. 3. W. Stivers' building (new) joins the last-named on Court street is built to the corner of Front--77 feet on Court by 31 on Front. It is substantially built of brick, 3 stories, the first and second designed for his extensive Dry Goods, Grocery and Clothing business 4. Moore & Osborn's building joins Stivers' on Front. It is 3 �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 181 stories, the first and second to be used as a Dry Goods store. 5. The Odd Fellows' Hall:-The third stories of the last two named are to be fitted up and used as an Odd Fellows' Hall, leased by Mineral Lodge No. 242. The main hall is 142 by 56 ½ by 12 feet, has ten large windows, two ante rooms, nice large closets. It is one of the finest halls in the State and is furnished in magnificent style 6. H. Cohen's building, a three-story brick, fireproof, is immediately above Moore & Osborn but not connected. It is 22 by 80 feet; the lower story is 14 feet high, has circular ceiling, iron front, silver-plated iron sash, glass 5 by 2 ½ feet; 2d and 3d stories are 12 feet high. It is to be used as a Hardware, Dry Goods and Clothing store. The last four buildings are nearly finished. 7. The T.O. Crawford Building, a three-story brick, next above Cohen's, is finished and occupied. A 22 by 66-foot two-story brick is in the rear. 8. Next above Crawford's are two temporary frames, one occupied by A. Gatchel as a furniture ware-room; the other by D. & E. Reed as Drug Store and Grocery Store. There are no buildings between these and Remington's corner. 9. Remington & Halliday's building, on the corner of Front and Linn, is a three-story brick with imitation stone front. One side of the store room is for books, stationery, wall paper, &C. The remainder is for a drug store, clothing store, offices, and sleeping rooms. The store room is 24 by 74 feet, with two ware rooms. 10. On the corner of Second and Linn, W.J. Prall has a large frame workshop and ware room for stoves. This, with a stable or two, completes the list of structures on the upper square of the "burnt district." Starting again from the Court House we have, on the west side11. The Bank Building (erected by Daniel & Rathburn and Darius Reed) on the corner of Court and Second, three-story, fire-proof, designed for a bank and a drug store. It is 45 by 56 feet (on Second street) and has a ponderous vault in the Bank. 12. Next come several temporary frames, now occupied by: Moore & Osborn, W. Stivers, H. Cohen, James Ralston, Mrs. Sidebottom's Confectionary; Huttel, and Howe & Jenkins, Tailors; W.J. Prall's Stove Store; Burkhar & Bichman, Jewelers. 13. On Front, four doors below the last-named, is the Mayhugh Building, a three-story brick, used as a Grocery and Provision Store The only buildings left between the Stone Bridge and Linn street were the Edwards store and Samuel Halliday's dwelling house next above. By 1861 at least three others were helping the Mayhugh Brick to fill the gap below Court: Cartwright's two-story frame, corner Court and Front; John Eiselstein's Sale, Harness & Trunk Manufactury three doors below; and Thomas Whiteside's Boot & Shoe Shop three doors above the Bridge. Sam Silverman was selling Groceries and Provisions in the Mayhugh Building, first floor. Bichman & Burk- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 182 hart, Jewelers, moved to the first floor of the Cartwright Building; and to the second floor came Ernest Feiger's "Art Gallery" from the Swallow Building opposite, both "removals" occurring in the summer of 1860. Said Swallow Building was the former Stivers Brick. Soon after the Fire, H.H. Swallow bought a controlling interest in the Stivers business. In '58 he bought the remaining interest of W. Stivers, and on April 1, 1861 took as partner George Eiselstein, clerk with the Stivers firm since 1845. The new firm became Eiselstein & Swallow. By April, 1861, A. Burnap's new frame "next door below the Remington store" and one or two others practically filled the vacant space in that block. W.A. Aicher had moved his Jewelry Store from 7 doors above Linn into the Burnap Building "right at the head of the Wharfboat Landing Road"; Mrs. S.D. Gibson had a Millinary Establishment one door west of Aicher's Jewelry Store; Adolph Seebohm's Drug Store was "under the Remington House" (See Hotels, farther on); Remington & Halliday had dissolved partnership, W.H. Remington had added books to his already large and varied assortment of goods. The T.O. Crawford store-room had been occupied first by C.M. Evans' Shoe Store, then by the Jennings & Co. Grocery & Provisions Store, and finally by April, '61 Crawley &_Co. was selling groceries and provisions there. In April '61, T.J. Smith's Shoe Store occupied the building on the east corner of Linn and Front--called "Cheap Corner" since "Cheap Andy" (A. Laubner) kept store there. George Atkinson, Baker and Confectioner, was a few doors above. Simon Silverman was selling Dry Goods, Groceries, Etc., besides Clothing at Wholesale and Retail, in his large new frame �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 183 in his large new frame on the west corner of Sycamore and Front. Wendel Joachim had moved his "Butcher Shop" from Second street to a new business place somewhere between Linn and Sycamore. To the new Court street buildings already listed had been added George Huttel's new structure, "12 feet wide and as high up and deep down as the proprietor sees fit to make it," two doors from Front, west side. On the east side "three doors from Back street," Patton (Joseph) & Smith (Dan E.) were advertising Fresh Groceries. In the "back room of Peter Lambrecht's Jewelry Store, one door below the new Bank Building," F. Lyman, Painter & Glazier, had installed himself. In a small building on the east side of Linn, Anton Kohl had a Barber Shop, which, it seems, was too well known by 1861 to need advertising, for Mr. Kohl announced himself only as a Dealer and Manufacturer of Umbrellas and an all-healing Salve. On the west side of Sycamore was John Geyer's place of business (presumably still a broom factory), and "nearly opposite" was Lowrey's Tin Shop. Not until the latter part of the decade doea the Rolling Mill district appear as a mercantile center. In May, 1858, Donnally & Jennings advertised their "New Cash Store, corner store near the Rolling Mill, at the Sign of the Red Flag." One year later C.E. Donnally announced his "New Grocery & Provision Store, in Jennings' old stand near the Rolling Mill." George Rasp's Grocery Store, "a few doors above Donnally's," was mentioned in a brief editorial item; while the "new establishment of Charles Rauch, Grocer, between the Coal Ridge Flouring Mill and the Pomeroy Foundry" was given much lengthier notice. "Mr. Rauch says the first thing he does when he begins in a new town is to announce it in the home paper," I �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 184 the editor concludes. Accordingly, the next week's advertising pages of The Telegraph introduced Charles Rauch, Wholesale and Retail Dealer in Foreign and Domestic Liquors to its readers. (N.B.-George Rasp did not advertise in The Telegraph.) COALPORT, MIDDLEPORT, SHEFFIELD-each of them came under the spell of the 1850s' Business Spirit. Certain municipal changes resulted, changes which must be presented before the details of business improvement are shown: Middleport by 1857 considered itself strong enough to manage not only its own affairs but those of its older neighbor Sheffield as well. The latter was now eclipsed by the former to such degree its name had passed almost out of use.7 7. Hardesty's History of Meigs County gives June 7, 1855 as the date of Middleport's incorporation and January 27, 1859 as the date of consolidation of Sheffield and Middleport. ButA news item in the June 23, 1857 Telegraph reads: "Middleport has just been incorporated. It has elected town officers and is now under full sail as a city… We wish them the utmost prosperity and hope to see the day when their corner lots will sell ay $1,000 per foot." In that same year of '57, Middleport's Town Ordinances were made public through the advertising pages of the Telegraph; none had appeared there before that year,--wherefore the conviction that 1857 and not 1855 is the year of Middleport's incorporation. Coalport (the Coalport Salt Works and vicinity), on the other hand, although returned to Philip Jones with the Pomeroy Coal Company's failure in 1839 and thus a part of the new Greater Middleport of '57, continued as Coalport, even in advertisements; moreover the name had expanded to include the Dabney Salt Furnace and beyond. Sheffield's earliest advertised industry was W.S. Myrick's Cooper Shop, opened in 1851, presumably in response to the demand for �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 185 salt barrels at West Columbia's new Salt Furnace. There appears to have been also a Sheffield Manufacturing Company, concerning which industry, however, nothing was found except its Notice of Sale. "on March 6 1854 to the highest bidder all that property known as Donnally's Addition to the village of Sheffield…" Philip Jones's five-story Brick, though never functioning as a cotton factory, does seem to have made a satisfactory Foundry for Messrs. Kellum & Company during the greater part of the 1850s (See Burning of, below.) A frame Sash Factory and Planing Mill, put up close to the Foundry about 1857, was one of J.W. Jones's contributions to the industries of his father's town. Another was a Shingle Factory, erected by J.W. Jones & Company a year or two after the Sash Factory burned down in November, '58. (See below.) Within a few yards of the Sash Factory stood the Grant Brothers' Flour Mill, still flourishing during the entire decade-and still the "Sheffield Mill" in the public mind. In March, 1856, John Harwood announced the opening of his Carriage Manufactury in "Rice's Brick Building, 4 doors below the St. Charles Hotel, Middleport." In May, 1856, A. Murdock and L.S. Nye of Pomeroy bought of Philip Jones a tract of land east of Rutland street for the site of their new Crystal Flour Mill. Due to financial reverses the mill was sold in April, 1860, to Grant Brothers. During the year 1859 Joseph Faehnle, Wagon and Carriage Maker, opened a Shop on Mill street between 4th and 5th streets. In June. 1859, a Saddle, Harness & Trunk Factory "on Rutland street at the head of First street, in Holt's Building, up stairs," �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 186 was thus advertised8 by L.D. Moore. 8. When Sheffield merged with Middleport, the latter's 1st, 2d and 3d streets became 2d, 3d and 4th respectively. But business men didn't respond promptly with the necessary changes in their business addresses. Holt's Building was on Second street after 1859. Some of the earliest Middleport stores that continued into the '50s were: Watkins & Smith, corner First and Main streets, in '53. George Womeldorf's general store of '47 was a “Grocery Store at the head of Second street,” by '57. R.B. Wilson's Dry Goods Store of '47 was still at the "corner of Front and Rutland" in 1860. And the Sheffield Store of I.M. Davis & Company was still on "Front street near the Sheffield Mill" in 1856. Some NEW Middleport merchants of the early 1850s were: William Probst's Furniture Store, opened in '52 on the northeast corner of First and Main streets. D. Hummer & Company (F.A. Armitage) opened a Clothing Depot on Rutland street, "one door above Wilson's corner," in '54. A year later F.A. Armitage advertised as "Manufacturer and Dealer in Ready Made Clothing, Holt's Building, Rutland street." E.S. Edwards, of Pomeroy, had located on the corner of Front and Rutland streets by November, '55, and was dealing in Dress Goods, Clothing, Hardware, Groceries, Etc. Some that came during the latter half of the decade: Peter Root in '57 advertised Stoves, Tinware, &C, Wholesale and Retail, on Second street. By November, 1860, Mrs. Hannah Root, Widow of Peter Root, announced she would "continue to carry on the Tin and Stove Business… at the Brick Shop on First street, be- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 187 between Coal and Main streets." George Rupp, in '57 sold Stoves, Tinware, &C, "at the store formerly occupied by H.C. Curtis, opposite Hugg's Drug Store." Hugg & Coe, Druggists, in May '59 gave notice of their removal "from their old stand [location not given] to their new building, southeast corner Coal and First streets, opposite William B. Probst Furniture Store." C.A. Mathews, Manufacturer of Tin, Sheet, and Ironware, and Dealer Bradley Stoves, was at "hupp's old stand" in May, 1860. Philip Huber, Gold and Silversmith, remained on Second street, near Rutland, during the entire decade. John C. Enos opened his Bakery & Confectionary on "Front street a few doors west of Rutland street," in May, 1860. Kennedy's Drug Store continued on Rutland sreet in 1860. In June, '59, a new firm announced itself in a column-length, bigletter AD: the John Grant & Company, whose members were A.P.T. Watkins, John Grant, Melzar Nye and Samuel Bradbury; whose location was the "store room of A.P.T. Watkins, Esq., corner First and Main streets. The Company was to deal in Dry Goods, Family Groceries, Hardware, Coopers' Tools, etc., etc. MINERSVILLE, including Dutch Town and Welsh Town, by 1860 had two new store-keepers: George L. Joy and Valentine Gress. By that year it had also a Drug Store the proprietor of which was Jacob Schaeffer, M.D., graduate of Heidelburg University and German Revolutionist. Besides the Drug store Dr. Schaeffer had also the responsibilities of practicing physician and village postmaster, in 1860. SYRACUSE, in 1858 had “two general stores, one blacksmith shop, one boot and shoe shop, and two or three saloons, where cheap whis- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 188 key was sold," said Dr. Thomas Barton in his Autobiography (See BIBLIOGRAPHY). One of the stores was the S.M. & M. Company's store. In January, 1859, Syracuse had also the Drug Store of Dr. D. Myer, Druggist and Apothecary, who dealt in "Oils, Paints, Brushes, Varnish, Perfumery and Fancy Articles." The Ebenezar Williams Coal-Bank, a short distance beyond Minersville, had been operating in a small way since early in 1850. No town had grown up around this enterprise for it was carried on mainly by Mr. Williams himself. It is brought in here because of its connection later on with the salt industry. RACINE, without even a coal mine before the end of the decade (see above), was nevertheless thoroughly imbued with the spirit of industrialism. In 1860 Racine had two marble works: the Excelsior (Skirvin, Kelly & Smith), "opposite the United States Hotel and two doors north of Col. Smith's store"; and the Premium Marble Works. In 1858, Thomas Eagan brought his Wool Carding and Spinning Machine from Steubenville, set them up in a new two-story building, which thenceforth became The Racine Woolen Factory. Racine had two steam grist mills; it had the Ellis & Jones Store on Front street, the Lucius Cross Store, the above-mentioned Col. Smith Store, Wm. Tillinghast's Boot & Shoe Store on the corner of Main and Elm streets, and others perhaps. But the "Machine shops of all kinds" reported after an editorial visit to Racine existed largely in the editorial imagination it is feared. ANTIQUITY MILLS, it is almost certain, had at least one store in 1861. The Racine Coal Company's new mine was much nearer to Antiquity than to Racine. The development of the Mills into a village is believed to have began with the opening of the coal mine. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 189 Now, to the VIRGINIA SIDE, where the passing of the rural scene began with the erection of the salt furnace at West Columbia in 1849. The only signs of awakening before that year were the Chiselburg boatyard, the George Birthisel and the Thomas-Foley coal operations. In June, 1851, during the same week that The Pomeroy Salt Company began boring its well, Editor Van Horn made a trip to West Columbia. The following week's issue commented thus: "…We paid a visit to this new and flourishing town a few days ago, the first time since its birth. We were agreeably surprised to see that it has grown up within a year to be the first town in the county. As many people at a distance may not be aware of its locality, we will state that the town is situated about twelve miles above the mouth of the Great Kanawha, in Mason County, Virginia, opposite the mouth of Leading Creek, Ohio. Its wells are among the best in the country and the salt is of the very best quality… …We were politely shown over the works by Mr. Stevens, one of the proprietors. They are the most complete and efficient we ever saw [Van Horn meant the works, of course, not the proprietors]. (A detailed description of the process of salt making follows. This will be found in the next chapter.) "Mr. Stevens informs us," the editor concluded, "that he finds ready sales for all he can make and that the prospect is still better, as they can manufacture it so low as to undersell the foreign salt at all seasons, leaving a good margin of profits. They are prosecuting their enterprise with commendable vigor and will make west Columbia famous and themselves a fortune. In spite of these glowing prospects Mr. Stevens' company only a few months after incorporating itself as The Cincinnati & West Columbia Mining & Manufacturing Company, sold its furnace to the above named W.C.M. & M. Company. On August 17, 1853, Secretary S.M. Mack made his first report (a printed copy of which is on file in The Department of Archives & History, State Capitol, Charleston, West Virginia.) Mr. Mack states therein that west Columbia at that time had "a church, two school �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 190 houses, a printing office, a telegraph office, steam saw-mill, salt furnace, tannery, carding machine, stave machine, six stores, ten steam engines employed in various other mechanical operations"; and that the population, "now 800, has nearly doubled within the past year." The Company, Secretary Mack proceeds to explain, had secured control of the frontage of coal lands from Ten Mile Creek, at the lower limit of the Narrows, to its upper limit, opposite Coalport, Ohio. It had laid out "Mack's Addition," embracing Minersburg, and also 1000 lots on land back of the River bluff. It had opened thirty-seven new rooms in the Rock House mine (the Minersburg bank) and another mine had been opened above Ice Creek. As at Pomeroy, the first miners at West Columbia were Welshmen- in all probability had come from Pomeroy mines. These had found "their situation so comfortable and profitable that they desired to assist their relations in Wales to come over," and accordingly had "suffered their wages to accumulate in part in the hands of Supt. Mack, and the residue of the sum requisite for defraying the expense of the voyage has been advanced by us, to be charged to the parties upon Supt. Mack's books and worked out in the mines upon their arrival." And so, in order to give those old-country relatives a chance to come to West Columbia, H.E. Robbins, Esq., of Hartford, Conn., in the summer of 1853 made a special trip to Wales to secure native Welsh miners. From the Welsh mining districts he "forwarded from Liverpool, per ship Middlesex, to New York, thence to West Columbia forty miners, carefully selected for superior skill, sobriety and fidelity… The express assent of their employers was required in each case as sine quo non to payment of package money, Our �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 191 contract sufficiently protects our interests in respect to working out passage money on arrival.” In the second report (February, '54) much satisfaction is evident from the fact that the Company was constantly receiving "accessions from other mines, especially from those of Pennsylvania," because "our men make $2.00 to $2.75, compared with the $1.25 paid in Pennsylvania, with steady employment at all seasons, whereas the Pennsylvania men lose time by frequent stoppage of works, reducing their average to $1.00 per day." The Company owned fifty flatboats (the report further states), 6,000 to 10,000 bushels each, in which its coal is floated from the mines to Cincinnati and intermediate points. It owned sixteen barges and a sidewheel towboat, the Dutchess, which was used for towing barges and more substantial flats. And, "since the risk of navigation by oars and sweep is to be superseded gradually by the use of steamboats,” arrangements were almost completed for the purchase of two more steamers. Arrangements were made, too, for the establishing of three coal yards in Cincinnati, one at the mouth of each of the city's two canals, a third intermediate yard "for securing retail customers who cannot be supplied from the yards at the canals." "I have also built ten coal floats," reports Mr. Mack, "for delivering coal to steamers. Heretofore boats have been supplied with coal entirely at Coal Port, Ohio. From 6 to 10 thousand bushels per day are sold." The W.C.M. & M. Company's primary interest, it is clearly seen, was coal. However, it had been by no means indifferent to salt. Its Rock House furnace (secured from the Stevens Company) was in operation and a second one, the Laurel Cliff, about half a mile �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 192 above Ice Creek, was almost completed. Two more were to be built very soon. The Company's salt was taken at the furnace, the buyers providing their own means of transportation; but the Company was expecting to get part of this part of the carrying business with its towboats. Mr. Mack figured that when the four furnaces got into operation, the Company would make an annual profit of about $253,440 on salt alone. Besides coal and salt the W.C.M. & M. Company's property had other possibilities, such as iron, glass, lime, building stone, building brick, fire brick, petroleum, alum, Glauber salt, Epsom salt, stone ware, fire stone, copperas, bromine, sulphur, oil of vitriol, chloride of lime. But "it is not the opinion of the Directory that the interests of the Company at present require the investment of capital in any way except in the manufacture of salt and the mining of coal." Along the River front the Company had built a wharfboat for the accommodation of steamboats. A Marine Railway, or Dry Dock, also had been complete, by Isaac Behan, the owner. The first coal banks also were along the River front, in the bluff bordering the River. The main seam being forty to sixty feet mark, in cars above high water mark, the coal was sent down from the mouth of the mine to the flatboats; these ran over a double-track railway so operated by means of cables that a descending loaded car drew up the emptied car. Elisha Mack, the local superintendent, reported also the building of thirty to thirty-five double houses; "these," he says, "with the twenty purchased from Mr. Stevens make 111 tenements owned by the Company." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 193 A Company Store-general merchandise, of course-had been provided for the convenience of the employees. Under the name of Mack & Company to store was "well supplied with a full assortment of goods made its sales at a reasonable profit for cash on account." As the men were "paid up fully in cash on the fifteenth of every month," and there was "no compulsion to deal at the Company store or to take out a certain portion of wages in goods," it would seem that the trade relations between the W.C.M. & M. Company and its employees left nothing to be desired by the latter-especially in view of the fact that six other stores are reported as flourishing in west Columbia at that time. Three of those six storekeepers were: E.D. Withers, Hogg & Williams, Strimback & Mason. Also there was George Parsons' Meat Shop, Mathew Cohen's Merchant Tailoring Shop, Edward Biggs's Drug Store and Saddlery & Harness Shop; and Sandy Mason's Saloon. A coal-bank and several nearby dwellings in the extreme west end of the Horseshoe Bottom had become Wilson's Mines by 1860. The mine probably had been opened by George Birthisel, had changed hands several times and finally was bought by R.B. Wilson, of Middleport. That sleepy little settlement was to experience a great awakening soon. At MASON CITY, R.C.M. Lovell managed the new salt company's business along with his coal business. In partnership with him was James A. Payne, veteran steamboat owner, who had come to Mason when the salt company was formed and had taken charge of the transportation end of both industries. The partnership was known locally as Lovell & Payne. That it started successfully is indicated by a �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 194 Telegraph item of October 20, 1857: Mason City continues to prosper. Lovell & Payne have shipped a large amount of coal. They are now mining and piling up on the River bank large quantities to be ready for shipment when the river rises. The new furnace makes beautiful salt. On February 22, 1860 the Virginia Assembly enacted that R.C.M. Lovell, James A. Payne and others were "made a body politic and corporate, under the name of Mason City Mining & Manufacturing Company…" thereby merging the Lovell coal and salt works. Minor industries flourished in Mason. At their boatyard on the River shore below the salt furnace were made Lovell & Payne's barges, coalboats and steamboat Baton Rouge. In 1860 John T. Davis and Brother Sam, of Pomeroy, put up the Mason City Saw & Planing Mill on the River bank a short distance east of the city limits. Early in the next year Jacob Mees and brother-in-law Abraham Fruth moved their saw-mill from Meigs county to the River bank just a few rods east of Mason City's corporation line. A flour mill was added by Mees & Fruth the same year. These industries, along with the cooper-shop and blacksmith shops connected with the Lovell & Payne coal and salt works; their three towboats, Lake Erie No. 2, Liberty and Baton Rouge (last-named in place of the wrecked Hero), their brickyard and the Patrick & Nickolson sawmill, constituted Mason City's principal sources of employment. But there were a number of small industries employing one, two or three helpers, such as Gottfried Capito's Brewery on the southeast corner of Second and Brown streets; the German wheel-wright's Wagon Shop on Brown street just beyond the brewery; Ben Biggs's Carpenter Shop in a small building on Horton near Front. In that shop young Biggs made not only furniture and coffins but such minor articles as a work bench for Michael Schlaegel's new Shoe- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 195 maker Shop on Front just around the corner from Biggs's shop. HARTFORD CITY, like Mason, had a coalyard on its River front. It had also a Carding Machine and a Stave Machine, owned by D.L. Starr. Hartford's chief minor industry, however, was the Saw Mill and Boatyard below the Creek. William Harpold had put up the saw mill when he came to Harford in 1854; in that same year he began building coal containers on a wholly new model; in fact, William Harpold, with his brother Henry as partner, built the first modern type coal barges used on the Ohio River, say the Harpold family records. Hartford got its post office on August 16, 1858. The office was named Hartford City, its first postmaster was John Fish, book-keeper at the Company Store. He quartered the office in the store, which was managed by James W. Kelly and whose customers were served by W.W. Harper and Columbus Sehon. NEW HAVEN in April, 1861, with neither was still The Slope; but it was New Holland Henry Capehart (German, Gebhardt) owned the bank and all the land on which the new town salt plant nor post office, to some because farmer flour mill on the River was rising. On June 19, 1851, the Telegraph informed its readers of an event that might have been momentous in The Bend's industrial life had the value of Oil been fully realized then: Last week at the salt well of the Coalport Company when the sinker reached ten feet it struck a vein of oil, which is of a quality not excelled in the United States. Over forty barrels were collected. The oil is highly inflammatory. The boys of Pomeroy have been using it almost every evening for fire-balls. The oil is said to have formed a veritable creek, rushing down �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 196 to the River and spreading out over its surface for miles. Guards were stationed along the bank to prevent the possibility of fire. In several issues the Telegraph carried an advertisement for the sale of Petroleum, or Rock Oil, at the Coalport Salt Company's works. But the vein was stopped up as soon as possible to keep it from ruining the salt well. Salt was considered of so much more consequence. But early in 1861 an "oil fever" broke out. Along with reports of Union Meetings, Flag Raisings and the like, came such items as, "Oil excitement is on the increase and leases are in demand"; “The Telegraph will be ready tomorrow to supply all desiring Oil Leases.” Brief notices about Worley's Well, the Hudson & Gates Well, the Wilson Wellall sinking in the vicinity of the "old salt well." The Independent Oil Company and the Naylors' Run Company were formed in Pomeroy by "the most prominent citizens." On April 4, three of the fifteen wells had "good prospects." The Virginia side, too, had a light attack of the fever. In March, '61, the Laurel Valley Coal and Oil Company, A.L. Knight, George Patrick and others, incorporators; and the Virginia Mineral Oil & Coal Company, R.C.M. Lovell, W.C. Starr and George Murdock, incorporators, became victims. On April 9, 1861, the oil fever suddenly vanished. BUSINESS AND INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS in The Bend, though in general tending upward, did not experience an uninterrupted flow of prosperity during the 1851-61 decade. On June 5, 1855, the public was informed editorially that "The recent panic has somewhat checked operations at Leadington." But on September 25, same year, "Pom- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 197 eroy begins to look lively again… Everywhere the noise of the hammer is heard and cheerful faces meet you at every corner"; and a little less than a year later readers learn that Pomeroy's wealth has increased "notwithstanding the Severe Money Crisis which the Country has passed through." But Editor Thompson was soon to learn that the Country's critical period-hence of course the Bend's also-was just beginning. Depressed business conditions in western cities, a resulting decrease in the demand for coal, a consequent lowering of prices for coal-such was the course that brought on a series of Miners' Strikes during the next three years. Announcement of the first of such strikes appeared in the issue of December 1, 1857: The miners of Pomeroy, West Columbia, Mason City, Hartford City, Syracuse and Minersville met at the latter place yesterday to decide on terms upon which to accept employment. Their action has not yet been learned. The next issue said: The miners of Pomeroy and surrounding towns are still refusing the prices offered. There are about 700, mainly Welsh and Germans. Many are anxious to work but are restrained by the majority. The last item brought a long letter of defense from the miners the following week; Thompson replied with a "little plain talk," the substance of which was that he himself was a member of a labor organization, the Journeymen Printers; that the "coal diggers" were wrong in refusing lower wages when prices fell. By the following autumn (October 26, '58) there were "unusual Signs of business revival in Pomeroy." The miners, "so long out of employment are all at work again on mutually satisfactory terms," And two months later (Dec. 21, '58) Editor Plants (see Section "Telegraph" below) thought the most cheering music heard for some time was the "reverberating sound of machinery in the Rolling Mill as we �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 198 passed it the other day… We were surprised to see it in full blast." But there could have been nothing cheering in the Notice of a Sheriff's Sale, on May 10, '59, of the lots "whereon the Coalport Salt Works are situated… the property of The Coalport Salt Company, at suit of John Hall." Nor d id the items at various dates during 1859 of the departure of miners from Pomeroy to work in Tennessee, Kentucky, and elsewhere, testify strongly of business revival. The early months of '61 read especially cheerless. In January, a "Suit Against the Pomeroy Rolling Mill" is mentioned; on the following March 15, a Notice of Sheriff's Sale of "Mules, Horses, Coal Wagons, Dray, Pig Iron, Iron Ore…" property of the Rolling Mill Company, at suit of Cyrus Ellison," brought forth no joyous editorial note. A long list of Attachment Notices against J.V. Pomeroy, of New York, for various sums of indebtedness to individuals and business firms suggest the probable fate of the "Pomeroy Foundry and Machine Shop" at Lower Pomeroy. On March 5, 1861, the Pomeroy Coal Company's miners were striking. Editor Plants did not know what they demanded but thought it "a very unpropitious time to strike. Coal is a drug on the market… the strike will end in but little good to any, much injury to many." WEST COLUMBIA, reported in August, '57 as "now standing still," was to remain so standing for several years. Over-speculation, the recent money crisis, legal embarrassments-all contributed to the bankruptcy of the W.C.M. & M. Company. Nor was MASON CITY exactly flourishing in 1860 and '61. Three �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 199 communications to the September 14, 1860 Telegraph (grouped under one head, The Mason City "Strike,") tells part of the story. The first letter is addressed to Messrs. Lovell & Payne, is signed, “Miners of Mason.” The second, a reply, is signed, "Calaway Company, R.C.M. Lovell, Agent." Two significant facts were learned from these signatures: 1st, That the Lovell & Payne partnership was no more (though the miners seemed not to know it: 2d, That R.C.M. Lovell was now merely the agent of another company. The letters themselves reveal the fact that the strike was not for higher wages but for a cash system in place of the "truck system forced upon us the past six years, contrary to the promises of the employers to pay cash, which they have failed to do time and again until necessity compelled us to draw out our wages in goods." The third letter, ordered by a Delegate Meeting of Miners, appeals to the public for sympathy and financial support in their effort to "abolish an oppressive system which fetters the merchant, paralyzes the industry, robs the workman of the profits of his labor, impedes the march of progress to swell the profits of employers and capitalists. Reports of the outcome of this strike could not be found. It had no outcome, probably, since the decisive reverses of Lovell & Payne impending crisis already had taken place; namely, the Baton Rouge Disaster: J.A. Payne, unlike other coal operators, who did not seek markets below Louisville, had taken coal down the Mississippi-the first shipper to do so. At great expense Lovell & Payne had founded a coalyard at Baton Rouge. Early in 1860 Captain Payne started down to the coalyard in command of the Lake Erie, No. 2 and its tow of coal that was to be added to the 80,000 bushels already in store �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 200 there. When almost in sight Of Eaton Rouge, Captain Payne was notified that the coalyard had been wrecked by a storm and its coal sent to the bottom of the Mississippi. Realizing that he was financially ruined the venerable steamboat man sent the Lake Erie back to Mason City in charge of his nephew, Mate Harvey D. Bailey; while he himself joined his relatives at Charleston, Virginia. The Mason City Mining & Manufacturing Company, of which R.C.M. Lovell and J.A. Payne were the largest stockholders, immediately sold its coal property to the Calaway Mining Company; the M.C.M. & M. Company became the Mason City Coal Company, but with the names of Elisha Mack and Samuel Condon substituted for those of J.A. Payne and R.C.M. Lovell on its Stockholders' list (Act of March 12, 1861, Virginia Assembly). It is after the Baton Rouge disaster that R.C.M. Lovell's name appears as Agent for the Calaway Company's Virginia interests. About the same time (judging from news items in the Telegraph) V.B. Horton Jr. became agent for the same company's coal works on the Ohio side of the Horseshoe Bend. (The Calaway Company will come into fuller view later on.) THE OHIO RIVER SALT COMPANY, an organization effected in the year 1855, was destined fifteen or twenty years later to bring results undreamed of at the time of its beginning. When the Band's first salt furnaces rose, there were more than fifty furnaces, large and small, in operation in the Kanawha Valley. The first four or five years' output in the Bend was bought up by Kanawha manufacturers, mainly by Ruffner, Hale & Company, and disposed of as they saw fit. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 201 Kanawha manufacturers are said to have ridiculed the first efforts of Ohio River salt producers. By December 29, 1857 some "feeling" appears to have developed in one or both of those salt producing regions. On that Editor Thompson quotes a letter from the “Cincinnati Commercial” on the subject of Kanawha salt, in which letter the statement is made that Kanawha salt is reshipped from Cincinnati to Pomeroy and to Marietta, and that Pomeroy salt is very inferior for packing purposes. The editor’s comment is, that conditions are exactly the reverse: that Pomeroy salt is bought by the Kanawha companies and marketed as Kanawha salt. “The act shows the desperate condition of Kanawha manufacturers,” he concludes. The “desperate condition” imagined by Editor Thompson at that time did indeed become a reality in later years. HOME AND COMMUNITY, 1 (The Material Side):-This side of home and community life in The Bend naturally was the first to benefit by the improved business and industrial conditions. Many of the comforts, conveniences and luxuries that were enjoyed in the larger towns during the 1851-61 period became available to Bend inhabitants. Before they are brought into view, however, some information regarding the number and the general character of the people who lived in The Horseshoe Bend during that period is essential. In 1850 the POPULATION on the Ohio side of The Bend was 3,480—so said V.B. Horton in his letter of November, 1851 to President Robbins at West Columbia; on March 22, 1860, it was given as 6,418 in a census compiled for the “Cincinnati Gazette.” The population of Pomeroy alone, in the same year (1860) was estimated at about 3,500; of Mason City, 1,016, “exclusive of slaves and including one �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 202 free Negro." Middleport, on Oct. 13, 1857, was found to have 1,590 inhabitants, according to Postmaster Pangborn, whose duty it was to take the enumeration of the town's school children; and who, while doing so took also that of the whole town. Syracuse in 1858 contained about 400 inhabitants, in the opinion of Dr. Thomas Barton (see SOURCES). Hartford City's population was about the same as that of Syracuse; while west Columbia's was about the same as that of Mason, probably--though one enthusiastic reminiscer (native of West Columbia) was sure it was nearly that of Pomeroy, his estimate being "about 3000.” Naturally in a state of fluidity from the beginning, the Bend's population was very much more so during the 1850s. Before the development on the Virginia side was begun, the newcomer who didn't like the Bend had no other recourse but to go back East or farther West. After the founding of West Columbia he could go on a veritable merry-go-round of job-hunting and home-seeking right in the Bend itself. No sooner was a new mine opened or a new salt furnace begun than there started a moving in of craftsmen and workmen and common laborers from every other Bend settlement. About the year 1856 West Columbia's workingmen began to move almost en masse, some of its miners going to Syracuse to work in "The Pit" (shaft mine), others to Mason City, to Hartford City, to the "Upper Slope," or perhaps to each of these in succession. The W.C.M. & M. Company's apparently impending ruin had caused the exodus. Accompanying this intra-Bend migrating was an almost continuous stream of immigration from the East, from Pennsylvania, from "Up Kanawy"; from Canada, from the Old Country. Some of these newcomers, too, made the round or partial round of the Bend before settling permanently. The objectives of the largest groups of old-country immi- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 203 grants are summed up briefly by C.A. Hartley: "The Welsh and Germans came to mine coal, the Irish to find any sort of remunerative employment, and the English in the hope of finding favor with the Hortons and Pomeroys because of national kinship and of getting situations as superintendents and other positions a bit above that of miner or common laborer. In the interest of truthful recital it must be said that they largely succeeded in their ambitions.” To this neat generalization, however, there are to be found so many exceptions that in the interest of further truthful recital it is necessary to call attention to a few of them: First, the German Revolutionists. Participants in the unsuccessful German Revolution of 1849 felt constrained, in many instances, by the reactionary events of the early 1850s to bid the Fatherland a fond but quietly hasty farewell. Many of those refugees, the majority probably, came to the United States, a goodly number found their way to the Bend. Inasmuch as the German Revolutionary party consisted largely of university students, army officers, professional men-in short, of men more or less educated-it is evident that those who reached the Bend did not, in most cases, expect to dig coal. Among the Benn's Revolutionists were Jacob Schaeffer, medical student of Heidelburg University; John Hess, 2d Lieutenant in the Prussian army; Charles Eichmann, also of the Prussian army; John Roedel, army man who came with the party led by Karl Schurz in 1852; The names of Adam Long and Dietrich Findling are also mentioned as Revolutionists. Likewise from Germany came many who were trained in the mechanical arts and in various hanc1icrafts. Some of these too may have been Revolutionists, some belonged to the large group that migrated to escape compulsory army service. A few of the skilled �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 204 craftsmen and skilled manual artists who located in the Bend were: watchmakers Andrew Burkert, Peter Lamprecht, W.A. Aicher (the lastnamed educated for the priesthood); architects and builders Rudolph Bader, George Luikart; cabinet-maker George Faehnle; wagon-makers Michael Blaettnar, Joseph Faehnle; shoe-makers Stephan Engelhardt, William Starke (Starkey), Michael Schlaegel; tailor George Huttel; barber Anton Kohl; stonecutter George Bauer. Linen weavers and carpet weavers, too, came in considerable numbers. For them, however, there was so little demand, commercially, in The Bend, that they usually had to find work in the mines or the salt plants. Pomeroy, in general, was the foreigner's goal. That some settled in Middleport and elsewhere has been seen above. Among the Scotch-Irish who continued to come in direct from the Old Country during this decade were also some skilled workmen. As their cognomen indicates, these, foreigners had done more or less migrating even before coming to the Bend. John McKee and wife arrived in West Columbia in 1853 with three children, the oldest having been born in Ireland, the second in Scotland, the third in England. In '59 the McKee family, increased by two West Columbia-born offspring, moved to Mason City; by the opening of the Civil War they were located in Hartford City, where they remained permanantly. With the fixed purpose of remaining but a short time came some foreigners to the United States-ultimately to find themselves fixtures in the Bend. Charles Eggenswiller, native of Switzerland, migrated to Cincinnati in '53 expecting to make a fortune and then return to his native land. Two years later, after some "ups and downs," he secured through a Cincinnati friend the place of hostler �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 205 for William Healey at Hartford City. In 1860 the young "Schweizer” was advanced to the position of salesman at the Hartford City Company store. For some foreigners, American Freedom appears to have been the magnet that drew them to the New World. John Egan Bird, son of an Irish landlord, who somehow was found in Cincinnati by a member of the West Columbia Mining and Manufacturing Company, was engaged as paymaster and bookkeeper for the new firm. Shortly after the arrival of John Bird and his wife in West Columbia, their first child (a daughter) was born; whereupon Mr. Bird was impelled to take the babe to Cincinnati to be baptized. While in the city the happy father celebrated the occasion with a little too much grog and was reported to his employers by "jealous friends." 'Lisha Mack, Company Superintendent, looked over Bird's books, reported he "couldn't find a farthing wrong." But John Bird resented the meddling; "I come to a free country an' I'm gonna be free!" he declared, and refused to continue working for the Company. Instead, he started a store of his own; and "the women of West Columbia made shirts and brought them to father's store to be sold, and they found a a ready sale," proudly concluded John Bird's daughter Hannah, when, in the summer of 1932 she related the above incident to the writer. John Bird died in 1861 and was buried in the Catholic burying ground at Mason City. Ben Biggs with his spring-wagon hearse led the long funeral procession, the greater part of which consisted of pedestrians. Some foreigners came to the Bend for reasons not apparent and not discoverable. “Sandy” Allen, son of an English nobleman, was one of West Columbia's several saloon-keepers. Dissipated and morally depraved, Sandy nonetheless was educated, cultured, intelli- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 206 gent, agreeable, entertaining. His wife was his extreme opposite in every particular. The couple lived in a hovel, which the wife never left and where she was treated as a servant rather than a wife. What circumstances had brought this strange union about and the strange couple to West Columbia remained a mystery to the town’s inhabitants. Some foreigners reached the Bend under great difficulties. In 1853 two young German-army-service dodgers landed in New York with a party of their fellow-countrymen. Skilled weavers, both, they soon secured work in the Eastern metropolis. But neither of them knew more than a dozen English words, each was desperately homesick; and so they decided to go to Pomeroy, where they knew some of their friends to be located. Pocketing their meager cash reserves and shouldering their little foreign-made trunks they started on the westward journey by stage coach. They traveled as far as their money took them, then stopped to work as farm hands to earn money for another short stage ride; stopped again to work (sleeping in barns); then rod another short stretch; and so on. To their surprise and joy they made their enquiries regarding directions to Pomeroy understood, found everyone kind and ready to help with information and hand-outs- until they reached Athens, Ohio. There the good farmer's wife who opened the door in response to their knock, turned and the instant she caught sight of the two "furriners" turned and called loudly: "Hyuh, Shep! Hyuh, Shep!" But the two travellers were quicker than the large dog that came bounding around the corner of the house. Before he could reach them they were out of sight of dog and farm house and double-trotting briskly southward. By sheer luck they struck the right road without making further enquiries and in due time trudged wearily into the outskirts of Pomeroy. There they �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 207 had no difficulty in finding their German friends. Later both young men, whose names were Gottlieb Krautter and Jacob Lederer, became permanent residents of Mason City. William Jackson, Scotch miner, came to Pittsburgh in the early 1850s leaving his wife and four children in Scotland. As soon as he had earned enough money to pay for their passage he sent for his family; and when the vessel was due he went to New York to meet them. But the ship had not arrived, nor did it come in during the several weeks he waited in New York. Assured that the vessel was lost he finally returned to Pittsburgh; while the little vessel, merely delayed by storms, came sailing into New York harbor. Immediately upon debarking Mrs. Jackson took her family by train to Pittsburgh, only to find that her husband was no longer at the address he had sent her. Dismayed and bewildered, she left her children at a hotel while she went out to look for their father. After long, fruitless search she came back to the hotel-where she found him with the children! Son William, age five, had been standing on the hotel balcony watching the world go by, had espied his father in that world! The meeting is more easily imagined than described. Five- year-old William later became "Bill" Jackson, prominent citizen of New Haven for many years. Foreigners were not the only Bend immigrants to experience difficulties in reaching their destination. Jacob Bird, young Eastern Virginian, was trying to get to some friends at Mason City because of a crisis in the parental home. It was the time when Southern "feeling" was taking on an ominous hue. Jacob Bird dared to express openly his sympathy with the Abolition movement; his family resented such sympathy as disloyalty, resented it to such a degree �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 208 that son Jacob had to decide to leave his home. While making his way to friends in Mason City he encountered many obstacles, the most serious of which was the Greenbrier river-full of floating ice; but which was surmounted by simply swimming through it. When young Jacob arrived in Mason City he at once became a valued citizen of the town taking an active part in every movement for its well being and ending his days there as a minister of the Methodist Episcopal church. However, this great inflow of new settlers did not increase The Bend's population as much as one might suppose. Much of it merely filled the gaps made by the departure of old settler for other regions, terrestial or celestial. The "western fever," the "gold fever," and "The South" made significant inroads. Oliver Grant with his family left Middleport for Iowa in 1854. Legal notices dated 1859 mentioned "Lewis S. Nye, of Illinois," "Aaron Murdock, of Georgia," "Thomas Irvin, of Kentucky." In 1854, the departure of "about a dozen Welsh miners for the 'Golden Gate'" was reported; and in '59 that of "another company of fourteen, nearly all Welsh, for California." These are only a small part of the great number that emigrated from the Bend during the 1850s. The increase during that decade was between 3000 and 4000. Naturally, 3000 or more new inhabitants created a demand for an increase in the number of HOSTLERIES and DWELLING HOUSES. Editor Thompson took his fellow citizens to task for not meeting that demand. On August 8, 1854 he expostulated thus: HOTELS IN POMEROY:-The gentlemen now in charge of hotels are doing the best they can… but… Is there a building in town suitable for a hotel? We blush whenever we see strangers coming to Pomeroy to remain any length of time; we know they stand a poor chance of finding suitable accommodations. It would be no effort on the part of citizens to put up suitable buildings. Soon all suitable lots will be occupied and there will be no place for a hotel. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 209 Three of the "gentlemen in charge" were Alexander Todd of the Vinton House (former Riheldarfer); Prosecuting Attorney Jacob Earhart of the Merchants' Hotel 3 doors above Linn; George K. Webster of the United States Hotel and Stage Office (formerly the Austin House) below the Rolling Mill. One year later Mr. Thompson was able to announce: …We are pleased to note therefore that Mr. Webster, proprietor of the United States Hotel, has recently enlarged and greatly improved his house. The only regret is that it is located a little too far from the Court House… We hope the public will show proper appreciation by giving him a liberal patronage. Other hotels followed rapidly. About three months before the '56 Fire, A.E. Banks advertised that he had purchased the property known as the Ohio Hotel, increased it to four stories in front and made other "reparation.” It was to be known as Banks House and was situated on Front, "immediately at the Wharf Boat Landing." This hotel could not be identified. In August of the next year-l857-W.H. Remington advertised a Hotel for Rent, to be ready for occupancy by October 1st. "The best stand for a public house between Wheeling and Cincinnati," his advertisement said; the location was given as "directly opposite the Wharf Boat." On November 2, 1858 the Telegraph announced that Mr. C. Gibson, recently of the Remington House, had taken charge of the "fine, large brick house recently built and furnished by T.O. Crawford… directly opposite the Wharf Boat… built expressly for a Hotel… No pains have been spared to make it a suitable stopping place…" This building was on the site of the Bosworth Hotel, burned in the '51 fire. The tables of these hotels were all supplied with "the best the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 210 market affords," and their stables with "abundant provender and a careful hostler." Middleport had its St. Charles Hotel, located four doors above the Rice Brick Building. West Columbia's Van Matre House continued in operation during the whole decade. Its West Columbia Hotel, or Biggs House, was burned down in '56 and not rebuilt. At Mason City, J.A. Payne built a three-story hotel on the west side of Center street between Second and Third. There was also the Wallace House on Horton, between First and Front; and the Mumaw Boarding House on First, between Horton and Center. Hartford City had a Tavern, concerning which only one detail could be found: that N.B. Newell was its first tavern keeper. Racine advertised its new Racine House, "two doors north of P.M. Petral's store, John Ellis, proprietor," in '55. By 1860 the town had grown sufficiently, it seems, to justify R.H. Pilcher in opening the Pilcher House. "The United States Hotel, opposite the Excelsior Marble Works," is also mentioned. Of Pomeroy's dwellings for renters Editor Thompson complained on May 22, '55, that rents were exhorbitant and tenements unusually poor; that buildings scarcely fit for cow stables rented for $50 to $60 per year. Two-story double houses were the prevailing type for "Company Row" tenements on the Virginia side. Lovell & Payne extended. Mr. Lovell's first row of miners' dwellings eastward, beyond Horton; and westward, beyond Center street; not, however, with one-family cottages like those which Editor Thompson had commended so highly but �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 211 with two-family doubles, four in each direction." “Welsh Row," "Irish Row" and "'Dutch' Row" were the nicknames soon acquired by those three rows in the order of their location; why, it is not necessary to explain. West Columbia, too, had its Irish Row, in Ice Hollow; and its Welsh Row, below the mouth of the Creek. It had also an English, Row, in Cedar Hollow near the upper bank. But West Columbia had no "Dutch" Row, for it had few, if any, Germans in its earliest days. Those Company rows did not retain their nationalist characters very long, however. The foreigners, especially the Germans, immediately upon their arrival began buying or building homes of their own. The style of house usually chosen by them was the cottage; and the space alloted to it most commonly was one corner of the lot. In Mason City, where most of the lots were 80 by 266 feet in size, the foreigner thus had a nice, large plot for the vegetable garden which he considered necessary for his family's physical and financial well being. It was during that decade that thrifty Germans and Welsh discovered the possibilities for home-building and gardening on the hillsides of the several "Runs" on the Ohio side. Monkey Run9 drew many Germans who were looking for home sites. 9. For some unknown reason this run was called Africa run by early settlers. The Germans either misunderstood the name or intentionally called it Affe Ron, "Affe" being the German word for monkey- so runs the most plausible explanation for the origin of the name, Monkey Run. -George Joachim. Some fine residences were built in Pomeroy during 1851-61. One was "Oren Branch's thirteen-room dwelling, intruducing a new style of architecture, the Gothic." Another was the nine-room residence �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 212 of V.B. Horton, Jr., with its two-story ornamental piazza" in front and "largr porch at the back." The Branch residence was on east corner of Front and Butternut, that of V.B. Horton, Jr. in the "upper part of Pomeroy"-east of Kerr's Run. The most attractive residence of Mason City was perhaps that of R.C.M. Lovell, on the southeast corner of Horton and Second streets Though only a one-story frame, the house was much more commodious than the ordinary cottage; and with its trellised windows, latticed porches, attached kitchen and slave quarters, spacious flower garden, the place had a decidedly Southern atmosphere. Slave quarters were necessary adjuncts also at the Payne Hotel and also on George Patrick's place in the northeast corner of Mason City; and for Dr. A.L. Knight's eight Negroes when he built his new brick residence at West Columbia. But no slave quarters were built by William Harpold when, after moving over from Antiquity Mills, Ohio, he built his thirteen-room home on his farm below Sliding Hill Creek. Instead, a secret hiding place was considered necessary. Present-day descendants believe that secret compartment was meant to serve as a hiding place for run-away slaves enroute to Canada. Undoubtedly there were more than three brick residences built in the Bend during this period; yet three are all this researcher could locate: John Fisher's in Middleport's "Fern Hollow"; Dr. Knight's in West Columbia; John Brown's in Mason City, northeast corner of First and Center streets. Bricks for the Brown house were brought from the Ben Knight brickyard in Pomeroy's Sugar Run early in '53 during a sixweeks' freeze-up of the River at that point. Teamster Jacob Roush hauled those bricks on a sled across the ice. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 213 Stone cottages, however, were put up in Minersville's "Dutch Town" by many of the German settlers who had been stone masons in the Fatherland. Many older Bend residences instead of building new houses when the need for them arose, preferred to enlarge, weatherboard or otherwise modernize their original log cabins. George Patrick's family resided in such a dwelling at Mason City; the Sehon family had its log cabin on its extensive farm below Hartford City similarly metamorphosed; the old Waggener cabins on the McDaniel and the Robert Adams farms had likewise become comfortable frame dwellings. On a knoll back of Hanging Rock on the McDaniel farm stood the unmodernized log cabin whither Albert McDaniel had brought his bride from Washington, D.C. in that year 1830 or '31. Similar structures housed many a large, not in every instance poor, family in '61 in The Bend's towns as well as in its rural sections. Of Pomeroy's other brick buildings (besides residences and stores) that doubtless rose during the 1850s, only two were found. The M.E. Church "in the upper part of town, a short distance below Dunham's lot," was reported nearly completed in November, 1856. By April, 1861, A.C. Crowley & Company had begun the construction of a new two-story Brick Jail, “to be completed by November 1, at a cost of $5000 to the county." A brick school-house, a brick M.E. church (Heath Chapel), and a brick Presbyterian church were erected in Middleport during the 1850s. (For location and time of building of each, see CHURCHES farther on.) Search for the brick building said to have been put up by Philip Jones “to be used as a church by the Campbellites" was unsuccessful. The Rice Brick (shown above) may have been built before 1850. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 214 West Columbia still had its three-story Town Hall and its U.B. Churchand-School-Room structure which the Reverend Moses Michael had built in 1852 or '53. Another public brick building is mentioned, but with very indefinite data as to size, purpose, etc. CIVIC IMPROVEMENTS gradually changed the picture of The Bend in the 1851-61 decade. On November 11 after the 1851 Fire, Editor Van Horn announced that the recent Ordinance10 respecting sidewalks in Pomeroy were generally being regarded; but he hoped that "before 10. The Ordinance established grades for and required construction of sidewalks on such part of Front street not included in the 1849 Ordinance, and also on Court. (See advertising pages of November, 1851 Telegraphs for this and all preceding Pomeroy Ordinances.) the annual swamps are formed , pedestrians will have a causeway the entire length of the corporation. Wood pavements are the most popular, and deservedly so; they are never so dirty as stone or brick and always smoother. Some of the stone pavements are ridiculous caricatures of stone piles. The lack of experience of our citizens disposes us to leniency, though such walks are dangerous to passage," he finally concluded. As to the street Ordinance, the Editor complains that only one place has been graveled. "Plank is the best and the only available material," he advises. The next year ('52) grades were fixed and sidewalks required for all River-to-hill streets, and grades were fixed for Second street from Sycamore to Mechanic, "the remainder of Second street to be without grade for the present." But four years later, (January, '56), editorializing on “Dangerous Places," the Telegraph said that some of the plank walks �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 215 were dangerous to travel; that a railing was needed on one side of the Stone Bridge; that a stranger might step off the stone walk near the Boatyard and sue the city for damages. On July 11, '59, an Ordinance was passed establishing a higher grade for Front street [from the east line of Court] to Lot 82 (V.B Horton's place). Forthwith came complaints that the new grades were much higher than the lots and street in many places. The following December the ladies of the Presbyterian church had an oyster supper the object of which was, "funds for a fence and for filling necessary, now that the sidewalk is considerably above the church grounds." By December, '58, the Stone Bridge had reached a stage such as to bring forth a "philosophical" editorial. "Never an event however seemingly disastrous but brings some compensation," Editor Plants begins. With this comforting philosophy he proceeds to inform his readers that "On Thursday night last the Stone Bridge over Sugar Run broke, split, busted, caved, and pretty much quit being a bridge. This view, especially the yawning gulf in the street, looked pretty bad. But “-more philosophizing on the graces of meekness, patience, perseverence under difficulties on the part of teamsters and engineers of all vehicles while "winding their weary way" around Sugar Run; and on the salutary influence of forming the habit of paying taxes, etc. Two weeks later he asks sarcastically for the building of a hotel with stables, etc., west of the dilapidated Stone Bridge to accommodate people who were compelled to carry their marketing from Sugar Run to the business houses. Horses should have learned to swim when young, Mr. Plants thought. During the next four weeks the county authorities evidently �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 216 had "got busy" to a satisfactory degree for Editor Plants states briefly and without facetiousness or sarcasm: Mr. Harpold, of Racine, repaired the Stone Bridge at this place. It is a good and substantial piece of repairing. Not more than six months later, however, (July 19 and August 2) appeared the following: NOTICE TO BRIDGE BUILDERS: Sealed proposals are to be read at the Auditor's office for the rebuilding of the Bridge across the mouth of Sugar Run. Specifications followed, some of which were: Width at the top, 30 feet; height to be level with the street in front of the Edwards store; surface of the bridge to be reasonably smooth and to be covered with gravel or cindar to the depth of six inches. There was to be a railing of locust posts on each side, 3 1/2 feet above the surface of the bridge. George Bauer's bid of $1,200 for the building of the bridge was accepted. Whereupon Editor Plants feared that Mr. Bauer, "who is industrious and a good workman will find it a pretty hard bargain. His bid was so small that he will not be able to make good wages on the job:" But the editor knows "Mr. Bauer will perform his contract faithfully." Six weeks later the work on Sugar Run Bridge was announced as progressing. The editor trusted that the "contractor will make wages corresponding to the fidelity with which he seems to be doing the work." Whether he did or did not do so was not reported in the Telegraph. "The wall on the southwest of the Court House lot is progressing,” Telegraph readers were informed on June 28, '59. Thus another needed improvement was about completed. The item of March 1859 stating that "We understand that an effort is to be made the following season to build a bridge �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 217 across Sugar Run on Back street," was not followed up with one announcing that the prospective bridge had materialized. The following item needs no comment-at present: TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: Persons owning HOGS within the corporation of Pomeroy will take notice that the Marshall has been instructed by the Common Council to enforce the Hog Ordinance. (June 20, 1854.) R. Stivers, Marshall Pomeroy's streets still were "dirt" streets. A new vehicles was added in some parts of town in the fall of the railways from the coal mines were built with double Plants suggested that the railways be bridged, but does that the bridging was ever done. difficulty for 1858 when all tracks. Editor not say later As early as August, 1854, $500 was appropriated by Pomeroy's Council and the same amount or more was subscribed by citizens for the grading of a Wharf at the Court House Landing. But four years later (August, '58) the Telegraph found occasion to whip Pomeroy’s back over the shoulders of Mason City; with the following: Our prosperous neighbor, Mason City, is grading a splendid wharf opposite our most magnificent one. They are also grading streets and making other improvements. They have one serious disadvantage in that they have not of our beautiful red clay for sidewalks; they will have to use "old fogy" brick or stone. Let the city commissioners of Mason City visit Pomeroy and see our new sidewalks, especially those around the corner of Front and Court streets. In June, '59 it was announced that "Laborers are working on the Wharf to be made in front of Court street." The wharf (or "levvy," to the Virginians) of "our prosperous neighbor, Mason City," was made of selected cobble stones and was indeed a "splendid" one for that day. But only a few sidewalks could have been pronounced splendid. Like Pomeroy property owners, that of Mason City (except R.C.M. Lovell, J.A. Payne, and one or two others) �delayed complying with the ordinance; most of them delayed so long that the Council finally recinded it. Anderson, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 218 Brown, Center, Horton and Front were the only streets included in the ordinance since there were few, if any, houses east of Horton. Most of the sidewalks put down were made of large, comparatively flat sandstones that in the summertime were sources of woe to the toes of barefoot boys and girls- which meant the toes of nearly all Mason City boys and girls. The walks in front of the Lovell house and of the Payne Hotel were of brick. It was during this period that the authorities of Mason County built a long wooden bridge across Ice Creek. Up to this time (the early 1850s) the creek was crossed simply by fording, it is said. Now, following this necessarily incomplete picture of the Horseshoe Bend's external appearance in the 1850s, the inside of a few homes are brought into view. But here, too, the pictures lack many details; more than that, they are synthetic pictures, composed of material on HOME FURNISHINGS gathered piecemeal here, there and everywhere in our sources. An idea of what constituted "modern conveniences" in that period was suggested by V.B. Horton Junior’s advertisement of the proposed sale of his home "in the upper limits of Pomeroy" in the June 23, 1857 Telegraph. The ad states that the nine-room house had "two passages and stair casements, five grates, closets, three cisterns one of which is under the kitchen, stone sink with pump… good stable; carriage, wood and ice houses." Into homes even less pretentious than this one went marble top furniture, stuffed-seated chairs, sofas, etc., from the A. Gatchel and the John Probst & Company furniture stores in Pomeroy, and W.B. Probst in Middleport; parlor stoves from the W.J. Prall or the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 219 Middleport Stove Store. In many such homes was either a piano forte or a melodeon, upon which some member of the family took a weekly "music" lesson. Manufactured carpets were not advertised by Pomeroy and Middleport merchants, but John Shillito's Carpet Store at Cincinnati had a big space on the advertising pages of the Telegraph every after January of 1858. In the homes of workingmen conveniences were rare. Cisterns were luxuries. Each town had its own town pump; besides, there was a well or two, the owners of which usually permitted the inhabitants of the town to get water for drinking and cooking at the rate of about ten cents per month per family. Mason City people had access to "Butcher" Hildebrandt's well on Anderson street and to Peter Roush's on the southwest corner of Second and Center streets. Water for other purposes was collected in rain barrels that adorned one or more of the corners of practically every dwelling. In "dry spells" there was always a drayman ready with dray and water barrel to haul water from the River and fill the rain barrels for a small sum. Families living near the River were lucky; they needed cisterns nor draymen- only two buckets and an iron hoop by means of which the carrier could keep the buckets steadied at a uniform distance from his legs as he walked. (Even a hickory barrel-hoop was better than no hoop at all.) The wood stoves advertised by W.J. Prall went not only to rural homes. Children of thrifty foreigners (and some others) made regular trips to cooper shops, carpenter shops, boatyards, to gather stove wood; and those who lived near the coal tracks (on Center street, Mason City, for instance) supplemented the wood with a nice collection of coal which had dropped accidentally from the coal �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 220 cars which passed regularly to and from the mines to the salt furnaces. Lamp chimnies [sic] were procurable at Remington's and at Reed's Drug Store early in the '50s; but Candles and Lard Oil were given special notice in grocers' advertisements as late as 1860 and '61facts which speak for themselves. FOOD continued to improve in character and variety. Meat Markets were common by '61. Wendel Joachim early in '51 was supplying Pomeroy residents with fresh meat from his shop on Second street "near the Broom Factory"; in the later '50s he was "still 'meting' out choicest stakes, surloins [editor's spelling], cutlets, chops, &C, on Front street…" John Worley in February, '59 still furnished Middleport citizens with "the fat of the land." Mason City residents could buy fresh meat at Hildebrandt's one-story brick "butcher-shop" on Anderson street. Only one advertisement for Oysters was found, and that in '59: The most superb oysters ever brought to Pomeroy are now arriving daily at the Billiard Saloon on Front street, $1 per can. Also served up in good style at the Saloon. -August Mayer. But oyster suppers were given by the churches early in the decade. Only canned oysters were available, of course. Sugar, Coffee [green], Tea; Oranges, Lemons, Raisins; Mackeral, Codfish- all were advertised generally. One firm had "on hand Common, New Orleans, Havana, Loaf, Powdered, Crushed, Maple, and other Varieties" of sugar. Butter, eggs, fowls, etc. were not offered until late in the decade, but "Country Produce Taken in Exchange" appeared early and very generally in advertisements. "Ice Cream, that delicious summer luxury which Hossick serves at his saloon these warm evenings," was given special editorial notice May 1, 1851. "He has fitted a room for ladies and their �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 221 attendants, which our beaux and belles would do well to visit," the item concludes. On the same date, Robert Sidebottom, "new Baker and Confectioner on Front street, above Linn," announced that "Choicest Lemonade and other wholesome temperence beverages are to be served during the warm weather." A Soda Fountain, "with all recipes and appurtenances," was offered for sale by H.B. Smith in the spring of '51. But Soda Water was not advertised until May, 1857, when George Atkinson, new Baker and Confectioner on "Front street, few doors above T.J. Smith's Shoe Store," announced that his "Soda Fountain is now in full blast," and that his Ice Cream Saloon would be ready "as soon as the weather is sufficiently warm." "Let everybody and their wives put up fruit… If people ate more fruit and less hog they'd be healthier and happier,"- thus exhorted Editor Plants in a July 1860 editorial extolling the superiority of the tin fruit cans manufactured "by the thousands" by Prall & Hatch. The inference is that canned fruits at last had a place on the winter menus of many Boot-shaped Bend homes. The Country Produce advertised by the Provision Stores and the Bread and Cakes offered by Bakers and Confectioners were seldom bought by families of moderate means. Especially was this true at Mason City, where about seven-eighths of the large lots (most of them measuring 200 feet by 80 feet) was taken up by kitchen garden, cow stable, chicken coop, pig sty, and the huge brick bake-oven in which was baked every Saturday the coming week's supply of bread- and kuchen, if it was a German family's oven. Two new products, a food and a household commodity, were intro �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 222 duced into the Bend in 1860. Both were manufactured by J.G. Enos, Middleport Grocer and Baker. Both were recommended editorially in the Telegraph. "Lovers of good, warm biscuit," Editor Plants advised, "should procure J.G. Enos's Baking Powder. It does not have the injurious effects of soda… have used it for some time." And a few weeks later: "J.G. Enos… has recently completed machinery to manufacture Crackers, to the superiority of which we can testify; we were presented with a fine lot." The CLOTHES worn by the classes and the masses is an interesting feature of the Bend's 1850s picture. All the Pomeroy, Middleport and West Columbia merchants, milliners and merchant tailors listed above, advertised the very newest materials and styles. W.H. Remington on his return from a trip Easy in the spring of 1855 brought back a "New Stock of Silks, Satins, Delaines, Calicoes, Ginghams, Lawns, Challeys, Muslins, Checks, Tweeds, Cassinets." John A Norgan's rhymed advertisement in the spring of '51, if not exactly poetical is highly informative on the subject of men's clothing: Fancy Silk and Satin Vests, Of the very best; Fancy Cassimere and Doeskin Pants, For Lawyers, Doctors, Farmers and Laboring Hands; Cloth, Tweed, Felt and Blanket Coats, by the Wagon Loads; The latest style of Silk Hats, Cloth and Silk Plush Caps; Striped and Fine White Shirts, Handsome as Canary Birds; Carpet Bags and Umberellas You will find with him always; Warranted Shoes and Boots, With a host of other Goods, All of the very best and neatest. Come one and all and examine for yourselves. And you will find that John sells cheapest. Gentlemen of means could have their clothes made to order, others could buy them "ready made." The latter kind was the mass product (in modern phraseology) of the several Pomeroy and Middleport clothing stores which employed a number of apprentices. Boots and shoes likewise were either custom made or ready made. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 223 Both kinds were practically hand made, since only three machines (rolling, sewing and pegging) were known to the larger boot and shoe establishments, or "manufacturies." Apprentices did the work in those shops also. The "immense muffs, gay shawls, and plumes on the bonnets reaching to the shoulders, and earrings," worn by fashionable ladies did not appear in the advertisement. They may have been kept by W.H. Remington, whose lengthy list of articles included bonnets and concluded with "any other goods that the people want." Most of them, probably, came from Cincinnati. Except the earrings. Certainly no woman had difficulty in finding earrings at one or the other of the Pomeroy and Middleport jewelry stores. If not at Eichmann & Burkhart's, then surely at Peter Lambrecht's "one door below the Bank Building on Court street," or at W.A. Aicher's "next door below Remingtons," or at Philip Huber's on Second street, Middleport. And bonnets properly plumed undoubtedly were on hand at Mrs. S.D. Gibson's Millinary Store "one door west of Aicher's." The regularly advertised mercantile establishments were not the only sources of elegant apparel, however. "Grandmother Probst made beautiful fine white shirts at a dollar a piece for all the young men in Pomeroy,” wrote Mrs. Hudson (the former Lelia Probst) in her "Recollections." The finery of the classes is but a small part of the 1850s' dress revue. Striking indeed must have been the contrast of the masses in their linsey-woolsey or calico garments, homemade-the men's as well as the women's-and probably without benefit of pattern other than an old worn-out garment ripped into its several parts. Handmade, too, of course, since sewing machines did not �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 224 reach the Bend until late in the '50s and then only into the wealthier homes. The "outlandish attire of the many recently arrived "furriners" added another sharp note of contrast. Such a revue would not approach completeness without the portrayal of some of the children of that day. "All children went barefoot in summer," wrote Emma Van Duyn, daughter of Dr. Wm. Van Duyn, in the March 23, 1928 Tribune-Telegraph. "And how glad we were when it came time to strip off our copper-toed calf-skin shoes and home-knit woolen stockings, even if we did suffer from 'stubbed toes and stonebruises.” The climax came, however, when we had to take a pan of cold water, go out on the back steps and wash our feet, no matter how sleepy we were, before we were allowed to crawl into our trundle beds." "Grandma" Schumacher (97-year-old granddaughter of Joseph Condee and still [1940] living in Mason), recalled being sent every spring and fall to Shoemaker Englehardt to be measured for a pair of shoes. The summer shoes were worn only on Sunday; those for winter were coppertoed and worn with heavy, hand-knit woolen stockings, and long, narrow flannel dresses that came almost to the ankles. PROFESSIONAL SERVICES of all the then known kinds were procurable. Physicians locating in Pomeroy after Doctors Howe, Guthrie, and Roehm, were Charles F. Thomas, J.P. Bing, Isaac Train, John Elben. Dr. Howe's departure has been noted above. Dr. Roehm continued near the Rolling Mill throughout the '50s (and later); the other four had their offices in the vicinity of the Court House. Dr. Elben advertised himself as "Homeopathic and Hydropathic Physician." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 225 Middleport's Dr. William Van Duyn continued practicing through the 1850s. Dr. C.R. Reed located in Middleport soon after graduating in 1853 from Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. Next to come was Dr. J.C. Rathburn. And on January 4, 1861, Dr. Elijah Stansbury announced that he was to begin practicing "the Thompsonia or Botanic System of Medicine" in Middleport. Along with his medical practice Dr. Stansbury offered also to teach Book-keeping to anyone desiring a "practical knowledge of the science from a practtical book-keeper." In March of that same year (1861) Dr. William N. Hudson, "well known to old residents," announced himself as "Surgeon, Hygeo-Therapeutic Physician and Electro-Magnetizer, at the 'old Knight place' near Middleport, where he attends to a limited practice after extensive experience of many years." At West Columbia Dr. Aquila L. Knight, former Mason County school teacher, located in 1851, a year or two after his graduation from the medical department of Western Reserve College, Cleveland, Ohio. To Mason City came, in 1853, Dr. Alfred Patrick, brother of Mrs. R.C.M. Lovell, immediately after his graduation from Ohio Medical College, Cincinnati, and opened an office. In Hartford City lived Dr. O.G. Chase, "well educated, of fine appearance and decided ability, but seeming to care little for practice." Why he stayed there nobody knew. Locating at Syracuse in 1858, Dr. Thomas Barton, "self-made physician," by 1861 had extended his field of practice to Minersville, Hartford City and New Haven. In January, 1859, "Medical Reform” was brought to Syracuse by "Dr. D. Mayer, Electric Physician," who had an office also in Pomeroy. In addition, Dr. Mayer �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 226 operated a Drug Store in Syracuse. Minersville's aforesaid druggist-post master Dr. Schaeffer competed with Dr. Barton for local medical practice. The Bend's first resident dentist, Dr. C.N. Maddy (see above) by April, 1853 was advertising himself as "Agent for the Union Life Insurance Company, office in the Remington Brick, up stairs." But Dr. Maddy was "also prepared for performing Dental Surgery in a style of neatness, ease and durability surpassed by none." His terms were "Cash or Produce." Dr. D.C. Whaley, who had set up a dental chair in "a room over the Remington Store" in 1850, announced on August 15, 1854 that the was locating permanently in Pomeroy to practice "Surgeon-Dentistry on Front street next door to the Telegraph Office." But from May, '57 to the end of the '50s Dr. Whaley's office was in Middleport, in the second story of the Hummer Building. In the very early '50s Doctors Maddy and Whaley had to compete with Surgeon-Dentist Spry, of Portsmouth, and resident dentist, Dr. W.C. Churoh. In March, '59, Dr. T.O. Boggess opened a dental in the Remington Building. Legal service was obtained principally at Pomeroy as a matter of course. In 1851 Theodore Montague and the two law firms, Irvin & Plants and Wall & Earhart, had offices in the Court House. Lawyers John Cartwright, Nathan Simpson, H.T. Van Horn had offices elsewhere. By '57 Irvin & Plants had become Plants & Burnap, by '61 Plants & Paine (Lewis Paine, son of S.S. Paine) had an office in the Edwards Building. Another rising young lawyer, Thomas Carleton, built himself an office on Linn street, east side, in the summer of '58 and began practice as Attorney & Counceller at Law. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 227 In 1859 the new firm of Simpson & Lasley, Attorneys & Councellors at Law, appeared. In April, '51, "Professor" Wooley, Taker of Daguerreotypes, located in Middleport, in the Stedman Building, and immediately made known to the public that with his new Electro Galvanico just received from New York he could "take better daguerreotypes than ever before taken in the West." Two years later Mr. Wooley moved his place of business to the second floor of the Branch Building, Pomeroy. During the next two years Moore & Gilbert's Daguerreotype Boat stopped "just above Remington's Wharf, to remain a short time." Soon other such boats made short visits. In 1856 the Pomeroy Daguerrean Gallery located "over Mayhugh's Grocery," but soon afterwards was "in the Swallow Building on Court street." Ernest Feiger in October, 1858, bought out the Daguerrean Galler in the Swallow Building, advertised at once: I am now prepared to take all kinds of pictures, Ambrotypes, Melanotypes & Daguerreotypes, at 50¢ apiece. Leather pictures for sending in letters. Pictures inserted in Breast Pins and Lockets. Rooms over Swallow's Store, entrance on Court street one door below O. Branch's store. In July, 1860, Mr. Feiger moved to Cartwright's new building, corner Front and Court, "opposite Swallow's store." Ernest Feiger did not call himself Professor. Instead, he dignified his vocation by advertising himself as an artist (which he proved himself to be) and his place of business an Art Gallery. Pomeroy had its first TELEGRAPHIC SERVICE in 1848, when a "Magnetic Telegraph Office" was opened in a building on a corner above the Rolling Mill. O.B. Chapman had charge of the office, probably owned it. The Telegraph said very little about this new service; in fact, it said nothing except to state in its Prospectus (published after the ‘51 Fire) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 228 that "by means of the magnetic telegraph we are enabled to give the news of the day, European and American, at least eight days before they [Telegraph readers] receive it in any Eastern paper." In February, '57 the brief announcement was made that Pomeroy was now destitute of telegraphic communication. But by January, '59 the Editor was able to publish the first dispatch sent over the wires of the recently organized Pomeroy & Athens Telegraph Company. The message read in part: Messrs. T.A. Plants & Co. We welcome you into electric communication with Athens… Pomeroy, the city of Coal Smoke, Iron and Salt… May the band of our common interests be strengthened by this new tie. The Pomeroy office was temporarily located in Reed's Drug Store on Court street. Mr. E. Crow, who had had the contract for constructing the line, was Pomeroy's first operator. West Columbia as early as 1853 had a telegraph office “affording communication with all parts of the Union,” wrote W.B. Robbins, President of the W.C.M. & M. Co. in his first report to the General Meeting of Stockholders, August, 1853. The Daniel & Rathburn Bank at Pomeroy has been in this picture several times, hence the question of BANKING SERVICE for Bend citizens has been partly answered. Provision for such service at West Columbia was made on May 27, 1852, by Act of the Virginia Assembly authorizing the establishing at that place of a branch of the Bank of Virginia, said branch to be the Northwestern Bank of Virginia. Similar service was to be secured at Mason City in 1860 when on March 31 of that year the Manufacturers' & Miners' Bank of Mason, Virginia, was given a charter. The West Columbia Bank began operations but discontinued them in a few years. The Mason bank did not even get started. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 229 Mention has been made of the first TONSORIAL SERVICE offered Pomeroy's male citizens by the free Negro, Addison. Immediately after the 1851 Fire Addison moved his place of business from Front to Court street. The next year Henry Greuel opened a barber shop "west of the Remington store." Within the next five years had a second competitor in Abram Fischer, first "on Front street, five doors above Linn." Addison long ago had ceased advertising. One of the "Wants of Pomeroy" listed by Editor Thompson in May, 1855, was LIVERY SERVICE. "To ride a few miles," complained Thompson, "a person must walk half the distance for a horse and buggy, then pay three prices for a miserable concern…” That want was supplied before long by either William Patton or W.N. Snyder; in July, 1860 those two men announced they had formed a partnership Livery Business; that they would be glad to serve "all old patrons of the Stable;" that they were adding new stock to that already on hand. Editor Plants gave the new firm brief editorial notice, adding laconically that he was glad to hear they designed to improve their stock. DOMESTIC afford "hired great numbers the 1850s. relatives and SERVICE was easily procured by all families that could girls." German, Irish, Welsh and English girls came in to the United States seeking just such employment during Many of them found their way to The Bend through friends. And this Miscellaneous Line of SERVICES; also, was available: There was A.E. Williams TEACHER of the ORGAN, PIANO FORTE, MELODEON, or SERAPHIS, FLUTE and VIOLIN, who made his presence in Pomeroy in the early '50s known in a brief announcement. Prof. G. Brandstattner, TEACHER of PIANO and MELOFEON, in Decem- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 230 ber of '59 let the public know that his residence was on "Back street, near the M.E. Church." P.B. Brunker SOLD New York, Boston and Baltimore PIANOES in 1860 "at city retail prices." Mr. Brunker also gave lessons on the Piano and the Melodeon. Prof .Munson TAUGHT SINGING and the latter '50s, but did not advertise formally. His musical entertainments at the Court House "reflected great credit on him and his scholars," said a news item. WHEELER & WILSON SEWING MACHINES were SOLD by C.E. Donnally, agent, in 1860. And, finnally, the BY NO MEANS MINOR SEHVICE, performed by William Prall, whose residence in 1860 was "on Carr's Run, a few doors north of the Nye Saw Mill." COFFIN-MAKER of the early '40s and the '50s, Mr. Prall now not only had READY MADE COFFINS always on hand but offered the services of an "ELEGANT HEARSE," which he had recently fitted up. A. Gatchel, FURNITURE DEALER, also advertised UNDERTAKING and RFADY MADE METALLIC AND WOOD COFFINS, but no hearse. BEN BIGGS, at Mason City, furnished all the coffins and led all the funeral processions occasioned by deaths on the Virginia side from West Columbia to New Haven, with his spring-wagon hearse. It has been shown, though not definitely stated, that INTRA-BEND TRAVEL during the early part of the century was in great part one-way traveling: from the Virginia side to the north side. As settlement of the Horseshoe Bend developed, this not only continued to be the case but such northbound travel increased greatly in volume. The everincreasing needs and wants of the smaller Virginia communities could be met only by the well-appointed mercantile and �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 231 other business establishments of their Ohio neighbors, especially of Pomeroy; while the Ohioans ordinarily had little occasion for coming to the Virginia side. The earliest means for crossing the River were the privately owned canoe or other small craft; or the ferries licensed by the first Meigs County Court to operate at Graham Station and at Letart Falls. By the early '50s the operating of a public craft on the Ohio River required a license from the State of Virginia. (Upon what authority Meigs County issued those earlier licences has not been discovered by this writer.) Exactly when and by whom the first Virginia licensed ferry operated in The Bend is not known, but it must have been very soon after the founding of West Columbia and at that point in the River; for it was on August 19, 1852 that G.W. Allison advertised his Omnibus Accommodation Line to begin running at once between West Columbia and Coal Ridge Mill- not Sheffield or Middleport, be it noted but west Columbia, meaning, without doubt, that he expected many of his passengers to come from south of the River- an expectation with little basis had there been no public ferry. But the kind of ferry, whether hand-, horse-, or steam power, is not so easily deduced. A Telegraph item in an 1854 number mentions the Lark, a little steam craft engaged in all sorts of job work, as also ferrying at West Columbia. Another source avers that by 1854 traffic at West Columbia had gone into reverse: Ohio people were crossing over to the new Virginia town to trade! Regarding the establishing of a ferry at Mason City there is more definite knowledge. On May 16, 1854 the following paragraph appeared on the advertising pages of the Telegraph: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 232 POMEROY & MASON CITY FERRY:-G. Wallace of Mason has the satisfaction of announcing to citizens the establishment of a Horse Power Ferry across the Ohio between Pomeroy and Mason City. Terms moderate. Individuals, horses, teams, cattle, and freight ferried with safety, convenience and dispatch. There was no need, it seems, for Mr. Wallace to inform the public that the Mason City ferry landing was to be at the foot of Horton street- nor that the horses to be used were blind. Three years later (July 7, 1857) the public was informed through Editor Van Horn that "a regular Steam Ferry" had been established between Pomeroy and Mason City; that the boat, the Kate Howard, was an excellent craft and well managed. Another authority gives Rankin Wiley, Mason City resident, as owner and operator of the Kate Howard. After all, the Allison Bus apparently did not fulfill expectations; for in August, 1857, Editor Thompson, as if announcing something hitherto unheard of, chortles: A.M .Barlow, Esq., has started an Omnibus as is a Buss, right here, too, in the city of Pomeroy and the towns and villages that lie around loose in its suburbs. It is running from Sheffield Mills to Coal Ridge Mill four times daily. Arrangements for time of arrival and departure are not yet completed. But meantime, look out when the horn blows! The aim of the Barlow "Buss" evidently was to bring West Columbia, Sheffield, Middleport and Coalport people to Pomeroy. Those of Kerr's Run, Minersville and Syracuse were accustomed to having private conveyances perhaps, or to prefer walking. The three means of OUT-0F-TOWN-TRAVEL were stage coach, steamboat and private conveyance. Some idea of the speed made by the last-named may be gathered from Editor Van Horn's short account, of August 9, 1853, of his trip to Athens: Last Tuesday morning at 5 o 'clock in company with Mr. Halliday, T.A. Plants, Esq., and Lewis Paine we started to Athens to attend �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 233 the annual Commencement exercises at Ohio University. We took the Sugar Run route and reached Harrisonville in time for breakfast. We arrived at Athens at one o 'clock. Regarding the decade's River travel one fact is to be noted: that the Pittsburgh-New Orleans, Pittsburgh-St. Louis and Pittsburgh-Cincinnati packets no longer had the monopoly of that travel. Shor run, or short-trade steamboats began coming into the scene, their number continually increasing. Three of these were: The Hamburg, starting in '52 to make tri-weekly trips between Pomeroy and Portsmouth; J.W. Mathews's "fast-running towboat, Tempest, expressly built for the Gallipolis-Ravenswood trade," appearing in '55 and the Pomeroy, Parkersburg-Gallipolis packet in 1858. Naither of the TWO PROSPECTIVE RAILROADS whose rumored coming to The Bend were said to have brought R.C.M. Lovell to the Ohio River ever materialized. The Manassas Gep Road, expected to terminate at Mason City, was never again heard of. The one that was to pass through Pomeroy was heard about enough to make it considered an absolute certainty. Read the Telegraph's story of united effort, false encouragement, crushing defeat: January 13, 1852 A railroad is projected from Hillsboro, via Piketon, Jackson and Pomeroy, to Parkersburg. The B. & O. have adopted the Hillsboro & Cincinnati Road as a part of this line. March 15 and March 22, '53, Two Railroad Meetings at Pomeroy. Report of 1st meeting William McAboy was appointed chairman. A. Thompson acted as secretary. The chairman of the committee to procure subscribers stated that the required amount was short about $12000. Much was said by Messrs Horton, Sitvers, Bosworth and others about the different routes and the best means of securing the required sum. Mr. Horton promised to raise half if others would raise the other half. H.B. Smith stated that Prof. Mather (?) would subscribe $5,000 if the railroad terminated in Naylor's Run. We understand the citizens of Middleport and Sheffield sent an agent to Hillsboro in the interest of the Leading Creek route. Citizens of Middleport say they will aid in the Sugar Run route if unsuccessful with the Leading Creek route. Report of 2d meeting. The stock is all taken. Mr. Horton left for �Cincinnati Saturday with the books. Engineers with implements will soo be here. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 234 July 19, '53 Operations have commenced on the Pomeroy track. The railroad seems a fixed fact. The depot’s location is yet uncertain. We hope the matter will soon be settled. If our office is to be moved we wish to get all our type out of the way before the cars come in, lest some forms be knocked into Pi by the iron horse. August 2, '53 …Work on the railroad is progressing with reasonable dispatch. Aug. 23, '53 Work on the railroad is suspended. October 5, '53 The Marietta and Hillsboro roads are planning consolidation. Prospects for a branch road to Pomeroy are nipped in the bud. The Baltimore has given up Hillsboro and is now looking after the Hocking Valley and Columbus raod. Jan. 24, '54 Only one week is left for action. If the requisite amount is not subscribed our Directors threaten to surrender our rights to the Marietta Company. Meigs County alone is derelict Feb. 1, '54 Consolidation of the Marietta & Cincinnati and the Hillsboro & Cincinnati roads has been finally arranged. We shall have no railroad. U.S.MAIL DELIVERIES th The Bend continued during almost the entire '50s over the old land routes. Some of the arrangements were so poor that they caused business men great inconvenience. More than that, Mail Contractors sometimes openly violated their contracts to suit their own convenience. One instance of such violation occurred in 1852. For several years before '52, Pomeroy's mail via the Lancaster and Pomeroy route had been coming daily eight months of the year and tri-weekly the remaining four months. The Department at Washington decided that since almost the whole county was served through the Pomeroy post office it should have daily mail the entire year. The contractor, for reasons of his own, soon sublet to H.T. Hoyt, Proprietor of the Athens-Pomeroy Coach Line, who immediately reduced Pomeroy's mail to a tri-weekly basis and changed the time of arrival and departure at Athens to suit his triweekly delivery between Marietta and Chillicothe. As soon as the violation was discovered ��A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 235 it was exposed by Marcus Bosworth and the Telegraph and reported to Washington. Postmaster Ralston was authorized to employ extra service; whereupon Contractor Hoyt immediately supplied the Pomeroy office with daily mail and complimented the Telegraph by calling it a "filthy sheet." Cincinnati mail came to Pomeroy by way of Gallipolice twice a week. Through the Telegraph's efforts the Cincinnati postmaster was induced to send such mail to Columbus, whence it came to Pomeroy daily over the Lancaster-Pomeroy route. To make possible the delivery of the Telegraph to subscribers in a failry reasonable time, several offices getting mail once a week from another office that was served twice a week, requested and obtained permission to change their receiving day. They wanted the paper delivered in two or three days instead of in seven as to formerly. The West Columbia post office, served once a week from the Pomeroy and Point Pleasant offices, finally in '53 was given tri-weekly service. By 1855 rumors began to be heard about efforts to get River mail established between Parkersburg, Virginia, and Maysville, Kentucky, “that being the only portion of the River destitute of mail." Finally on July 6. 1858, the Telegraph was able to announce: Capt. Russell, of the Silver Star, has made a contract with the Government to establish regular tri-weekly mail between Pomeroy and Parkersburg. Each office along the line is to have its own exclusive mail bag to receive only such mail as may come from either Pomeroy or Parkersburg for such place. It is to be hoped that the land routes along the way will be abandoned and the whole business given to Capt. Russell. Letart, Virginia, and Mason City, Virginia, are among the points to be so served. At last, the Mail Boat had come to The Bend! On March 20, 1855, was announced the New Postal Law, which required that beginning July, *** next, all letters were to be pre- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 236 paid and charged 3¢ under 3000 miles; over that, 10¢; that weight would be regulated as heretofore; that Stamps were to be sold by postmasters at precisely the same rate charged by the Department, and violations subjected postmasters to a fine of not more than $5,000. The law provided also for the registering of valuable letters at a fee of 5¢, the Department assuming no liability for loss. When Franklin Pierce, Democrat, became President in 1853 he re moved several postmasters in The Bend the principal ones being James Ralston at Pomeroy and Samuel Bradbury at Middleport (Salisbury post office.) Mr. Ralston was succeeded by George Lee and Mr. Bradbury by Dr. Pangburn. The name Salisbury11 was changed to Middleport on June 26, 1854. 11. Salisbury's first postmaster, Andrew Donnally, was succeeded by John Smith on Sept. 18, 1827; Smith by E.T. Grant Apr. 10, 1837; Grant by Elias Cole Feb. 16, 1839-all this from P.O. Dpt. Records. Undoubtedly Postmasters Donnally and Smith had the office farther down near the Creek. It was Elias Cole, probably, who moved it up to the newly founded town of Sheffield, thus giving rise to the local tradition that Elias Cole was the first postmaster of Middleport. HOME AND COMMUNITY, 2 (The Mind & Soul Plane) EDUCATION, though greatly advanced during the 1850s, was slow in starting on a genuinely forward move. A new school law passed by the Ohio Assembly in '53 mad e provision for the appointing of county Boards of Examiners and for a system of Union, or Graded, Schools; whereupon in April of same year Judge Heckard appointed C.C. Giles Principal of Pomeroy Academy: James M. Evans Principal of Meigs High School & Teachers' Institute12; and the Reverend T.B. Dooley, Rec 12. This school, early known as Chester Academy, was incorporated �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 237 by Act of Legislature March 6, 1839. The eighteen incorporators included Randal Stivers, James Ralston, and Asal Hoyt. The school was placed under the management of twenty Trustees. The object of its founding was "To afford better facilities for the instruction of youth in literature and science and for the inculcating of good morals." The Institute was located at Chester, in a good brick building erected expressly for it. In 1846 James M. Evans was employed as teacher and Superintendent, which position he held six years. tor of the Episcopal church at Pomeroy, as members of the first Board of Examiners of Meigs county. Immediately the Board had published a "Notice to Teachers," announcing the following examination April 30, at Pomeroy Academy; May 7, at Chester; May 14, at Rutland May 21, at Racine. The new Graded, or Union, System, did not get into operation with quite the dispatch as did that for the examination of teachers. It required additional buildings and teachers, the funds for which were to be raised by taxation. Several years passed before Union schools were in operation either in Middleport or Pomeroy. Meanwhile those Pomeroy children who attend free school continued to receive their instruction in the two-room brick school on Second, or Back street and in the old wooden building up town near the Flour Mill. Cyrus Grant, who was in charge of the Brick School three or four years, resigned in the autumn of '53 and was succeeded by Lewis Paine. Mr. Grant's assistant, Miss Murray, was later succeeded by Miss Urania Stivers, "mother of kindness to anyone needing assistance.” (Mrs. Logan) On October 6, 1853, contained a short but (to specially informative item. "We understand," wrote "that the winter session of the German Free School Monday in the Presbyterian church by August Nast." yet leaving much unanswered in regard to Pomeroy's the reseraoher) Editor Van Horn will commence next Illuminating, and first �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 238 German free schools. "The district school will open at the Brick School House Monday…”-such notice appeared every October for several years (in the Telegraph). But September 12, 1856 brought a change: UNION SCHOOLS:-The Pomeroy Schools henceforth are to be conducted on the grades system as nearly as circimstances permit. H.F. Miller, A.M., has been employed as Superintendent. He must have the cooperation of the citizens. Children must be in school at the proper time. The Central High School can accommodate a few pay scholars from other districts if application is made in time. -Board of Education. How nearly circumstances permitted the new system to operate was not definitely disclosed. Three years later (Oct. 4, '59), in a lone article on the Pomeroy Schools (published by Order of the Baord of Education) the location of the three school districts was reported as: First, or Lower District, that part of town below Sycamore street; Second, or Middle District, from Sycamore to the S.W. Pomeroy Caol Works; Third, or Upper District, all above the Coal Works. The school house in the Middle District was a new frame, built on the site of the later Central Building; the one in the Upper District was the Methodist Church just back of the Flour Mill; the building had been bought by the Board of Education when the new M.E. Brick Church was erected. The Middle District building contained one Primary School, one Secondary, one Grammar and one High School. "We called it 'the High School,’” wrote John Stivers in the November 8, 1922 Tribune-Telegraph, "but it was innocent of curriculum, commencement, and everything else that makes a high school." On September 13, 1859 the Telegraph announced that "The Public Schools of Pomeroy will commence on Monday next with N.M. McLaughlin, Superintendent. The teachers are: Mr. T.S. Stivers, Miss Caroline �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 239 Stivers, Mrs. N.M. McLaughlin, Miss Bicknell, Miss Chalfin, Miss Ewing, Miss Wall." THE ACADEMY flourished--for a time. A two-days' examination (oral) in the summer of 1851 by "the excellent German teacher Mr. Holz and two of our educated clergymen" proved Mr. Giles's efficiency. In the fall of '55 H.A. Keen, A.M. of Harvard, with Anna Keen as assistant, succeeded Mr. Giles. "A large Hall for Gymnastics" (a small frame, really) was erected on the grounds that year. In '58 or '59 the Academy building was rented to the Pomeroy Board of Education. The Academy's career for that decade was ended. Besides a. large local enrollment, the institution in its flourishing days had students from the East, the South, South America. Among its Bend students were: W.A. Aicher, William Dilcher, Perry Simpson, George Eiselstein, Spicer Patrick and sister Mary Patrick from Mason City, Columbus Sehon and Edmund Sehon from Hartford City. The "Pomeroy High School" was a private school conducted by the Reverend R. Wilkinson of the Presbyterian Church in a room over the The O. Branch store on Court street. Rev. Mr. Wilkinson specialized in preparing young men for college. In November, 1853 Editor Van Horn attended one of the Pomeroy High School's examinations. He was especially pleased to learn that the "dull, forgetful scholar was dealt with very tenderly; that the heathenish doctrine of compulsion was becoming obsolete in the schoolroom. "In our childhood the custom was to have whalers instead of instructors," editorialized Mr. Van Horn. He was pleased to not, also, that Miss Comstock, the assistant, who was "thoroughly educated in an Eastern seminary," had all the "quali- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 240 x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x ities of mind and heart necessary for successful instructing." MIDDLEPORT was much slower than Pomeroy in putting the new school law into effect. As late as '57 J.R. Bissel, "an ardent friend of education," sent two bitter complaints the the Telegraph the burden of which were that the average time for free schools in Middleport was not more than five months instead of the seven for which the Legislature had made provision. He censured the Board of Education and the local Directors severely for not providing buildings enough to accommodate one-third of the children. "It will not be better until the people rally for the Union School System," concluded Mr. Bissel. But Middleport did not lack private schools. In April, '51 the Misses Bailey and McClain opened the Middleport Select School (location not given.) Besides "Orthography, Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, Grammar, Natural and Mental Philosophy, History, Botany, Algebra," these ladies offered "Painting, Franch Embroidery, Wax Fruit, Wax and Paper Flowers," with extra charge. "Due attention shall be paid to the Morals of 'the Pupils," the ladies promised. James M. Evans in April, '51, (probably vacation time at Chester Academy) opened Sheffield Select School "for the special preparation of teachers." The Middleport High School and Teachers' Institute was begun in the "Brick Building near the Christian Church," by H.F. Miller, A.B. Two years later J.L. Eakin, A.M., announced the first term of "Middleport High School,” in the "Brick School House. 13. These three quotations (taken from advertisements) show that Middleport had a brick school-house by 1855 and that it was on the Main street of the 1850s. For time of building see CHURCHES below. In May of the same year (’51) Miss Richardson opened a Select �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 241 School also "in the Brick School House on Main street, Middleport," At SYRACUSE no school house had been erected when Dr. Barton came there in '58. Unquestionably, however, there was free instruction, and private as well, given somewhere in the town. RACINE'S "large new school house, the best in the county, is nearing completion,"--this in a June, 1858 Telegraph. In '59 Alban Davis, A.B., taught the high and the grammer school and J.L. Beckler the grades of the RACINIE UNION SCHOOL. The first Meigs County Teachers' Institute was held in Racine's new school building during the week of July, 27, 1858. Text Books recommended by Meigs County Board of Examiners for county schools were: McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, Ray's Arithmetic and Algebra, Pinneo's Grammar, McGuffey's Revised Spelling Book, last named being "just out May, '53 and used in all the best schools in the West." Ohio's free schools of the '50s being for white children only, Editor Plants's item of July 20, 1858 on Pomeroy's Negro school therefore would be more enlightening if it gave the public some details as to the support of the school, etc. The item follows: We have long been aware that the colored population of Pomeroy had in operation a separate school but had not made ourselves familiar with its progress. Last Friday evening we attended an exhibition given by the colored school. The exercises were held in the colored church. An admission fee of 10¢ was charged, to be used for furnishing the church. The house was crowded; many prominent citizens… present. Many boys and men… we did not see one improper act or hear one disrespectful word… Suffice to say no friend of the oppressed could leave the scene without the conviction that with just treatment and opportunity they are susceptible of large improvement and high culture. Several free Negro families lived out on the present (1936) Lincoln Road during the 1850s. There they had their own church, wherein their school also was conducted. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 242 On the VIRGINIA SIDE, in Mason County, there was a prospect of securing public schools under the law passed by the Virginia Assembly in 1846. By 1858, after a long and hard fight, the required petition had been duly presented to the County Court; the election had taken place with the desired result of a two-thirds vote in favor of a district school system; a commission, regularly elected, divided the county into districts; each district had elected its commissioners, who in turn were to appoint a Board of Trustees for each school in the district. But there the work came to a halt because commissioners in some districts and trustees in others deliberately refused to act. The leaders of the movement, one of whom was Dr. Knight of West Columbia, then secured a writ of mandamus to compel officials to carry out the provisions of the law. The case went to court. There it was still pending when the Civil war broke out. But Subscription, or "Pay" schools, flourished in all the new Virginia communities. They were taught mainly by teachers from the Ohio side. The first such school in WEST COLUMBIA was conducted in the basement, or first story, of Mose Michael's three-story brick building. The W.C.M. & M. Company's first annual report (August, 1853) tells the stockholders that West Columbia contains two school houses; the writer of the second report (February, '54) says, "…I think we could make no better investment than to build a small church and a school house." There is no authentic record, however, of any other school at West Columbia than the one in the Michael Brick; nor of any other teacher than Captain Allen Mason. MASON CITY's first school house was originally a smoke-house on �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 243 John Brown's premises. Mr. Brown himself had used the building as a school-room for his own children; an so, when in 1853 Asel Hoyt came across the River to start a Subscription School for the new children coming in, it was an easy matter, probably, to combine the two schools. The late Marion Mumaw was one of "Professor" Hoyt's scholars. Two years later (May, 1855), Mrs. Sarah Cox advertised her SCHOOL FOR MISSES AND SMALL BOYS, to commence in her school-house (location not given) in Mason City and continue eight weeks, for a limited number of scholars. After the August vacation there were to be three terms of fifteen weeks each, at $5 per term. A small charge was to be made for incidental expenses, as repair of house, fuel, etc. Mrs. Cox's dwelling (and school-room) is believed to have been the back part of the present (1937) Kautz residence on Brown street. Not many Catholics, if any at all, came to Mason before 1856, hence there was no special school for Catholic children until that year, or soon afterwards. Details of the first Catholic school in Mason were lost to the memory of the town's oldest Catholic resident (of 1937) and other sources are lacking. At HARTFORD CITY the M.C.M. & M. Company gave the United Brethren a lot for a church on condition that one room be reserved for school purposes. One of that school-room's first teachers was N.B. Newell, "son of the man who kept the first tavern in that little burg." Sidney Campbell, "a rigid disciplinarian and a natural teacher," was another. Young George Wilding and Morris ("Maz") Chapman "constituted the senior class in Sidney Campbell's private academy." (Quotations in the above are from George Wilding's newspaper articles of later years.) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 244 In the summer of 1859 the M.C.M. & M. Company took possession of the U.B. Church building and converted it into FRANKLIN INSTITUTE, announcement of which institution appeared in the latter 1859 and early 1860 issues of the Telegraph. In abstract the ad reads: FRANKLIN INSTITUTE, at Hartford City, Mason County, Virginia, Commenced under patronage of Hartford City Coal Mining & Manufacturing Company, for Farmers' and Mechanics' sons and daughters, where they may receive(superior education to that offered in common schools hitherto. Charges sufficiently low for all to embrace. Now entering second session. Delightfully situated on a gently sloping eminence overlooking the Ohio, only short distance from steamboat landing. School Room and Teachers' residence is held in spacious building formerly known as Brethren Church. The room contains 2000 square feet, is replete with every suitable convenience. Heating and lighting are perfect; four large stoves, 280 ft. of window light; being elevated sixteen feet above roadway, is most desirable healthy condition. …also a Library and Reading Room Department containing many excellent periodicals to suit the desires of all. It is intended hereafter to add Piano Forte for Ladies as accompaniment to City Brass Band now in full operation every evening. School is conducted by Principal and Assistants, male and female. Male pupils taught every branch of learning necessary for their future advantage. Female Department also is taught every necessary accomplishment; plain and fancy needlework in addition to a sound scholastic course. Thus may the children of the above-named receive as liberal an education as in aristocratic institutions where charges exclude many naturally talented children from obtaining the assistance necessary to develop the intellect. Terms per session of three months, $2.50 each. Limited number of boarders taken at a small charge. References may be had to pupils' parents either in Ohio, West Columbia, Mason City or in this place, on application to the Principal of the Institution. -Samuel B. Saunders, Preceptor. George Wilding Jr. attended Franklin Institute one term. Rev. John Perry was his teacher. "Brother Jerry was a carpenter as well as a preacher and teacher," wrote the Reverend George Wilding. "He spent his mornings and evenings building benches and desks for his school. In his leisure time he patiently instructed me how to overcome my Welsh economy and extravagance in the use of my h's." CHURCHES increased in number and in variety of denominations dur- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 245 ing the 1850s. All church buildings doubtless were as uncomfortable an winter as was the Pomeroy Presbyterian Church, whose two stoves near the doors made that part of the room unbearably hot while breaths were congealing in the remaining part. Foot-stoves were by no means out of date. Yet, the Presbyterian church was very modern for the times. When a small melodeon was bought against the wishes of many members; and when soon thereafter Elder Bosworth brought his bass violin to church, thereby causing increasing disapproval; then--Miss Caroline Stivers kept right on at the melodeon and Mr. Bosworth at the violin undauntedly until criticism grew less and less and finally died out. Musical instruments had won. Pomeroy's Wesley Chapel was united with Middleport's Heath Chapel (see Middleport churches) in 1855 to form a new circuit, and its name was changed to Union Chapel. The brick building was erected in 1856 but not dedicated until January 16, 1859 (reason for delay not given.) Throughout the decade it remained Pomeroy's only brick church; and, with its basement and lecture room and two class rooms, probably the most commodious. As to the instalment of musical instruments our sources are silent. Episcopal services were discontinued about 1854, or about the time that Recotr Thomas Dooly's name disappeared from the County Board of Examiners and the notation, "No services at present," began to appear after the name Episcopal in the Telegraph's Church Directory. Some, probably most of the Episcopalians attended the Presbyterian church thereafter. No Baptist church was built in Pomeroy during the 1850s, but William McAboy, Secretary of the Executive Committee of The Salem �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 246 Baptist Congregation, occasionally announced prospective meetings of said association with the Canaan Church, the Welsh Baptist Church noted in the next paragraph. The Welsh, who "came palm singing" into The Bend (quoting C.A. Hartley), built three churches on the Ohio side: a brick Presbyterian, "Old School," in Minersville; a "New School" Presbyterian near Pomeroy's western boundary; and a brick Baptist Church near Frey street, Coalport. The Reverends John Williams, John Jones and Peter Lloyd were the pastors of these churches respectively in 1856, according to the Telegraph's Church Directory. St. John's Evangelical Church was organized July 7, 1853, by Pomeroy's up-town Evangelical Germans. Several years later they built a church on the corner of Plum and Condor streets. St John's pastor in 1860 was Julian de Reichenstein. Trinity Lutheran Church, Pomeroy, organized in 1858 or '59 by several separatists from the St. Paul congregation, built their church on Butternut street--which later became known as the "Lower Lutheran." Announcement of New Jerusalem church services at Pomeroy first appeared in the Telegraph's Church Directory on March, 1853. The services were to be held every other Sabbath afternoon at three o' clock in the Pomeroy Academy building (the former Pomeroy residence) and were to be conducted by the Reverend C.C. Giles, Principal of the Academy. By the end of 1856 the announcement had disappeared from the Directory; and in 1857 a news item reported Rev. C. Giles to be located in Cincinnati as pastor of that city's New Jerusalem, or Swedenborgian church. Middleport Swedenborgians held out much longer. During the l850s no newspaper notices of their meetings appeared; but some old resi- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 247 dents are sure the Swwdenborgians had fairly regular services at the home of Mrs. Ebenezar Grant, in Sheffield. Heath Chapel (M.E.) was built on Third street, Sheffield, soon after Jonathan Duncan Hoff and his family settled there, or about 1851. The organizers of that church were: J.D. Hoff and wife, Susan M. Hoff; John Fisher and wife, Ann Fisher; John Mathews and wife, and a Mr. Pennington and wife. J.D. Hoff, a stone mason by trade, contributed and laid the foundation of the building. During the early years each member took a candle to church for evening services. Circuit Rider Uriah Heath was the congregation's first pastor. In the year 1856 Heath Chapel and Pomeroy's Wesley chapel were united to form a new circuit (hence Union Chapel at Pomeroy, as above.) Beginning in 1855, or soon after Marcus Bosworth moved to his farm below Sheffield, Middleport's hitherto occassional Presbyterian services were announced regularly by the Pomeroy pastor: first, for alternate Sabbath afternoons at Heath Chapel; then, in ‘56, for "every Sabbath afternoon, at the New Brick School House." By the spring of 1861 the Presbyterians' new brick church going up on Third street had advanced far enough to permit the holding of services in its basement. That Middleport's Christian congregation had a church building on Main street during the l850s may be seen in the several citation from advertisements of private schools (see SCHOOLS above.) During 1851 and '52 the Reverend John Eaton, Universalist, preached on Sunday afternoons at Pomeroy in the brick school house, and "at early candle lighting" in Sheffield school house. In June, 1860, the Universalists held a "two-day meeting at the brick school house, also a basket meeting on the following Sunday in the grove near A. Watkins's residence." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 248 In Coalport, on October 20, 1856, at a previously advertised meeting, the members of the "Society known by the name of "Primitive Methodist" …resolved to incorporate, to annex itself to "the body of Wesleyan Methodists… and to be known thereafter by that name." MASON CITY’s first church builders were Methodists. In the spring of 1854 or '55 the Reverend George Arnold, then in charge of the Point Pleasant Circuit of the Western Virginia M.E. Conference, rode up to the Arthur Edwards farm two miles below Mason to arrange for regular services in Mason. The Brown Smokehouse was secured for the services, a class was organized. Mrs. Soloman Stone, Mrs. Hester Adams, Mr. and Mrs. Seth Ely were some of the members, Mr. Edwards was made class leader. On July 24, 1856, R.C.M. Lovell and wife, for $1 in specie, conveyed to Trustees Asa Brigham, Arthur Edwards and Samuel Street the title in fee simple to the northwest half of Lot 11 on Mason City's First street. A subscript ion paper was circulated; the first item entered thereon was "Benjamin Biggs, ten days' work." Mr. Lovell gave a check for $50. Peter Huggard, a free Negro, promised fifty dollars' worth of plastering. Philip Harpold, saw-mill owner near Letart Falls (whither Arnold had gone on horseback to purchase lumber for the church) donated $50 by deducting that amount from his bill. Many smaller amounts were subscribed. John Winkleblack in the meantime drew a plan--similar to that of the Pomeroy Presbyterian Church but smaller--and was given the contract for the new church's erection. Lemuel Jarrott, Arthur Edwards and Mr. Weese went up to the Harpold Mill, floated the lumber down to Mason City in a flatboat. Samuel Hobbs hauled the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 249 foundation stones from a quarry back of town. Bed Biggs and William Snodgrass did all the carpenter and joiner work, including seats, high pulpit and four inside pillars; but no cupola was built then. In the early summer of '57 Mason City's M.E. Church was dedicated by its first pastor, the Reverend J.B. Ford, circuit rider. An M.E. Sunday School had been organized in the Brown smoke-house soon after the Reverend George Arnold's first visit to Mason City. Logs for benches had been brought from the woods. A Pomeroy Sunday School had sent song books, testaments and primers. Samuel Street, Seth Ely, Wash Ely and Mary Weese were the teachers. On March 1, 1857 the Sunday School had its first meeting in the new church. The walls were not yet plastered, the seats were blocks of wood sawed from timber lying about the building; but the attendance was the best the school had known. Mr. and Mrs. Lovell, both Episcopaleans-probably the only ones in Mason at that time-attended the Presbyterian church at Pomeroy; but Mrs. Lovell also taught a class in Mason's M.E. Sunday School, so we have been informed by Mrs. Lovell's daughter (see Footnote l4) Some of Mason City's Germans and the majority of its Irish were Catholics. One of the latter, Joseph Ryan, very soon after his arrival in 1856 set about collecting funds for the erecting of a church building. Mr. Lovell donated two lots (the southwest and northwest corners of Third and Pomeroy street) for church and priest's residence respectively, and also gave liberally in cash14. 14. Mrs. C.M. Crosby, a daughter of H.C.M. Lovell living at the present time (April, 1937) in Marietta, Georgia, is our authority for this information. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 250 Until the church was ready for occupancy mass was said in the Ryan home on "Back" street (between Pomeroy and Horton) by the Reverend Father Shinn, a mission priest who made regular visits to Mason. To those services came not only all Mason Catholics but also those of Hartford and West Columbia, some of them walking both ways. The name chosen for the new church was St. Joseph. By the time the building was completed-in '58 or '59-Father Shinn had been succeeded as mission priest in that part of Virginia by the Reverend H.F. Parke. Mason City's rather large group of Protestant Germans consisted of adherents to three different religious faiths: the Lutheran, the Evangelical and the Methodist. Since none of these sub-groups was large enough to support a church of its own at Mason City, each German Protestant had to solve the problem for himself--which was done in most cases by affiliating with the church of his choice at Pomeroy. A Welsh Baptist Church was built on Mason's Third street (between Pomeroy and Horton) some time during this period. While no positive proof is at hand, yet there is no reason for thinking this church did not receive assistance from Mr. Lovell just as had the Methodist and the Catholic churches. At Hartford City in 1854 or 1855 a Welsh Baptist church was built on the hill overlooking the Mason County Mining & Manufacturing Company's salt furnace. But there were not enough Welsh in the community to continue the maintenance of the building and so it was soon sold. In 1856 the Methodists put up a church with lumber that had been donated by William Harpold, a charter member of the Methodist organization. Here likewise it is safe to assume that the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 251 M.C.M. & M. Co., in keeping Bend, donated building lots congregations respectively; permitted to continue using into Franklin Institute. with the custom of town founders of The to the Welsh and the Methodist furthermore, that the United Brethren were their building after it had been made over New Haven by 1861 had as yet "no church, no Sunday; it looked as if God had not yet arrived. On summer days the English and Welsh coal miners gathered under the big elm trees on the River bank on Sunday morning with a few kegs of beer to spend the day playing cards, pitching quoits, running races, wrestling. By sundown they were quarrelsome, arguments resulted, which generally ended in a free-forall fight from which most of the participants were led home and put to bed." So wrote the Reverend George Wilding in his Reminiscences (published in the Pomeroy Leader in the year 1922.) At West Columbia, two other churches beside the United Brethren (Moses Michael's three-story brick) were built before the l860s: a Welsh Presbyterian and a Methodist Episcopal church. The Bend's first church bell was the $50 bell bought by the Reverend Moses Michael for his three-story brick. The United Brethren were not the only Bend residents who answered that bell's summons to worship on the Sabbath day. Occasionally from Pomeroy, members of the Horton families and others drove down in carriages; frequently from Hartford, Mason, the Lower Flats, came all the prominent families in their carriages driven by slaves, who also attended the services but sat on a bench specially reserved for them in the rear of the church. The first Pomeroy church to have a bell appears to have been the Catholic church. When in January, 1856, Editor Thompson gave out �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 252 the news item that the Catholics in Pomeroy had hung not only one but "two fine-toned bells in the belfry of their church" he enlarged the item with the hope that their example would be followed by other churches. Accordingly, when five months later (June, '56) a large steamboat, the City of Wheeling, in trying to avoid a raft was wrecked upon some rocks "about two lengths above the Pomeroy wharf," the boat's bell, a large, deep-toned one, was bought by the authorities of Pomeroy's Methodist Episcopal Church and hung in the belfry of the new brick Union Chapel, or "Brick Chapel." MORAL CONDITIONS such as existed at New Haven (and doubtless in other Bend town) impelled Pomeroy's Town Council in 1851 and '52 to reenact, with supposedly necessary revisions and additions, several of its earliest ordinances. That these did not have the unqualified approval of every Pomeroy citizen is implied in Editor Van Horn's comments on April 15 of that year: A New Ordinance, posted at the door of the Court House of Meigs County, Ohio, and signed by the proper municipal functionaries, sets forth the rules to be observed by good citizens of the "Crescent City of the Cliffs," under pain and penalties, viz: 1. Empowers the Mayor to employ a police of not more than 60 persons to keep vigils over the aforesiad mayor and citizens during the hours when the honorable god Morpheus is wont to assert dominion over the "children of men." 2. Declares that no suspicious person be allowed to perambulate the streets of our goodly city unless able to give said police full and satisfactory evidence of peaceful intentions. 3. Declares that NO ONE be allowed to go abroad over the face of the whole city after 10 o'clock unless able to give satisfactory account of "Whither and to what end His perigrinations tend." 4. Comes down with penalties of from one to ten dollars, Federal U.S. money, at the discretion of an indulgent tribunal for disturbine the repose of the paving stones or waking the echoes of the cliffs in the witching hours of the night. We most solemnly protest against neighboring towns construing the decree as derogatory to the morals of Pomeroy. The ordinance is only one of the eccentricities to which all grave and dignified bodies are subject at times; it seeks to force upon our fair young belles not to perambulate the streets but to let sweet voices carol for the entertainment of their cavaliers. "Remember, ten o'clock, my dear, Remember, oh, remember!" ��A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 253 The members of the "grave and dignified body" which had enacted the ordinance ridiculed by Editor Van Horn were: Oren Branch, Marcus Bosworth, V.B. Horton, William McAboy and H.B. Smith. This body had been elected on April 19, 1851. On July 2, 1852, or less than two months after the passage of said ordinance, the new council recently elected passed again the seven 1841 ordinances for the prevention of immoral practices. These ordinances were given to the public through the advertising pages of the Telegraph. In substance the ordinances were: 1. Persons fourteen years or over were forbidden from sporting, rioting, quarreling, hunting, fishing, shooting, making a disturbing noise, working at common labor (necessary or charitable work excepted) on Sunday; fine, 50¢ to $5. (Travelers were not to be prevented from their journey; watermen from landing boats for supplies.) 2. For interruption of religious services, a fine of $20. 3. Persons fourteen years or over were not to curse and damn or profanely swear by the name of God, of Jesus Christ, or of the Holy Ghost. Fine, $1 to 25¢ for each offense. 4. For appearing intoxicated on the streets or other public place the fine was, Jail. 5, 6 and 7 concerned the suppression of houses of ill fame, of Gambling and of disorderly houses. The so-called "Gallon Ordinance" which the Council had passed in 1850 (see above) was a contested question of the municipal election of 1851. The ordinance won by a mojority of seven votes, and was not again contested at any later election. This ordinance, together with the first provision of Ohio’s Temperence Law, which, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 254 like the Gallon Ordinance, forbade the drinking of spirituous liquors on the premises where sold, made saloons impossible in Pomeroy during the 1850s. Yet, in his June 2, 1857 issue of the Telegraph Editor Thompson lamented the fact that drunkenness, rioting, jostling passersby off the pavements and other objectionable conduct were common practices in Pomeroy on Saturday nights. The four Virginia towns across the River had to close their many saloons (Mason City at one time had seven) two years the County Court having refused, in May, 1855 and again in '56 (May), to grant licenses for the selling of spirituous liquors. Town records are lacking, hence it is impossible to say whether any ordinances similar to the Pomeroy Ordinances were adopted. An "old resident" of West Columbia writing of that town during the 1850s said: "There were several saloons in West Columbia, whiskey was cheap and easily obtained. Besides, most grocery stores had brandy peaches for sale in large glass bottles or jars. But a drunken man was a sight seldom seen." But laxity in enforcing local and state laws cannot be held responsible for the THIEVING, PILFERING and ROBBIBG that was rampant in some parts of The Bend. George Cox has remained longest in the memories of West Columbia's oldest inhabitants because of his weird connection with the burning of Edward Biggs's Hotel and store on May 5, 1856. Cox was long sought by sheriffs and constables throughout The Bend because of his numerous bold thefts. Finally, after robbing the Biggs store and escaping, he was caught and brought back to Mason County his feet shackled in a chain taken from the Biggs store. As the sheriff led the prisoner through the hotel door he, the prisoner, heard Biggs say, “If Cox had had �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 255 those chains on the night he robbed the store, we'd have heard him." Cox replied in solemn tone: "As soon as the snow melts and I can get around, I'll melt all the chains in your store." Not long afterwards the Biggs store mysteriously caught fire and burned down. While the flames were raging, the onlookers heard a horrifying shot from the hill; looking up they saw Robber Cox standing on top of a cliff, pointing his finger at Biggs while shouting and yelling derisively. Then suddenly he disappeared. Whether he was recaptured was not stated; he is known to have been in The Bend later. (There are several different versions of the Cox story, all agreeing on the two main points: the threat and the startling appearance on the cliff while the Biggs store was burning.) And there was the notorious Cahoon Gang. James Cahoon, erstwhile flatboatman, owned that part of Lot 299 just above Monkey Run. His house long had been the retreat of thieves, robbers, gamblers, counterfeiters--outlaws of every kind and class. James Cahoon himself, accused of store-breaking, thieving, and finally of starting Pomeroy's 1851 Fire (to get the Bosworth Hotel's silver spoons for counterfeitmoney-making), was tried , found guilty, and sent to the Ohio Penitentiary at Columbus. Sevilla Cahoon and her accomplice George Cady in the early part of 1854 were tried in the Circuit Court for passing counterfeit money in West Columbia, but were cleared on a legal technicality. In the following August a party of young men from Pomeroy and Coalport repaired to the house occupied by the Cahoon family and began demolishing it. Interrogated by one of the two Germans who had bought the house, the Captain of the party informed him that they had been sent by the County Authorities to drive the family out. The next morning the owners learned �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 256 upon inquiring at the Court House that the young men had acted entirely on their own initiative. Prosecution of the crusading party was threatened--but was never carried out. The Cahoon family had been privately warned of the intended attack and had left the house. But the next morning they were at the Wharf Boat waiting to take the first steamer up the River. "May they never return to Pomeroy," was the wish not only of the Telegraph but of the entire Bend. Murders, too, were committed on each side of the River. The one which shocked the whole region most violently was reported by the Telegraph May 31, 1854, as-follows: HORRIBLE AFFRAY: On Thursday last night a brute named McMahan, considerably intoxicated, paraded the upper part of town with two rifles, threatening to kill J.M. Strider and several other persons. About 5 o’clock, P.M. he decided to cross the River to kill John Adams, who, he said, had accused him of stealing a turkey. When he got out of the skiff and started up the Rver bank Adams heard the threats and started into the house. McMahan fired at Adams but no one was hurt. By that time several persons were near one of them was Mary Waggener. A young man named Waggener [Charles] immediately laid off his coat and started towards McMahan thinking he had no other weapon. McMahan drew the other rifle and fired at Waggener. The ball lodged in Waggener’s right side, below the hip. McMahan fled to Pomeroy, where he was arrested and put into the County Jail. Mayor Murdock, before whom he was examined, sent him to Point Pleasant. Young Waggener died at 11 o’clock Friday morning. McMahan was hanged at Point Pleasant the following October. A few weeks before, the murder of John Haggerty by John McIntire had occurred. The two had been gambling, had quarreled, had agreed to fight at a certain place; but the combat had ended before the place was reached. At the trial (June Session, Court of Common Pleas), Mrs. Nye and her son each testified they heard McIntire say, "Stand off, I don't want to fight you." The Jury's verdict was "Not Guilty." (McIntire was related to McMahan, the murderer of Charles Waggener.) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 257 Gamblers seem to have been more numerous in West Columbia than in any other Bend town. In the pre-Civil War days the professional poker player found his easiest and most profitable victims on board the Ohio and the Mississippi River steamboats. Up and down the River he traveled, making the acquaintance of wealthy planters or other promising-looking passengers, winning their money by his slick trickery. Occasionally he debarked at this or that landing place for rest and change. West Columbia, for reasons known only to themselves perhaps, became the haven of an unusual number of those card sharps. In spite of these and the many other instances of lawlessness that could be shown, life in general went on in The Bend with apparent unconcern--or, at least, without serious interruption. Especially was this true of The Bend's SOCIAL LIFE, since need of diversion, recreation and entertainment was as great then as it is today. The various means by which such need was met were determined, then as always, by local conditions combined with the social development of the times. During the first half of the decade almost the only form of PUBLIC ENTERTAINMENT available in Pomeroy was the annual Circus, it seems, since Telegraph readers never were apprised of any other kinds. News of the coming of the Circus was found, of course, on the advertising pages, where it appeared in immense lettering, accompanied by the most startling illustrations. Dan Rice evidently had been there before 1851, for he announced that year (in June) that he would "again have the honor of exhibiting at Pomeroy…" The public was further notified that two boats, the Hudson and the Reveille, would bring the people free of charge, the former those from the upper part and the latter those coming from "West Cloumbia, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 258 and Sheffield," meaning Middleport also, of course. Clearly, the whole Bend was expected to attend. But the Spradling & Rogers Circus was the first on hand that year ('51), having been there on May 9. "Equestrian, Dramatic, Zoological, Theatre and Menagerie. Under a new-fangled Marquee lighted with Gas inside. A Drummond Light outside. This light next to the Sun is the most potent light known to mortals. "-so read the S. & R. advertisement in 1851. By May, 1860, the same company had a new feature in the person of Tom Watson, Court Jester, who was to "sail the Ohio River in a Wash Tub drawn by four Geese." Not until 1855--if advertisements are a criterion—did Pomeroy have opportunity to be entertained publicly except at a circus. On September 26, 27 and 28 of that year, a two-column advertisement informed the public that Bullard's Panorama of New York City was to be exhibeted at the Presbyterian Church, the picture to move nearly two hours. Admission prices 25¢ and 15¢. In May, 1857, it was announced editorially that "Mr. George Clarke, the identical George Harris of Uncle Tom's cabin," would lecture at the Court House. Clarke was described as a "very light mulatto, quite intelligent and an interesting lecturer." During the next three years, partly because of a change of editorial policy and partly because activities actually had increased, the county newspaper contained more news regarding entertainment projects. (See NEWSPAPERS, for said change.) There was the Lecture Course of the Fall and Winter of 1858-59, consisting of six lectures. Prof. Allyn, of Ohio University, gave the first lecture of the series. His subject was Poetry, with illustrations from Whittier and Bryant. Prof. Fowler, of Hillsdale college, lectured on Astronomy and illustrated with an "apparatus �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 259 for exhibiting on canvas the sublime phenomina of the heavens." Prof. Andrews discoursed on the geology of Southern Ohio, And so on. Then there were Oyster suppers (of canned oysters) and Fairs and Christmas Trees in the "Lower Room of The Academy" by the Ladies of the Sewing Circle and by the Ladies of the "Subday School Society of The Presbyterian Church"; and similar affairs by the Ladies of the M.E. Church at the Brick Chapel, and a Sunday School Exhibition at the same place. And there was the Musical Convention arranged by the Pomeroy Musical Association, to be held four days during March, 1859, and to be conducted by Prof. C.B. Hitchcock. The convention concluded with a Grand Concert of Choruses, Anthems, Quartettes, Glees, Solos, and The Cantata od Esther. Tickets for the whole concert were 75¢, but clergymen and editors were admitted free. There were public meetings that had other aims besides that of pure entertainment. As early as May 8, 1851 a series of Temperance Meetings was announced by John R. Williams, "familiarly known as "Old Williams” at the Court House. "There is abundant room for reform in this goodly 'City of the Cliffs’” opined Editor Van Horn. By November 11, same year, Van Horn was able to report that John R. Williams, Temperence Lecturer, had done much good; that One of our Grocery Keepers [meaning saloon keepers] joined the "Sons" and on Saturday night last made a bonfire of his stock in trade. As he was out of the corporation the Gallon Law [see above] could not reach him but it seems "Old Williams" did. Mr. Williams was one of the founders of a temperence society organized in the latter 1850s and calling itself the "Washington Association." W.J. Prall was president of the Association in 1850. Lectures sponsored by the Association were frequent. A Washington's Birthday Celebration at the Court House in 1858 �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 260 was merely mentioned in the Telegraph issue following the event. Of course there were social functions such as balls, parties, picnics, though none were reported before January, 1859. In the January 18 issue of that year was found a social write-up of especial interest. V.B. Horton Jr., who recently had purchased the "swift and elegant side-wheel steamer Die Vernon, to run between Parkersburg and Louisville," gave a Cotillion Party on board the boat before it started on its trip down the River January 31st. Editor Plants, evidently one of the guests, wrote of it: The "Beauty and Chivalry" of Pomeroy convened on board Die Vernon last Thursday evening. A party under the supervision of Capt. Horton would hardly be otherwise than pleasant, but this one was especially so as every attention was given by officers of the boat… and more than that, almost the entire beauty of Pomeroy was gathered there to chase "With flying feet the hours away." We cannot refrain from alluding to a few who seemed to shine more brilliantly than ordinarily. Miss P---st was charming and entered into the enjoyment with zest that… is an index of the soul. Miss H----ll, Mrs. W----e, Mrs. S---n… the Misses T-----d, Mrs. H-----y, Mrs. W----y, a dance couldn’t exist without them. (Did such editorial daring shock those ladies, we wonder?) In the preceding Telegraph issue a Ball at the Gibson House on New Year’s Eve was pronounced "the most brilliant of the season." Managers Gatchel, Lambrecht and Taylor were accorded the "honors of the occasion." And the "music of the Cotillion Party at the "Remington House" on January 6, furnished by "Messrs. Huttel, Gibbs, Wells and Dawson," was considered "excellent!" A party at N.R. Nye’s at the upper end of town" on July, 1860, "came near ending disastrously." Several who rode around by "Rock Spring" after the party had a run-away; but no one was hurt. Fourth of July celebrations, if and when they occurred, were not noted in the Telegraph before 1859. That year the "Glorious Fourth" was to be celebrated by Pomeroy’s Public Schools at a "beautiful �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 261 grove in Naylor's Run, a short distance back of town"; the Telegraph was "authorized by Supt. Mr. Lewis Paine, Esq.," to announce that Judge Heckard., Dr J.P. Bing and others would address the assembly. In the same Telegraph issue appeared this item: BILL CIRCULATING THE STREETS:-Concert and Ball!! On the 4th of July. Seven men will play on Brass Instruments! In Sugar Run near the Katholik Church. Accounts of both occasions were given in the Telegraph the next week and read as follows: About 200 pupils and 100 citizens, including the editor, had attended the school picnic; singing, addresses, and general enjoyment until noon, when a splendid dinner was served; games, plays, chat, and sociability completed the day. At the second, many Germans had celebrated. "Fairy steps would have been a shade lighter if a 'leetle' less 'lager' had been “aboard," the reporter surmised. But "the platform was strong, and the customs though new and strange were altogether proper to those accustomed to them,” he generously admitted. At the next year's school picnic "all children in good standing as members" were to meet in their respective schools and march thence to Central School. From there the whole procession, girls preceding boys, was to march in a prescribed order to the area in front of Horton's office; then to the street leading to Nailor's Hun, then out to the grove. "Parents not attending may thus see the schools in procession." Pomeroy had one place of diversion where anyone and everyone met on equal terms "without money and without price." That place was the River bank. "At the first toot of a boat whistle, when the boat was nearing the wharf, the people rushed to the banks," wrote �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 262 Mrs. Logan. Not every boat that whistled stopped, however. Three items in an April, 1851, Telegraph furnish a good basis for visualizing a River-bank assemblage viewing the passing of of two Pittsburgh Cincinnati steamboats--keeping in mind that there was no retaining wall along the bank and that Frontstreet was not paved: The steamer Bucheye State passed Pomeroy yesterday Tuesday one hour and 35 minutes ahead of the Messenger. Some of the green ones thought as MISS JENNY LIND was aboard, the Messenger could beat the Buckeye… The Messenger passed Pomeroy yesterday with Jenny Lind on board. The people fire a salute to the "Nightingale." The Ohio passed up last Saturday with 250 passengers on baord. "The poor ye have always with you" was true of The Bend even in its most prosperous days. That Pomeroy residents were not indifferent to their poor is indicated by an item in the February 10, 1851, Telegraph: NOTICE! A Meeting of the Relief Union Society will be held at Mr. Dunham's house at 2 o'clock P.M. Friday, February 13th. We hope all the ladies of Pomeroy will consider themselves invited. Mrs. C.R. Pomeroy was characterized by O.B. Chapman as "marvel of benevolence, clambering about hillsides, wading the mud of hollows to hunt up cases of want." But Mrs. C.R. Pomeroy died in November, 185215. 15. Mrs. Pomeroy's father was Thomas Worthington, governor of Ohio 1811-1818. In the early part of the century he and his wife Eleanor left their home in Virginia for the wilds of Ohio in order to be able to free their inherited slaves. Almost at the end of the decade (January, 1861), August Mayer gave notice that “having observed the excellent results in other cities" he had opened a Soup Kitchen at his Billiard Room on Front street. Tickets were to be sold at a moderate price to those able to buy them, the tickets to be distributed to the poor. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 263 In February of the same year, after reading the Appeal of the Kansas Relief Committee, Editor Plants reminded, the people of The Bend that one of the important questions of the time was, Shall the people of Kansas be permitted to starve? Four weeks later he was able to report that at a meeting of Pomeroy citizens at the Court House, a Central Committee was appointed to raise means in aid of the people of Kansas. That Middleport would have liked to see its happenings reported in the county newspaper is implied in an editorial item, June 23, 1857. "Middleport must not blame us for not reporting their local news unless they take some pains to keep us 'posted'," protested Editor Thompson. "We are too poor to spend time looking up local news and publish only such as can be picked up about the office." Thus it happened, therefore that research failed to produce more than a very few items regarding Middleport's church suppers, school exhibitions, picnics; its post office and River bank gatherings--all of which it had without doubt. Three short reports were found, however, which, although the events they report cannot he classed exactly as public entertainment, are nevertheless not wholly out of place here. Of the first event Editor Van Horn wrote briefly: The First Fair of the Meigs County Agricultural Society was held Wednesday, October 22, at Middleport. An address was given by V.B. Horton. The articles presented were not remarkable for their excellence, but the movement has an important bearing on the interests of agriculture. Te editor did not, perhaps could not, tell his readers where the Fair was held; but, thanks to Mrs. Hudson's "Recollections," (see above) we can tell our readers that the place was the second or third floor of Philip Jones's five-story brick building. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 264 The next item, somewhat longer, tells about the destruction, by lightning, of J.W. Jones SASH FACTORY one evening, in late October, 1858. In the following November 2d Telegraph issue appeared an account of the fire. At great length the writer pointed out that within a few yards of the building was the five-story foundry "with its tapering spire and top,” and that within about the same distance on the other side stood the Sheffield Flouring Mill with its chimney stacks far above the highest point of the building that was burned down. "All of which proves,” the writer concluded, "that lightning does not always prefer the highest point.” That fire incidentally did provide Middleport residents with a spectacle that was merely entertaining to some, perhaps, but for the majority was more bewildering and awe-inspiring than entertaining. The storm had come on between eight and nine o'clock, p.m., and was accompanied by a veritable deluge a cloudburst, in present-day terminology. Suddenly the townspeople were made aware of a most stupendous blaze somewhere in the vicinity; and just as suddenly they learned that the blaze came from the long frame building put up by J.W. Jones for a Sash Factory early that year. The building was full of window sash and doors and also a lot of pine lumber, all of which burning together made a most beautiful fire. The people could do nothing but stand in the pouring rain and "watch the flames soar to heaven." To try to help save something did not seem to enter anyone's mind. The fire died down almost as quickly as it had arisen, leaving the onlookers wondering whether it had been real or only a beautiful dream. The next morning there was not a vestage of the building to be seen except the foundation stones and some machinery. Even the ash- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 265 es had been washed away into the River by the rush of water down the ravine along which the building had stood. Sometime during the next year occurred the burning of the five-story brick itself. The fire was believed to have been of incendiary origin, since neither Philip Jones nor the foundry owners, Messrs. Kellum & Company, were able to discover any traces of the cause of the fire. The loss was given as from seven to ten thousand dollars, with no insurance on either building or contents. “It was a loss to Middleport as well as to the men immediately concerned," said the Telegraph account. West Columbia in its first years gave promise of becoming The Bend's social center. On December 16, 1851 appeared the newspaper notice of the "Grand Union Ball" to be given at the Van Matre House West Columbia, on December 31. The ball was to be "the most brilliant gathering ever witnessed in this section of the country," and guests were promised a "real Virginia welcome." A perusal of the following list of managers of that outstanding event-to-be will convince anyone familiar with the names of prominent families in The Bend and in the "Lower Flats" that something more than the admission price was needed by those wishing to attend: ---M A N A G E R S--Jos. S Machir Thos. Somerville Thomas Fowler Thomas C. Hogg A.W. Hogg John Mitchell Rezin Bumgardner John Hall Capt. George Martin Lymar Evans John Robert Calvin William C.A. William Lewis James �R.T. John L. Brown Adams Somerville Brown Barlow Roseberry Ball Mitchell Van Horn Reed Andrew Roseberry S.A.M. Moore Capt. Thomas Friend James Williams Capt. E. Williamson James Sanders Thayer Horton Capt. Wash Kerr Thomas Lewis A guest list would have been enlightening here. But the follow- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 266 ing week's issue is missing from the Telegraph File; besides, social events got no "write-ups" in the early 1850s. The same number which carried the Notice of the Grand Union Ball contained also another, namely: New Year's Ball, at West Columbia Hotel. Ample provision for guests. Dancing to commence at 8 o'clock. Arrangements at Ferry Landing for accommodation for horses of those coming from Ohio. MANAGERS:Lewis Anderson Samuel Bradbury A.B. Donnally Dr. A.L. Knight Hon. Thomas Somerville But on December 23d appeared the following Notice: Mr. Biggs requests us to say that the Ball advertised to come off at West Columbia House on New Year's Eve has been postponed. Evidently a conflict, due to the characteristic slowness of the times' news-spreading facilities, had occurred. At Mason City, the informal "Dance" was a frequent diversion. Some home could always be found ready to admit a "passel o' young folks," (usually including Ben Biggs and Fiddler Jim Nicholson) looking for a place to spend the evening in dancing. Practical joking, indulged in to an extreme degree in those days, sometimes went beyond its limits at Mason City. For example, the young men who threw a live goose down the huge chimney of the log house where in a wedding supper was in progress discovered to their surprise and humiliation that public sympathy was wholly with the discomfitted bridal couple. The perpetrators of the joke finally were apprehended and lodged in the county jail at Point Pleasant; and the ringleader, to the credit of Mason City people be it said, never risked coming back to town again. A saloon in Mason City (and everywhere else, for that matter) was generally designated as Irish, Welsh or German, depending upon the nationality of its proprietor and the resulting preponderance �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 267 of patronage from his fellow-countrymen. English and American imbiberswho were by no means few-drew no nationality line. But, frequently, on a Saturday night, a group of younger Americans decided to indulge in what they called a "clean-out.” In a body they would enter one of the "foreign" establishments, begin drinking, start an argument, end it by driving out all the patrons and compelling the saloon-keeper to close up for the night. At New Haven as late as 1861 there was not even a post office where in the citizenry could gather. Only once or twice a week did they have such an opportunity-when Mine Supt. Wilding brought the village mail from Hartford City and distributed it in his office: namely, the boiler room of the engine house. Racine, beyond The Bend, was quite frequently chosen by the Meigs County Agricultural Society as the place for its Fair (not reported every year by the Telegraph). But Racine’s chief pride seems to have been her public schools. On March 1, 1859, a School Exhibition was given at the Racine Union School, on which occasion the oration of H.L. Sidley on “The Claims of the Young Men of America," was pronounced a master production. The Middleport Brass Band furnished music for the occasion. Thus did the towns in The Bend each have its own opportunities for recreational commingling. As the decade advanced, such gatherings, especially those of Pomeroy and Middleport, often were inter-urban and inter-state affairs rather than purely local. Mason City furnished at least one occasion for the gathering of all The Bend's inhabitants and peoples. That occasion was the "First Grand Picnic Rally" of The Young Men's Benevolent Association of St. Joseph's Church at Mason City, in May of 1860. The �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 268 picnic was held in one of the groves "a short distance above town" [meaning a short distance above Horton street]. Father H.F. Parke superintended the affair. Early in the day steamboat excursions brought people from all the neighboring towns. Accompanied by Auton's Brass Band of Gallipolis the picnickers repaired to the grove, and "soon afterwards footballs were in active flight, quoits flew hither and thither, choruses and songs enlivened the crowd, the band discoursed sweet music, even the birds participated in the festivities," -so reported one of the picnickers. "Perfect harmony reigned all day…-a rare thing where so many nationalities are gathered together. Not a single person was intoxicated and the utmost decorum was observed," the writer concluded. Steamboat excursions to Gallipolis and to Point Pleasant took place occasionally in the late 1850s. The Meigs County Fair, held, now at Racine now at Rock Springs, appealed to town residents no less than to countryfolk. Anderson’s Race Course below Mason City and Machir's Course below West Columbia ("Lower Flats") furnished two items for the Telegraph in the late 1850s. In December of '58, B.M. Brown's black horse won the purse at Anderson's Course (identity of Brown and amount in purse not given); and in July, l860, "Tupton Slosher," owned by Henry S. Welton, trotted on Machir's Course. R.C.M. Lovell owned some very fine horses, as did also C.R. Pomeroy. Undoubtedly these two men and many others in The Bend took active part in the races. (It is assumed that reports could not be "picked up" in the Telegraph office.) "That marvelous race mixture in the Ohio Valley [Hulbert]," or mixture of nationalities, introduced into the boot-shaped bend by �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 269 its very first settlers, naturally grew with the increase of population. The first Germans: the Roushes, the Siegrists, Rickards (Richarts), Neases, Wolfs, etc., married New Englanders, Virginians,-that is, descendants of nationalities other than their own. An instance of a "Mixture" of German and Irish is the marriage of George Burthistle's daughter Jane to Jacob Roush of Mason City. Some time during the 1850s the coal merchant met financial reverses, moved his family to Mason City. On December 29, 1859 Jane Burthistle [or Birthisel, by that time], was married to Jacob Roush (formerly Rausch), Teamster and also at that time Deputy Sheriff of Mason County. The wedding took place at Point Pleasant in the home of Andrew Rosebery, the wedding party (consisting of newlyweds Mr. and Mrs. Columbus Shrewsbury and the bride and groom) driving thither in carriages. Mr. and Mrs. Shrewsbury "stood up" with the bridal pair during the ceremony. And, inasmuch as no wedding account is complete without a description of the bride's costume, it is not out of place here to add that the bride wore "a large-plaid brown and green silk dress made with tight waist pointed in front and back; with large flowing sleeves edged with green fringe, and white undersleeves having "risbens" [wristbands] embroidered in white and pink rosebuds; and with eihht widths in the skirt." (Account of Wedding and Description of (Bride’s costume taken from The Jacob Roush Family Records.) Northerner and Southerner mixed on a large scale in this small section of "the melting pot of the world.” The Wolf-Waggener marriage (Mary Waggener, quoted above), was one of many such alliances. In March, 1856, C.R. Pomeroy, widower since 1852, married Miss Fannie Sehon, daughter of "the late John Sehon,” owner of an extensive farm below Hartford City. During the same decade Miss Margaret Sehon, sister of Miss Fannie, became the wife of V.B. Horton, Jr. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 270 One budding Northern-Southern alliance failed to bloom. Mason City's young physician, Dr. Patrick, long wooed Miss Ella Pomeroy, daughter of C.R. Pomeroy. Perhaps it was his method of wooing: holding her horse on every possible and impossible occasion, that was objectionable to Miss Pomeroy; whatever it was, she finally married one Dan E. Smith and Dr. Patrick in 1859 moved his office to Charleston, Virginia. The story of this blighted romance brings into the picture one of the favorite pastimes of the classes of that day: namely, horseback riding. Local harness shops, it seems, could not meet the demand for side saddles, for George Birthisel on one of his trips to Cincinnati brought back seven such saddles. Mrs. John Neale (formerly Sophia Anderson, reputed Belle of The Bend), was considered a superior rider. Mrs. R.C.M. Lovell, also, had the reputation of being a remarkable rider. But swimming in the River--rich and poor alike could enjoy that summer pastime, though only the male portion of the population was wont to do so in the 1850s. "The great flat rooks in the Sliding Hill bend," wrote the Reverend George Wilding, "made a superb place for swimming, the deck of the Garibaldi, the watchman's little boat, was a convenient place for diving." Skating, too, was within the means of a few of The Bend's youths. "In winter we skated on Philip Roush's field," recalled Rev. Wilding. "Skates were rare luxuries in New Haven in the late '50s. The choice styles had runners curving over the front toe, with a knob on top. Mine were 'mulies,' or 'bunties,' with no curving runners, or horns, and lots of strap, tightened by using corn cobs." Boys also played marbles "for keeps," and "town ball," the fore- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 271 runner of baseball. They roamed the hills in summer for "blackberries, raspberries, huckleberries, 'sarvices,' pawpaws, nuts, persimmons," coasted down the hills in winter--Hartford and New Haven boys, of whom George Wilding Jr. was one, did those things, and so, unquestionably, did boys and girls everywhere in The Bend, whether rich or poor. There were boys in other parts of The Bend (but not many) who, like George Wilding, Jr., spent much of their leisure time reading such publications as The Philadelphia Dollar Paper, the Toledo Blade, the New York Ledger's "thrilling stories" and Harper's Weekly with its "pictures of the growing war storm in the South." All these periodicals came through the mail to the Wilding home. There were others one or more of which doubtless came to other Bend homes, as: Arthur's Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Great Republic, Cosmopolitan Art Journal, Saturday Evening Post; and for the ladies of the household, Peterson's Ladies' Magazine, Ladies' Repository, The House and Garden, and Gody's. Besides, there was Remington's Book Store, whence many of the latest novels and other "objectionable" books found their way, directly or indirectly, openly or surreptitiously, into this and that Bend home; indirectly, because because books were a luxury that many book-lovers either had to borrow or get along without; surreptitiously, because novels were taboo in most Bend families. And above all, THE MEIGS COUNTY TELEGRAPH, at $1.50 a year, should have come to every home in the Bend; but alas, from frequent editorial pleas and inducements for subscriptions, the conclusion must be drawn that it missed doing so by a long way. Nor did the first numbers in the Telegraph File, the April 1851 �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 272 issues, leave the impression that non-subscribers missed much. The total lack of personal news seemed to detract from its value and literary features promised in the April 1 Prospectus were disappointing. Then suddenly the following item caught our eye: THE NEW DRESS.-Last week our streets were graced by the appearance of a couple of our most respectable and intelligent young ladies in the new costume. All who saw them spoke in the highest terms of their neat and pretty appearance. The new style we understand to be adopted by quite a number of Pomeroy ladies. The more the better. [“Short skirt and pantaloons" was the new style.] A little farther on, the section devoted to Tales, Essays and Poetry "selected from the best authors" was found to contain an unsigned "poem," a parody on Longfellow's Excelsior. Two lines of that original effusion ran: Her brow was glad, her skirts beneath Unsoiled by mud hung scant and brief. Still farther on another original, this one convincing us that Editor Van Horn's paper was worth a more careful perusal. This long poem is entitled. "School Days of Olden Time." Part of it runs: ...... When with my dinner in my hat I trudged away to school. ...... With locks all curled and face so cleanBoys washed their faces then. ...... That school ma'am! Heaven bless her name, When shall we meet her like? She never sported pantelettes, Nor silks on her did rustle; Her dress hung gracefully all around, She never wore a bustle. Yes, the 1851 Telegraph would be worth more than a glance-(for this opus, at any rate.) Even simple announcements here and there proved this; as: (Item in the May 1, '51 issue): Persons calling at this office on business with the firm of Davis & Morton, Carpenters, are informed they have removed to the Foundry Building below Sugar Run. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 273 This building is no longer the place for hand-saws and jack-planes but for wise saws and plain facts. The Telegraph's Editorial Page noted the arrival of ocean steamers, as the Pacific, the Washington; gave Despatches from California along with those of European countries, information and news which no doubt interested readers of the early 1850s. Also such announcements as, There Will be a Balloon Ascension at Columbus, July 4th, by Mr. Wise, the celebrated Aereonaut. The new Flying Ship, United States, viewed by the Editor and others at Hoboken, is now ready for launching in the air. Some of the Telegraph’s comments on the weather and the River are enlightening to those of us who have been told by "oldest inhabitants" that in those days the Ohio froze over every winter. On December 23, 1851, the newspaper said: This morning the River is closed… It is six years since the Ohio was frozen over at this place. And on January 20, 1852: The River last night FROZE OVER at this place… We say froze over because the mere closing of the Ohio is nothing; it takes place by floating masses of ice lodging against shore ice… But last night it literally froze over, the expanse being clear as a mirror… We have heard several persons who have pased their lives on the banks of the Ohio say they never saw the like before. Let it be remembered, then, that on the night of January 19th, 1852, the Ohio was frozen over16. 16. The statement of one of our oldest inhabitants that from November, 1855, the Ohio remained solidly frozen 100 days is not born out by Telegraph items. From them we learn that beginning about January 7, 1850, the River remained closed about fifty-one days. For those who contend that our seasons have undergone a great change during the last fifty or seventy-five years, we have selected the following items: [Jan, 20, l854] The thermometer, we learn from Mr. Stackpole, at 4 o'clock this morning was 26 below zero--the coldest weather �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 274 within forty years, say oldest inhabitants. [May 2, 1854]. The oldest inhabitant fails to remember such weather as has been experienced the past week. On Thursday night, and Saturday and Sunday it snowed incessantly and the temperature was no disgrace to the month of February. We really began to fear that Winter, the icy old rascal, had fallen asleep while lingering in the lap of Spring. [January 15, 1856]. The weather the past two weeks has been intensely cold. Monday and Tuesday of last week it was 15 and 18 below! The coldest weather ever known in this region. (That Mr. Stachpole's thermometer on January 20, 1852 either was misquoted or did not register correctly seems to be implied in this item.) So much for the weather. Now, two items on the River trade: [June 27, 1854]… There are now 15 steamboats engaged in towing coal to markets on the Ohio above the Falls. Of these, five run from this neighborhood to Cincinnati and ten from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati and other places-as far as Louisville… [November 18, 1851]. The River is at a splendid stage and rising rapidly-a perfect panorama of rafts, flatboats, coal boats, and every other kind of craft known to Western waters. Our town is sending out enough coal to warm half the state. The upper part of the county is on the move to New Orleans with potatoes, cabbage, apples &C, to feed the starving denizens of Mississippi. We hope they will return loaded down with the "root of all evil.” A rapidly rising Ohio suggests Floods to twentieth-century dwellers alone: its banks. If it did so to those of the nineteenth century, the fact was not so much as hinted at in the Telegraph. Nor was much space to details thereof after the floods were over. Observe the meager description of the two highest floods of the '50s: (From the April 9, 1852 issue): The flood was disastrous. From Minersville to Sheffield was submerged. Sheffield and Middleport are higher, hence the suffering was less. The water was within two inches of the '47 flood. (And on April 24, 1860): There are three feet of water in the Telegraph office Edwards Building. The River lacks three or four feet of the '52 mark. It is to the eaves of some dwellings. Each of the three editors of the ‘50s: R.T. Van Horn, Alfred Thompson and T.A. Plants-made trips to the various neighboring �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 275 towns, so as to be able to give subscribers first-hand information regarding industrial conditions in The Bend. Nearly all the usable portions of those reports of such trips have been applied in this work wherever they seemed most fitting. There remain two such reports, however, that it seems best to quote in their entirety. After Editor Van Horn visited West Columbia in July, 1851, his account of the trip contained a description of the salt manufacturing process. We give it here, with enlargement of some passages that were rather obscure in meaning: Beside an immense cast-iron pans (each 8 each section was built steam- and water-tight fire-chamber walls and brick fire chamber the steam furnace had eight to ten by 10 by 3 feet) bolted together to form one section. Over a wooden chest, pans and chest bolted together and made by caulking. These sections are sat longitudinally on the forming one furnace. Adjoining the furnace was a series of wooden vats, or cisterns- the settlers and grainers of the old kettle furnace but very much larger (10 by 100 feet). From the steam chest were extended three rows of copper pipes that passed through the cisterns from end to end. Steam passing through these pipes caused rapid evaporation by keeping the brine hot. Above the grainers heavy boards were suspended. Onto these boards the salt was lifted out of the grainers by means of long-handled shovels every twenty-four hours. And woe to the "salt-lifter" who was unfortunate enough to slip from a plank into the seething brine! After proper draining the salt was wheeled in wheel-barrows to the salt-house, there to be packed into barrels for shipping. In September, 1858, the Editor visited Syracuse. Of the Syracuse mines he wrote: The "Shaft" is 25 yards from the River and is 85 feet deep. The space between the river and the shaft is used as a Coal Yard. The Engine for lifting the coal out of the shaft is perhaps the most perfect piece of machinery in the county. It is worth seeing. The mine has seven principal "entries," each eight feet wide, 300 to 400 �feet long. From these and running at right angles are 107 rooms each 24 feet wide, 60 to 100 feet long. There are now 90 to 100 men employed, mining about 8000 bushels per day. The Advertising Pages of the Telegraph must have furnished no less interesting reading to 1851-6l readers then they did to this reader. For some of that reading we doubtless are indebted to the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 276 editor; for most of it to the advertisers themselves, apparently. There is no question, for instance, as to where John Strider's Star Store advertisement originated. Strider evidently had heard that he was suspected of selling whiskey. And so, in 1851, to his long, rhymed advertisement he added "A few words to those that the coat fits": The few words consisted of several ironical statements regarding the "awfulness" of selling whiskey and ended with the promise that "When you quit slandering your betters and come like men and pay your debts… then I will quit my bad habits. If you attend to your own business you will have enough to do." On February 28, 1854, W.J. Prall's advertising illustration, a man with a stove on his back, made its first appearance. On November 10 of the next year the man was lying on his back. The words under the picture were unquestionably Mr. Prall's own: Oh, ye Delinquents, Listen! And give Ear unto the Lamentations and behold the Fallen Condition-flat on his back-of he who is called William. I have labored with you, Lo! these many years, and now behold my pitiful condition! All for want of "filthy lucre" and nothing but MONEY will relieve me and place me on my feet again. Therefore, please call at the "Captain's" office and "fork over" immediately. -W.J.Prall By December, 1858, perhaps due to the apparent return of good times, the man was on his feet again and Mr. Prall's prosperity was announced editorially thus: Bill Prall says don't pay any attention to his Ad. for a week or more, until he gets present orders filled. If people don't slack up a little he must take the Ad out of the paper; he can't attend to everything at once. The Ad of George Addison, the Negro Barber (April, '51) leaves one wondering as to the composer: BARBAR-OUS REMOVAL [meaning his removal to Court st.] With razer sharp and water hot He'll always be found on the spot Ready to serve all who please to call, Both old and young, great and small. Then don't delay but come along �And have it done up good and strong. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 277 The poem in prose form that appeared on April 4, 1854 leaves no doubt as to the composer, since it is an editorial item: NEW FIRM, NEW STORE, NEW GOODS. In this kite-flying age, When new goods are the rage, It becometh the sage, To look on the next page, Where advertisements new And essentially true, Expose to your view What each merchant can do To accommodate all Who give them a call. In our column today Without much delay, And perhaps we should say In a delicate way, The new firm and new store Of OSBORN & MOORE Is announced the first time, Causing all this poor rhyme. A man half asleep Who should just take a peep At the "fixins" they keep Would know they sell cheap. S.A.M. Moore we opine Is a "trump" in his line, And with Ezra and Bart To assist at his mart, In the Chesterfield art, Cannot fail to attract, By their goods and their tact. If you doubt what we say, Just call in there some day When you've plenty of pelf, And “thry” for yourself. Location, Front street, 2 doors above Court. Moore & Osborn, Dealers in Dry Goods, Notions and Straw Goods. Death Notices appeared in an out-of-the-way corner in very small print. Some were accompanied by rhymed condolences of relatives or friends. Editorial comment there was none. The death of Mrs. S.W. Pomeroy was made known to the public on January 27, l852 with the following brief notice: DIED, on the 20th inst., after a few days' illness, Mrs. Clarissa Pomeroy, age 82, widow of the late S.W. Pomeroy, formerly of Brighton, Massachusetts. Not a word as to S.W. Pomeroy's having been the town's founder. Marriage Notices in general received similar treatment. Occasionally, however, circumstances seem to have made it impossible for the editor to refrain from expressing some personal feeling; as in the notice published on May 27, 1851: Married, Mr. Seth Paine, Merchant, of this place, to Miss Rowena Rathburn, of Rutland. The printers were kindly remembered by the happy couple. Such evidence of good feeling is always flattering to the disciples of Faust. When W.B. Probst and Martha Grant were married on April 28, 1853 "in Sheffield, by Rev. Ezekiel Sibley," and also when C.R. Pomeroy and Miss Fannie Sehon were married (see above), Editor Thompson �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 278 added to each notice a gracious Thank You for "bountiful supplies of cake." In an October, 1852 number appeared this brief notice: Married, on the 28th ult., by Rev. Thomas Dooley, George McQuigg, Esq., to Miss Caroline S. Smith. A few details regarding that wedding would have interested many Pomeroy readers, no doubt, for the bride was the grand-daughter of Zenas Horton, the Horton brother who did not come West. In 1848 or '49 Miss Smith came to Pomeroy to attend the Academy. A year or two afterward she went to Rutland to teach school. There she met George McQuigg, to whom she was married as noted above. The marriage on Nov. 20, 1851 of S.A.M. Moore to Lydia Stone at Belpre, Ohio, was given similarly brief notice. Editor Van Horn could have added that the two Edwardses and the two Donnallys and several ladies went with Mr. Moore to "help him get married," that the trip was made by steamboat and that R.R. Hudson and F.M. Chase "tended store" the week the four proprietors were away. In one April, 1858 number appeared two two-line marriage notices: those of Capt. W.A. Barringer to Anna Teeter, of Johnstown, Pa., and of J.P. Phillips to Mary J. Weese, at Mason City. The new editor, T.A. Plants, made this brief but sprightly acknowledgement: Just two not ices, each accompanied by a bright gold dollar, for which we invite ourselves to their Golden Wedding. And on May 18, to the marriage announcement of "Mr. George Eiselstein, of Pomeroy, and Miss Sophia Ihle, of Chester, at the residence of A? Ihle, Esq., by Rev. S. Klein," was appended the special literary tribute: If Sophia's as sweet as the cake That came with the note to the Printer, Her presence will evermore make Home bright in the dreariest winter. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 279 If George proves as true as the gold That came with the note to the Printer His love will never grow cold, However dreary the winter. Then let our young friends remember That, though beauty and youth decay, Love can make the future December As bright as the present May. Two of the many notices that editorial comment would have made especially interesting to many readers were: (In the August 21, 1860 number): Married Elizabeth Cohen, daughter of Harrison Cohen of Pomeroy, to Baptiste Gilmore, of Point Pleasant. (On Sept. 20, 1859): Married, at the residence of the bride's father, in Pomeroy, by Rev. Sturgis, of Gallipolis, John Pope Capt. of Topographical Engineers, U.S. Army, to Clara P. Horton: eldest daughter of Hon. V.B. Horton. Conscience-pricking to many readers (and possibly amusing to some) must have been Editor Thompson's outburst of righteous indignation on November 10, 1857, directed against his neighbors, who were "too busy attending 'revival meetings' to pay the least attention to the sick or dying." He assured them, however, that after discharging a half-witted servant for setting the bed on fire and for leaving his sick wife to run off to meeting, etc., he was "doing first rate now; we are doing our own housework, waiting on our sick wife, writing editorials, selecting news matter, setting type, marketing, etc., etc., and under obligations to nobody. The wife is getting better-the neighbors may go to heaven their own road… it is not our desire to offend them or induce them to call; we hope to make them just angry enough to remember it when someone else gets sick in the neighborhood." Rather frequent happenings to the Telegraph's weekly issue were �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 280 lateness of appearance and non-appearance. Some of the causes were high water, low water, ice--preventing steamboats from bringing a supply of paper; other alleged reasons: editor's absence, other work, hands wanting to go to the Fair, ill health, etc. And yet, as early as 1854 Editor Thompson could boast that "The Telegraph goes to California, the British Provinces, Illinois, Iowa, etc.; and as exchanges to all the principal cities and many towns." During the whole decade the Telegraph editor was more or less dependent on the large city newspapers for other than local news. Obliging steamboat clerks supplied him with such papers in advance of the mail. For example, on May 22, 1851, thanks were expressed to Smith of the Ohio and Weaver of the Buckeye State for Pittsburgh and Cincinnati papers “sufficient for a week's reading"; and to W.P. Halliday of the General Gaines, "for a full file of New Orleans and St. Louis papers." On December 6, 1859, the “Courier, Swallow, Ohio No. 2 and Mesrs. Patton & Montgomery of the Wharfboat favored us with Cincinnati papers"; also, "To R.J.J. Curtis, gentlemanly and obliging telegraph operator in our town, thanks for favors in furnishing items for the Telegraph." In February, 1860, the editor was "under obligations to V.B. Horton Jr., Agent for the Calaway Mining Co. of Pomeroy, for late New York papers." That two of the Telegraph's three editors of the 1850s aspired to higher things is indicated by their election to the Ohio Legislaturethat of A. Thompson in the fall of 1855 and of T.A. Plants in 1859 and '60. TWO OTHER NEWSPAPERS had brief existence in Pomeroy in this decade. In 1855 the Central Committee of Meigs County (H.B. Smith, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 281 S. Cutler, George Lee, J.S. Earhart) founded the Democrat, "In accordance with a long cherished wish of the Democaracy of Meigs County and the recommendations of prominent Democrats of several adjoining counties." Its Purpose was "To advocate the true sentiments of National Democracy." How long the Democrat fulfilled that purpose is unknown; only one reference was made to it in the Telegraph. "Our first apprentice is now publishing the opposition paper," said Editor Thompson in August, 1856. The People's Fountain, C.W. Hoy editor and J. Rundle publisher, appeared in Pomeroy in January, 1854, was announced by the Telegraph as "Democratic professedly," its editor "extremely witty." By September the Telegraph had to report that Mr. Hoy is once more editor and this time sole proprietor of the People's Fountain. Messrs. Rundle & Smith contemplate a trip to California. The career of these last named gentlemen was short but very creditable. West Columbia made five attempts within five years to support a newspaper. First came the Slasher, published in 1852 by Judge D.S. VanMatre. In January, February and May of '53 the Telegraph quotes from West Columbia’s Bulletin; By October, ’53, the Western Messenger had succeeded the Bulletin; and by December 12, 1854 the Messenger was reported sold to a joint stock company of members of the United Brethren Church and its publication suspended to give place to the Virginia Telescope, under the control of the U.B. Church. The first number of the Telescope was pronounced "a credit to the conductors of the town"; but by August, 1856 its last number had been issued. About a year later came Judge Van Matre's second attempt, The Virginia Messenger. Of this Messenger nothing more was heard-neither of its life nor of its death. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 282 Middleport had no newspaper during the 1850s. POLITICALLY, The Bend during the first half of the 1850-60 decade was decidedly Whig, in the second half yet more decidedly Republican; hence its Political Life centered in the activities of those two parties. At a Whig Mass Meeting held at the Court House on August 16, 1851 by the Whig Central Committee (J. Cartwright, M. Heckard, E. Williamson, B.H. Stedman, V.B. Horton), speeches and a free dinner had the desired warming-up effect. The following week at a second Mass Meeting a Whig Club was organized. V.B. Horton addressed the meeting "at length." On September 7th following, Editor Van Horn with some friends attended a Whig meeting at West Columbia. Citizens of "Nyesville, Pomeroy, Coalport, Middleport, Sheffield” were given free ferriage at West Columbia. A Club was organized, with Elisha Mack as President. State Senator Ward, of Kanawha District, aided in the organizing and then talked one and one -half hours. Mr. Van Horn had seldom heard a better speech. Our Democratic neighbor Anderson was at hand; he was in excellent spirits at first but after the meeting he was not to be seen,” Van Horn slyly chuckled. In 1854 Mass Meetings were held to protest against the passage of the Nebraska Bill. At Pomeroy, the Germans were the first to call a meeting--a fact which was "not a credit to native born citizens," Editor Thompson opined. Rev. L. Theiss was chairman of that meeting; the committee appointed to draft resolutions was composed of George Rasp, August Nast, Wendel Kautz, David Geyer, Abram Fischer, Rev. J. Pfetzing, W. Schreiner. Soon afterwards a County Meeting �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 283 was called by: H.G. Daniel, M. Heckard, C.C. Hoy, Dr. S. Roehm, Rev. L. Theiss, and C.C. Holz. In April, 1853 the Democrats held a Demonstration at the Court House for the purpose of making nominations for the various State offices and selecting delegates to the State Democratic Convention. Details were not reoprted. It was in 1853 that The Bend first came into direct contact with Spoils System tactics in National politics. In 1845, it will be recalled, James Ralston, a Whig, was appointed postmaster at Pomeroy by Democratic President James K. Polk. Five years before, Samuel Bradbury, also a Whig, had been given charge of the Salisbury (later Middleport) post office by Democratic President Martin Van Buren. But in the early summer following the election of Franklin Pierce, that Democratic President removed Whigs Bradbury and Ralston from their respective offices and appointed Democrats George Lee and Dr. David Pangburn to succeed them at Pomeroy and Middleport. Editor Thompson reported the unusual proceeding with these additional observations: When Whigs turn men out of office it is customary to give a reason for so doing. Mr. Ralston may have expected this. He was appointed by Polk; no one was removed; he was appointed to fill a vacancy occasioned by resignation. He never solicited the office nor used any effort to retain it. The removal is consistent with the Democratic principles of "appropriating the spoils of the office.” Dr. Pangburn was appointed postmaster of the Salisbury office in place of Samuel Bradbury, removed. Bradbury held the office twelve years. He twice tendered his resignation, never received an answer. If this is Democracy, will someone define Tyranny? By 1855 Republican Meetings had taken the place of Whig Meetings. On July 6, 1855 a Republican Mass Meeting at the Court House was held by "all who are opposed to the misrule of the Slave and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 284 Pomeroy's very small Democratic minority included of German citizens. In one 1856 issue of his newspaper saw occasion to comment sarcastically: "A large number marching the streets and hurrahing for Buchanan. It is the eagerness with which they seek to be enslaved." a goodly number Editor Thompson of Germans are amazing to see In the Virginia towns across the River it was the Republicans, if any, whose conduct was considered "amazing." In the 1856 presidential election three Mason City votes were cast for Abraham Lincoln: one by a Southerner, as a joke; one by a Welsh miner; one by an employee of the Patrick-Nicholson saw-mill. On learning that one of his men had voted for the Republican candidate, Philip Nicholson, one of the mill owners, swore he would kill the man whenever he found out who it was. Fortunately, he never found out; for the man was his own brother. By July 12, 1860, at least one of those Germans, William Dilcher, new Pomeroy Baker, had been convinced of the error of his past reasoning. "Come, let us reason together," was announced as the subject of Wm. Dilcher's Farewell Address to the Democratic Party, on that evening. The meeting was reported the following week: An unusually great crowd was at the "Farewell Address." The Stars and Stripes waved. Judge Heckard was chairman. Mr. Dilcher spoke one hour. He was received with great applause and was cheered frequently. He was not quite as fluent and forcible as if he had spoken in German, but he made himself understood. Invitations to reply were called for. Waller, of Racine, was called. He hesitated, finally came forward, and surprised everyone by announcing himself a Republican. Two months later there was a “Demonstration of German citizens" at the grove in Naylor’s Run. The German, Hassaureck, editor of a German newspaper published in Cincinnati, made the speech. People of all nationalities went "to see him speak in German and to hear him in English. It was the grandest political demonstration ever made in Meigs County. The Germans are democratic from principle ��A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 285 in the true meaning of the word," explained. Mr. Plants. On October 6th, 1860 a Grand Republican Rally took place at Pomeroy. The steamer Windsor started from Cheshire and the Tornado from Letart Falls early in the morning to bring the people from all over the county. And on Monday night preceding the Election (which took place on October 9) the "Last Gun of the Campaign” was fired- with a mass meeting of all the “Wide-Awakes” (Republican clubs) throughout the county and a torchlight procession. On November 8, one month after the Election, the Telegraph had the opportunity and the satisfaction of announcing the National Republican Victory- using one column of its second page for that purpose. During the period between the secession of South Carolina (Dec 20, 1860) and the firing on Fort Sumptor (April 9, 1861), feeling expressed itself mainly in Flag Raisings and Union Meetings. Flag Raisings had begun, in fact, the preceding summer. On July 18, 1860, a “Pole Raising,” at 3 P.M., with speeches, etc, on Lincoln Hill, was announced. “But Where, tell me where, May that Lincoln Hill be found?” sang Mr. Plants editorially. “Oh, Pshaw! Go ask Heckard, Prall, or anyone else living there; they’ll tell you at once,” he concluded. And thus also is answered the question of the time and circumstances of the naming of Lincoln Hill17, Pomeroy. 17. It is said the hill up to that time had been called Heckard’s Hill, Judge Heckard having been the first to live there. [V. Smith was the second, W.J. Prall the third] But only the year before, Editor Plants had referred to it as “the hill west of town.” About five weeks afterward, “on the night of the Great Sherman Meeting,” the Lincoln flag pole was cut down by “a dastardly coward.” �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 286 On January 11, 1861, a "beautiful American Flag" was reported as "waving above Crystal Mill, Middleport." The flag was procured by the citizens of Middleport, "irrespective of party and was denominated Union Flag." As early as May, 1850, a Military Company was organized at Pomeroy. The meeting for that purpose was held in Remington Hall; P.B. Stanberry was voted President and Dan E. Smith Secretary of the Company. Union Meetings were The Bend's immediate reply to the secession movement. On the Virginia side Union sentiment was almost as strong as it was on the Ohio side. Such a meeting was called for Saturday, February 2, 1861, at Pomeroy, "to take into consideration the alarming state of the county and to recommend measures of compromise." Hon. V.B. Horton was to address the meeting. Signers of the call were: Wm. Williamson, N. Simpson, George McQuigg, W.H. Remington, D.W. Curtis, L. Paine, G.S. Guthrie, R.L. Curtis, D. Reed, A. Gatchel T.J. Smith I. Train On January 11, 1861, a meeting was held at Point Pleasant for the purpose of getting the sentiment of Mason County on the national crisis. R.C.M. Lovell and George Patrick, both of Mason City, took active parts in the meeting, hence a part of the Telegraph's report of the meeting is not out of order here. Captain McCauseland, who was called to the chair, appointed a committee of seven to draft resolutions… John Newman delivered a slave-driver tirade against the Republican Party; said 12 or 14 Northern states had passed acts nullifying the �Constitution. R.C.M. Lovell took issue on the number of states; he said the facts were bad enough, hoped the gentleman would confine himself to them. Mr. N. insisted he had authority; Mr. L. demanded it. The speaker read from papers, enumerated nine states, said Ohio had such enactment. Mr. L. sternly denied the statement, challenged proof. Mr. L. could not produce it. Rapturous applause for Mr. Lovell. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 287 The president was asked why so many Ohioans were admitted to disturb the meeting. Breathless silence followed. The Ohioans were allowed to remain. George Patrick, chairman of Committee on Resolutions, made his report… which was too strong for the Union to suit certain gentlemen; whereupon said gentlemen offered a substitute. Col. Beale declared it downright “Secession and Disunion.” Passage… was rejected by a thunderous NO! Col. Beale’s report [a substitute, but very similar to Patrick’s report] with amendments was passed; supported by known conservatives, hence supposedly conservative. C.H. Moore, Esq., made a short patriotic speech; expressed regret for disrespectful allusions to Ohio Citizens. After “Three Cheers for the Union,” the meeting adjourned. The SLAVERY QUESTION apparently had not hitherto given the Telegraph much concern. The “human chattels from the Old Dominion” that appeared daily on the streets of Pomeroy on business for their masters, and the “Sambos and Rastuses driving the carriages of Mason City families in the discarded garments of their masters and looking like gentlemen of the period” got no editorial notice. Two or three “Slave Stampedes” in Mason County were reported briefly but with a strong suggestion of a delighted-to-report feeling. In February, 1857 a “News of the Week” editorial commented sarcastically “…But we have not heard of any move in Congress for a plan by which the waters of the Ohio can be prevented from freezing and so ‘inciting niggers’ to vamouse. This ought to be attended to immediately, for such ‘intervention’ (of ice, not of Congress) is clearly unconstitutional…” The newspaper (name not given) which inspired the sarcasm was unquestionably a Southern publication. But on June 7, 1859, “Pomeroy’s Supposed Fugitive Slave Case” was given a whole column. The story, condensed here as much as possible, is: A pretty girl has been attending the Pomeroy schools for two or three years; her father and master, one of the F.F.V.’s engaged in buying up slaves and shipping them South, paid her board and schooling. Last winter an attempt was made to persuade the girl back to Virginia; but the girl, though fond of her father, declined. The girl’s mother was then shipped South. Tuesday last the father and another man, both armed, called on �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 288 the girl. She was not alarmed; but friends immediately raised the cry of "Kidnap," the town was aroused, a crowd collected. The Virginians protested pacific intentions, the father declared he had come to pay the girl's bills, in fact had emancipated her, showed a deed in proof. But when the deed was examined and found invalid, suspicion was aroused. By this time another person was on the scene: the husband of the girl's mother, a free Negro, married to the woman fourteen years, who had paid part of her price and also of her freedom. Naturally he was outraged when he learned of his former master's presence and attempted to kill him. The Virginian found safety in a colored man's house, implored the gods, men and Negroes to save him from the wrath of his former chattel. Finally a truce was arranged: the Virginia gents surrendered their revolvers to Esquire Lee, the darkey his to Sheriff Smith, the Virginians were accompanied by the "Squire" to the the Old Virginia shore. When the ferry was reached the Virginian offered the ferryman $50 to land him safely on the other side. When safely delivered on the soil of the Mother of Statesmen he received his weapons. On the whole, it was the grandest spectacle of mingled farce and comedy ever enacted here. Lone will these representatives of Virginia remember their visit to the city of “salt and cindars." Since then, the father has given the girl a genuine deed of manumission. She is pure white, intelligent, beautiful--would really sell for two or three thousand dollars in the South. To the great disappointment of our Deputy Marshal a "rescue case" cannot be made of the transaction even under the Fugitive Slave Law. In contrast-or, perhaps, comparison-to the above it would have been interesting to learn how editors and readers reacted to Notices like these: SIX CENTS REWARD! …will be paid for the return of one John Coventry, age l7, who was bound to the Subscriber by the Warden of the House of Refuge near Pittsburgh. On leaving he took my skiff. I forbid anyone harboring him or trusting him on my account. -John Woods, Sr., Racine, Ohio, May l7, 1858. RUN-AWAY, 5¢ Reward! Indented Boy. William Stoner, 16, bound by Superintendent of the House of Refuge, Allegheny county, spring Petral. I will not pay any charge he may contract, and I forbid harboring the boy and will prosecute… to the full extent of the the �of 1858, to P.M. any person law. --March 1, 1859. A few details regarding the occasion indicated in the item following and_the reporter's source of information would have been enlightening: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 289 (From Jan. 4, 1859 issue): The table set on New Year's Eve in Mayhugh's Hall by the members of the Colored Church is spoken of as being superior to all other tables heretofore spread before citizens of this place. For the Closing of this Scene, material was found in an article, An Echo of Slavery Days, published in the Tribune-Telegraph of May 10, 1922. The writer of the article got his information from Charles Wink, former well-known caulker at the Horton Boatyard. The article, in substance, reads: Lovell & Payne together owned two valuable skilled laborers; one, an expert caulker, bought on the auction block at New Orleans for $3000; the other, a first-class miner, secured in the Kanawha Valley at the same price. These two slaves were given the most solicitous care. If one fell ill he was attended by the best doctor procurable. Both were paid for overtime work. Just before the Civil War began, the caulker was accidentally drowned in the following manner: While he and several other men (including Mr. Wink) were launching a barge at the Lovell-Payne boatyard, it stuck on the ways. An old German and the slave went to the lower side of the barge to soap the runway. Mr. Wink and several others were under the boat working at the cribbing when suc1denly the craft shot riverward. Wink and his companions dropped down between the timbers and were saved; but the German and the Negro while running for safety were caught and carried far out into the river ahead of the barge. There the German came up, "making uncomplimentary remarks about things in general and the vagaries of barges on runways in particular." But the slave never came up. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 290 VARIOUS PROMINENT CHARACTERS STILL PRESENT At The Beginning Of The Next Act These characters will appear in groups, each group presenting close-up views of its individual members. Because of lack of informative material in every instance, some views are much less detailed than others; and, for the same reason, many outstanding members can not be presented at all. First, the OLD TIMERS of the 1850s: At their head, that Pioneer of The Narrows, Samuel Grant. In the fall of 1860 a silver-headed cane bearing this inscription was presented to Mr. Grant: Presented to Samuel Grant, Esq., by the Republicans of Middleport, Ohio, for having walked 22 miles on the 9th day of October, 1860, at the age of 83 years, to secure a Republican vote. Mr. Grant's letter of acceptance (too long to be Quoted here in its entirety) concluded with these words: Should circumstances ever require me, in the performance of my duty as an American citizen, to walk that distance over again, I shall do it cheerfully, sustained not only by your highly prized present but by the grateful remembrance of your regard and esteem. --Middleport, Ohio, October 28th, 1860 Philip Jones, about ten years younger than Samuel Grant, but in declining health, participates no more in public affairs. Always of a self-effacing temperament Mr. Jones, now omre than ever, is satisfied to let others win public praise while he continues to do good deeds in private. Randall Stivers, born in 1787, is still active. Soon after moving to Chester Mr. Stivers served the county, first as Commissioner then as Sheriff; and in 1832 was elected to the State Legislature, remaining there two terms. Just when he was "Letart Township's foremost school teacher" and when he returned to Pomeroy, was not learned; but we found him at the *** place in 1855 serving as �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 291 Town Marshall. In '59 he was again elected Justice of Peace of Salisbury Township, which office he had held since 1818. Col. Andrew Donnally was the first of the Old Timers (as far as could be discovered) to leave the scene of the 1850s permanently; he death occurred at his residence in Sheffield on August 24, 1854. Col. Donnally had mede up in service for the comparative shortness of his life: since coming to the boot-shaped Bend in 1818 (from Virginia) he had, besides being Graham Station's first postmaster and also Salisbury's, "successfully filled the offices of auditor, sheriff, representative, senator, treasurer, county clerk of Meigs county, and at the time of his death was holding that of Clerk of the Common Pleas Court." Public Officials are always numerous at the county seat; hence several more besides the two above listed as Old Timers are on hand. In the lead come the Judges. The reminiscer who said that Pomeroy was prolific of judges might have added, "once a judge always a judge." Only three of Pomeroy's judges of the 1850s can be presented here, however; they are: Nathan Simpson, who served from February, 1838 to 1844 as Associate Judge of Meigs County. About 1851 Judge Simpson moved from Rutland Township to Pomeroy to engage in the practice of law. In 1859 he formed a partnership with W.H. Lasley, recent graduate of Cleveland Law School. Judge Simpson's connection with anti-slavery activities and with the temperence movement have been shown above. Samuel Bradbury, whose parents came from Maine to Leading Creek in 1816 with seven children and $1.50. Needless to say that the family had come via flatboat and that its first residence was a cabin. In *** then thirty-five �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 292 years old, was elected Associate Judge of the county, serving until the office was abolished in 1851. The Samuel Bradbury became County Sheriff, but remained "Judge Bradbury" to the community. Martin Heckard, who, before coming to Pomeroy in 1842 had taught school, practiced law and held the office of Prosecuting Attorney of the county. In 1846 he married Catherine Horton, sister of V.B. Horton. In '52 he became Judge Heckard by being elected first Probate Judge of Meigs county (under the new state constitution), which office he held three years. In 1858, upon the organization of The Pomeroy Coal Company Judge Heckard was chosen its chief mining engineer. Now come other officials: Samuel Halliday, who had won educational honors at the University of Edinburg and was on his way to a professorship in Ohio University at Athens when, for some undiscoverable reason, he stopped at Meigs county. Mr. Halliday has been seen in Pomeroy in the 1840s as County Auditor and in the '50s as W.H. Remington's business partner. A leter item stating that Mrs. Samuel Halliday died in Illinois in February, 1861, tells the rest of the Halliday family's story in brief: Gone West. Samuel S. Paine, who was employed as secretary and book-keeper at the Howe Brothers' Shovel Factory in 1837 or '38. In 1840 S.S. Payne was elected first Mayor of Pomeroy. In '42 he was elected County Recorder, which office he held during the next twenty-four years. Marcus Bosworth, already presented as Elder of the Pomeroy Presbyterian Church when it was organized in 1847; and later as intrepid introducer of instrumental music into the same church, was the county's Deputo Sheriff in the early 1850s. An incident of the 1851 Fire at Pomeroy (see above) adds an interesting touch to the Bosworth picture: When the fire broke out Mr. Bosworth was boarding with his wife at �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 293 the hotel. Mr. Bosworth owned the hotel; yet, while the fire was raging at its worst, he was found in the rear of the building calmly munching an orange. Jacob Roush, on the Virginia side of the Bend, began a long public career when he was appointed Deputy Sheriff of Mason county. Mr. Roush did not give up his teamster business when he entered public life; instead, he employed competent men and boys to do his hauling, take care of his horses, and perform all the other work necessary in the successful operation of that business. Lewis Bumgardner, living at Hartford City, Virginia, became "Squire Bumgardner" for the rest of his life by virtue of his election to the office of Justice of Peace of Waggener District during this period. Industrial Leaders, in deference to Law, are taking third place in this Grouping. Some who have already appeared will therefore necessarily appear again. At the head of the group stands V.B. Horton. Besides liquidating the indebtedness of P., S & Co., (with the help of C.R. Pomeroy) and reorganizing it on a solid financial basis as The Pomeroy Coal Company, was the responsibly head of the Pomeroy Coal Company, of the Dabney Salt Company, of the Pomeroy Rolling Mill, and was the leading stockholder in several other salt companies and other businesses. In add it ion to his business responsibilities V.B. Horton was active also in political life. In 1854, in a district that was Democratic by more than three thousand (the Eleventh), to the astonishment of himself and his friends he was elected to Congress. For the details of that remarkable we are indebted to C.A. Hartley. The campaign of '54 in Ohio, Mr. Hartley said, had been a most unusual one. The Democratic legislature had gerrymandered the State so as to give �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 294 its party practically all the representatives. The Horton nomination therefore was considered merely a devjce for filling the ticket in his district. Because no one dreamed he could be elected his candidacy was not largely published. In the list of candidates appearing in the New York Tribune the day before the election, the words, "No opposition," stood opposite the name of the Democratic candidate in Ohio's 11th district. But, although the Whig party was on its deathbed, the election returns of October showed not a single Democrat elected. The AntiNebraska men, of whom V.B. Horton was one, had carried the State without a single exception. In 1856 V.B. Horton was re-elected to Congress. Two years later he was again tendered the nomination; but he declined it because he thought his private affairs needed him most. In 1860, without his knowledge he was nominated by acclamation at the Republican District Convention. “For the good old cause of human liberty," he said, he would accept the nomination. Again he was elected. When not in Washington, D.C., V.B. Horton could always be relied upon for one of "his clear, forceful, truthful, old-fashioned addresses" on every civic or political occasion. Horace S. Horton long ago had given up the mercantile business (so we are led to conclude) in order to join his brother in the salt and coal business. In April, 1861, he was serving the Pomeroy Coal Company as Secretary and Treasurer. Thayer Horton, it has been stated, was elected president of the Racine Mining & Manufacturing Company in 1801. Some time during the 1850s he was married to Miss Elizabeth Richards, who had come from Windham, Vermont, to Pomeroy to teach in the Pomeroy Academy. V.B. Horton, Jr., (known as Val Horton), already shown as steam- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 295 boat captain and owner, had taken charge of the Calaway Mining Company's Ohio interests by the time the curtain rose on the next Act. More than that, he had become a resident of Virginia, having moved with his family to the Sehon farm across the River when the house he advertised for sale in June, 1857 (see above) was bought by Major B. Skinner. C.R. Pomeroy, who is characterized by O.B. Chapman as "one of the most agreeable men in Pomeroy," was still associated with V.B. Horton in the Pomeroy Coal Company and also in the salt business (see Ohio River Salt Company). James A Payne's exit from the south side of the stage has been portrayed. In point of age and business experience Mr. Payne belonged to the preceding generation. Almost sixty when he came to Mason City in 1856, he already had made and lost two fortunes in the river-transportation business. Left an orphan and apprenticed to a blacksmith in childhood he nevertheless by 1830 had become captain of the Enterprise, a Kanawha river steamboat. From then on Mr. Payne was engaged in flatboating and steamboating, having almost complete control of the Kanawha salt trade. In 1848 he had five steamers afloat, all engaged in the carrying trade on western and southern waters. Then misfortune overtook him, compelled him to seek new rivers. He went to California. “At the end of two years I controlled the carrying trade of the Sacramento," he told an interviewer (Virgil A. Lewis) in 1885. Again he was unfortunate. Returning to the Kanawha Valley, he sent the first coal out of the Kanawha into the Ohio river. Soon afterwards he came to Mason City to help organize the Mason City Salt Manufacturing Company and to take charge of its shipping. Immediately after the Baton Rouge misfortune, his third and last, James A. Payne returned to his �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 297 placed him “first at anything that meant progress for the town.” (quotation from Mrs. James M. Crump, granddaughter of William Harpold and now living in the old Harpold home.) The Carleton Brothers, William, Isaac, John Jr., operating the sawmill built by John Carleton Sr. in 1850 between Minersville and Syracuse, were important factors in the building of the latter village: practically all the lumber used was sawed by them. Standing just opposite Sliding Hill and facing one of the shortest, most treacherous bends in the River, Carlton Mill served a second purpose: it was a landmark for rivermen. Ebenezar Williams, Welshman, who had “cast his fortunes with Meigs county people on Christmas Day, 1841,” opened a coal bank just below Minersville about the year 1851. By the end of the ‘50s the owner of that mine was one of the few successful individual coal operators in The Bend. John Fisher at Middleport was another. From the Fisher band (see map) coal continued to go to the river (either in horse-drawn wagons of on a track; sources conflict) through a street that had no name on the town plat. And so, following the town’s example, that street named itself; it took the name of Coal street. The Manager (called Agent on the Virginia side) of a salt plant eas a man of responsibilities. R.C.M. Lovell’s agent, George Patrick, had come to the Kanawha Valley from Onondaga, N.Y., in 1835 to introduce the patent steam furnace to Kanawha manufacturers, hence he was a man of extensive knowledge and broad experience in the salt manufacturing business. Edward Turnbull, English immigrant of 1845, was made manager of the Pomeroy Salt Company’s plant in 1854. Mr. Turnbull’s nationality may have helped to win him “pull,” but it is hardly to be �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 298 doubted that his six years' experience (1845-1851) at Kanawha Salines and nearly three years with the Coalport Salt Company were a strong point in his favor. William _Q. Starr, the Coalric1ge Salt Company's first manager, was found to be engaged in a similar capacity at the Mason city Salt Works in 1861. Bank Bosses, too , held responsible positions. Edward Edwards, seen earlier as R.C.M. Lovell's first mine supervisor, moved in the latter 1850s to the Kanawha coal fields and was succeeded at the Mason City mine by Thomas Hutchinson, who had recently arrived in Pomeroy from England. William Downie, whose coming to Pomeroy with the Crosbie family has been delineated above, after a succession of short turns at team-driving, clerking, working about a salt furnace, finally (in '55) was placed in charge of the Peacock Bank, which post he was still holding in 1861. Mr. Downie's promotion effected also that of James Jones, the Peacock's first bank boss, to the general superintendency of all the Pomeroy Coal Company's mines--(so, at least, we have been led to interpret several newspaper items). The character and accomplishments of New Haven’s first bank boss, George Wilding, merit detailed presentation. A coal digger, barely able to read and write, this Welsh immigrant child had grown up in Pennsylvania, had married there. When his first born was five years old, George Wilding had opportunity to attend night school. He took it. After moving from Hartford City to New Haven a second such opportunity presented to him. He took that one. He bought books, standard works, and mastered them. He studied surveying under Mason County Surveyor Gary Hogg and attained such proficiency that he was *** to lay out the town of New Haven for the Union Salt Company. Deploring the lack of school facilities for New Haven children, he �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 299 raised funds enough to build on the hillside a little school house (and have it painted white). His well-balanced mind and sound judgment together with his love of people inspired such confidence that he was called upon to render decision in all kinds of disputes and troubles. This, substantially, is the description that the Reverend George C. Wilding has given of his father. Though every salt furnace had its Salt Maker, or superviser of the salt making process, only two of the 1850 period were found. Lemuel Jarrott, Virginian from the Kanawha Salines, came to Mason City to superintend that branch of work at the "Mason City"; John R. Humphrey, above mentioned salt maker at Hartford City, came likewise from Kanawha. Perhaps it was his great responsibility at the furnace, perhaps it was merely his large family that made Mr. Humphrey "seem sour and cross though he really was warm and genial." Steamboatmen, from owners to deckhands, constituted a large group. Some of the prominent ones were: Richard Rush Hudson, eleventh son of W.N. Hudson, who came into the Bend’s industrial scent first as a hod carrier. But very soon he is seen conveying not bricks in hods but coal and salt by means of a steamboat, the Hudson. By 1861 R.R. Hudson was not only conveying the Ohio River Salt Company’s salt to market but also had been made that company’s secretary. For his transportation business R.R. Hudson maintained several steamboats and a fleet of barges at his Middleport landing. Among the oldest rivermen, the oldest one probably was Capt. George Martine, Scotchman, captain and master of the first Condor from 1840 to the end of that boat’s lifetime (about 1846). When the second Condor was built, Captain Martine had charge of her until “age incapacitated him” (said age not recorded). He was suc- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 300 ceeded by Asa Barringer, who had been one of his first pilots on the first Condor. Capt. Elisha Barringer was the other pilot on Condor No. 1 and also piloted the second Condor. From the latter he went to the Brooklyn, then (about 1859) to the Windsor, both of which were "Horton" steamboats--meaning that they belonged to the Pomeroy Coal Company. It was while piloting on the second Condor that Capt. Barringer introduced the first stove into a pilot house. "Hitherto pilots just bundled up, did the best they could without fire," the record said. Daniel DeWolf, flatboat pilot in his earlier years, made his debut as steamboatman on the third Condor. From that boat he was transferred to the Crescent City, the Hartford City Coal & Salt Company's towboat. On the latter boat Daniel DeWolf was both captain and pilot. In April, 1861 he had as Mate on the Crescent City, Fred Riheldarfer; and as Watchman, Joseph Batterson. Albert McDaniel, oldest son of Ezekiel McDaniel, "one of Uncle Sam's sailor boys" before coming West, naturally took to steamboating rather than to the managing of the McDaniel farm (the father having died in l836). Beginning as watchman, young McDaniel advanced to the posit ion of Mate and by the 1850s, when he himself was entering his fifties, had become a captain. Before the Civil War broke out Captain McDaniel had commanded first the Quaker City, then the Keystone, both Pittsburgh-Cincinnati packets. Capt. Edmund Williamson, son of Archibald W1illliamson, by 1853 was a full-fledged steamboatman. In May of that year he took command of the Jane Franklin, Marietta-Pomeroy-Cincinnati packet. The 107 barrels of molasses which Capt. Williamson brought back from New Orleans the preceding year probably came via �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 301 Orleans the preceding year probably came by steamboat also in his command. By the late 1850s he had for sale something else-something that had not been brought from a distance: he had “pure Catawba Wine of our own manufacture, for medicinal purposes or for family use, warranted to be right,” procurable at his residence “near Coalridge mill, price 60c the bottle.” When not on the River Capt. Williamson was active in a political way, having served as chairman of committees for Whig Meetings on several occasions. Horace Merrill Horton, son of Horace S. Horton, embarked on a steamboat career during this period. Interested in steamboats from boyhood, young Horace by 1858 occasionally had been permitted by indulgent pilots to take a hand at the wheel. In November, 1859, Editor Plants in commentating on his favorite steamer, the Courier, stated that “the office is occupied by ‘Billy’ Anderson and ‘Hod’ Horton, both too well known to need an introduction.” In June of the next year the Telegraph told its readers that “Mr. Horace Horton has been chosed te,porary captain of the Baltimore,” and a few weeks later that “On the eve of Huly 4th the steamer Baltimore, Capt. Hod Horton in command, took an excursion to Point Pleasant.” During that same year of 1860 young Horace Horton at the age of twenty-three secured a pilot’s license, good between Wheeling and Cincinnati. Now comes a Miscellaneous Group, headed by: The Edwards Brothers, whose store building was a landmark even in the 1850s. The Edwards Building quite commonly was the starting point for describing the location of other stores, other points (as has been shown above). These two “gentlemen of the old school” brought from Maine the custom of having a large wagon built with compartments, filling it with such articles as rural housekeepers �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 302 would be likely to buy, and making with it weekly trips through the surrounding Ohio counties. The brothers themselves, dignified in appearance, were always dressed in the prevailing fashion of the 1850s: broadcloth frock coat, white vest and tall silk hat. Wendel Joachim (not related to Abraham Joachim) stands next because of his ability to make a fortune in the butchering business. In 1849 or '50 Mr. Joachim began supplying Pomeroy residents with fresh meat from his small shop on Second street. But very soon he began adding steamboats to his list of customers; so that by the end of the decade he was furnishing two daily Pomeroy-Cincinnati packets, all the shortline boats, and the Mississippi and St. Louis boats with fresh meat. He is said to have literally "coined money.” William A. Tucker, Kanawha "well-borer," came to Pomeroy soon after salt-furnace building began on the Ohio side of The Bend. In 1854 he married Julia Ann, fifteen-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William McIntyre (Mrs. Betty Williamson McIntyre), who were by that time living at Kerr's Run. Mr. Tucker drilled a goodly number of wells, perhaps the majority of all that were put down during the 1850s. S.A.M. Moore became a man of varied business interests. The job he had in his pocket when he came to Pomeroy in 1847 (clerk and bookkeeper for Edwards Brothers) he held for seven years. Then he formed with Judge Henry Orborn the mercantile firm of Moore & Orborn. Along with that business he undertook, among other things, the agency for an Eastern real estate firm that had bought the Gibson House and other Bend property. T.B. Rockhill, Pomeroy's gifted but disappated shoemaker, whose Shakespeare readings at the Court House were always popular, mer- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 303 its special portrayal. Mr. excellent workman, took an curtain rises on the first Shoemaker Rockhill, ardent jump into the fray. Rockhill had no family connections, was an active part in all public matters. When the scene of the next Act of this drama, Democrat, will be seen among the first to Of the two Georges whose reminiscences in later years have furnished so much material for this work, only one will be old enough to go to war in 1861. George Joachim (born 1834) was duly confirmed at the age of twelve or thirteen in St. Paul's Lutheran Church, of which his father was a prominent member. When George reached young manhood he launched forth into the business world as clerk in the George Rasp store, near the rolling mill. Much of his leisure time was spent in teaching himself to play the little melodeon that the family then possessed. By the end of the 1850s he also was seriously interested in Elizabeth Rasp, one of his employer's daughters-so seriously interested that in 1858 he became her husband. But his marriage did not keep him from volunteering in the service of Uncle Sam when the call came. The Virginia George, namely George Wilding, born in 1846 (in Pennsylvania), was still enjoying his boyhood at the close of this period of 1850-1860. But this is not to say that he had spent his entire first fourteen years in playing and reading; he had done some hard work during that time, too: he had operated the stationary engine at the Slope Mine on occasion, had dug coal out of that mine, had hauled timber with a yoke of exen and had done other manual labor. And before the coming conflict was ended he too had done his bit for the Union cause, (as will be seen in the next Act.) Now, a few brief sketches of Hartford City and New Haven "Worth- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 304 ies”—not that there were more such men in those two towns than in the other Bend towns but merely because our source (the Rev. George Wilding) was practically the only available one for material of this kind. Wiatt Willis, co-supervisor with John Humphrey (above mentioned) in the construction of the salt furnace and afterwards “boss” of the salt works. Willis’s six feet six inches of height have him a commanding and forbidding look the belied his really genial nature. R.E. Winkleblack, “boss carpenter, large, swarthy, with jet black hair like an Indian’s, wore about his work a fine white shirt with attached collar and black string tie-unusual in that day. Most boys were afraid of him but I [George Wilding, Jr.] liked him.” James W. Kelly (“Little Kelly”), Manager of the Company Store (Hartford), also a native Virginian, “well educated, with many winsome qualities.” Oliver Kelly (“Big Kelly”) engineer at the Hartford Mines, and the “self-elected wise man who knew absolutely everything about everything. He and I were close chums.” Simeon Williams, famous revival-meeting singer. George Moredock, an excellent talker, delighted in arguing with Williams. Once Williams thought he had Moredock cornered, shouted, “Oh, Consistency! Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian!” All the above-portrayed “Worthies,” along with many other not especially note-worthy characters were still on the stage when the curtain rose on the next Act of this drama. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 305 ACT THREE (186l-'76 approx) THE CLIMAX A.-A SLIGHT INTERRUPTION "'What will the Administration do?' is on the lips of the whole people," -so ran the introductory statement of a long Telegraph editorial on the Secession demand for the surrender of Fort Sumpter. The editorial was written for the April 12, 1861 issue; but by the time the Telegraph reached its readers, not only had the question been answered but the South's response also had been given. At 4:20 o'clock on the Friday morning of that twelfth day of April General Beauregard had fired upon the Fort. The Civil War had begun. On Saturday the news of the firing was received at Pomeroy. On the following Monday morning came the next news: The President's call for 70,000 men. That week's paper announced that because of the freshet the mails were not arriving promptly, but that the suspense had been greatly relieved by the "courteous operators of the Pomeroy & Athens Telegraph (line), Messrs. Curtis & Lucas." Immediately booming cannon, shrill fife and rattling drum became the chief features of the day. Middleport's noted fifer, "old man Taylor," with Drummers James and David Whaley, soon were in demand by recruiting officers all along the River from Middleport to Racine including the towns "Over in the Southland." By the time of the Telegraph's issue of April 26, the Pomeroy Home Guards and the German Home Guards had been organized at Pomeroy; also two companies of Meigs County Volunteers and a company of Virginia Volunteers were ready to join the Regiment of Virginia Infantry Volunteers then in process of organization at Mason City. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 306 Officers of the Home Guard were: B. Skinner, captain; Dan A. Smith, 1st lieutenant; James Ralston, 2d lieutenant; Joseph Patton, 3d lieutenant; P.B. Stanberry, orderly sergeant. The German Home Guards were under Capt. John C. Hess, former 2d lieutenant in the German army; Due to their experience "they drilled better than the Americans… Mostly Bavarians, they wore the Bavarian uniform: gray coats with green linings and cuffs." The two companies of Meigs County volunteers were enlisted by Captain Cyrus Grant, West Point student. New Haven's Henry S. Welton organized Company A, Virginia Volunteers at Mason City. Of the 164 men composing the company, "125 were enrolled in fifteen minutes," proudly recalled an old Mason resident. Albert McCown, of Mason, was elected 1st lieutenant but soon resigned. Dan A. Smith succeeded him. (See the year '62 for A. McCown in the 13th Virginia.) On the evening of April 25, Prof. Munson closed his Singing Class at the Presbyterian church (Pomeroy), went to the Court House and sang to the Meigs County Volunteers. A Miss Julia (?) (last name blurred) sang a song to the air of "Dixie," composed for the Volunteers, and Prof. Munson led the audience in the Karseillaise Hymn. On Saturday, April 27, there was a grand Union Demonstration at the Court House. The meeting had been called "without distinction of party or class, for the purpose of extending to the Executive our heartfelt co-operation and influence in any measure he may adopt having for its object the preservation of the government, the enforcement of the law and the punishment of treason." The committee which called the meeting included T.B Rockhill, H.L. Sibley, Aaron Stivers, W.H. Lasley, Joseph Patton Jr.. Two or three hundred came �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 307 over from Mason City "to join in expressions of loyalty to the Union and the Constitution." W.C. Starr, Supervisor of the Mason City Salt Works, was made president of the meeting; Jacob Bird, also of Mason, and Henry S. Welton of New Haven were placed on the Committee of Resolutions. Henry Welton was also one of the speakers. Meantime Home Guards and Companies of Militia of Reserves were springing into being all over Meigs County. In May, Racine citizens selected as officers for their Home Guard; Silas Jones, captsin; Lucius Cross, 1st lieµtenant; C.W. Cooper, 2d lieutenant; J.C. Angell (?) 3d lieutenant; A.E. Banks, orderly sargeant; W.H. Bush, ensign. Dr. George K. Ackley acted as Secretary of the meeting and J.R. Ellis as chairman. At Letart Falls a meeting was called to organize a Home Guard but failed to accomplish anything. "The patriotism of Letart is not what might be desired," deplored the county newspaper, (Telegraph). Whether that criticism was merited or not, home guard organizing in general proceeded with enthusiasm as did also the recruiting and forming of companies for the Fourth Virginia Regiment. Captains T.J. Smith, Philamon Stanbery, William Brown and (Dr.) D. Mayer made up companies on the Ohio side; while Major Oakes, U.S.A., with J.L. Vance of Gallipolis as captain, and William C. Dailey and B.W. Curtis as first and second lieutenants respectively, organized the second company of Virginia Volunteers, namely, Company B, at Mason City. At West Columbia companies were organized by one or more of that town's six commissioned officers: Captains Allen Mason, Peter Darnell, Timothy Russell; Majors Lemuel Harpold, J. Bromley; Lieut, Wort Darnell. By early, July Companies A and B, Virginia Volunteers, and six �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 308 additional companies had gone into camp at Mason City, where they were mustered into service as The Fourth Regiment of Western Virginia Infantry Volunteers (briefly, The Fourth Virginia). These eight companies came from Ohio’s Meigs, Athens and Gallia counties and Virginia’s Mason and Jackson counties. Lewis Anderson’s farm, on Mason’s western boundary, was chosen for the regiment’s encampment field; the Welsh Methodist church on Third street, the Wallace House on Horton, and several other buildings, were commandeered for barracks. The regimental officers were: J.A. Lightburn, colonel; William H.H. Russell, lieutenant colonel; John F. Hall, major. George Ackley, of Racine, was appointed surgeon of the regiment. On July 19, Companies A and B and T.J. Smith’s company, Virginia Volunteers, having received orders to march, left for Point Pleasant. By the latter part of August the remaining companies of the Fourth Virginia had received marching orders. Among them were Capt. D. Mayer’s company, consisting mainly of Virginians from near Murrayville, and Capt. Wiliam Brown’s company (Company E), made up mainly of Meigs county men, with all its officers and about seventy privates belonging to the “Temperance Association.” Philamon Stanbery was this company’s first lieutenant, Ehpraim Carson of Racine its second lieutenant, Oliver Phelps of Mason county its third corporal. Later in that year James H. Hysell, who had just begun practicing at Mason City after graduating from Cincinnati Medical College, assisted W.C. Starr in the recruiting of the Ninth Western Virginia Infantry Volunteers. This regiment consisted largely of Ohio men. W.C. Starr was commissioned as lieutenant-colonel and James H. Hysell as assistant surgeon on the Ninth Virginia. Among other enlistments that summer were: Dr. J.P. Bing, who left �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 309 for Camp Diamond in July to join the 53d regiment as surgeon; Dr. C.R. Reed and John Roedel, who in the same month of July joined Company C, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, the former as assistant surgeon and the latter as first lieutenant. Not every service-eligible inhabitant of the boot-shaped bend's Ohio side considered it his bounden duty to join the Northern army. Jame Whaley, resident of Middleport, was the son of Revolutionary Sodlier James Whaley; and, furthermore, he was a Virginian and a Democrat. For these reasons he couldn't decide whether to fight for the North or the South. Then, one morning at the breakfast table James Whaley heard a call: "James, why halt ye?... Never turn back on the principles the Stars and Stripes represent." Forthwith James Whaley applied for and in a very short time received, a commission as recruiting officer. Nor was every boy that longed to “go for a soldier” as determined to do so as was James Whaley’s nineteen-year-old son, Frank Whaley. Being musically inclined, young Frank had made himself a fife out of an alder stalk. In the spring of ’61, discovering that his fife was worn out, Frank wheedled his father into buying him a new fife. Then he got Fifer Taylor to teach him how to blow it. On July 18, Fifer Frank Whaley learned that Capt. Vance’s Company B was leaving Mason City for the Front the next morning; whereupon he at once presented himself to Capt. Vance and asked to join the Company as musician. He was accepted and directed toward a group of other boys in the barracks. The boys called, “Jump in and root out yourself a sleeping-place in the straw!” The new recruit started to do sol but just then he heard his father’s voice. Knowing what that meant, young Frank began to plead; he even “bellowed like a calf” to be allowed to stay. Finally his father promised that if he got �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 310 his recruiting commission Frank could join his company. Soon afterward the commission came, and young Frank Whaley’s name headed the roll. The earlier Meigs county volunteer companies organized for three months’ service and were ordered at once to Camp Jewitt (near Athens) or to Marietta. By mid-summer these three-months companies had returned; but most of their men eagerly re-enlisted, some joining Capt. H.M. Horton’s projected company, some answering the call of Capt. Cyrus Grant for “twenty able-bodied men as volunteers in the U.S. service,” others enlisting with Capt. Welton, now stationed at the Gibson House as recruiting officer for the regular service. Yet others joined some one of the three cavalry captains then forming companies: Capt. Behan, at Middleport; Capt. Titus, at Rutland; Capt. Hess, at Pomeroy. With Capt. Hess (Company M, First Virginia Cavalry), was Gottlieb Wildermuth and German Revolutionist Dietrich Findling, the latter as quartermaster sergeant. Life in the barracks furing the recruiting period was not uninteresting-if one can judge from the few facts learned. The Middleport barrack was the “building known as the Jones property, across from the Middleport foundry” (evidently Philip Jones’s frame residence). James Whaley’s brother, Dr. David C. Whaley, was quartermaster. The sleeping apartment was on the second floor and a man was stationed at the door to keep the men from violating the temperance rules and from staying out too late at night. One man had a “girl” over in Virginia; there was no way of getting across the River to go to see her. One dark night he went down to the Webb sawmill, found a big poplar slab and crossed the River on it. (Was he found out? Our source does not tell us.) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 311 For the townspeople there was excitement enough. In the spring, when Capt. Curtis and First Lieut. George Hatch took two companies to a field on Heckard’s Hill to drill, the whole town followed. Drilling continued the whole summer. The companies paraded the streets in their new uniforms; their presence was in demand at pole raisings and other patriotic celebrations. In its July 14 issue the Telegraph expressed indebtedness “to the courteous operator at Athens and to our very clever fellow-townsman Goerge McQuigg for late dispatches from the seat of war.” Thus were Telegraph readers given something new to talk about. Along with all the diversions incident to recruiting had come several others that arose from the accident of geographical location. The south side of the boot-shaped bend happened to be in Western Virginia, the section of the Old Dominion that was peculiarly affected by the firing on Fort Sumpter. Virginia, hesitant until then, immediately joined the Confederacy; to which act Western Virginia responded with vigorously active protest (said protest having been encouraged by a long-felt grievance due to injustices in the matter of taxes, etc.) Whereupon Eastern Virginia countered with equally vigorous activity against the Western Unionists. And so, in April, when the Unionists in Mason City raised the Stars and Stripes on the “Green” along the River bank, there may have well been some basis for the rumor that a body of “Secesh” was coming from Charleston to tear down the flag and rout the Unionists. The rumor reached Mason on Sunday while the people were at church. Without doxology or benediction the churches were emptied; and very soon a crowd of women and children, each carrying bedding or other necessities, the German women jauntily poising immense feather beds on their heads, was on the levee waiting anxiously for the ferryboat. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 312 At Pomeroy on that same Sunday morning young Henry Koehler, about twenty years old, was walking with his mother along Second street on his way home from church. As they passed Court street they saw a queer looking crowd milling around. On reaching home, son Henry was sent back to investigate. Warily approaching the excited throng he saw that the men were armed with ancient flint-lock muskets, squirrel rifles, horse pistols, navy pistols, knives, etc. Harrison Cohen was particularly impressive: in one hand he "held a shot gun; around his waist was buckled a broad leather belt with a huge pistol hanging on one side, on the other an equally huge knife that was a sort of cross between a corn cutter and a cheese knife." Cohen himself was making fearful threats against the rebels. On inquiry young Henry learned that "the rebels were coming to Pomeroy!" Some of this fearfully and wonderfully equipped army were country people who had begun trooping in to help save their county seat. Shortly after noon when Judge Heckard came down from off the hill to report that a body of men about two miles below on the Virginia side was moving toward. Mason City (he thought he had seen them through a field glass), farmers were still arriving. By evening all were returning home. No rebel had come. Exhorted the Telegraph on May 3: Western Virginia is for the Union. Western Virginia should not be permitted by mob violence to dragoon her into secession. Men of Ohio! Remember your brethren in Western Virginia! In the latter part of May occurred an event which for a day or two looked very much like actual war. Back of Murrayville, Virginia (at the northernmost point of the boot-shaped bend), there was a "nest of secessionists." The citizens of Murrayville, who were Unionists, were informed of plot of the "Secesh" to attack the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 313 town; they appealed to Ohio; citizens of Chester and other near-by Ohio communities hastened to the help of their neighbors. Finding no enemy they left for home (Sunday morning). They were gone only a short time when the enemy did appear on the hill. The Chester men were recalled; all Meigs county was stirred into action. When the report reached The Bend, R.C.M. Lovell fired up the Baton Rouge (Calaway steamboat) and started up the River bearing Pomeroy’s Home Guards and a large force of Volunteers from Mason City. Next day rumors came of a severe battle in which 300 Unionists and sixty “rebels” were killed. On Wednesday the boat returned-with all troops sound. In June, 1861, Western Virginia’s Protest to Secession culminated in the FIRST WHEELING CONVENTION. That body, after declaring the state government disrupted and proclaiming itself the state’s legal governing body, proceeded to “restore” Virginia by completely reorganizing it. Whereupon Eastern Virginia was aroused to action indeed, its objectives being Western Virginians in general and members of the Convention in particular. William Harpold of Hartford City was one of the members. From then on, rumors of Virginia’s attempts to conquer the south side of the boot-shaped bend filled the air. On Monday, July 4, couriers arrived thick and fast in The Bend to announce that O. Jennings Wise with 1500 men was advancing to take Ravenswood and then come on to Mason City. Pomeroy’s Home Guards, “making a fine appearance as they crossed the River,” marched to the aid of troops and citizens in arms at Mason. Scouts reported the advancing army to be within five or six miles. Attack seemed almost certain. The Telegraph informed its readers thatAll the women and children of Mason City, Hartford City and West Columbia have fled to *** *** what they could of bedding and �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 314 furniture. Our streets are filled with fugitives. People from the back townships are pouring in armed with rifles, guns, etc. We expect a very respectable army in Pomeroy by night. But the next day they were told thatThe Secesh, if any, heard of the preparations, retired. This morning all is quiet. Country people are returning home; women are leaving coal banks, caves and other hiding places. Was it a false alarm? Responsible men from Virginia declared they saw troops coming in this direction; the reports were repeated Monday by some who professed to have come with express haste to give the alarm. At least, it has been demonstrated that the population is ready to fight. The preceding Saturday night great excitement had resulted from the news that a squad of secessionists under the “notorious Dr. Albert Gallatin Jenkins of Greenbottom” had carried off Messrs. Waggener1 and Miller, Union men of near Point Pleasant, and that many of the Wheelnig Convention men were escaping into Ohio. 1. Major Andrew Waggener was shot and killed near Point Pleasant by a Confederate cavalryman on March 30, 1863. He was then 84 years old. Others, too, were escaping from the South. Said the Telegraph of June 14th: Families on their journeys to the North from Virginia are encountered nearly every day on the streets of Pomeroy. This morning [Wednesday] we saw a couple of covered wagons. The owner was from within twelve miles of Charleston, Virginia, owned a splendid farm, well-to-do. He left the home of his childhood, was on his way to a brother in Indiana. He says farmers in his vicinity are neglecting their crops, are thinking only of their personal safety. He says a large majority would welcome Federal soldiers as delivery from cruel bondage, George W. Summers to the contrary notwithstanding. Patriotic feeling was another source of excitement and diversion during those stirring days. On June 30 of that first year the Telegraph contained a list of the business men of Pomeroy who pledged themselves to close their business after nine o’clock, A.M. on July Fourth for general observation of the day. In the list appeared the name of every business man hereinbefore mentioned as a Telegraph advertiser and also several who did not advertise. The �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 315 latter were John T. Davis, Michael Benz, Henry Dilcher, Michael Epple, George Joachim, C. Koehler, William Todd, Jacob Phillips, C.A. Katz, George Loy (Minersville). On a Sunday in October a fleet of Government steamboats floated in the River near Pomeroy. From barges which had been attached to the boats at Coalport coal was being transferred to the boats. Bands played, the soldiers on board (3000, it was said) sang, Pomeroy’s Front was jammed. The soldiers were bound for Kentucky to “defend the loyal citizens of that state from rebel invaders.” On that same Sunday on Middleport’s River bank stood “Rough and Ready,” a clumsy cannon made at the Pomeroy rolling mill from an old steamboat wheel shaft and borrowed on some pretext by Middleport soldier boys. When the boys heard about the steamboats they loaded the cannon with paper, green grass sod, etc., and as the boats began passing down the River they applied the powder. Instantly Rough and Ready “was transformed into a ball of fire that silenced its career forever.” Advertisers got some new ideas during that summer of ’61. As, To Arms! To Arms! A Grand Charge is to be made on Atkinson’s Ice Cream! Ladies are expected to participate in the glorious achievement. Only a dime per saucer. H.R. Smith and Joseph Rigg, purchasers of the Sugar Run Carding Machines near the Court House, saw the serious side of the coming conflict. At the end of a lengthy Ad regarding their improvements and preparations for doing good work, they suggested “that farmers plant every foot of soil, to help sustain life while the enemy is attempting to destroy. Prepare yourselves to return to the WHEEL and LOOM of our fathers,” they advertised. Needless to say that patriotic feeling on many occasions was blind, unreasoning, unreason***, cruel, “Down with the Traitors!” �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 316 Up with the Flag!” was on the lips and in the minds of every Bend Unionist; and woe to the person who let drop a word that could be construed into disloyalty to the Union. At Pomeroy, when the word came that 300 Unionists had been killed at Murrayville one prominent business man said, “It served them right; they had no business to go.” Immediately Randall Stivers and S.S. Paine decided that a rope was the only remedy for such traitorous sentiments. While the crowd was gathering, the man escaped through Reed’s Drug Store and remained in hiding until the storm subsided. At Mason City one night the report got out that Moss McCown, clerk in the Calaway Company Store, was preparing to enter the “rebel” army. The house in which the young man lived (n.e. corner First and Horton streets) was surrounded by an angry, determined mob. But in some mysterious way the boy managed to escape and to reach his destination. Albert F. McCown, brother of Moss, making another instance of the breaking patriotic duty. (Albert McCown was made Western Virginia Volunteers when it was September, 1862.) joined the Union army-thus of family ties from a sense of captain of the 13th Regiment of organized at Point Pleasant in At Syracuse, Isaac Carleton narrowly escaped rough treatment because of a joking remark. One day the local militia after finishing its daily drill sat down to rest under a large beech tree. Mr. Carleton, wealthy and very portly Irish land owner of Syracuse, approached the group and after resting a few minutes remarked, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, “Boys, if a dozen old women were to come along with broomsticks in their hands they could make the whole kit of you run.” Instantly one of the boys sprang to his feet, rolled up his shirt sleeves and moved toward the old man with clenched �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 317 fists and a volley of oaths. Three or four other boys seized their irate comrade and had a hard struggle to keep him from attacking their kindly fellow-townsman. Mason and Hartford citizens decided that “not a man shall be drafted into the service of Jeff Davis.” Early in July a man drove into Mason City, started to organize a company in a building on Center street. He was asked about his commission; his hedging made his Confederacy connections obvious. A crowd gathered on the corner, all ready to “string him up”; on his solemn promise never to return, they let him go. Most vindictive in purpose was the letter which was published on June 21 “by special request of prominent Virginia citizens.” The letter was headed Hartford City, Virginia, and read thus: Editor Telegraph:-You will please publish the following names in your paper. They are those who voted for the Ordinance of Secession in Mason County, Virginia. We desire that every person should have a chance to know them now and forever. We think that by having them entered upon the columns of your paper they will be well marked. We hope that every Union man in Mason County will obtain a copy of your paper with the names and lay it on a shelf for future reference. The list contained 116 names; among them were those of West Columbia’s Dr. A.L. Knight, D.S. VanMatre, John Fowler, Hugh Callagher, and New Haven’s Henry Roush. All joined the Southern army soon afterward. (Also E. Withers and the two Cohens of West Columbia and John Grim of New Haven.) “The list will make an ugly record in the hereafter,” commented the editor. “The children of today will grow to manhood with a mark upon them that will cause them to execrate through their whole lives their Tory fathers. Dr. Knight’s family was compelled to leave West Columbia, and friends who helped them in their need were reported to headquarters as giving aid to the Rebel Cause. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 318 There were other attempts to convince "rebels" of the error of their ways. At New Haven the boys organized a wooden-gun company, with Tom Turnbull captain and George Wilding Jr. first lieutenant. When this company heard that Henry Roush was to join the Confederate army they decided to arrest and imprison him. Marching up the road with their guns on their soldiers, tall paper caps on their heads, they boys chances to meet the man they meant to arrest. But-“he looked so goodnatured, and so big,” that they decided not to arrest him just then. And so they let him pass on. The Bend’s excitement during the second year of the War consisted mainly of reports of raids by the Guerrillas, or “bushwhackers,” the famous Jenkins raid and Lightburn’s Retreat. Its diversion was relief work and the reading of letters from volunteer sons, husbands, brothers, relatives. During the summer several suspicious characters in Pomeroy were searched and found to have with them the uniforms and implements of the “Moccasin Rangers.” They were taken to Parkersburg by Deputy U.S. Marshal Smith. Only a week afterwards a band of twelve or fifteen guerrillas raided the home of Thomas Hopkins, Letart Township, during Mr. Hopkins’s absence. And the following week the notorious Bushwhacker Rhodes was caught at Racine and sent to Ravenswood. LIGHTBURN’S RETREAT.-On Tuesday and Wednesday of the week of August 19, 1862, occurred on the Ohio side of the boot-shaped bend a most unusual and exciting movement. A day or two previously General Cox had been withdrawn from the Kanawha Valley and was to be sent to join General Pope near Washington, D.C. An immense train of horses, mules, wagons, and a large supply of Government stores �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 319 had been left by Cox at Charleston, in charge of Col. Lightburn stationed at Cauley Bridge. The Confederates immediately tried to get possession of the Valley, their objective being the Kanawha Salt Works. Col. Lightburn’s force being inadequate for holding Charleston he determined to save at least the immense train of horses, mules and wagons left there in his charge by Gen. Cox. After destroying the large supply of Government stores there, ordering the destruction of bridges between Charleston and Point Pleasant and the obstructing of the roads, Col. Lightburn started the train and his own army toward the Ohio Rivers by way of Ripley, Virginia. At Buffington Island they crossed to the Ohio side and started on their way to Point Pleasant. For the remainder of the picture we give some extracts from the Telegraph’s very, very long account: We don’t know the number of teams but were told the train was eight miles long. It was such a show as was never before seen in Pomeroy. It occupied a good part of Tuesday and Wednesday in passing through the town. The train was followed by a host of fugitive white and black. For two or three days they have been resting in groups under every shade tree along the road. Many of the soldiers had not had one hour’s rest for four days and nights, the fugitives none for more than half that time. Scores of old men and women, scarcely able to walk, little barefoot children three years and upward, walked all the weary march without stopping to sleep. We passed along the road from Pomeroy to Racine, Tuesday morning, found it literally lined with weary pilgrims who had lain down to sleep and rest on the free soil of Ohio, which to them was a land of Canaan reached at last. We stopped and talked to many, heard tales the novelist could never coin from his fertile brain. All the white Union people left the Valley. Hundreds followed the retreating train, hundreds more escaped down the Kanawha in boats, skiffs, canoes, rafts of all descriptions, on all sorts of land conveyances, on foot. All the black people being Unionists, they left in the same fashion. Union slave holders generally told their slaves to escape as best they could… Slaves of the Sesech took advantage of the general confusion, joined the swelling throng. It was a sight we never hope to see again. Yet it had its bright spots. We saw men who a week before had been wealthy…slave-holders at that, speak to the fugitive slaves as they chanced to meet, in tones of most unaffected kindness… As we passed along the road we saw and conversed with many wanderers, white and black, did note hear one unkind word or tone of voice that betokened hatred or prejudice. �All seemed amazed at the reception they had met in Ohio. We must say we feel proud of our citizens. From the time it was known �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 320 that fugitives were with the train, the women all along the line baked and cooked to supply their wants… We saw by the doorways of humble laborers piles of bread and pies, and busy hands of wives and children dealing out to hungry and weary way-farers. We also saw many with buckets of water by the roadside, with cups, to quench the thirst of all the crowd. There is not enough space to describe all the scenes and relate all the incidents. …It was exceedingly gratifying that we heard less cursing “niggers” than we have heard in any other two days for years…heard two or three drunken loafers damn them, but they got no countenance from the crowd… In the course of this account of the Retreat the Telegraph reporter made sarcastically critical comments on the “strategy” and the “military science” that influenced Gen. McClellan to withdraw Gen. Cox from the Kanawha Valley and thus give to the Confederates the opportunity to make the salt they were needing so badly. The famous JENKINS RAID occurred about September 2. When the news came to Pomeroy that a company of guerrillas under the notorious Jenkins was at Ravenswood, the Home Guards were called out, the country people came with rifles and shot guns, and by night about three hundred armed men were on the streets. After leaving Ravenswood the Rangers crossed to the Ohio side, came down to Racine, took all the good horses they could find (about twelve), crossed back into Virginia at Wolf’s Bar, below Racine. From there they moved across country striking the Kanawha at Buffalo. Thereafter nothing more was heard of them in The Bend On April 11, 1862 (just one year after the War had begun), announcement was made in the Telegraph of a meeting for the organization of a SOLDIERS’ RELIEF SOCIETY. Notice of the meeting was read also in the churches on both sides of the River. In due time the Society was organized, with Mrs. H.C. Daniel elected as president, Miss Sarah Pomeroy secretary, Mrs. Heckard treasurer; and Mrs. Donnally, Mrs. Lasley, Mrs. H.B. Smith, Mrs. Swallow, Mrs. H.S. Horton made executive committee. The Society resolved that since �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 321 it was inexpedient to establish a hospital at Pomeroy, the organization would raise and forward at once to the Sanitary Commission at Cincinnati money and articles useful to the Commission. By June 6 the Society was able to report a long list of contributions of money, clothing, towels, etc. Some towns reported as organizations; as, "Ladies' Soldiers' Aid Society of Racine"; others through an individual citizen. Mrs. W.C. Starr reported for a group of Mason City women. G.W. Moredock and James Kelly solicited money at Hartford, G.L. Joy at Minersville. (The Telegraph File lacks many of the 1862 issues; hence the briefness here.) Some time during the year a “Sanitary Fair” was held at the Gibson House, Pomeroy. “High, low, rich and poor worked as one woman” to make articles of comfort for the soldiers and to sell the same. The Fair ended in the evening with a big dinner and with the selling at auction of all articles not sold during the day. “Bill” Prall acted as auctioneer and true to character said “many funny things”. The affair was a great success. Many soldiers’ families, too, were often in great need. In all such local cases of distress Isaac Carleton, V.B. Horton and scores of others were “most munificent” benefactors. On August 29, (’62) was published the list of contributors to the Meigs County “Fund for Fitting out Volunteers,” or the “Military Fund.” Rather, it was a list of contributors and non-contributors, for after several names had been written the notation “refused to give.” William Remington’s name was so connoted. The next week came a letter from Mr. Remington explaining why he had not contributed. For several weeks thereafter readers of the Telegraph were regaled by an exchange of “pleasantries” between fund solicitor S.A.M. Moore and William Remington. “Mushroom draft patriot” and �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 322 just plain "Liar" were some of the complimentary terms used. Death notices, if any, of Bend soldiers were not found, but here again the incompleteness of the File may be the reason. On August 1, 1862 a letter from James H. Hysell, Assistant Surgeon in the 9th Virginia, reported that in an attack upon them by about three hundred cavalry, Lieut. Col. W.C. Starr, Capt. Sam Davis and Lieuts. B.F. Stivers and James Ewing had been taken prisoners but were well treated and soon to be exchanged. “All are home but Lieut. Col. Starr, who is on his way,” said the Telegraph a few days later. Some time during the War (time not given) H.L. Sibley of Racine, C.R. Pomeroy, and some others were captured and put in Libby Prison. “Because C.R. Pomeroy wore glasses and had a clerical look he was taken for a chaplain and therefore allowed to go free. H.L. Sibley happening to know something about shoemaking, took a sole off C.R. Pomeroy’s shoe, put in a letter to a Meigs county paper, then tacked the sole on again. The letter reached its destination.” (Quotation is from F.H. Whaley.) Hamilton Johnson of West Columbia spent several months in Anderson Prison. When finally exchanged and sent home he was “broken in health and nearly starved.” On April 11, 1862 the 4th Virginia (mustered in at Mason City) was reported stationed at Ceredo, Virginia, and “not yet fighting but sending money home.” By August it was with Gen. Cox in Kanawha county; in December, along with the 37th and 47th Ohio regiments it was ordered south. There the next year it took part in the Vicksburg and Chattanooga campaigns. Before long it had acquired the nickname “Bloody Fourth” (reason not given). (The years 1863 and ’64 are bodily absent from the Telegraph File, hence for those years other sources have been used here.) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 323 The “restoration” and “reorganization” effected by the First Wheeling Convention (June, 1861) did not wholly satisfy the people of Western Virginia. The desire for complete separation, already in the air, kept growing stronger and stronger; developed finally into an actual movement. New-State meetings took place throughout the region. Such meetings were held at Hartford City, Mason City, West Columbia, during 1862. Lieutenant Governor Polsley, G.W. Moredock, Lewis Bumgardner were some of the speakers at those meetings. The Second Wheeling Convention and Thirt partitioned the Old Dominion; A Constitutional Convention framed the new state’s constitution, and the General Assembly of “reorganized Virginia” consented to the formation of a new state, all of which measures were duly ratified by the Virginians west of the mountains. And on June 20, 1863, West Virginia, “born amid the throes of civil war,” came into being. The south shore of the boot-shaped bend had passed forever from the control of the Mother State. Time and again The Bend was thrown into a furor of excitement by reports that Jenkins or McCausland was advancing into the region. Immediately there would be hurrying to and fro, hiding of valuables (one Mason City man buried some gold money, never did recall the place of the burial), bundling up of children and old folks and hurrying them across the River or back into their own hills. Then the news that the report was unfounded, and a moving back again to their homes. Finally the long-looked-for, long-dreaded invader did come. It was in the summer of ’63 that the daring Confederate general, JOHN MORGAN, after crossing the Ohio at Louisville, swept through southern Indiana and Ohio, burning bridges, stealing horses, looting small towns and plundering generally. The dashing officer’s �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 324 plan was to re-cross the River into Virginia at Buffington's Island near the upper end of the boot-shaped bend. There he expected to rejoined by "Copperheads,” "Knights of the Golden Circle," "Sons of Liberty,” and other sympathizers in the North who would get him back into Kentucky. But by the time he reached a point about twenty miles west of Pomeroy, such swarms of men were pursuing him and obstructing his path that he apparently decided to cross the Ohio at once. Reaching directly south for Cheshire, where Eight Mile Island made a good ford, his forces for some reason were divided, a part continuing on toward the River the others, with Morgan, striking eastward through Ohio. And then came the local militia into the scene. It happened that a short time previously two Middleport companies of the Ohio National Guard-one of infantry commanded by Capt. R.D. Wilson, the other of artillery, under Capt. John Schreiner-the two numbering about one hundred_and twenty men, had been ordered with other companies to rendezvous at Marietta. On the very night of their arrival in camp came the news of Morgan's approach to their own town. Asking at once for orders to return to the defense of their homes they soon were on board a steamer and by daylight, under the command of Capt. Wilson, were marching put on the road back of Middleport to meet the approaching enemy. Barely had they succeeded in frightening the raider out of his course when Capt. Wilson was informed that one detachment of Morgan fugitives was heading for a shallow place several miles above Pomeroy. Reinforced by twenty men and armed with an old cannon that had been used in Fourth-of-July celebrations, Wilson immediately marched to intercept the escaping raiders, reached a point favorable for that �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 325 purpose late in the evening. Loading their artillery with pieces of chain and spikes the interceptors placed it so as to command several hundred yards of straight road flanked on one side by trees and on the other by a small stream with steep banks. Part of the men were hidden among the trees, a part were stationed as pickets. The arrangements were hardly completed when the enemy—sixty-eight men and seven officers-approached. Ordered by the picket commander to surrender they did so with almost evident willingness. Triumphantly they were marched to Pomeroy, placed under guard in the Court House and soon thereafter turned over to the proper authorities as prisoners of war. Next came the word that Morgan’s main force was about to attempt a crossing at Cheshire. By good luck the Little Condor, “a low, fiercelooking, long-nosed craft, with suggestive holes in her wheel-house, but very inoffensive,” lay at her Pomeroy landing-place. The Fourth-ofJuly gun was quickly placed on her bow, in a conspicuous position, and the boat started down the River. As she rounded into view of the Island her crew beheld, first, the river-bank on the Ohio side lined at the water’s edge with cavalrymen intently watching one of their number trying to force his horse into the River; then-those same horsemen suddenly wheeling their horses, galloping up the Ohio bank and out of sight! They had caught sight of the Condor and evidently had taken her for a government gunboat. (The three preceding incidents are taken from Howe’s Historical Collections; but Howe’s account of them is here condensed and slightly revised.) The rumor that Morgan was about to cross the River just above Pomeroy reached Mason City through one of the innumerable Roushes, who galloped into town on horseback shouting excitedly to everyone he saw: “The Rebels is comin’! Git! Git! Over the River as fast as �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 326 yu' kin!” The people “got” across, as usual; also, as usual, they came back in more leisurely fashion. And the sounder of that alarm ever afterwards was known as “Git” Roush. At New Haven young George Wilding, then a lad of seventeen, was placed on the staff of the Home Company in command of Dr. Chase, a Hartford physician. During the Morgan excitement of the Company encamped in Weaver’s orchard, opposite Racine, where, aided by gunboats they were to guard Wolf’s Bar against crossing by the Confederates. Wilding was sent by Capt. Chase to the gunboats above the Bar to ask for guns and ammunition. As he sauntered along the shore skipping stones into the water, he heard the crack of a rifle; then another; and another; then a bullet whistled over his head, skipped into the water, plowed the gravel under young George’s feet. Knowing that there were Morgan men hidden in the willows on the Ohio bank the boy “made long leaps up the bank and into the tall corn at the top.” The eight hundred men captured at Buffington's Island were brought down the next day on a steamboat, the men guarded by a section of the Thirteenth Virginia Regiment, "our own county [Mason] boys." The boat halted at Hartford but didn’t land, lest the boys leap off and run home to visit. Men and prisoners both were half starved. Word was sent around by “grapevine telegraph” and “soon all the baked and cooked food in town was hurried to the boat.” "Stragglers from Morgan’s troops were captured in the hills back of Hartford during the next week. Some girls picking blackberries saw several soldiers hiding in the bushes, fled home with the news. Few, if any, of the soldiers escaped. “The Home Guards, always ready with shot guns, rifles or corn cutters, would capture the poor fellow and send him either to Point Pleasant or to Wheeling �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 327 or to the Mason City recruiting station." (The several incidents immediately preceding were taken from George Wilding’s newspaper contributions of later years.) To the people of Middleport and vicinity the most shocking incident of the Raid was the apparently deliberate murder of the venerable Dr. William N. Hudson. When the advance guard of Morgan’s cavalry came within sight of the physician’s residence, which was about three miles from the River, the lieutenant in command called a halt of an hour or two. During that time Dr. Hudson found an opportunity to go out and secrete his horse. While he was returning across a field he was deliberately shot down, and from the wound thus inflicted he died five days later. During the time his victim was breathing his last, the lieutenant who had ordered the doctor shot was in the Hudson house with others, ransacking it for valuables. B. THE PLAY RESUMES On other events of '63 and of the years ’64 and ’65 our sources are personal reminiscences, and these recount only the suffering and privations and fears endured. The small towns were especially desolate, since in them only old men and women and children remained after the draft was put into effect in 1863. At West Columbia, one old resident recalled, “when the corn-meal bin began to run low there was nothing to do but buy a sack of corn, shell it, take it to Hogg’s old water mill about seven miles below town and either exchange it for meal or wait until the grist was ground. The trip was generally made by a woman. A woman in horseback with a sack of corn was a common sight.” Only occasionally, when one or more of the soldiers were home on furlough, did the people on the south side feel �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 328 safe and therefore happy. Came at last the conference between General Grant and Lee "under the old apple tree at Appomattox”: and soon thereafter The Bend's soldier boys that had survived the war and had not returned before, came marching home again. As could be expected, some came with impaired health some with maimed bodies. John Roedel, of Pomeroy, came back in '64 with only one arm, the other having been lost at the battle of Piedmont in that same year. Also, to be expected, the soldiers were given a rousing welcome home. Many churches held special services for them. Those who had joined the Confederacy were not branded permanently as had been predicted. They took their former places in their respective communities, settling down gradually to the "even tenor of their ways" of ante-bellum days. The desolation, the suffering, the fear, and the final rejoicing just presented do not, however, constitute the whole picture of those last three years. One part-quite a small part, it is true-shows industrial effort and gradual business revival. The industrial outlook in 1860 and '61 was very dark; the slump in the salt and coal markets had compelled manufacturers and_shippers to shut down their works; the few attempts to continue operations were badly crippled by lack of workmen--so many of the able-bodied ones had volunteered for army service. Yet, items like the following imply that in the fall of 1862 the salt works and coal mines were not continuously idle: [Nov. 28, 1862] The recent rise in the river has sent fleets of coalboats to suffering cities below. The salt from the yards of furnaces would_have gone if the Government hadn't taken possession of all the barges of the Ohio River Salt Company and left them without means for shipping. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 329 [Dec. 5, l862] It is a busy scene at the yards of the various furnaces. They are shipping the large accumulations of salt manufactured during the long season of low water. A few more days more will clear the yards and probably supply the demands of pork packers. The rise in the river was a very great advantage to both producers and consumers of salt. Not alone the cities below and the pork packers; the very life of the Union itself was dependent upon coal and salt. Vast supplies of coal were needed to keep Government transports running on the Ohio and the Mississippi; salt was used in great quantities for preserving the immense amount of food required by the army. In spite of the shortage of workers due to the draft, therefore, we find Pomeroy operators trying desperately to vie with Pittsburgh operators in supplying steamboats with coal. (William Harpold opened a coalyard at Hartford for that purpose in February, 1862.) For transporting its coal the Pomeroy Coal Company needed an additional steamboat, and so it had the Little Condor built in 1862 at the Horton Boatyard. With Asa Barringer as Master and Stephen D. Webb as engineer, this new Condor while pursuing its regular duties for the P.C.C., was pressed into Federal service on occasion. The boat was an ordinary steamer except that it was painted like the U.S. gunboats, a feature which made possible its passing by unmolested while other boats of equal size or larger were harassed or threatened by the enemy. Because of the great demand for salt, we find that salt furnace building, also, had not wholly ceased. In July of ’62 a company of Pomeroy and Middleport men (George Cooper, --- Donnally, H. Holt, Edwin J. Horton, Duncan Sloan) incorporated the Diamond Salt Company, rebuilt the old Coalport salt furnace and renamed it The Diamond. In that same year of ‘622 George W. Moredock’s Union Coal and Salt �A.F Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 330 2. Our authority for this date is Editor Plant’s account of a “stroll in Hartford City with our good friend G.W. Moredock” in June of 1862. After a brief discussion of the salt works the editor says, Mr. Moredock has now under construction new salt works a little farther up,” the new salt works undoubtedly being at New Haven. The Reverend George Wilding gives 1862 as the probable date of the New Haven furnace. Company built its furnace near the Upper Slope mine. At the end of 1863 Lemuel Sargeant, of Cincinnati, former president of The Mason City Salt Company, was still operating that company’s “Mason City”, with the name of his business changed to Mason City Salt Works. In 1864 Dr. Guthrie, of Marietta, started building the Beacon Hill furnace on the site of West Columbia’s first furnace. As soon as the Civil War ended, an unprecedented BUSINESS REVIVAL was on foot in the United States. Industrial reorganization in the South; growth of the pork packing industry in Cincinnati, Louisville Chicago, St. Louis; development of pottery factories and glass factories along the Upper Ohio-these, to say nothing of the everincreasing dairy and domestic needs for salt, meant a prodigious increase in the demand for that product. And, consequently, the beginning of a veritable furnace-building race in The Bend. Company after company was formed, “furnaces sprang up like mushrooms over night; men tumbled over each other, as it were, to get salt stock at fabulous prices,” writes C.A. Hartley. By 1871 had been added on the Ohio side the Buckeye, Windsor, Syracuse, Sutton, Minersville, Racine and Riverside furnaces; and the old Leadington furnace had been started up again. On the south side stood the Valley City on the west bank of Sliding Hill creek �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 331 the Jackson, back against the hills west of the Valley City; the German on the former site of the Waggener homestaed; the· Hope, join-in the Mason City on the east. Down near Wilson's Mines went oup, first the Bedford, soon afterwards the Virginia and the Quaker; still farther down, the Newcastle; and Dr. Gutheirie's Beacon Hill at West Columbia had become the King Furnace when in 1867 or '68 it was bought by John King and son of New York. The Buckey Salt Furnace had no furnace by November, 1869 and yet it was manufacturing salt in that year. It accomplished that feat by barreling the water from its two completed well and floating the barrels in barges down to the nea Bedford furnace to be made into salt. So zealous was the Buckeye to get into the Salt-making race. With a few exceptions the names of these neaw furnaces were the names of the companies which built them. The Racine furnace was put up by the Rathbone Salt & Coal Company, incorporated in May, 1869. This company's leading stockholders were J.N. Camden and other wealthy capitalists of West Virginia. Its maning operations were started on the Donaldson farm at the mouth of Bowman's Run. The Virginia Furnace (called also the Clifton) was built by the Bedford Company; the Quaker by Philidelphia capitalists, The NewCastle by the Burnap Salt Company. By 1871, then, there were on the Ohio side of the boot-shaped bend fourteen salt furnaces (and companies). V.B. Horton was president of six; the Pomeroy, Sugar Run, Excelsior, Buckeye, Minersville and Winsor; and he was an influential stockholder in several of the others. The Riverside Company built its furnace a short distance below Antiquity. The success of the Riverside’s first experimental well �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 332 was believed to indicate that both sides of the boot-shaped bend as far as Letart Falls were salt-bearing and that there would be "within five years a line of furnaces on both sides out the district…” The West Virginia side by 1871 had twelve furnaces: ten new ones and the revived "Mason City" and the M.C.M. & M. Company's at Hartford. At the annual stockholders' meeting of the M.C.M. & M. Company on May 26, 1870, it was unanimously decided that the name of the company be changed to Hartford City Coal & Salt Company. Samuel Coit continued as president but the Honorable Morgan G. Bulkeley, governor of Connecticut, became G.W. Moredock's chief associate in the financial management of the H.C. & S. Company's business. The Union Salt & Coal Company's New Haven furnace had, as resident agent, Douglas E. Newton, a Marietta man. Two years after the furnace was built-that is, in 1884-Mr. Newton became also the son-in-law of the Company's president, G.W. Moredock. William Harpold and brother, Peter Harpold, were the organizers and principal stockholders of the Valley City Company. V.B. Horton, Jr., son-in-law of John Sehon (who died in 1856) and manager of the Sehon farm, organized the company which put up the Jackson Furnace the site of which was a part of the Sehon estate. The German Furnace was the project of a company of six Germans five of whom--George Weiersmiller, Abraham Fruth, Charles Raehrs, George Rheinschildt and Peter Lambrecht-were Pomeroy businessmen. The sixth, John Mees, was proprietor of the saw mill and flour mill just above Mason City. The Hope Company, allegedly organized by John Downing of Middleport, was incorporated by ten Mason City men and one Pomeroy man. The home town men were George H. Patrick, Edward Edwards, Micah �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 333 Williams, Richard Jones, Ephraim A. Young, Rankin Wiley, John Young, Wm A. White, J.S. Dowry, Nathan Simpson; the Pomeroy man was John Cartwright. The Hope furnace joined the “Mason City” on the east Many of the Bedford Salt Company’s twenty-six incorporators were residents of Bedford township, Meigs county, wherefore the name of the company. Wilson’s mines, near which the company’s first furnace was built, had been sold the preceding year (1866) to H.C. Daniels and others and renamed The Clifton Mines. By the time the Bedford company’s second furnace, The Virginia, had gone up (’67) the mining hamlet had grown into the thriving town of Clifton (see farther on). Many of these twenty-six salt companies-the majority, probably-were members of the Ohio River Salt Company, the salt selling agency organized in 1857. Little is known of that company’s achievements up to 1869, but in that year it was found to be doing effective work for its members. R.R. Hudson, secretary since its formal organization, with his own extensive fleet of steamboats and barges transported the salt at reduced costs and the Company had been able generally to control prices. But it was still meeting strong competition from the fifteen furnaces remaining in the Kanawha Valley. And so, again someone had an inspiration; this time it was that the Ohio River Salt Company should contract with the Kanawha producers to take all their salt for five years at 25₵ the bushel and thereby give the Ohio River Company complete control of the salt trade in the West and Southwest. The contract was made; office, hitherto located at building recently put up by Run Salt Furnace, “in front and in May, 1869, the Ohio River Company’s Middleport, was moved to Pomeroy into a new H.B. Smith on the River bank near the Sugar of the residence of H.B. Smith, Esq.” �A.F Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 334 The company was reorganized but with V.B. Horton continued as president and R.R. Hudson as secretary. George McQuigg was appointed inspector, J.M. Evans, book-keeper, S.P. Coe, traveling agent. On February 9, 1870, the Meigs County Press (Middleport’s newspaper) announced that the Burnap, Clifton, Union and Hartford furnaces had withdrawn from the Ohio River Salt Company. The Press considered the disruption a misfortune, but thought the Company had “over-reached themselves in buying Kanawha salt, paid too much for it”, and that “a rule or ruin spirit manifested in the Board is making harmonious dwelling together impossible.” The Press had been misinformed-the Union and the Hartford had not withdrawn. But the criticism proved to be correct. (See below.) COAL COMPANIES. Most of the salt companies were organized as coal companies also. This fact, however, did not discourage the forming of companies whose interests were coal alone. Coal companies (and individual mines, too) could flourish by supplying the salt plants that owned no mine, the local demand for coal for domestic use and the very considerable down-River trade. What appeared for a while to be the most powerful coal organization in The Bend was the CALAWAY MINING COMPANY. Chartered in the early ‘50s under the laws of Tennessee, with its principal office in New York City, little was known of that company’s dealings before it began buying up coal property in Meigs and Mason counties. That was about 1858, presumably, for in ’59 V.B. Horton Jr. was acting as agent for a Calaway mining enterprise above Minersville, and by the fall of 1860 R.C.M. Lovell was the Calaway’s agent for its “Mason City Coal Company,” which had bought the Lovell coal land. But it was not long before the financial dealings of The Calaway �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 335 aroused suspicion. It issued bonds for the building of a salt furnace, yet not one bond was sold. It did not pay its employees; they sought work elsewhere; the Calaway mines ceased to operate. On November 15, 1866, the Telegraph reported that part of the Calaway’s landed property, “the hill portion of the old Brown farm adjoining Mason City,” had been sold to Messrs. H.B. Smith, Darius Reed, John Cartwright and Cyrus Grant; but that the “coal under the land is reserved, together with other property of the company4.” 4. The bonds issued for the building of the Calaway’s salt furnace were secured by a deed of trust to Samuel J. Tilden and Lowell Holbrook. The Company gave one bond each to Tilden and to Holbrook for serving as trustees and attorneys. The remaining bonds were disposed of in various ways, none were sold for money. The Calaway estate was involved in litigation for over thirty years, during all of which time the company’s employees continued in the hope of getting the wages due them. When in 1894 the litigation ended with a sheriff’s sale, the employees got nothing, of course. (The Hope Company's coal bank was under one of the hills.) Mason City miners thought their idle days were over when in the summer of 1864 L.H. Sargeant’s Adamsville Coal Company opened its coal bank in the hill about half a mile above Mason City’s eastern corporation line. Still more heartened were they, perhaps, on the night of November 1 of that same year, when they were treated by Mr. Sargent to a “sumptuous report,” details of which are given in PROSPERITY AND PROGRESS below. On November 15, 1866, under the large-type headline, NEW ENTERPRISE, appeared the announcement of the formation of “The Union Coal Manufacturing Company of West Columbia.” The company was organizing, the announcement stated, with a capital of $200,000 for carrying on its business “nearly opposite Middleport and where the company owns several hundred acres of coal property.” This compa- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 336 ny, the announcement stated further, was about to organize another company for the erection of a Nail Mill. Given as the names of the corporators of this new company were: H.G. Daniel, Hon. T.A. Plants, Darius Reen, J.N. Titus, Nial Nye Jr., H.H. Swallow, R.B. Wilson. All were said to be Pomeroy or Middleport men except R.B. Wilson, who formerly lived at Middleport but was now a resident of Cincinnati. But in an early January, 1867 number of the Telegraph appeared the Notice of Dissolution of the Union Coal Company by partners R.B. Wilson, H.G. Daniel and W.P Rathburn (whose name was not in the list of corporators). The notice stated further that the company’s real and personal property had been conveyed in the Union Coal Mining & Manufacturing Company of West Virginia, “a duly incorporated body.” (The name of the incorporators of this latter company were not given.) The Pomeroy Coal Company, however, was still the leading coal company in The Bend. Horace M. Horton by 1871 had been made superintendent of transportation and also bookkeeper for the Company. Robert Dyke, Englishman, shoemaker by trade and recently returned from a four months’ visit to his native land, was made superintendent of the Company’s coal banks in ’66, probably succeeding Scotchman W.B. Downie, who had taken charge of the Peacock bank in 1855. (As previously stated, the Pomeroy Coal Company operated V.B. Horton’s mines, which now number three or four.) Some other coal companies and individual mines operating in 1871 were: The Camden Coal Works, with its mines in the lower end of West Columbia. The Calico Mines, opened about ’63 by S. Powell and now called �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 337 Sterling bank (but named Grantsburg by some patriotic miners). The Carleton Coal Company, operating the Calaway mine west of Syracuse. The Miner’s Coal Company, Minersville, with E. Thomas as president. Ebenezar Williams’s Mine, near Minersville The “coal bank at the head of Sycamore street [Pomeroy] was put in fine working order and rented to J.B. Bradford,” announced the Telegraph in March, 1865. Several new towns were on the map of The Bend by 1871 as a result of the new coal and salt enterprises. Clifton has been mentioned. Adamsville, adjoining Mason City on the northeast, was laid out by Robert Adams, owner of the land, in 1863 probably. The Mees Saw Mill and Flour Mill were in Adamsville. If the salt furnace begun by L.H. Sargent’s “Mason City Coal & Salt Company of West Virginia,” (incorporated in ’67) near the Adamsville coal bank had reached completion, there would have been a Sargentsville adjoining Robert Adams’ town. That was the name given in the Incorporation Act as the new company’s place of business. On the Ohio side between Minersville and Syracuse was laid out the town of Carletonville, wherein was located the Carleton Coal Company’s coal mine and also the Sutton Coal & Salt Company’s salt plant. (Time of establishment of town was not ascertained; its name appeared in several 1867 Telegraphs.) Pomeroy increased its limits during this decade. On May 30, 1867, Telegraph readers learned that the petition of the people of Coalport to be annexed to Pomeroy had been granted by the County Commissioner. “Pomeroy and Middleport now join,” added the reporter. “Pomeroy has gained about 2000 population.” The town of Clifton probably owed its first growth to the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 338 Bedford Salt Company. A claimant for that credit, however, might have been the Clifton Iron & Nail Mill Company, organized early in 1867. This was the company contemplated by the members of the recently formed and immediately dissolved Union Manufacturing Company noted above. Its purpose now was the manufacturing of “casing, lining, shingle, cut and wrought nails; finishing, lathing, clinch, blued nails; tobacco, barrel, cut and wrought spikes, etc., etc.” H.G. Daniel was made president of the company, H.H. Swallow treasurer, George Downing secretary, and General W.H. Powell of Civil War fame, superintendent. By November 6, 1867, the mill was in operation and about thirty dwellings had been built, besides stores, hotels, and other business structures. By January, ’68 the new Jones Keg Factory was “working full capacity to supply kegs for the Nail Mill,” which in turn was making 1500 kegs of nails per week and employing 125 hands. On January 15, 1858 a post office opened at Clifton, with W.H. Gilchrist in charge of its operation. By 1871, Squire Shank’s Novelty Wood Works was making “washing machines, bread boards, rolling pins, matches, coffins and rough boxes” at Clifton. Most of the work at this factory was done by Shank sons Edgar, Charlie, Fred, George, and Jim. Clifton’s Brick Yard, on the level stretch along the River bank, employed others besides family member. The bricks were made by hand, dried in the sun, burned “in the old-fashioned way.” New Industries had sprung up in every Bend town by 1871. At Pomeroy the revival of the Rolling Mill was perhaps the most helpful achievement for that town as well as for Mason City. All but collapsed in 1861, that industry appeared again on the Telegraph’s ad- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 339 vertising pages in 1865 but under a new name: The Pomeroy Iron Company. Of this new company V.B. Horton was president, W.H. Remington secretary and treasurer, Cyrus Grant agent. In June, 1867 one of the editors of the Point Pleasant Register made a trip to Pomeroy, ostensibly for the express purpose of writing up Pomeroy’s new industry. The following week Register readers had opportunity to see Pomeroy through the eyes of either Editor J.A. Shearer or Editor G. Tipett (and, incidentally, to read the Pomeroy Iron Company’s first Ad in the Register): We were up at Pomeroy a day or two ago. What a place it is! It is emphatically the iron city of the river. Whiz-whiz-whiz-whiz! Puffpuff-puff! Civilization is at work there! Men with their coats off and their shirt sleeves rolled-up-brawney [sic] stout-fisted men in the iron mills-are “harnessing down with iron bands” of steam and machinery the very elements, and making them tributary to the practical purposes of this busy day and generation. Away out West the steam-horse goes snorting and shrieking along the broad prairies or stands impatient to delve out a path in the solitude and primeval of the wilderness-but up from here in this busy city of Pomeroy comes a good portion of the material-the iron and nails-which make a path whereupon Progress can walk forward and plant her triumphant banners o’er the cities of the plains. Seven miles long, at night her numerous mills lighting up the face of the river-thousands of bushels of coal thundering down the [riggid]? declivities of the hills-steamboats loading and unloading-a seven miles stretch of utilitarianism, bone and muscle-such is Pomeroy in the year of our lord, 1887. A new building for the manufacture of nails had been added a few weeks before this glowing description appeared. On July 1, 1869, the Register copied from the Fleetwood Reflector the following item: The Pomeroy Iron Company, with a superior Nail Mill now in full blast, is under the broad pennant of Col. C. Grant. Our word for it, old “Iron Sides” will make the thing go. In January, 1870, the Company’s new advertisement notes its Cotton Ties especially and calls attention to its U.X. Brand, a superior iron “that we only make on especial orders.” Outside of salt works and coal works, the Pomeroy rolling mill and the Clifton Nail Mill were the Bend’s major industries. They �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 340 gave employment of one kind or another to men and boys in practically every Bend community. Other Pomeroy industries were: the Foundry & Machine Shop (Pomeroy Machine Co.), “Horton’s Boatyard,” the Davis Planing Mill, the Coalridge Flour Mill (Pomeroy Flour Co.), the Sugar Run Flour & Feed Mill (moved from Leading Creek by D.R. Jacobs in ’71), the Sugar Run Wool Carding Mil (H.B. Smith & Co.), the Pomeroy Sash Factory (W. Kautz & Co.). Only barges were built at the Boatyard after the War. The Little Condor was the last steamboat launched there. When in 1866 the Coalridge Flour Mill was destroyed by fire, a four-story brick was put up in its place by a Joint Stock composed of V.B. Horton, Capt. E. Williamson, N.R. Nye, Edmund Nye. This organization called itself The Pomeroy Flour Company. V.B. Horton was its president. The Pomeroy Machine Company, chartered in ’67 by W.H. Clark, Cyrus Grant, J.B. Hampton, George McQuigg and W.C. Williamson, built a new brick foundry and machine shop on the site of the Stackpole & Clark building recently burned down. Clark, the new company’s agent and treasurer, was succeeded in ’71 by Alban Davis. The company had a large number of stockholders. Gottlieb Wildermuth soon after his return from the War brought the old Schaeffer Brewery and put up in its place a 100-foot-square brick with two-story basement. The Wildermuth establishment, like its predecessor, was popularly called The Rolling Mill Brewery. D.J. Jenkins & Company’s Sugar Run Mill in January, 1867, was advertised as “Refitted, repaired for grinding or crushing and grinding, corn, oats,” etc. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 341 At Middleport in 1866 R.R. Hudson organized the Marine Docks Company, which brought Isaac Behan’s Dry Docks up from West Columbia, enlarged them and added a saw and planning mill: “Hudson’s Mill.” The Middleport Woolen Manufacturing Company was founded in February, 1867, with John Grant as president and John Schreiner as secretary. The Company bought Racine’s Woolen Factory, brought machinery and owner Thomas Egan to Middleport (Egan to run the factory), set up the machinery on the site of Grant & Company’s Crystal Mill (destroyed by fire July 4, 1866). The company advertised that it was manufacturing “Fancy Cassimeres, Jeans, Flannels, Satinets, Blankets, Linseys, Stocking Yarns, Etc.,” with “latest machinery and experienced workmen.” A Middleport reporter for the Telegraph in ’68 claimed for his town also “two flour mills, and one large foundry and machine shop, three sawmills, five blacksmith shops, two saddle shops.” (He overlooked the manufacturing establishment of Joseph Corben, Coppersmith, on Front above Rutland street, and the Murray & Co. brickyard.) The flour mills were the Grant Mill and the Champion, the latter built in ’67 by Roup & Bailey on the corner of Third and Machanic streets. In April, 1870 Grant Brothers bought the Champion and moved it to the Grant Mill, making the latter “one of the largest on the River.” Model Mills, Riggs & Jacobs proprietors, were advertised in ’69, location not given (but believed to have been Leading Creek). The new Middleport Machine Company announced in April, 1867 that it had purchased the J.W. Jones machine shop and foundry (that part of the five-story brick left after the fire of April, 1859); that the building was to be enlarged and improved so as to be prepared �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 342 to furnish farmers anything “from plow point to thrashing machine”; steamboatmen “everything from bolt to engine”; also saw mills, grist mills, car wheels, etc., etc. The new company’s president was Samuel Bradbury; its secretary-treasurer, R.C. Grant. Three Middleport saw-mills were: Wilson’s,o n Second street; the new saw-mill known as “Hudson’s Mill”; and the Holt & Webb saw-mill “on Second, west of Short street.” (Last named may have been the Ashley & McElhinny mill mentioned by Frank Whaley as “in the lower end of Middleport,” in 1861.) The reporter’s two saddle shops evidently were L.D. Moore’s on First and P.F. Bryan’s on Second, “nearly opposite the post office.” One of the five blacksmith shops was that of J.N. Semple, who did “Blacksmithing and General Wagon and Carriage Repairing, on Second street”-in the front room of his residence. Some of The Bend’s smaller towns acquired minor industries during this furnace-building period, some did not. West Columbia, visited by a Register reporter in December, ’67, was reported as “many years in a dilapidated condition but now taking on a new dress and new life.” Again in April, 1869 the Register was “pleased to report” for West Columbia that: The town…now can boast the finest furnace on the Ohio and Kanawha, which, under the management of J.S. King & Son, is turning out more salt than any other furnace on the above rivers [Kanawha and Ohio]. Besides the King Furnace, the Russell planing mill was still turning out coal and salt barges; also A.E. Sargent’s foundry and boiler works (bought of Arthur Brock in 1853) and the flour mill on Ice Creek were operated occasionally. At Mason City, the “steam saw-mill at the head of the ferry landing, owned by W.H. Remington, resumed operations after being idle a �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 343 long time," said the Pomeroy Banner in May, ’67. Presumably the mill had changed hands when George Patrick left Mason in ’61 or ’62. Mees’s Mills (saw and flour), actually beyond the city limits but nonetheless considered a Mason City industry, were prospering during this period. The Davis Brothers (J.T. and Sam) dissolved partnership in 1861 and the big saw- and planing mill standing a short distance above, east of the Mess Mills was operated a year or two by Sam Davis alone. After his return from the War as Capt. Sam Davis, he ran the mill only a very short time, if at all. PAVING BRICK, 50,000, of Best Quality, for sale at the Mason City Brickyard. Apply at Yard or to J.C. Cartwright, Pomeroy, Ohio. [Advertisement found in October, 1869 Telegraph.] The Yard was on Mason’s Front street “Green”; the bricks probably the remains of the old Lovell brickyard. By May, ’74 S.J. Harper, Pomeroy brickyard owner, had a New Kiln on the same site. Mason would have had the rolling mill that Clifton got in 1867, thinks an old resident, if her mayor, George Patrick, had not opposed it because “a mill would destroy the town’s beautiful site, and the smoke would be an intolerable nuisance.” Hartford City in December, 1867 thought it was to be further industrialized when Major Brown’s coal and salt property was reported sold to one “Rev. R.A. Arthur with the view of starting a salt furnace and probably a rolling mill and nail factory.” If the sale was actually made, one wonders whether it was those prospective industries that instigated Major Brown to lay out his farm into town lots and name the platted town Brownsville. At New Haven the Steam Furniture & Wagon Factory of Weaver & Shipley commenced operating in February, 1870-if the new firm’s �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 344 announcement in the Point Pleasant Register proved to be that of an actual industry. That enterprising town had also two coopershops-which was one more than was usual in a town with only one salt furnace. The Capehart Flour Mill on the River bank just east was sold about 1870 to Adam and Jacob Leitweiler, German back of New Haven since early in the 19th century. Though corporate limits of the town, that flour mill always was part of New Haven. of New Haven farmers living not within the regarded as a Neither Minersville nor Syracuse, as far as could be learned, had any other industries of importance besides their salt furnaces and coal mines and the blacksmith shops and coopershops connected therewith. The Carleton Sawmill below Syracuse, with a planing mill added, still was cutting and preparing timber for most of the building projects in the surrounding country. Racine, visited by O.B. Chapman in January, 1867 (after his fifteen years’ absence from the county), had grown from “a few scattered farm houses, wheat and corn fields in ’52, to a thriving village of several hundred inhabitants.” Industries noted by Chapman were “two flour mills, two saw-mills and a good boatyard.” The Egan Woolen Factory had been sold to the Middleport Woolen Mfg. Co. during that same year (see above). But on April 10, 1870 T.E. Egan & Sons announced: “The Racine Woolen Factory Re-Opened!” By no means all the smaller industries of the 1860s have been presented; that would have been inpossible. It is believed, however, that enough have been shown to bring out the main point; namely, that salt had completely transformed the appearance of the en- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 345 tire region; that is, the Horseshoe Bend and a part of the west side of the boot-shaped bend. Coal, of course, was the fuel used at all salt plants. As in the '50s, the poorest part of the coal seam and the slack were used in the furnaces, while the best part was sold to local users or was shipped. With so many mines in operation, mining was even more than formerly a Leading Industry and at the same time more than ever a subsidiary to salt manufacturing. A NEW INDUSTRY:-At the end of the '60s, however, there came into The Bend an industry that was wholly dependent upon yet not necessary to the salt industry. The industry was Bromine Manufacturing. In April, 1868, Gustav A. Hagermann, brilliant young chemist from Denmark, made the first bromine in the Ohio Valley. Hagerman set up his first still at the Dabney Salt Works. Some time during the next year he put up a second still at the Minersville furnace. The bromine was obtained from the liquid that remained in the grainers after the salt had been lifted out of them. In that liquid the bromine existed as magnesium bromide. By the addition of other chemicals and a process of distillation and condensation, the bromine was separated from the bittern, as the liquid was called. The bromine was then funnelled into bottles for shipment to manufacturing chemists. By 1870 Mason City, also, had a bromine factory. In 1868, Dr. Hermann Stieren, Munich University graduate and former chemical lecturer at Humbolt College, St. Louis, came with his wife to Mason from Natrona, Pennsylvania. With Dr. Stieren came Hermann Lerner and wife, the two men having been in the bromine manufacturing business ln the Pennsylvania town. In Mason they procured living quarters at the residence of Eduard Schwarz on the southwest corner of Anderson �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 346 and Third streets. In the Schwarz’s spacious back yard stood a large iron kettle for various domestic uses. In that kettle Dr. Stieren and Harmann Lerner, assisted by Eduard Schwarz, began experimenting with brine from the local salt furnace. They boiled and distilled and condensed and what not until they were convinced that the brine contained a high percentage of bromine. In 1870 Dr. Stieren set up a factory on the east boundary of the Hope Furnace’s recently built salt sheds; and there Hermann Lerner made bromine while Physician-Chemist Stieren practiced medicine5. 5. It is claimed by local West Virginia historians that Dr. Stieren made the first bromine in The Bend. Regrettably it must be stated that Hegermann’s claim to that honor has the most substantial basis. A Telegraph item could be quoted to prove it; but that is not considered necessary. The important thing is that the industry was brought to The Bend; for its relation to the salt industry in later years (as will be seen) was of vast significance. The War was hardly over before the oil excitement bubbled up again in The Bend with more or less frequency until near the end of the ‘60s. In May, 1865, A.S. & W. Darrow commenced boring in Diamond Hollow-where oil had been discovered in ’51-struck oil and gas. On June 29 the Darrows had “over eighty barrels of oil in seven days, ready for shipping.” Reports from other wells were said to be good. On July 1, 1869, Hartford City was “soon to be as famous for oil as for salt.” The Valley City Salt Company while drilling for brine struck oil at a depth of sixty feet. A company was immediately formed. Hartford City was “alive with excitement” and “wells in abundance” were soon to be commenced. And this is the last that was said, in print, of either the Hartford or the Diamond Hollow wells. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 347 THE CRISIS (1871-1876) By 1871 the furnace-building frenzy had almost spent itself. Some of the furnace builders had more than spent themselves. The Middleport Salt Company built a furnace (The Middleport) in ’73, made an assignment in ’75. L.H. Sargent’s Mason City Furnace was sold at auction by the assignee, James A. Waddell, on July 8, 1872. Sargent’s creditors, G.W. Root and James P. Kilbreth, both of Cincinnati, bought the plant for $8000. West Columbia’s King Furnace shut down when the proprietor, John S. King, returned to New York in 1873. The Burnap Salt Factory (Newcastle Furnace) sold to a company of Eastern men in ’73, the latter went bankrupt in December, 1874. Nevertheless the demand for and the production of Pomeroy salt (as all Bend salt was known in the market) continued to increase until 1874, when they are said to have reached their highest point. The furnaces still in operation that year were yielding from five to seven million bushels annually. The Ohio River Salt Company in January, ’72, paid out $200,000 to its member companies. And yet, by November of the same year, eight of those members had separated from the parent agency and organized The Virginia and Ohio Salt Company. Five or six hitherto independent companies now united with either the old or the new agency. Hand in hand with increased demand for salt also increased demand for coal. The Pomeroy Coal Company, still the leader, took its coal from its leased mines: the Minersville, the Excelsior, the Peacock, Dabney, and Diamond. Its stockholders now were V.B. Horton, �A.F. Lederer, THE POMEROY BEND, 348 the Dabney Estate, E.J. Horton and Frank Dabney. Its officers: V.B. Horton, president; Horace S. Horton, secretary and treasurer. Horace M. Horton was the company’s book-keeper. The Pomeroy Coal Company was the largest employer of labor in The Bend, more than sic hundred men and boys being on its payroll. Its prices were the standard for all Ohio River mines. During the early 1870s it moved its floats and barges from Coalport to the foot of the Peacock mine. Other coal companies arose. The Sehon Coal Company, with Wyatt Willis as president and James Kelly as secretary, opened its bank in the fall of 1871. The coal of that bank was pronounced “superior to any mined here before.” The California Mining & Manufacturing Company was formed about the same time by Messrs. Pearce, Sayre and Hope of Hartford. The new Sterling Company operated the former Hrantsburg mine at Clifton. Prominent among individual operators were: Ebenezar Williams, at Minersville; John Fisher, at Middleport; Capt. Richard Blazer, at Leadington; W.W. Jackson and Thomas Jones, who together opened the Flint Hill mine near New Haven about 1874 and in a short time were employing from thirty to sixty men. Bromine manufacturing made rapid progress during this period. Gustav Hagermann by 1871 had leased the bittern of the Minersville and another furnace and had made money so rapidly that in ’71 he was satisfied to sell his leases to J. Juhler, fellow-countryman and classmate, who had just arrived in Pomeroy. By the end of ’75 J.J. Juhler had leased all the bitter water on the Ohio side and some on the West Virginia side; and he was exporting bromine to England, France and Germany through agents in New York City, London and Berlin �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 349 On the West Virginia side, Dr. Stieren and Herman Lerner had parted company in the bromine manufacturing business. By the close of 1875 Dr. Stieren had secured control of the bitter water at West Columbia’s Quaker furnace and with the help of Eduard Schwarz and James Jarrott, a Mason City youth, was producing the pungent but valuable chemical so extensively that he was reputed “the most extensive bromine manufacturer in the world.” Hermann Lerner continued the factory at the Hope furnace, where Hermann Troeger made bromine while Mr. Lerner busied himself with plans for the increasing of his business. On June 18, 1873, with the help of his brother Bernhardt Lerner, of Hartford City, and three German friends, the Mallinkrodt brothers of St. Louis, Hermann Lerner secured the incorporation of The West Virginia Bromine Company, of which he himself controlled 159 of the 240 shares of stock. The Incorporating Act provided that the company was to expire on June 1, 1893 and that its principal office was to be kept at Mason City. Other industries-old ones revived and wholly new ones-kept coming into the scene: At Pomeroy, in 1874, Proode Brothers & Company rented the Davis Planing Mill, Sash & Door Factory; H.B. Smith & Company’s Sugar Run Wool & Carding Factory was “put in first rate order.” At Mason City, John Young and others bought the old PatrickNickolson saw-mill and started a boatyard. By November, 1875, William Larimer, foreman of the boatyard had completed a model barge, the largest barge of that kind ever yet built in that vicinity. The Diamond Glass Company was organized in the year 1874 for the purpose of erecting a glass factory at Mason City. The organizers of the company were John Young, Thomas Watkins, Mathias Young, J.C. Jones, and Moses Morgan, all of Mason City; R.L. Winkleblack of �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 350 Hartford City and John Eberle, of Pittsburgh. The factory was to manufacture all kinds of hollow glass ware, flint, or white ware; and window glass. The buildings were nearing completion in ’75 when Mason’s citizens were disheartened by the rumor that the factory was to be sold for debt. To Middleport and vicinity came: E.D. Grant’s Novelty Iron Works, corner Front and Mill streets. The Works by ’74 were making “Steam Whistles, Steam Gauges, Globe Valves and all kinds of Brass Goods.” The Middleport Machine Company, s.w. corner Second and Race (or Mechanic street), by November, ’73 had as president Joseph McKnight; as secretary and treasurer, James Boggess; as superintendent, W.B. Brown. In 1874 the Ohio Machine Company was incorporated with J.S. Boggess its president and treasurer, and Lewis Haag it superintendent. (This evidently was the Middleport Machine Company of 1867 reorganized and renamed.) By 1873 Middleport also had its Middleport Furniture Company, manufacturers of all kinds of cabinet furniture for the wholesale trade, with “salesroom and office on west side of Second between Rutland and Main” – the later Walnut street ; T.C. Smith was president and Phineas Hugg secretary and treasurer of this company. Middleport’s German Furniture Company was founded in 1872 by Stephen Eneglhardt and Father Jessing, the latter’s object being to provide work for the boys of his Orphan Asylum in Pomeroy. The factory, located on Lincoln street between Third and Fourth, was reported in December, ’75, to be “pushing things.” In 1872 or ’73 the Middleport Boiler Works went into operation on the corner of Third and Mechanic streets. The proprietors specialized in “marine boilers.” �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 351 In 1874 the Grant Brothers' Flour Mill was reorganized and the firm's name changed to Middleport Flour Company. Some other small industries in Middleport in 1874: S. Gilmore's Coopershop, west side of Beech, Lower Pomeroy. Holt & Webb Planing Mill, Second street west of Short. The Home Manufacturing Company, Carriage & Wagon Makers, corner Grant and Beech streets. Murray & Company, Brickmakers (location not given). Clifton's Keg Factory (J.W. Jones), burned down in 1873 but was rebuilt at once. In '74 it burned down again, was again rebuilt, this time by Messrs. Holland & Maxwell, who bought the factory and continued making nails for the nail mill. West Columbia's Foundry, idle for some time, went up in flames in l875. Mr. Sargent's youngest son, who had just been brought home from an insane asylum (supposedly cured) had started the fire. Of this heyday of The Bend’s salt and coal business the River necessarily was the center. Towboats playing upstream and downstream could be seen or heard at any time and at all times. Few, if any, of the salt companies or coal companies except The Pomeroy Coal Company owned their own towboats during this period. For the transportation of coal and salt, of iron from the Pomeroy Rolling mill, or nails from the Clifton nail mill, dependence was placed on the various regularly organized transportation companies, on individually owned towboats and on the regular Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and other packets. Three transportation companies were advertised: The Pomeroy Salt Transportation Co., R.R. Hudson, president; the Ohio River Transportation Co., John McElhinny, president; R.R. Hudson, business manager; the Parkersburg & Ohio River Transportation Co., Capt. J.N. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 352 Williamson, president. Each company had its own steamboats and fleet of barges. The offices of the first two companies named were in Middleport; the location of the third was not given but presumably was Pomeroy. Of Individually owned towboats, Captain James Shoemaker’s Charley Bowen (bought about 1872) was one of the most popular. The Pomeroy Coal Company’s Condor (No. 5) transported that company’s coal. The Little Condor belonged to the Ohio River Transportation Co., which bought it from the Pomeroy Coal Company in 1867. (The O.R.T. Co. owned also the Salt Valley.) The Telegraph, Potomac, St. James and other Pomeroy-Cincinnati packets; the Andes, Emma Graham, Hudson, Pittsburgh-Cincinnati packets, often lay hours long at the various salt furnace inclines while their decks were being loaded with barrels and barrels of salt; or at the Rolling Mill and Nail Mill landings receiving iron or nails. But this period was not without its railroad prospect. Begun about 1867, the second movement for a railroad did not get well on its way until about 1871. In October of that year a meeting took place at the Court House to “inaugurate measures to secure the construction of the Atlantic & Lake Erie Railway to this point.” Hon. T.A. Plants was chairman of the meeting. Speakers were: Judge Heckard, E.J. Horton, Col. Shepard, M. Bosworth, Judge Stansbury. Committee to plan measures: E.J. Horton, A. Seebohm, R.R. Hudson, Col. Shepard, Columbia Downing, Val Duttenhoeffer, W.A. Archer, James M. Titus. “Railroad stock was taken rapidly. The people are in earnest this time,” said the weekly newspaper. Within the next month G.W. Moredock, of Hartford City, was reported as taking $2500 stock; Capt. S.A. Burnap, of Newcastle, $1500; and V.B. Horton guaranteed the $3000 assigned him. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 353 During the year 1872 the various routes-Sugar Run, Monkey Run, Leading Creek via Rutland-were surveyed. Early in '73 actual work was begun. In August, Henry Priode secured a contract for building "part of the tunnel of the river hill." In March, '74, "The Monkey Run Tunnel is progressing; about 530 feet are finished," the public was told. In March, '75, V.B. Horton and others "left on the Hudson to attend a meeting of the A. & L.E.R.R. at Bucyrus. The result of the meeting will probably determine whether the road is to he built the coming season or the be indefinitely postponed." On June 2, "Construction of the A.& L.E.R.R. is assured! Pomeroy is to have a railroad at last!" rejoiced the Telegraph. "At last!" alas, proved to be five years in the future. FOREBODINGS.-Now, it must be revealed that during the latter part of this seemingly remarkable prosperous period there was creeping a gradually increasing foreboding among business men of The Bend. And there was real cause for such forebodings. Some years before the Civil War began, the State of Michigan discovered that it had vast beds of solid salt lying beneath its surface and that by boring down into the salt stratum and soaking it with water a nearly saturated brine could be produced; furthermore, it discovered that the slabs and saw-dust which its extensive saw-mills were glad to get rid of made excellent fuel for salt furnaces. And so, with saw-mills and salt furnaces working together, it happened that as early as l860 Michigan salt had begun to inch its way into the markets that hitherto had been monopolized by Pomeroy salt. Then, too, there was the increased production in western New York, which product had found its way into The Bend's once exclusive markets. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 354 (a) And last but by no means least cause of such forebodings was the reestablishment of the old order of things-a reestablishment that naturally followed such inflated business conditions as had characterized the immediate post-war period. Business men, in general, were not slow in sensing the coming calamity, though for a long time they showed little tendency toward trying to do anything about it. Finally, however, by the year 1876 some of the leading business minds of The Bend had not only been sitting up and taking notice, it appears, but had resolved to really try to do something about it. But before going into the details of that mighty effort for retrieving lost business opportunities, let us take a look at The Bend from another point of view-a point which will show The Bend's progress from the year 1861 to 1876: that is, from the beginning of the Civil War to the above-mentioned significant event to-be. C. PROSPERITY AND PROGRESS (1861-1876) It has been seen that the regularly licensed ferry was established in the boot-shaped bend whenever and wherever such advanced means of intercourse were in demand. Wherefore it follows that the number and character of its ferries were an index of the degree of progress made by the Horseshoe Bend. The ferries of the 1850s have been shown above. It remains now to observe the new ones that came later and the progress made by the old ones during the '60s and the first half of the 1870s. In June of 1867, on application to the Board of Supervisors of the State of West Virginia a steam ferry was to be established between Newcastle (later styled Greasy) and the lower end of Middleport. (Legal notice of the ferry's establishment appeared in the Point Pleasant Register.) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 354 (b) Very soon after the founding of Clifton in ’67, a little sidewheel steam ferry was put in by Capt. Wm. Linton to ply between the new town and Middleport. The name of Capt. Linton’s boat was Empire. In August of the same year the Empire was sold to The Marine Dock Company. Repaired temporarily, the boat was then sold to R.R. Hudson and displaced by the Acorn, a better boat. Peret Shutt, commander of the Empire, and Jeff Gardner, her engineer, continued in the same positions on the new ferryboat. At Mason City, the steam ferry Kate Howard of 1857 was succeeded in ’64 by the Enterprise, owned by Peter Roush and his son Sam Roush. In a few years this boat was replaced by Enterprise No. 2, an improved edition of the first Enterprise. Harvey D. Bailey was engineer on both these ferries. In January of ’73, Peter Roush and son sold their ferryboat to the Pomeroy & Mason City Ferry Company, a new organization of which William Adams, of Portland, Ohio, was the largest stockholder. Harvey Bailey also had stock in the new P. & M.C. Ferry Co. A new boat, the Champion, was immediately built by the Company. As soon as the Champion was installed in the Pomeroy-Mason trade the P. & M.C. Ferry Company transferred its old boat, the Enterprise No. 2 to Kerr’s Run to ply between Enterprise Landing5 and McDaniel’s 5. So named by John Strider, who was not proprietor of a large flour mill about a mile back from the River. Strider had a large sign at the Landing, which sign the public was supposed to construe into: “Highest figures paid for grain, horse feed and whiskey to boot.” The word figures was expressed by several numeral, horse by an artistic (?) daub of that animal, the last syllable of whiskey by a key, and after the word to was another hieroglyphic for the word boot. The Name for Strider’s mill was Enterprise Mill. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 355 Landing opposite. Ferry service with skiff and flat was maintained at Hartford and New Haven; and in 1875, on application of the German Coal & Salt Company, similar service was installed at German Furnace. Farther up in the Boot-shaped bend-between Racine and Graham Station, Letart Falls and Letart, W.Va., and so on- there were regular established ferries, (skiff and flatboat). Scores of people-yes, hundreds by the ‘70s-crossed on The Bend’s ferries daily from the West Virginia side; on foot, in conveyances of every character and description, all impelled by the same purpose: to make a business, or professional, or pleasure trip to some one or more of the towns across the River. And, inasmuch as Pomeroy had attained metropolitan status, the chances were that the final destination of the majority of ferry passengers was Pomeroy. All roads led to Pomeroy, by the year 1870. Of The Bend’s three steam ferries the one at Mason City was the largest; in fact, the Champion was said the be the finest ferryboat between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. A good boat was needed at that place; for more people crossed there than at any other place. Some people from Hartford and New Haven preferred to drive to Mason City and cross on the steam ferry rather than on their own ferry. By the ‘70s scores of Mason City people worked at Pomeroy; men, in the rolling mill, machine shops, coal mines, salt works; women, in the millinery shops, tailor shops, dress-making shops, stores. Scores attended Pomeroy churches and Sunday schools: German Lutherans, German Catholics, German “Presbyterians”; Episcopalians, Baptists. Every Mason Cityite who could afford to do so shopped at Pomeroy. Many men spent their Saturday evenings in Pomeroy saloons rather than in those at Mason City. On Saturday morning, Saturday night, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 356 and Sunday morning a veritable “confusion of tongues” could be heard on the Mason City ferryboat, especially in the ladies’ cabin where German, Irish, Welsh, English and American women all talked at the same time, each group in its native tongue. Between Middleport and Pomeroy the omnibus service begun by M. Barlow in 1857 continued more or less regularly during the War. In 1868 L. Lindsey of Middleport put in a “new and handsome bus” between the two towns. John Swink was running “the only 4-horse bus in the Line” in 1872. F.E. Fletcher was giving ten-minute service in 1875. Between Syracuse and Pomeroy bus service was begun by August Bartel of Syracuse about 1864. To announce the arrival and departure of his bus Mr. Bartel blew a succession of tan-ta-ra's, loud and long, on the bugle he had used in his German military service. By 1875 a son, W.F. Bartel, was running the bus twice a day and blowing the father's bugle. Minersville, Kerr's Run, and Mason City people too, heard and responded to its call. Travelling in the buses was over rough unpaved roads that in summertime were usually dust-covered and at other times either mudcovered or slippery with ice, snow or sleet. But no one ever had known better roads, and so the buses were considered a great convenience for those who did not own buggies or wagons or ox-teams. Yes, ox-teams were still seen in Pomeroy in the early 1870s. Another much-patronized means of getting to Pomeroy and to Middleport was the little Gallipolis-Syracuse or Gallipolis-Ravenswood steamer that came into The Bend at or just before the beginning of the Civil War. One of the first of these appears to have been the R.C.M. Lovell, of which a Telegraph reporter said in December, 1861: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 357 Every morning and evening about the same hour one heard the shrill whistle of the little R.C.M. Lovell as she leaves and returns to our landing. She is very prompt and quite a convenience to citizens of Gallipolis and Pomeroy. In May, 1862, came the Transfer, bought by Capt. E. Williamson and N.R. Nye to be a “River Omnibus” between Syracuse and Cheshire. The boat was to make three trips daily, fare 5c from each landing to the next. Also to be kept on board was “a saloon and other accommodations for the comfort of the travelling public.” Other short-run boats came and went during the decade: the Victress, the Energy, the Nannie D., the Oriole commanded by S.P. Coe and known as “the boat without a bar.” In 1871 the W.H. Smith, and soon afterwards the Brown Brothers’ Humming Bird, the first two of the swift little screw propellers so popular during the 1870s. Capt. Rhodes’s Mocking Bird, (very much like the Humming Bird), the Wild Gazelle and the Katydid, longer and more slender than the Birds, followed in quick succession, but with longer runs. Before viewing in detail the many business establishments and other goals of all this travel, let us look at the boot-shaped bend’s inhabitants themselves-as to number general appearance: The population of Pomeroy was 5,284 and that of Middleport 2,236 by the 1870 Federal census. Pomeroy had taken in Monkey Run and “Nebraska” (out on Sugar Run); Middleport had incorporated the Bosworth, Behan and Donnally Additions and in 1874 Lower Pomeroy. Roughly estimated, those two towns together had about one third of the twenty to twenty-five thousand occupying the boot-shaped bend as far as, say, Letart Falls. West Columbia, numberinf 778 in 1870, had lost a thousand of more since its heyday (about ’57), and was still losing; while Clifton’s 693 was still to increase but never to reach the thous- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 358 ands predicted for it. Mason City’s 1,182 made it the largest town in Mason County. With prospects of reaching at least 2000 in the next few years, it is not surprising that Mason’s leading business minds began to conspire to bring the county court house to their town. Unluckily, the good people of Point Pleasant regarded the young upstart town’s aspirations as nothing less than presumptious, hence proceeded to squelch them permanently. And they succeeded in doing exactly that. Hartford City’s population in 1870 numbered 918. Incorporated on March 5, 1868 while its second salt furnace was bringing in many new employment seekers, Hartford nevertheless did not attain the goal it so confidently expected to reach. New Haven, a mere hamlet until its salt works went into operation in 1862, had grown large enough by February 23, 1864 to get its own post office-with Charles Juhling for postmaster and the office named New Haven. By 1870 New Haven had 489 inhabitants. Like Hartford, it did not grow much larger. About 1867 Racine’s population was estimated at 700 by a newspaper which discovered also that Racine turned out thirteen Fire an two Life Insurance agents, wherefore it was ready to put up “Racine against the World for Insurance Agents.” Probably about three thousand of The Bend’s population were engaged in mining in 1870. These, in general, consisted of the original oldcountry Welsh, German and English miners that were still living; of sons of those pioneer miners; and of many Irish. Neither West Columbia nor Clifton had many Germans. At Hartford, English miners predominated. At Mason, if one nationality could be said to have predominated, it was the Germans. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 359 Not all the sons of foreigners were miners. Some were opening mines of their own, becoming operators, in 1870. Some worked in the salt plants and coopershops, in the mills at Pomeroy and Clifton, in the keg factory at Clifton, and in other factories at Middleport and Pomeroy. Many were running stores and other independent enterprises. Some were in the professions. The Bend’s foreigners were fast becoming Americanized. Nor, on the other hand, were all the miners, mill workers and factory hands foreigners or sons of foreigners. Pioneer Americans' sons worked side by side with foreigners in probably every industrial plant in The Bend. And, finally, there were the Negroes that now swelled the population of nearly every Bend town. A few of these were The Bend slaves and the descendants of Bend slaves freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. The great majority of Negroes, however, had been left in Pomeroy and Middleport as chance refugees of Lightburn's Retreat. There, because of their utter inexperience in making their own living, they had for a time presented a perplexing economic problem. Fortunately, a goodly number had as slaves learned coopering at the Kanawha Salt Works or were experienced in other work connected with salt making, such as salt lifting and salt packing. These had little difficulty in finding employment (but some difficulty, occasionally, in keeping such jobs; (some white workmen objected to working beside them). Others, both men and women, in time found work in the hotels, still others in private families. Few, if any other refugees were as fortunate as Olive Meade, who reached Middleport by way of the Kanawha River. On coming into town, almost the first person Olive saw was James Haptonstall. Recognizing Mr. Haptonstall as a former master the overjoyed Negress �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 360 sank to the ground and clapped him about the knees; she knew she had found a friend. (Mr. Haptonstall while living near Charleston, Virginia, several years before the Civil War, had taken two or three Negroes in payment of a debt, and Olive was one of these slaves. Mr. Haptonstall had not been a slave-holder before that time.) Another fortunate ex-slave was the expert coal miner owned by Lovell & Payne (see above). The Negro had saved the money he had been paid for overtime work, and thus, when he was freed in January, 1863 had enough to make him financially independent. With his big family he had been left in Mason by Mr. Lovell (when the latter moved to Kentucky in 1862), but crossed the River to either Pomeroy or Middleport when he was emancipated. As, in fact, did all the other Negroes that were freed in ’63, except a few who chose to remain with their former masters. And so it happened that there were practically no Negroes on the south side of The Bend untio 1871 when a number were brought to Mason City by The Mason Salt Company (see above). To protect those Negroes from threatened danger, the Company domiciled them in a row of double houses on its vacant tract below its salt furnace, built a high board fence around the tract and had the new workers taken to and from the enclosure under heavy guard. Neither Hartford nor Syracuse ever had any Negro population; both towns used drastic means to keep Negroes from settling in their midst. (Not by town ordinances, however, were such measures used; merely by common consent. At both places the prejudice was said to have been of economic rather than of racial origin.) The intermarrying of nationalities begun in the early pioneer days proceeded during this period with greatly renewed impulse as the foreign element become more and more Americanized. Already �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 361 started, the “marvelous race mixture” (quoting Dr. Hulbert once more) resulting therefrom grew ever more and more marvelous, even more astounding in its complexity and, if Dr. Hulbert was right, even more potent as a developing factor. In such intermarrying the Welsh, Irish and Scotch figured more frequently than did the Germans because they were familiar with the English language, whereas only the more highly educated Germans were likely to have such linguistic advantage. And yet, even as in earlier days, inability to speak each other’s language rarely deterred an otherwise desirable marriage. Hugo Juhling came to New Haven from Saxony, Germany, during the summer of 1862. Hugo’s stock of English words was exceedingly limited, but “with his rosy cheeks and full bloom beard he was pleasant to look at,” recalled the Reverend George Wilding. Obviously it was his general attractiveness that made it possible for Betty Shank to understand the handsome young foreigner’s “shy and timid courting” and finally to become his wife though she couldn’t speak a word of German. William Jackson’s brogue could not have been wholly lost when, barely in his teens, he began to woo ten-year-old English-German Mary Roush, who lived on a farm above New Haven. Mary was not repelled by “Bill” Jackson’s foreign brogue when she met him at Robert Robinson’s Sunday School (see below); she saw only that “his eyes were brown and merry and his cheeks red.” Hence her joy was unbounded when, on the Sunday before Christmas, the Scotch lad approached her after Sunday School and held out to her a large, beautiful candy apple with green stem and rosy cheek-the apple she had seen in the store window and gazed upon so longingly but, oh, so hopelessly. The boy had paid an unusual price for the apple, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 362 Mary Roush learned after she had become Mrs. “Bill” Jackson. The boy’s mother was dead, his father had gone away to hunt work and hence during that whole winter was able to send William and his brother only enough money to buy the meal for mush they themselves had to cook. For Christmas the father had sent each boy a quarter. William used his quarter, his only Christmas present, to buy little black-eyed Mary Roush “the only luxury present in the town” Adapted from “A Christmas Present of the 1860s” by the late Florence Jackson Parker. Foreigners began to look less foreign as they gradually discarded their “outlandish” apparel for that of their fellow citizens. In the spring of 1869 many foreign young ladies hardly could be distinguished from their American contemporaries when they, too, came out in the newstyle bonnets that Editor Chapman ridiculed as, "…smaller than ever… Some cannot be seen with the naked eye… The less they weigh the more they cost. A cabbage leaf trimmed with three red peppers and a dried cherry sells for $25. It is called a jockey… On advantage, it can be eaten as a salad when the fashion changes…” Nor in that same year when they appeared in the new bonnets that in Chapmanesque exaggeration were said to be, “worn high above the head and consist of a small piece of velvet (the smaller the better), with flowers, lace, feathers, birds, butterflies, bugles, a French horn, a fiddle, &C on top of it. Stylish, of course.” Ladies of foreign parentage in the summer of 1872 were among those who, in the new-style Dolly Varden dresses helped to increase the season’s “bustle and activity”-an editorial pun satirizing the women’s bustles and the fashionable dancing of that day. In the fall of 1875, many of them, too, wore the skirts that evoked the newspaper admonition: "Pull her back, girls, to the last notch. Never mind what the heathenish press say about it; it’s none of their business how tight you pin back or what kind of stripes your stockings have.” �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 363 Of foreign parentage, too, were some of the “young bloods,” who wore their trousers stuffed in their boot-tops so as to display the red, green or blue Opera Top then so fashionable; and some, quite likely, of those who were accustomed to “resort to the hills on Sunday after noons to smoke, and play cards, “among whom were nine-year-olds smoking with the ease and grace of a man of twenty-five.” But not out of Monkey Run or Dutch Town did many, (if any) of the very modernly dressed young ladies or young gentlemen sally forth. Those communities were still strictly German in dress and in language as late as 1876; exceptions were very, very rare. Whether the snuff-rubbing of stylish young ladies of the 1860s was taken up by their foreign or near-foreign contemporaries was not learned. We return now to the “over-the-River” travel of 1871-76. As in pre-War days, shopping was still the main purpose of such travel. It was only in Pomeroy and Middleport that those small-town residents who could afford to buy the latest and best of everything, could procure them: dress materials, hats, shoes, furniture, etc.; the roasted coffee that appeared on the markets soon after the War closed; the new grades of refined sugars as they appeared, each grade lighter than the preceding one, and at last the Coffee A Sugar that was actually white- but not granulated. Whenever a company store kept any of these or other luxuries, their prices were so high that only those employees whose pass books always showed them in debt any way, would buy them. Green vegetables, in general use by the close of this period, were not as a rule sold in the stores. During the spring and sum- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 364 mer months droves of Monkey Run boys and girls came up to Pomeroy very early in the morning with baskets of lettuce, onions, raddishes, spinach; later, with peas, beans, carrots, etc., to peddle them from house to house and also to the various hotels. Groups of German children from Mason City took their vegatables to Clifton in the late '60s and early '70s. But when the buyers began to offer them "scrip," as the money substitute given out by the nail mill to its employees was called, they decided to take their vegetables to Pomeroy. Such competition was not heartily welcomed by the Pomeroy young vegetable vendors. Many of the merchants of Pomeroy and Middleport were now oldtimers, fixtures as it were, whose well-appointed stores and shops were the goal of most intra- and extra-Bend shoppers. At Pomeroy were such first-comers as George Eiselstein, S.A.M. Moore, William P. Orborn, W.H. Remington, W.J. Prall, J.B. Hampton, W.A. Aicher, Charles Bichmann, Darius Reed, Thomas Whiteside, Adolph Seebohm, Sam Silverman, Ernest Felger, Henry Neutzling, Branch Brothers, George McQuigg. Some of these were still in their original locations; some had changed locations or business connections or both; some had built new stores. Most prolific builder-of-store-buildings was George Eiselstein of the firm of Eiselstein & Swallow. In 1866 Mr. Eiselstein built himself a fine two-story brick business structure on the west corner of Butternut and Front streets; but by November of 1867 he had sold the building to Moses Frank of Gallipolis, thereby causing the Telegraph to say that “it will be a matter of general regret in Mr. Eiselstein goes out of business.” Mr. Eiselstein didn’t. A year later (fall of 1868) the new firm of George Eiselstein & Company (Philip Elberfeld) was advertising its �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 365 new general store “at Edwards’ old stand near the Stone Bridge.” Two years later (December, 1869) Mr. Eiselstein was “remodeling the store on the upper corner of Court and Front and expecting to move in on January 1st.” In October, 1873 Mr. Eiselstein completed a large threestory brick on the east side of the Edwards Building. The whole third floor of this building was to be used as a “public hall”; it was, in fact, Pomeroy’s first Opera House. In September, 1875 this building was sold to Messrs. George McQuigg and Samuel Davis, Mr. Eiselstein continuing his “Pioneer Cash House” on the first floor. He was not yet through building stores; but his subsequent work in that line belongs to the next period. Upon the death of Judge Osborn in 1862, Moore & Osborn became S.A.M. Moore & Company (W.P. Osborn), but still at the old stand. By 1875 S.A.M. Moore was selling Dry Goods on the west side of Court, while a few doors below him at his recently opened News Depot W.P. Osborn offered “Books, Bibles, Fancy Articles, Etc.” Adolph Seebohm in December, 1875 moved his drug store from the Remington Building “into his new building on the opposite corner lately occupied by the Jacob Schloss Clothing Store.” Charles Bichmann, Jeweler, had no partner by 1875, was still on the west corner of Front and Court; the building now being the Bichmann Building, not the Cartwright Building as formerly. Ernest Feiger, Portrait and Landscape Photographer, was occupying the second floor of the Bichmann Building. Hosmer and Charlie Branch in 1868 bought the Leather and Shoe Finding business of George McQuigg, who retired in order to take over management of the Coal Ridge Salt Works. All the other pre-War merchants mentioned above were still holding forth at their respective locations of the 1850s. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 366 Some of the many new competitors in the mercantile field were: Former soap manufacturer David Geyer, who in 1862 announced himself as “successor to H.H. Swallow.” In 1869 David Geyer Senior moved his store to “Front below Court”; in 1871 he took David Geyer Jr. into partnership. Jacob Elberfeld, clerking for S.A.M. Moore. In April, 1865 he and his brother Philip Elberfeld were handling “Dry Goods, Boots, Shoes, Notions, Assorted Groceries,” on “Front street, one door below Court.” John C. Probst and father, George Probst, in 1864 built a brick Sales Room on Front below Court. By the end of 1875 the firm had become J.C. Probst & Son, with shop still above Naylor’s Run. In 1863 Thomas McLaughlin and James Crosbie opened a Merchant Tailoring shop on Court street, west side. In the late 1860s this firm took into their employ Adam Darling, expert tailor just arrived from Canada. By 1874 Mr. Crosbie and Mr. Darling each had shops of their own in Middleport. In 1872, David Silberberg established his “New York Clothing House” in the Edwards Building, where he advertised as “Dealer in Clothing, Gents’ Furnishing Goods, Hats, Caps, Trunks.” Simon Silverman & Son, Merchant Tailors and Dealers in Ready-Made Clothing, were doing business on Front, between Court and Linn in 1874. Berhardt Koehler, resident of Pomeroy since 1846, opened a Boot & Shoe Store on Court street in 1865, (at the age of nineteen). Like all other shoe dealers of the time, young Koehler also manufactured (made) shoes. In 1875 J.A. Winter had a Shoe Store on Front between Lynn and Sycamore, where he, likewise, “manufactured” shoes. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 367 In December, 1875, Milton Koehler, Watchmaker and Jeweler, “lately come to Pomeroy, already is established firmly in the good graces of many citizens.” Koehler’s store was in the Remington Building. Abram Blumenthal in 1869 was selling Dry Goods and Groceries on Front near Sycamore. In the autumn of 1875 the Blumenthal store room was enlarged so that it was “One of the largest and most attractive in the city.” A new Furniture Store, that of Nicholas Klein, had come to Front below Court by 1875. In 1861, Thomas Jones, with a capital of $40 began manufacturing Tinware in a small frame on Front below Court. Gradually Mr. Jones added Hardware, Building Materials, Agricultural Implements to his selling list. In 1869 he also took a partner, Thomas Turnbull. By 1875 the firm had become Jones, Turnbull & Genheimer and was occupying a new two-story building on the site of the small frame. T.H. Davis, who had come to Coalport in 1859, started in the Meat business in 1863 by killing a sheep and peddling it in a basket. Soon he opened a meat shop in Coalport, between Frey and Coal streets. By the end of 1875 he had a second shop on Front street, Pomeroy, one door below the Remington House. William Kraemer, Grocer, came to Pomeroy from Pittsburgh in the late 1860s and bought Henry Dilcher’s grocery business on Front, a few doors above Linn. By the end of 1875 he was located in one of the store rooms under the Gibson House. In January, ’74 O.B. Chapman reported that William Kraemer had introduced free delivery of goods to customers. “Kraemer is a live business man in many ways,” wrote Editor Chapman, “but he has not yet learned the value of printer’s ink.” Kraemer didn’t hasten to take the hint. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 368 John Franz came to Pomeroy from the West in the early ‘70s and opened a Grocery Store on Front, three doors above Linn. He dealt also in Liquors. Peter Gloeckner in November, ’61 advertised his New Meat Shop on Court street, “two doors below the Post Office.” By the end of 1875 he had also moved his shop to a few doors above the Gibson House and opened also a saloon there. Frank Gloeckner by the end of 1875 had a Meat Market one door east of the Seebohm Drug Store. Nicholas Bengel in 1875 was selling Flour, Feed, and Groceries on the east side of Court street. John Geyer established himself in the Flour and Feed business on the south side of Second, between Butternut and Mechanic streets, in 1865. He was still there in 1875 Charles Weiskittel’s Bakery & Confectionary was flourishing on Front, near the Blumenthal Store, in December, 1875. George Bell in July, 1875 opened a Grocery at the intersection of Union Avenue (see below) and Sugar Run street. It was “a great surprise” to the Telegraph “to learn of the store’s success,” and a store “so far out on Sugar Run” was “certainly an event worth mentioning.” H. Cole, colored, had a General Store on Hill Top street, (leading up the hill from the southside of Butternut.) Millinery Stores in Pomeroy in 1874 were those of: Miss H.M. Hoff, Front, above Sycamore; Mrs. M.M. Kennedy, in the Edwards Building; Miss M. Whiteside, Front, between Butternut and Court; Patten & Sherwood, Front, between Butternut and Court. Above Naylor’s Run the mercantile business was thriving in 1875. Most of the business houses there were located above the rolling �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 369 mill, on the west and east sides of the. Excelsior and Buckeye salt furnaces. Some had come there in the 1850s or earlier. The majority handled groceries only, some sold also liquors, a few carried dry goods, groceries and liquors. Between Spring street and the rolling mill there were, in 1875: John Gygax and John Krauss, each selling groceries; George Hauser, selling meat. Between the rolling mill and the flour mill: Groceries: John Epple, Michael Epple, C.A. Katz, Frank Diehl, Lloyd & Son; Drug Store, Charles Eppelin; Millinary shop, Miss L. Walters. Between the Buckeye and Nye street (Kerr's Run); Groceries or groceries and liquors: E. Williamson, Abraham Fruth, John Cross, Edwards & Brother; Dry goods and clothing, W.B. Segal. Michael Schlaegel, formerly in Mason City, made and sold shoes,on corner of Front and Cherry; Henry Dilcher did the same below Elm street. George Faehnle made and sold furniture, and Theodore Niggemeyer made stogies, tips, cigars, on Cherry. Between Nye street and Pomeroy's east corporation line the Coalridge Company’s General Store competed with: D. Garen & Company, corner Front and Nye; H. Leger, Nye street; Mrs. John Roedel, east side of Nye; Mrs. C. Foss, Front above Run; D.S. Lewis, corner Front and Bridge streets. Below Sugar Run, along Salt street and Front, from Pomeroy Salt Works and Monkey Run were the groceries of: E.L. Lloyd, Conrad Steiff, C. Follrath; Grocers Schrieber & Horton (Thayer), Val Koenig, Duncan Sloan, George Cole, and T.H. Davis (Meat Shop) were between Run street and Willow. The Schrieber & Horton store, above Dabney street and Duncan Sloan’s store, below �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 370 Dabney, were general stores. Middleport’s news reporter (for Telegraph) in 1872 claimed for Middleport “fifty retail establishments, none exclusively wholesale: two hardware stores, three boot and shoe stores, two meat shops, two silversmiths, one furniture store, two clothing stores, two bakeries, four eating saloons, twenty drinking saloons, four millinary stores,” the remaining seven being “either dry goods and grocery of exclusively grocery stores.” A check-up (based on the Sheppard Directory and the 1867, ’68, and ’72 advertising pages of the Meigs County News) revealed: (1) the business section of Middleport to have expanded to Mill street; (2) the street between Coal and Mill to have been called, first Mechanic then, later, Race; (3) the names of Main and First streets to have been changed to Walnut and Second respectively; (4) some advertisers still using the old names of those streets, as indicated here and there in the following list: The above-mentioned reporter’s two hardware stores evidently were Root’s New Hardware & Tinware Store in the McElhinny Building on Mill street, and Crary & Webb’s Tin & Sheet Iron Store on Rutland street. S.M. Hysell’s Hardware Store, on First between Coal and Main in 1867, was not given in either source in 1872. The reporter’s three boot and shoe stores: William Horden’s, southwest corner Second and Mill; M.J. Hamilton’s on Second, west side, between Walnut and Rutland; E.D. Jones’s New Boot & Shoe Depot in the Crawford Building (location not given). The two Meat Shops: Worley & Besserer, Meat Marker, northwest corner Second and Coal; Stewart & Brother, south side of Mill, between Second and Third. Silversmith Philip Huber, east side Second near Rutland, still �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 371 practically alone in his field, since his competitor was not even listed in the Directory. The one furniture store was that of W.B. Probst, northeast corner Second and Walnut (First and Main in 1867 Advertisement). The only book Store: Burt Green & Company (Mary E Sherwood), Sherwood’s old stand on Second, between Main and Coal. Clothing Stores, three: Peter Bottemus, west side Second, between Coal and Walnut; Railroad Clothing Store, on Mill, between Second and Third; D. Humer, Lasher Building, Second street. The two bakeries: Smith & Barnes, east side Second, between Race and Coal; Bradley & Covert’s New Bakery & Grocery, between Mill and Palmer streets. Two eating saloons: Francis Asman, east side Second, between Walnut and Rutland; W.W. Bryan, east side First, “opposite the post office.” Only five drinking saloons were found, three connected with a grocery or restaurant, two without other connections. Millinary stores, four: Kallum & Boyd, west side Second, between Coal and Race; Miss M.I. Kennedy, west side Third, between Mill and Elm; Mrs. J.M. Nye, east side Second, “opposite the post office.” Mrs. J.A. Rumsey, west side Second, between Coal and Walnut. The nineteen dry goods stores and grocery stores included some of the eating and drinking saloons that were not found: James Anderson, Grocery, n.w. corner Third and Mill; Samuel Authorson, Groc., north side Mill. Bet. 4d and 4 th. Bailey, J.T., Grocery, west side Walnut, Lower Pomeroy; Bradbury & Co., General Merchandise, w.s. Second bet. Race and Mill. Butcher, F.A., Groc., w.s. Sec. bet. Elm and Main (?) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 372 Calderwood & Son, Dry Goods, w.s. Sec., bet. Race and Coal; Cooper & Allen, Dry Goods, cor. Second and Mill. Cadot, S.C., Groceries and “raw and refined sugars,” (no address given). Davis, I.M., General Store, Second, “near the Flour Mill.” Enoch, Daniel, Grocery, n.e. cor. Second and Rutland. Grimes & Co., Grocery, in Saunders Building (no address given) Michael & Brother, General, Second bet. Rutland and Walnut. Morgan, D.P., General, s.e. cor. Sec. and Short. McElhinny, J.C., General, n.e. cor. 3d and Mill. Middleport Salt Co. Store, General, s.w. cor. Second and Rutland Schreiner & Titis, Dry Goods, s.w. cor. Second and Rutland. Swallow, G.W., Grocery, n.w. cor. Second and Walnut. Womeldorff, G.W., Grocery, s.e. cor. Second and Walnut (given First and Main in Press Ad.) Aforesaid reporter omitted Middleport’s five drug stores and two saddle and harness shops. The drug stores were those of: T. Fesler & Son, n.s. Mill, bet. Second and Third; Phineas Hugg & Son, s.e. cor. Second and Coal; W.M. Hartinger & Brother, w.s. Second bet. Walnut and Rutland; W.V. Lasher, 3-storybrick “opposite I.M. Davis,”; H.C. Waterman, No. 5, Mill. Saddle & Harness Makers: F.P. Bryan and Edward Lark, both on Second street. The many kinds of SPECIAL SERVICE offered in Pomeroy and Middleport were further reasons for across-the-river travel. In 1862 Dr. D.C. Whaley, without discontinuing his Middleport den- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 373 tal office opened another one on Court street, Pomeroy, “one door below McQuigg & Smith’s Leather Store.” The Telegraph rejoiced that Pomeroy’s long-felt need of a good resident dentist was now met. “Dr. Whaley has had ten years’ successful practice,” the item explained. “He uses galvanism when it is desired, to allay pain.” In 1867 Dr. Whaley moved his family to Pomeroy. Ernest Feiger’s Photograph Gallery in 1866 could be found “on the southeast corner of Court and Banck streets.” By the beginning of 1871 the Feiger galley had to compete with that of J.N. Lutz, on the corner of Front and Court-Felger’s old stand. Dr. Sebastian Roehm, general practitioner, was still located near the rolling mill in December, ’75, with a wide practice among the many German families on both sides of the River. New Physicians in Pomeroy by 1876 were: Doctors A.J. Krehbiel, J.W. Hoff, George Ackley, James Hysell, and many others. Dr. Krehbiel, Homeopathist, advertised as Deutcher Arzt, (German Physician) to be found at his “residence on Second street, formerly occupied by Dr. Elben.” Among Pomeroy’s many attorneys were: T.A. Plants, located in the office of the Sugar Run Salt Company. Grosvener & Vorhes, in Judge Lasley’s Building, Mulberry and Second streets. J. & J.P. Bradbury, office on the Court House. J.U. Myers, office on Front, near the Ferryboat Landing. Lewis Paine and W.H. Lasley, each advertising as Claim Agents for Bounty Money, Pensions, Etc. Pomeroy’s prominent barbers were: Anton Kohl, umbrella and salve manufacturer of the 1850s. Mr. Kohl was a barber then, too, but never so advertised himself-a “typ- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 374 ical German barber, who extracted teeth and cupped1 customers 1. as Meaning that he bled them with a cupping-glass. Barbers still were called upon to perform such surgical service. occasion required." The Kohl shop in 1869 was on Court street, west side. Charles Schorn, who came to Pomeroy in 1860. Having learned barbering from his father in Germany he soon found employment with Anton Kohl. In 1866 the partnership of Kohl & Schorn was dissolved; Kohl continued at the Court street stand, while Schorn opened a new shop in the basement next door to the Gibson House, east side. Conrad Zweifel, popular Pomeroy barber in the early 1870s, who in the late '60s had learned his trade under Anton Kohl. John Spaniel, also, had a barber shop on Front street between Court and Linn in the early 1870s. The increase in business during the Civil War and also a new banking law were together responsible for the change that took place in the Daniel-Rathburn Bank of the 1850s. On January 12, 1864 the bank advertised as The First National Bank of Pomeroy, "an Organization under the new National Law now ready for the transaction of General Banking and Exchange.” Officers of the new organization were: H.G. Daniel, president; W.P. Rathburn (son-in-law of H.G. Daniel), cashier; H.S. Horton, T.A. Plants, H.G. Daniel, W.P. Rathburn, A. Bradbury, J. Simpson, D. Reed, business directors. By 1867 George Plants was cashier in place of W.P. Rathburn, who had moved to Tennessee. Less than two years later (in October, '66) was advertised the "Bank of Pomeroy, H.S. Horton, President," and H.S. Horton, Cyrus Grant, E.H. Moore, D.M. Davis, J.A. Pomeroy, A.D. Brown, J.W. Stack- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 375 pole, Jno Ballard, Ben Wadman, directors. But on October 13 appeared the following notice: The BANK OF POMEROY will close its business on the 20th inst. Depositors are required to withdraw before that date. -A.D. Brown, Cashier By March, 1872, however, H.S. Horton had perfected an organization which was to purchase the “Eiselstein Corner” (east side Court and Front) for the “Second National Bank of Pomeroy.” On June 6 following, the new bank was opened with H.S. Horton as president; A.D. Brown, G.W. Moredock, George Eiselstein, W.H. Remington, John Schreiber, H.S. Horton and V.B. Horton as directors. In January, 1875, Major Albert F. McCown, “formerly of Hartford City,” was elected assistant cashier. Livery service, undertaking, marble works, and building, more or less interrelated, were not yet highly specialized, as the three following advertisements show: B.F. Biggs, who by 1867 had moved his carpenter shop from Mason City to Sugar Run, “beyond the Catholic Church, near the residence of Judge Lasley.” There he had a “Building, Jobs & Coffin Establishment” and also did “Carpenter and Joiner Work,” made “Sash, Doors, Windows, Etc.” Henry Priode, in Meigs County since 1840, established himself early in the 1860s, with his brother John, as Builders & Contractors. In 1868 Priode & Brother added a livery stable to their planing mill business “on Mechanic street near Dr. Trian’s office, and contracted for a Hearse.” By 1875 Priode (John), Baber & Wiswell were advertising also their “Pomeroy Marble Works, on Mechanic street. J.V. Smith in 1861 was still advertising his Marble Works begun �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 376 in the late 1850s. In 1873 he opened a Livery Stable on Butternut near Second street. (His marble works on the same site were not advertised after that date.) Undertaking, however, by 1874 had become a definitely competitive business in Pomeroy. In fact, after a careful perusal of advertisements we had a suspicion that competition among the county seat’s undertakers had assumed a rather sordid aspect. ForWhen Henry Priode & Brother in 1868 announced they were having their hearse made, the Telegraph stated editorially: “We are glad to hear that we are to have a good hearse in Pomeroy.” There was no advertised rival of that hearse until January, 1874, when B.F. Biggs’s announcement of his Coffin Depot on Sugar Run contained the special Notice: “I keep TWO HEARSES and a number of Carriages.” AndThree weeks later (January 21, 1874), J.C. Probst’s Undertaking advertisement announced specifically: “We have just received A FINE NEW HEARSE…” AlsoOn August 19, same year, “New Undertaker, Charles E. Long, Front street, above Remington House,” imparted to the public (in the Telegraph) the following information regarding his business: "I sell the fines coffins in the city and as I manufacture most of them myself I sell coffins for what others pay for them at the factory…” Whereupon followed on September 1, B.F. Biggs’s new advertisement headlined, “Great Reduction in Prices!” and climaxed with: “It is a great mistake about there being but one Coffin Manufactury in Pomeroy, as I have been largely engaged in the manufacture of coffins for the past six years. Being a wholesale dealer in lumber I have a decided advantage over a retail dealer and can sell CHEAPER THAN THE CHEAPEST… I keep all the latest city styles… double the amount of coffins and caskets, ten times the amount of shrouds. I shall make a specialty of manufacturing coffins hereafter and give my special attention to the UNDERTAKING BUSINESS. I �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 377 am prepared to furnish new carriages and a FINE HEARSE in the city at reasonable terms. Undertakers’ advertisements gave no further evidence of competition; more than that, B.F. Biggs’s competitors of 1874 gradually disappeared from the advertising pages of the Telegraph. MIDDLEPORT’S dentists in 1875 were Young & Lucas, in the Rathburn Building on the west side of Second, between Race and Mill. Its doctors, besides those of the 1850s and earlier (William Van Duyn, D.C. Rathburn, C.R. Reed) were: Bishop, J.C.; Branstrap, W.T.; Hudson, J.Q.A.; Post, A.C.; Tidd, C.H.; Waterman, H.C.; (Dr. Van Duyn died in 1874.) Residents attorneys of Middleport in 1874: Ira Graham, J.A. Green, William Mark, T.L. Montague. Middleport’s photographer in 1874 was W.H. Gilmore, his Gallery in the “third story of Lasher’s Drug Store, on Second.” Shaves and haircuts were procurable at Henry Rayford’s “Tonsorial Parlor opposite the Continental Hotel on Coal street,” or at the barber shop of Charles Asman, east side of Second, in 1874. Shampooning [sic] was advertised by A. Fisher, on Second, several years earlier. Banking Service was offered by: The Bank of Middleport, east side of Second, between Race and Coal, of which bank L.V. Lasher was president and D.S. Lasley cashier. The Citizens’ Bank on the north side of Second, between Walnut and Coal. Of this bank R.R. Hudson (president), John McElhinny (cashier), H.G. Daniel, Samuel Bradbury, Seth Paine and James N. Titus were the Directors. Livery service was obtainable at the Livery & Sales Stables of �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 378 J.S. Bircher, south side of Mill, between Third and Fourth; and those of L. Lindsey on Second, near the port office. Lindsey supplie also Funeral Furnishings. W.E. Culp, who had a “Coffin Depot” on the south side of Mill. Between Third and Fourth, advertised Undertaking also. Headstones and Monuments were made at G.G. Webster’s Marble Works on the north side of Coal, between Third and Second. Soldiers could have their bounty money, back pay, pensions, or other military claims adjusted at the office of R.B. Downing & Son (Major J.B.D.), General Insurance Agents. E.R. Grant, Agent for the Singer Sewing Machine and Dealer in pianos, organs, and other musical instruments, sheet music, etc., had his office and sales room on Second near Mill street. In the smaller Bend towns store and shops sprang up, flourished a while, then closed up. A few could hold out as supplements to the Company Store; for many of the company’s employees could not afford to shop regularly or even occasionally at Pomeroy or Middleport. Minersville in 1875 was advertising three such privately owned stores: those of J.H. Schoeneberger, of Johnson & Parry and of Valentine Gress. At Syracuse, in 1875, J.P. Capehart sold Dry Goods, Groceries, Flour, Boots, Shoes, Hats, Caps, Etc., “at the post office.” Racine merchants advertising in January, 1867 were: Ellis & Sibley, Dry Goods, Groceries, Clothing. L. & W. Cross, Dr Goods, Groceries, Etc., (Pearl and Water streets) D.O. Hopkins & Sons, Dry Goods, Ready-to-Wear and Made-to-Order Clothing; also Drugs. (In new brick store.) Joseph Petral, Dry Goods, Groceries, Boots, Shoes, Hardware, Etc. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 379 B.F. Sibley, Drugs, Stationery, Fancy Goods. J.L.W. Bell, Manufacturer of and Dealer in Boots and Shoes. Daniel Garen, Saddles, Harness. H.H. Miles, Headstones, Monuments. At West Columbia, the John Mason and Widow Bird stores survived the War. Mrs. Bird gave too much credit, soon had to close out. Clifton, the town that in 1867 “sprang up like a mushroom over night,” became mercantile-minded with the same degree of rapidity. B.F. Waite & Company opened a Dry Goods & Grocery Store “just above the Nail Mill,” and Stevens & Lasley a similar store in the “brick building on the corner of Second and Main”; and Timberlake Brothers “a few doors above Stevens & Lasley.” There was also Mrs. Ely’s Bakery, Rader & Reese’s Drug Store, William Raybold’s Meat Shop, a Boot and Shoe Shop, a Jewelry Store; also three saloons. The Clifton Iron & Nail Company did not open a Company Store in 1967. But in February of ’74 it bought of “D.S. Stevenson, Esq., the Merchant Prince,” the entire stock of his Wholesale and Retail Store. The preceding year Stevenson had advertised that his store on the corner of Mason and Cliff streets had the “largest stock of goods ever brought to Mason County.” W.E. Culp of Gallipolis in 1868 bought property in Clifton “with a view to opening a furniture store.” (Culp also bought a wharf-boat to place at the Clifton wharf.) At Mason new mercantile ventures began immediately after the close of the War. Capt. Sam Davis and J.S. Dowry advertised they had purchased the entire stock formerly owned by the Mason City Salt Company and would continue to do business at the old stand (Front, near Center street); that said stock consisted of “Groceries, Dry Goods, Boots and Shoes, Ready-Made Clothing, Queensware and Hardware.” �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 380 In 1867 M.H. Bayard announced he was “always prepared to attend the wants of the citizens of Mason City in the way of Dry Goods and Groceries.” Adams & Lehew opened a store on First street, between Pomeroy and Horton streets in that same year of ’67. John Young in 1867 was reported as receiving “another addition to his well-selected stock of goods.” The John Young store was on the southeast corner of First and Brown streets. In 1873 Mr. Young movit into his new two-story brick building on the n.e. corner of Pomeroy and Second streets. In 1867 (June), S. & A. Womeldorf advertised their New Millinary Store on Front street, Mason City. Prospects for a National Bank at Mason City were said in March, 1871, to be “fine.” But no bank ever materialized there. In December, 1870, C.C. Tomlinson, Mason City Druggist, (east corner Horton and Front), announced his return from Cincinnati with “a fine assortment of Drugs, Medicines, Pure Chemicals,” and also “Staple and Fancy Groceries,” which he could “sell lower than any other establishment in Mason City or Pomeroy.” In November, 1872, Druggist Tomlinson had a competitor in A. Seebohm’s clerk, Edward Roethlein, who opened a Drug Store in the old Mason City Salt Company’s store building (vacated by Davis and Dowry). Among the Hope Salt Company’s first structures in 1869 was a onestory frame building on Front street, directly opposite the Hope salt furnace, said building to be used as a Company Store. Likewise, when Roots & Kilbreth revived the Mason City Salt Works in 1875 they put up a similar building (and for the same purpose) on the west side of Brown street, close to their furnace site. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 381 Several smaller store arose in various parts of Mason during the late 1860s. Mrs. Julia Hart’s little grocery store on Center street directly opposite the old Payne Hotel, apparently succeeded well; for in a few years Mrs. Hart built a two-story business-and-dwelling house on Horton street and directly opposite the former Lovell homestead. In the late 1860s Andrew Winters came from Pomeroy and opened a boot and shoe shop on the northwest corner of Second and Horton streets. The Peter Lutz flour and feed store opened about 1867 on the northwest corner of Center and Second streets. Mercantile establishments on Front street at the end of 1875 were M. Grueser’s grocery, on Pomeroy, at the head of the ferry landing; Thomas Watkins’s grocery and U.S. post office; Chris. Witzgal’s shoe shop; Fred Fenzel’s grocery, corner of Front and Horton; the Butler brewery; the Mayer grocery; the Rothlein drug store; James Hart’s grocery. Five saloons, three of them connected with one of the other grocery, and Mrs. M.M. Kennedy’s milliner shop, moved from Pomeroy to Mason in 1875, complete the Front street business ensemble. Charles Capito, oldest son of Gottleib Capito, on his return from St. Louis where he had been attending college, engaged in the drug and grocery business on the southeast corner of Third and Brown till 1872, when he moved to Charleston. At Hartford City the H.C.S. & C. Company’s store, on Front street, near the salt furnace, was in charge of Charles Eggenswiller, one of Hartford City’s prominent Germans. Stephen Thomas, another German, had tried Wheeling, Middleport and Mason City before settling in Hartford in 1864. “Butcher” Thomas for many years was Hartford City’s only meat dispenser. Moss McCown, brother of Mrs. James Kelly, after the “late un- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 382 pleasantness" opened a little drug store in Hartford City. He was still there in 1875, doing a prosperous business. Richard Allen, Englishman (to West Columbia in 1856, soon afterward to the Lewis Farm in the Lower Flats), settled finally with his family in Hartford in 1867 and bought a grocery and notion store on Front street between First and Second streets. Two years later the Allen store made an original but unpremeditated contribution to the mercantile business of The Bend. Conceiving the idea of a special Christmas Sale, Mr. Allen in December of 1869 bought, through a traveling salesman for a Philadelphia concern, $75 worth of toys: Monkeys-on-sticks, wooden horses, elephants, etc., etc. Now, Mr. Allen already had laid in a large supply of candies, nuts, and “Jackson” crackers (fire crackers), and so, when the invoice for the Philadelphia shipment reached him and he learned that the slick salesman had doubled his order and had drawn a slight draft on him through a Pomeroy bank-a method which was quite new to him- Mr. Allen was sure he was “sunk.” However, when a few days before Christmas the steamer Edinberg came floating down the River through the ice, landed at Hartford and put off a box nearly as large as the Allen store-room, there seemed nothing that Storekeeper Allen and his wife could do but get busy marking goods. While they marked they also answered questions of curious customers and passers-by. In a very short time the word was out that the Allen store was to have a Christmas sale! It spread like wildfire. A rush commenced. People came in droves, -from New Haven, from Syracuse, and from the country round about. Men, women and children, three hundred or more, milled around the store till late evening firing Jackson crackers and having a good time generally. Although some window gazers called the display a �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 383 "lot of trash,” in three days Mr. Allen was able to meet the bank draft. Old Hartford residents recall the sale as the “First Christmas Opening in The Bend.” New Haven in an 1870 Pt. Pleasant Register item boasted “nine stores and groceries.” Smith & Roush’s store was the only one specifically named in the item. Another one of the nine, however, was the Juhling store in the brick building erected by Charles Juhling in the year 1865. Physicians locating in the smaller towns had a better chance to remain if they wished to do so. Dr. A.L. Knight, West Columbia’s first physician, returned to that town after the War and by 1876 had become one of the outstanding doctors of The Bend. Dr. John Armstrong, Mason City’s physician when the War opened, “was the only professional man in Mason County who remained true to the Flag during the War,” so the public was informed (in the Telegraph) when Dr. Armstrong died in August, 1869 at the age of eighty years. Dr. Wm. N. Calvert opened an office for “Botanic Practice” in the Wallace House in 1864, but the next year his office was “over Elberfeld Bros., Court street, Pomeroy.” Dr. P.H. Clark came to Mason City about 1870; Dr. Charles Cherington about the same time, it is surmised. Hartford City’s sick could be treated by Dr. James Meeks, who located in Hartford after his graduation from Sterling College, Columbus, Ohio, in 1860. Before entering college James Meeks had studied medicine under Dr. Knight at West Columbia. Dr. William B. Hensley came to New Haven in 1867, soon after his graduation from Cincinnati Eclectic Medical Institute. The new physician was prepared to minister unto spiritual as well as to physical ills for he was a United Brethren clergyman. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 384 (When patients of any of the above-named doctors died, Homer Crosby, of Hartford, was likely to get the order for the coffin; Mr. Crosby was a proficient cabinet maker.) Only a few lawyers located on the West Virginia side of The Bend. S.A. Heaton and J.W.C. Armstrong opened offices at Clifton. The law partnership of N. & G.P. Simpson (Judge Nathan Simpson and son Perry Simpson) formed in Pomeroy in 1861, moved to Mason City in ’66 but retained its office in Pomeroy. John U. Myers came from Jackson County, West Virginia, to Mason in 1868, opened a law office in Mason and also one in Pomeroy, at the corner of Front and Court streets. Tonsorial service could be procured in every town; each had its own local barber. Mason City’s popular barbers during the early ‘70s were Adam Rau and the Roberts Brothers, “Bill” and “Dave.” Hotels and Boarding Houses flourished on the Ohio side as a matter of course. Pomeroy’s Gibson House, vacant in the spring and summer of 1861, was used as a recruiting station and soldiers’ rendezvous. The next year it was leased to F.B. Riheldarfer, afterwards to James Ralston. About 1863 Ralston was succeeded by J.J. Weese, who was still proprietor when the editor of the Point Pleasant Register visited Pomeroy in June, 1868. Announced the Register the following week: “…We stopped at the Gibson House, one of the best conducted hotels in that vicinity.” And the Register’s advertisement of the Gibson House stated, “At this hotel is the best depot for the Cincinnati dailies. Guests can rely on good treatment and reasonable bills.” In 1875 A.P. Deem was the Gibson Hotel’s manager. At the Remington House in 1866, “T.H. Dawson, its gentlemanly and accommodating proprietor,” was prepared to give satisfaction in every way. Its stable was pronounced “unobjectionable” and horses were “sure to be taken care of.” During the ‘70s several improvements �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 385 were added to the Remington building. In ’71 a new cupola “like unto the pilot house of Mattie Roberts” was put up. In ’73 its old cracked bell was replaced by a new one; in ’74 a big illuminated sign, which “could be seen for a long distance on dark nights,” was added. In January, 1874, Capt. Joseph Hein opened his “German Hotel,” the Hein House, in a new building on Front street, “six doors above the steamboat landing.” By December, 1874 the new Weese House on Mulberry street was ready to begin operating. The four-story structure had been built during the 1850s but never yet, or only for a short time, had served the purpose for which it had been put up. J.J. Weese, formerly of the Gibson House and then of the Remington, had leased the property, refitted it and opened it to the public. The Coalport House was refitted, refurnished and working under a new proprietor, J.C. Kamp, in the late 1860s. Middleport hotels were many; they changed hands often; some used the the old street names, some the new, in their advertisements. Thus it was impossible for the researcher to be quite sure of their location. In 1874 were advertised: The Middleport, n.w. corner First and Walnut, built in 1869 as the Todd House, corner Front and Main; The Eational, Rice Building, Mrs. J.H. Rice, proprietor; The Continental, Second and Coal, T.H. Dawson; The St. James, First and Main. West Columbia’s Van Matre House of the 1850s (corner Main and Beacon streets) in November of ’64 was “newly refitted and opened for the reception of the public” by M.D. Altice. The hotel thereafter, for the short period of its existence, was The Altice House. Clifton’s mushroom-like growth was favorable to the hotel bus- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 386 iness. Squire Shank and a Mr. Summerville were the first to take advantage of that fact, the former with the United States Hotel and the latter with The Virginia at the head of the ferry landing. Mason City’s two largest pre-War hostelries, the Payne Hotel and The Wallace House, met different fates. The former degenerated into a tenement house during the late 1860s (styled by the townfolk as “the big house”); then in the middle 1870s the revival of the Mason City Furnace and the prospective glass factory raised it again to the boarding-house plane. The Wallace House became a boarding house, then a private residence the owner of which “kept boarders.” The Jarrott House, s.e. corner of Brown and First streets (John Young’s old stand) and the Myers House on Horton near Front, were Mason City’s most popular boarding houses in the early 1870s. The biggest boarding-house venture ever undertaken in Mason City was doubtless that of L.H. Sargent in November of 1864. The large hotel was built in the newly laid out Adamsville for the accommodation of workmen and officials connected with the Sargent Coal Works above Mason (see below for the hotel’s formal opening). With the demise of L.H. Sargent’s business (see above) the hotel became the private residence of W.H. Sargent, son of A.E. Sargent. Hartford City’s most popular boarding house during the 1860s was probably that of the Widow McBrian and daughters Kate, Jane and Mina. Abe Board’s Lincoln House came into the scene during or soon after the War. By the close of 1875 the Sattes House has become Hartford’s most flourishing hotel. Some degree of Civic Improvement was apparent in every Bend town in this period of prosperity and progress. In this, as in everything else, Pomeroy took the lead; but, like civic improvement everywhere, it did not even begin in Pomeroy before it was needed. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 387 In June, 1861 the Telegraph “respectfully” called attention to the “gutter of filth running down Sycamore to Front near Silverman’s store,” and to the intolerable stench rising therefrom because it was a “wallowing place for hogs.” The next year (1862) a hole in Front street, at Court, was commented on rather sarcastically. The reporter had seen many people fall into the hole, one of whom was the street commissioner. “Now,” the reporter asks, is there no one in town who will sacrifice a limb to remind the street commissioner of his duty?” In October of ’66 the Telegraph commended George Eiselstein for putting up a protection on the River bank when he built his new store on Front and Butternut, and gently hinted that the city authorities should make travel all along Front street safe in a similar manner. And two months later (December, 1866) Pomeroy’s citizenry was reminded that “the ground is now frozen but next week’s that will make the streets almost impassable and communication with our suburbs, “the venerable ruins of Nyesville and the Teutonic Hollows of Monkey Run, “difficult and therefore infrequent.” Cindars hitherto have been spread too thin, the reporter thought; and, whereas the rolling and salt furnaces now pay to have their cindars hauled away, why not make a contract with those two industries that would be of mutual benefit? In October of ’65, the Pomeroy City Council passed a new Ordinance which prohibited swine and geese from running at large “in any public road, highway, street, lane or alley.” Two years later a second ordinance required Pomeroy citizens to pen up their geese and swine. Since this second ordinance had “teeth,” Pomeroy a few weeks later was “exceedingly vocal by the enforcement of the ordinance �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 388 against hogs running at large. Marshal Lee, assisted by a gang of boys, patrolled the streets, penned up a large number of hogs in the ‘pound.’ Most owners came and paid the fine, took their property home. But one woman “simply knocked off a board, drove her pig home.” After much “persuasion,” however, she “paid her fine.” In November of ’67, “Capt. Burnap succeeded in getting Second street from Court to Butternut raised sufficiently to admit the passing of any kind of vehicle.” The next year (May, ’68) V.B. Horton advertised for sealed proposals for making a road up the hill on the east side of Mulberry street. A retaining wall twelve feet thick was then in the process of construction. In August, 1869 the Board of Improvements ordered a sidewalk to be laid “in front of the Academy Building on Mulberry street, now occupied by S.W. Pomeroy.” By 1870 many stone and brick pavements had been laid on Court and Front streets by property owners. As early as February, 1862, Pomeroy’s Council purchased 144 “1st class Cutta Percha Buckets,” and then authorized Mayor H.B. Smith to call a meeting for the organization of a Fire Company. In May of 1867 a Fire Engine was bought, for which the citizens were asked to buy bonds. On July 4, 1868 the Pomeroy Fire Company in its new “rig” paraded to Middleport to display itself and its new engine. Some time during the year of 1867 the Pomeroy Council decided to light the city with street lamps. By the end of the year not only the main part of town was so lighted but also Coalport and Monkey Run. The man whose duty it was to keep the lamps trimmed and burning at night had to clean and light them at sundown and at sunrise make another round to turn them out. A little step-ladder, an oil can, and a �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 389 cloth for cleaning, all had to be carried from lamp-post to lamp-post by the lamplighter, two of whom were Peter Ebersbach and Henry Zeiher (in 1872). It was in 1867, too, that the Pomeroy City Council passed an Ordinance to provide the town with a new cemetary. Three persons were to be appointed to purchase land for that purpose. By March of ’67 a second ordinance had been provided for the issuing of bonds for the payment of 83 and 1/3 acres bought of H.B. Smith and D.M. Davis. In his next issue the Editor of the Telegraph reported that he had visited the grounds for the cemetary, commended the purchase but criticized the laying out of rolling land into plain squares. He thought the Council should have employed an artist to lay out the grounds. In May, 1868 the Pomeroy City Council met for the first time in its own room (on Second street, between Linn and Sycamore). In February of ’69, an Ordinance re-divided the city into four wards (the fourth including Coalport.) In August, ’69 an appropriation was made to repair the road to “Locust Grove” Cemetary. In the 1870-76 period an important accomplishment was the building of Union Avenue. As late as 1867 there was no way to get from Rutland to Pomeroy except by going through Middleport. Editor Chapman began agitating for a new road through Sugar Run, was ridiculed, his efforts were thwarted. The Middleport Gazette saw “a design to divert from Middleport its legitimate trade.” But Chapman persevered and in 1872 saw the road completed and had its first name, Chapman’s Pike, changed to its present form. Pomeroy’s outstanding civic improvement of this 1870-76 half-decade was the establishing of a new grade for Front street (May 20, ’72), the widening of Front to 40 feet and the building of a retaining �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 390 wall all along Front street, with a railing for protect the River side of the street. Objections were raised by those whose buildings would be damaged by the cuts and fills necessary (some buildings either had to be raised or their first stories turned into cellars). A mass meeting was called to demand the Council to retain the old grade. Law suits resulted. But by January, 1875 the Telegraph was pleased to say, editorially: The street raised to grade improvement and length except a and sidewalk in front of the Remington House is now with the street above and below. It is a great was much needed. Front is now well graded its entire small part at the lower end of the 4th ward. By the close of 1876 the Stone Bridge had passed out of existence and new brick or stone sidewalks had been laid the whole length of the business section of Front street. Several times during this half-decade Editor Chapman saw “hogs running about the streets every day,” or “hogs becoming too numerous in the streets,” indicating to him an unaccountable laxity of law enforcement. As to street lighting Mr. Chapman suggested (February, ’75) that “in cloudy weather, especially if it is muddy, let us have the lamps lighted even though there is a moon.” Several other Telegraph items are worthy of note here: [August, ‘72]. The Council appointed a committee to see to the sinking and walling up of a Well in front of the Court House. [March 6, ‘72]. S.W. Pomeroy is having a substantial stone wall built along Mulberry street in front of his residence, as a support to the wooden pavement constructed about three years ago. [September, ‘72]. The old brick school building on Second was sold at auction. It was bought by George Bauer for $50. [August, ‘73]. The culvert to and across Second street is now finished. Mr. Horton is ready to extend it up Sugar Run valley as far as his property extends and is waiting action by the Council to build the portions under marked streets. ��A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 391 [December, ‘73]. A young man, dressed in his best, boots shined, just below the post office [e.s. Court] stepped into a hollow place in the sidewalk. The dirty water splattered up his trouser leg, into his boot, etc. He simply remarked: “--- --- such --- ---- ----------- sidewalks! And such a --- ---- one-horse town!” [January, were left in a street…quite a Several garden ‘74]. Our plank sidewalks, when the River was over them, rather demoralized condition. In one place up the lengthy section had been piled up on top a picket fence. fences were carried away. [Sometime in ‘75]. Two large rocks fell from the top of the ledge in the rear of the John Bartlett property on Second street. One of the two or three tons lodged in the kitchen of the old Bart-property in the rear of Sycamore, knocked down the stove… Another, perhaps five tons, stopped a few feet of the adjoining property, also…knocked down the protecting wall. The occupants had no notice of the danger. Immediately after the close of the Civil War (October, ’65) the Meigs County Soldiers’ Monument Association was organized, with Mrs. E. Horton as president, Miss Carrie Stivers as secretary. On May 30, 1870, (Decoration Day), the laying of the corner stone of the monument took place with appropriate ceremonies. The program was under the direction of Cyrus Grant, Grand Marshal. A procession was formed at Second and Butternut streets, marched to Condor street and back, after which there was speaking and a ceremony suited to the occasion. The monument was expected to be ready for unveiling on Decoration Day of the next year (’71) but for some unnamed reason did not arrive. Meantime a cobblestone monument had been erected at the head of Court street. The purpose of this monument is not given, but Editor Chapman commented thus upon it on April 12, ’71: J.N. Lutz, proprietor of the photograph gallery corner Front and Court has taken some fine pictures of the Court House and the cliff in the rear. The cobblestone monument at the head of Court street is shown in all its glory. Lucky that Mr. Luts took the picture; the crowning glory of the late Council’s reign is thus to be handed down to an �admitting and grateful posterity. It needs only the words, “Sacred to the memory of the Wise City Fathers, Anno Domini, 1871.” Not until October 17, 1871, was the Soldiers’ Monument unveiled �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 392 (delay having been caused by change of contractor, the October election, etc.). About 2500 people were present. Hon. S.N. Titus was chairman of the meeting. Rev. Kuppelrich, of the Baptist church, led in prayer. Gen. I.R. Sherwood, of Columbus, was the orator of the day. Middleport was not so very far behind Pomeroy in civic improvements, it appears. In August of 1867 Middleport’s Council made an appropriation of $300 for the improvement of the road in front of Wilson’s sawmill on Second street. In October of the same year another Ordinance required the construction of sidewalks and pavements in Middleport. From the October 15, 1873 Herald we learned, however, that the Middleport Council “has graded streets, alleys and sidewalks. Sidewalks have been ordered but not yet built on…” [name blurred] and that “the M.E., Universalist and Baptist churches on or in the vicinity of Main will demand something before the muddy season sets in.” In the matter of street lighting Middleport’s business men, led by J.W. Worley, made an early start. Said the Jan. 1, 1868 Press: J.W. Worley, Esq., has set a good example to all business men by placing a street lamp on the corner of Coal and Second streets immediately in front of our office. Mr. Worley has the lamp cleaned and lighted at his own expense. P.S.-Since the above was written, William Horden has placed a lamp on Second street, similar to the one mentioned above. On January 29 (’68), under the caption More Lamps, the Press said: R.R. Hudson has had three or four lamp posts erected and surmounted by carbon oil lamps. They light up Front street from Rutland to the Ohio River Salt Company’s office. Messrs. Grant & Company have a lamp on Front street and one on Second street near the Flour Mill. The M.E. congregation has placed one in front of its church on Third street. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 393 James Park, I.N. Davis and Dr. Lasher each has placed one in front of his business house on Second street. In June, 1871 Middleport bought a Fire Engine. “A fire company now needs to be organized,” advised the Press. Ergo, the Directory (dated 1874) was able to include: Vigilant Steam Fire Engine Company, City Hall Building, s.s. Race, between Third and Fourth In December of ’62, P. Hugg, Mayor of Middleport, made formal announcement (in the Telegraph) of the purchase of suitable grounds for a Cemetary, by The Middleport Cemetary Corporation. (Location of ground was not given.) In August of 1867, The Middleport Council “made an appropriation of $500 for a Wharf at the foot of Coal street. On February 9, 1873 an Ordinance was passed changing the name of the “First street” that was above Mill street, to Second street; also Main to Walnut and Mechanic to Race. In October, 1867 the Middleport Press (see below) laments the lack of a lock-up, “so necessary on Saturday nights, when there are so many disgraceful scenes on the streets”…”The Marshal must walk with his prisoner to Pomeroy when he makes an arrest, and for it he gets forty cents!” Not until December 15, 1875 was the county paper able to report: Work is progressing on the New Brick Jail in Middleport. The building is to contain an engine house, a council chamber, a firemen’s hall, Jail and several offices. In July, 1875 Middleport experienced a Big Fire! Ten business houses and one private dwelling were burned. The fire started in a building owned by Col. Downing. Buildings destroyed were: A store and dwelling on the corner of Wilson (?) and Second; the two-story brick owned by W.H. Hartinger & Brother had its walls seriously injured; the “Craw- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 394 ford Property,” the upper part of which was occupied by T.O. Crawford as a dwelling; the Lasher building, a frame tenement; the frame store building of E.D. Jones; the frame tenement owned by John Schreiner and occupied by Michael Brothers; another building belonging to John Schreiner and occupied by M.J. Hamilton’s shoe establishment; a threestory brick, corner of Rutland and Second and occupied by Aiken & Saunders; three frame tenements back of the Schreiner buildings and fronting Rutland. About four months later (in November, ’75) a news reporter wrote: The fire in Middleport last summer was a good thing. The buildings destroyed were nearly all small wooden buildings, not very ornamental and liable to burn down any time. In their places are fine brick store houses going up that will be an honor to the town. And on the following December 15 was announced: Schreiner’s new three-story brick is to contain a fine Opera House and Odd Fellows’ Hall in the third story. Hundreds of yards of new brick and stone sidewalks have been laid in Middleport during the last month… The new sawed-stone street crossings in Middleport, quite a number of them, are the cause of many a blessing upon the heads of the town council… For the civic improvement picture on the West Virginia side, we have, first, from the April 25, 1875 Register (Point Pleasant): The contract for the stone work on Ice Creek Culvert at West Columbia was awarded by the Bridge Commissioners to Mr. S…, of Bedford, of Ohio. A.F. Booth got the contract for making the fill. By September of ’75 “Quite an extensive fill” had been reported as made at Ice Creek, “but the culvert seems not large enough. The Creek has been a source of constant expense to the County.” Thus finally had disappeared the “long wooden bridge that spanned Ice Creek in the early days,” and had come into the scene its successor the “Cindar Bridge” of later years. At Mason City during the summer of 1874 the “Grade of the Mason �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 395 City Wharf was considerably widened.” About the same time the ravine running through Pomeroy and Horton streets between Front and First was filled in on said two streets; and the Town Council passed an Ordinance prohibiting hogs from running at large (also empowering the Town Marshal to pen them up when found on the streets). Early in the 1870s a one-story City Hall, consisting of council room and lockup was built on Center street, west side, near Front. The town’s gutters were annually cleaned of their overgrowth of dog fennel and other weeds, and streets were cindered occasionally. In February of ’74, Hartford City was reported as building a “calaboose” even though it was not needed, since there were “no saloons in Hartford City.” The town wanted to be prepared for emergencies, the reporter conjectured. Hartford, like all the other incorporated towns, cindered its streets, and also conducted an annual gutter cleaning it is believed. Its biggest civic project, however, was the grading of Front street in the early ‘70s. The caving in of the River bank at various times, when great masses of earth with trees in them slid down into the water, leaving great, yawning, impassable gaps in the street. All these had been filled with cindars and trees had been planted along the River front by 1876. New Haven and Clifton, neither of them incorporated, had only such civic improvement as was provided by private citizens and by the county. The Western Union Telegraph Company came into The Bend some time during 1870 or ’71. This is inferred from two facts: The Pomeroy & Athens Telegraph Company was still announcing stock holders’ meetings in 1869; some time in 1871 Walter Branch was appointed operator �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 396 of Pomeroy’s Western Union Telegraph Office. During the summer of 1875 the Hartford City & Pomeroy Telegraph Company was organized, the two sides of the River being connected by a wire stretched from a tree on Breezy Heights (Pomeroy) to a 100-foot pole erected in the lumber yard of John Young’s sawmill at Mason City. In March of ’72 the Pomeroy & Middleport Car Line Company applied to the Pomeroy Council for permission to construct a street railroad from the east end of Kerr’s Run to Middleport’s west corporation line. Early in April the Telegraph stated that the move for a street car line had met with a long list of recommendations from the city of Pomeroy. If the movement got beyond that first step, little if anything was said about it. A similar movement on the West Virginia side got somewhat farther. On December 1, 1875 a long editorial made known the details regarding a certificate of incorporation issues to the Hartford, Clifton, & Mason Railroad Company. The incorporators were: G.W. Moredock, E.D. Newton, J.R. Meeks, M.M. Brown, A.L. Sehon, Grafton Tyler, H.H. Swallow, George Downing, J.A. Waddell, Edmund Sehon. Capital stock, $100,000. Operation of the road was to begin May 1, 1876 and continue ninety-nine years. Company’s offices were to be in Hartford City. Suggested the Telegraph: As Hartford City, Mason City and Clifton are to be united by street railway it would be a good idea to consolidate the towns and bring the State Capital here. The towns were never so united. That many fine residences were built during this period was taken for granted; nor was the search for such residences unsuccessful. Almost in vain, however, was the search for a detailed description �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 397 of the “modern” dwelling house of that prosperous and progressive period. One only was found; namely, that of the new residence of H.S. Horton; it was published in the November 24, 1879 Telegraph. A condensed version follows: The whole structure consists of a large main building and a smaller rear building, with a cellar under the entire building. There are in all twenty-seven rooms (large and small) including attic and cellar. On the first floor are two parlors, a dining room, kitchen, wash room, baggage room, hall, pantry, china closet, store room, etc. On the second floor are two front chambers, three bed rooms, bath room (10 by 16 feet), nursery, servants’ room, dressing room, three large closets, five small closets, and a hall. There are two attic rooms in the third story. There are three flights of stairs, one in the main hall and two in the rear building. The whole building is heated by hot-air furnaces in the basement, with eleven registers. It has also six fireplaces for emergency. A force pump in the kitchen supplies a reservoir on the attic with water. By means of plumbing works connected with the kitchen range, four rooms are supplied with hot and cold water. There is a veranda 7 by 28 feet at the front of the house; a piazza 7 by 10 on the west side; a bay window in each side. B.F. Biggs supervised the construction of the building. The painting, glazing and varnishing was done by Robert Atkinson, (Pomeroy). Inside work in the front and in part of the rear is varnish finish showing the natural grain of the wood; ash and yellow pine. Messrs. Ritchie & Son (Pomeroy) supplied stationary wash stands (marble top) for all the principal chambers. The extensive range of tin work in connection with the furnace and also the spouting, etc., was done by J.W. Prall. The style of the building is American Domestic Architecture, made up of Grecian, Italian, and English. Entire cost of the structure was not under $10,000. A Telegraph item of September 4, 1872 brings into view another practically new residence: One month after beginning the job, Ben Biggs had V.B. Horton’s new dwelling ready to receive the first coat of plastering. The building is of wood, filled in between the siding and plastering with brick. �This was really the old V.B. Horton residence remodeled. When finished it was considered the most palatial residence not only in The Bend nut in all southern Ohio. A small array of servants was maintained to keep it in running order. No detailed description �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 398 of the interior could be found by this researcher, but it is safe to assume that the house had all the modern features that went into the new H.S. Horton residence just described. The remodeling and enlarging was considered necessary because by that time the V.B. Horton family’s social connections extended to the East, whence company came quite frequently to be entertained in the V.B. Horton home. Between the close of the Civil War and 1871 the commodious and attractive dwellings of Horace M. Horton, Edwin J. Horton, and C.R. Pomeroy were added to the vacant section between the Presbyterian church and the V.B. Horton place. It had happened that the side of the dwelling occupied by C.R. Pomeroy since about 1839 was included in the tract bought by the Buckeye Salt Company for its salt plant. Therefore the dwelling was cut up into several sections and the parts placed on the hillside back of the furnace to do duty as residences for the company’s employees. The old Pomeroy home back of the Court House, transformed first into Pomeroy Academy then into a public school, became a private residence once more in 1867; for in that year the second Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy, now a widower, came from Cincinnati with his four remaining children to reside in his father’s town. The family having traveled extensively, brought to the old homestead many beautiful and interesting things, such as Chinese screens, pottery, fans, etc. Present-day Horton residents recalled (for the writer) how much they as children, enjoyed going there. One remembered especially a Chinese basket filled with Litchi nuts stored in the garret; and how those nuts “were filched, one at a time, until we were found out.” The Judge Irvin place just west of Sugar Run was occupied a part of this period by Captain Burnap. The once extensive estate was, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 399 However, considerably reduced in size; the “beautiful driveway that had been kept in such perfect condition” was by 1871 occupied by the Eiselstein brick store building, the Eiselstein brick residence and other dwellings. Numerous residences went up on Lincoln Hill and on Breezy Heights during this period. At West Columbia a notable residence was built on top of the cliffs back of the King Furnace about 1867. John King, who bought Dr. Guthrie’s unfinished salt plant, had the house built. It was only one story high but very long, with many porches and windows from which there were fine views up and down the River. The house was elegantly furnished. Its surroundings were laid out by a landscape gardener. A grove of trees almost hid the dwelling from view. Workers by the score were maintained about the premises. At this hilltop residence King entertained his friends from the East. During the summer months young folks by the dozen came from New York, Philadelphia, etc., to spend the season at the King mansion. The summer evenings were spent in dancing, card playing, music, and so on. Negro waiters were on hand everywhere to serve the guests in any manner desired. At Clifton, in 1867, on a charming hillside side arose the elegant two-story brick residence of General W.A. Powell, Superintendent of the Clifton Nail Mill. H.G. Daniel and son-in-law George B. Downing each had attractive homes built just above Clifton, in which dwellings they resided while connected with the nail mill. While all these buildings were going up at Clifton, the laborers’ housing needs were not forgotten. To the east of General Powell’s place a long row of cottages extending from the county road to the hill; �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 400 and down near the Newcastle furnace a row of twelve two-story doubles gave shelter and living quarters to some of the many workingmen flocking into the town with their families. In 1869 or ’70 a real estate company tried to populate the Clifton hilltops. The company had a wooden stairway built from the top to the bottom of the hill, stops eight feet wide, a substantial railing on each side, at intervals a large platform with wooden seats, to serve as a resting place. Many hilltop lots were sole and some houses built there. At Mason City, Dr. Stieren and William White, the latter being Manager of the Mason City Salt Works for T.H. Sargent, each built himself a new dwelling. Dr. Stieren on Brown street and Mr. White on the west side of Anderson. Each man wanting his home to be the finest in Mason, tried to outdo the other, the result of the rivalry being that Mason City acquired two very handsome new residences. Mason City acquired also two more brick dwelling houses before 1876. Mrs. Joseph Yung (Young) with her mother and three children came from Germany about 1870 and built a German type brick cottage on Third street between Brown and Anderson. In 1873, John Young, by that time a prominent business man, had a three-story brick residence built on the n.e. corner of Pomeroy and Second streets. (His two-story brick business on the same corner was built at the same time.) The business building was built on the corner literally, while the dwelling was placed back of it in such position that it had two front yards: one on Second street and one on Pomeroy street. On the River bank of his farm west of Hartford City, Major Brown had a substantial and attractive homestead built in the fall of 1874. The building was of brick. Its furnishings were said to have cost $2000. When completed the house became a mark for rivermen because �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 401 it was always well lighted at night. Within the residences of the well-to-do in general, the minimum of elegance and convenience by the year 1876 was: a square piano, “cushioned” furniture and Brussells carpet in the parlor; imported carpet and marble-top-washstand and bureau in the “spare” bedroom; a sideboard in the dining room; an iron sink and a “hired girl” in the kitchen. Within the “best room” of the laboring classes it was: a rag carpet; cane-seated chairs and a cabinet organ. (Several workingmen’s families at Mason were looking forward to acquiring those luxuries “when pa gets his Calaway money;” needless to say, they never acquired them in that way.) Here and there lived a house-wife who still did her darning and mending by candle-light, who still on Saturday sanded her freshly scrubbed kitchen floor-to the possible woe of her offspring when they ate their afternoon “piece.” Neither the town pump not the rain barrel were wholly memories by 1876; Pomeroy’s Jack Hysell and Mason’s Daddy Hobbs, each filling his water barrel at the River shore, were familiar to everyone who regularly crossed the River on the ferryboat, Champion. The more pretentious residences built during this period were in most instances set far back from the street and the entire space in front and at the sides of the house was used for the growing of flowers and ornamental shrubbery. Walking in the flower garden was facilitated by graveled or sodded walks that wound about the flower beds. The whole yard (there were at yet no “lawns”) was protected from trespassers by an iron or a picket fence. Some yard were further ornamented with castiron animals such as dogs, deer, etc. The residence of Ben Biggs just east of the Sugar Run school house was recalled by several older residents as being especially attract- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 402 tive because of the two very life-like greyhounds reposing gracefully, one on each side of the walk leading from the gate to the front porch. At the rear of those lots on which the finer residences stood there was usually a barn, large and well built, wherein were kept the horse or horses and the carriage or buggy or both, which the families living there considered necessities. In not a few instances a cow, too, and chickens besides, were kept in those barns. Most new houses of smaller dimensions also were set farther back from the sidewalk. Most side yards, old as wells as new ones, were now planted with flowers instead of with vegetables; and the coal shed now stood near the alley along with the pig pen, chicken coop and cow stable still considered indispensable by thrifty families; they still were likely to be vieing with farmers in supplying their community with milk, butter, eggs, etc. Newspapers, their number and the kind of support given them, are an index of the plane of advancement of the town itself-so, in substance, editorialized Alfred Thompson back in the 1850s while trying to convince merchants of the importance of advertising. Plants & McLaughlin, editors and proprietors of the Telegraph since 1858, were succeeded in 1860 by Plants & Son and the name of the paper was changed to Pomeroy Weekly Telegraph. Very soon afterwards T.S. White bought the paper but in 1866 sold it to L.C. Thrall & O.B. Chapman, who moved the office to the “Burnap Building, Front street, near Sugar Run.” By 1867 (January 3) the old name, Meigs County Telegraph, was restored, the paper enlarged to four sheets but still published by Thrall & Co. An August 1869 issue announced the paper’s removal to the “Stivers Building on Second street, just �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 403 east of the Court House.” On January 1, 1872, a new organization, The Meigs County Telegraph Printing Company, announced it would print the Telegraph hereafter, with O.B. Chapman as business manager and sole editor, and George B. Crow as secretary and treasurer. Perhaps it was O.B. Chapman who inaugurated the policy indicated by the following item and thereby won for himself the office of business manager from the new company: [October, ‘71] Those photos we are giving as premiums to those who pay are giving satisfaction. The Soldiers’ AMonument is the main attraction, but the Court House, Jail and printing office, and the wall with the hill behind fill up well. The Middleport Gazette, D.W. Davis Editor and Proprietor, (Journeyman in the Telegraph office in 1864), made its first appearance on November 1, 1865. The paper consisted of four pages of six columns each, pages not so large as those of the Telegraph. “As is pretty well known,” announced Editor Davis in his first issue, “we had intended calling our paper The Meigs County Press; but to please the majority of subscribers have accepted the title, The Middleport Weekly Gazette.” In March, 1867 the Gazette was bought by H.C. Teeter, (Local Editor of the Gazette), and L.O. Smith; was enlarged to seven columns and its name changed to Meigs County Press. In May, 1869 the Press was bought by N.I. Behan, enlarged to eight columns, suspended by its creditors and used by them to start The Meigs County News November, ’71, with E.S. Branch as editor. In July, ’78, G.W. Chase bought the News, finally sold it to Behan & Teeter, who changed it to The Meigs County Herald. Financial embarrassment soon caused the paper’s permanent suspension. The Pomeroy Banner had brief but notorious career. Begun in the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 404 spring of 1867 by J.V. Stevens, by June of that year the Telegraph was provoked to describe a certain Banner article “blasphemous, indecent.” Several months later the Point Pleasant Register, Democratic paper, pronounced the Banner “the most intolerable, filthy, low-cast, lying, treasonable sheet that comes to our office,” and the editor “a perverter of truth… neither Christian, moralist, politician, literary man nor gentleman, but calls himself a Democrat!” Stevens left Pomeroy the next month; his paper, under the new name, Crescent, and a new proprietor, in a very short time suspended publication. Whereupon the Telegraph item, Jan. 7, 1869 issue, followed: IN MEMORIAM: Died, in Pomeroy… of chronic imbecility, The Pomeroy Banner, official organ of the Democratic party, Meigs county, in the second year of its age. The thing had indeed been ailing from the very moment of its birth… The Weisen Freund (Orphans’ Friend), established in the spring of 1873 by Father Jessing in the interest of his Boys’ Orphanage at Pomeroy, continued several years with success. The Mason County Journal (Mason County Printing Co.) in March, 1873 was moved from the county seat (Point Pleasant) to Clifton. By January, 1874 its editor, E.S. Trussell, had been succeeded by Allen Mason. By January, 1875, the company had moved it printing establishment to Mason City and elected William Pilchard, of Letart, W.Va., as editor. In 1875 L.K. Harpold bought the old Temperence Banner office at Pomeroy (not the above-mentioned Stevens’ Banner), moved it to West Columbia, began publishing the West Virginia Monitor. Like all its predecessors at West Columbia, the Monitor did not last long. It was that town’s last newspaper venture. A noticeable feature of the Pomeroy and Middleport newspapers of this period was their continual bickering back and forth. This, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 405 for example, from O.B. Chapman (of the Telegraph) in March of '67: The editor of the Middleport Gazette says, when Pomeroy citizens to gain time get off steamboats at Middleport and walk or ride to Pomeroy, that they are passengers for Middleport. He seems to want to leave the impression that Cincinnati steamboats come no farther than Middleport. The following week's Gazette is not in the File, hence its answer is lost irretrievably. But in the following May its new editor had this to say about Pomeroy's annexation of Coalport: Pomeroy has "taken in" Coalport. The town of Pomeroy now extends to our corporation line. "How about annexation?" If we just remain inactive… we will become attached to the beer town without any effort on our part. · In June of the same year Editor Chapman spoke of a Middleport industry as being "in the lower end of this place"; whereupon Editor Teeter began an account of a "Trip to Pomeroy" (the account reading suspiciously fictitious) thus: "Having had occasion to visit the "upper end" we noticed…" "That chap man" and "that gassy chap man" found in several Press editorials, suggested more than pure humor. In August of 1874 O.B. Chapman again twitted the sister town: Middleport considers Lower Pomeroy as an offshoot and is trying to annex it without the consent of Pomeroy. The attempt will be fought by residents and real estate dealers. On December 16, of the same year, after the annexation had taken place O.B. growled, editorially: Middleport has gobbled up Lower Pomeroy at last and still isn't happy. She wants a new name and a new charter. The next weeks came the following denial (to an accustation which was not found by this researcher): Middleport thinks Pomeroy is slightly grieved because of the annexation of Lower Pomeroy. This is not true; there are not half a dozen persons in our whole seven-mile length and as far back as you can see that are feeling bad. Our "more fortunate neighbor," now that she has bagged Lower Pomeroy, is still puzzled about a new name. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 406 And in January, 1875: The Middleport News wants to know how it can be made out that Pomeroy is seven miles long. Simple enough when you consider that Middleport men when away from home generally register themselves as from Pomeroy. Like London, Pomeroy… has a number of suburban villages which at home are recognized but abroad are not known. We hope this explanation is satisfactory. But Editor Chapman did not always speak disparagingly of Middleport. On January 24, 1872, in commenting on a proposed cotton factory by the people of Middleport, he said: “Pomeroy capitalists use their money shaving notes; Middleport people invest in factories, draw Pomeroy's most useful citizens." Editor Teeter very soon after the founding of Clifton in 1867 visited "the new town across the river," and the next week gave his readers a most enthusiastic description of the "surprising amount of building and other business going on." Middleport citizens in general, needless to say, were especially interested in their new neighbor; they knew their own town would profit greatly by its rising and growth. Progress in Education was one important outcome of The Bend's industrial prosperity. The April 11, 1867 Telegraph told the public something about Pomeroy's new school building which was just completed: About the center of Pomeroy now stands a fine three-story brick building (beside basement), 100 feet long, 50 feet wide, with four rooms on the first floor, four on the second, and on the third floor a library room and a large hall to seat seven to eight hundred people. The whole building is warmed by a large furnace in the basement. The principal's room has a clock, window shades, etc. W.E. Smith, Superintendent, teaches the grammar and high school subjects. Six of Pomeroy's ten schools opened Monday in the new building. By September, 1869 Pomeroy Had the following schools: First Ward (Kerr's Run}; First Ward Colored: Central; German School; Third Ward. The German School was taught in the Central Building. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 407 By the end of 1872 a new school building "near Sugar Run" was ready for occupancy. By August of '73 two new names of buildings had appeared: the Sugar Run (Colored) and the Lincoln Hill schools; but no Third Ward building was listed. The Pomeroy Academy building from 1858 to '65 was used for a public high school (so-called) and the gymnasium for elementary grades. After the Civil War was ended the Academy's Board of Trustees, "determined to make the school a permanent institution," announced the opening of a Fall Term, with Allen Whitman as teacher. In August of '67 the Reopening of the Academy in September by Mrs. Dr. Ferguson was announced. But the Winter Term of "Mrs. Ferguson's Select School" was advertised to begin at "her residence on Second' street, near the Remington House." The change of location and name of Ferguson's school undoubtedly was due to the return of S.W. Pomeroy and his taking possession of the Academy building, which was his father’s residence. By Act of Legislature, April 14, 1870, the Academy building together with the grounds was sold by the Academy Trustees to S.W. Pomeroy for $10,000. Names on the Deed were: V.B. Horton, C.P. Maples, Cyrus Grant, C.R. Pomeroy, E.J. Horton. With part of the proceeds, or ($6,000), a lot was purchased of John R .Pomeroy and the remaining $4,000 was invested in a new Academy building the total cost of which was $13,462.27. In 1875 in a long announcement the public was notified that the "first term of the Academy was to begin on September 27; that Henry G. Galton, A.B., was to be Head Master. Once more the Pomeroy Academy was to make a new start, this time in a fine new brick structure designed especially for school work (and located on Front street near Grace Episcopal church.) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 408 At Middleport, plans for the erection of a new three-story brick school building with a Town Clock in its cupola, were on the way in 1865; Mr. Haptonstall plastered the building during the summer of 1867. These are the only definite facts found regarding the time of erection of Middleport's new Union School, or Graded School, the two terms still meaning the same in Ohio. The structure consisted of ten rooms, a large Hall for school exhibitions and public performances, and a superintendent's office. Bricks for the new building were made, sundried and kiln-fired, on the commons directly facing the school-the same whereon the abovementioned brick Jail was built in 1875. Water for mixing the plaster and for other purposes needed was piped from the "old Fisher coal bank" in the hillside back of the new building. The most artistic feature of Middleport's new Union School Building was said to be the winding stairway extending from the first to the third floor. The town's especial pride was the Town Clock in the cupola, funds for which had been secured by exhibitions, concerts, cantatas, and other forms of public entertainment (see below). The public time piece was ordered from Germany by Philip Huber, the town's first clock-and-watchmaker, who also installed it in its place. On the morning of December 5, 1871, Middleport school work was suddenly interrupted by a most unhappy event: Fire broke out in the new Union School Building. Fortunately a pond of water was near by-in the hollow left in the commons when the clay for the bricks was taken out. A bucket brigade extending from the stairway to the pond was quickly in action, the fire was kept under control until the Pomeroy Fire Laddies arrived. The damage, though considerable, was repaired at once. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 409 Middleport's First High School Commencement took place in the spring of 1872-four years before a similar event took place in Pomeroy. The graduates of this first commencement were Miss Ella M. Moore and Miss Alice Scott. (No account of the exercise was obtainable because Middleport's 1872 newspapers are absent from the Meigs County Newspaper File.) The Meigs County News of 1873 IS in the File, however, and in it was found, in the April 2 number, a detailed account of Middleport's Second High School Commencement, a condensed version of which follows: The exercises took place on March 27 (presumably at the Union School Hall-the News did not name the place). The class motto was: The Common School-The Railroad to the Millenium. Dr. C.R. Reed, Secretary of the Board of Education, presided. The Reverend H.B. Scott made the opening prayer. The Pomeroy Band furnished music for the occasion. The following program was carried out, every part of which was fulfilled in a commendable manner: Essay, C.W. Downing: The Development of the Human Mind. Colloquy, Dying for Love, by Misses Jessie McElroy and Addie Hummels and Messrs. David Moore, Charles Probst and Frank Allen. Oration by the Graduate, C.C. Brownell: The Atlantic Cable. Presentation of Diploma, by The Rev. H.B. Scott. Address to the Pupils, by Superintendent Jas.R. Conner. Address to Patrons and Friends, by The Rev. Hiram Woods. Benediction. The Superintendent of Middleport's schools in 1871 and '72 is believed to have been S. Puckett. That J.C. Chase was holding that office in the early part of 1873 is obvious from the "Report of the Middleport Public Schools for the First and Second Months of the Term beginning September 15, 1873," published in the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 410 News and signed, "J.C. Chase, Superintendent." Citizens of Syracuse and vicinity in June, 1866 were apprised of a project by which they could secure a college in their midst. Isaac Carleton offered to give ten acres of land and at least fifty acres of coal property, with 200,000 bricks, on condition that others add enough to erect a building for a school of higher grade. The offer was accepted. One citizen subscribed $1000, several others subscribed $300 to $600. A three-story building fifty by seventy feet was planned at once. The new institution, chartered as Carleton College, was placed under the control of the Methodist Episcopal church but it was to be open to males and females of all religions. Disabled Union soldiers and orphans of such were to have free tuition. Of the College's career up to 1876 only a few scattered details were found. Dedication was announced to take place on Sunday, July 18, 1869. The Reverend J.H. Creighton of Ironton and Prof. Hurst of Ohio University at Athens were to be present. In 1879 the building was completed and a grade school was begun in the second story, with J.H. Lawhead in charge. The Third story was used by the Odd Fellows and most of the First story as sleeping rooms for foreign students. In 1873, the spring term began on March 10, with J.Q. Speaker, "a superior teacher," in charge. In June of '74 Carleton College was in session but was asking for financial help. In April of '75 C.T. Coates took charge of the Syracuse institution. By the end of June, same year, "Carleton College is in a flourishing condition. C.T. Coates, Principal, has the public's con- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 411 fidence,” the Telegraph proclaimed. Meanwhile (in April, 1867) Mr. Carleton had laid out Carletonville to join Syracuse on the west. The Syracuse M. & M. Salt Company's salt furnace, built the same year, adjoined the College's coal property. On the West Virginia side of The Bend there were of course no free schools during the early 1860s. At Mason City in 1860-63, private schools were taught intermittently and by various teachers in Mrs. Cox's school room on Brown street (See Mason Schools in the 1850s). In the northeast end of town during these years Miss Lavinia Patrick, daughter of George Patrick, conducted a school in the Patrick residence. Miss Patrick's school was popular in the entire community. Some of the pupils recalled by "one of them" were Nannie Jarrott, Rilla Jarrott, Henry Mees, Joe Long, Norris Waggener, Lizzie Mees, George Sherwood. In New Haven's hillside school house, (the one built by George Wilding Sr.,) the first teacher was Dan Duskey. Mr. Duskey's methods seem to have been the extreme opposite of those of "gentle and beloved Miss Patrick." George Wilding the Younger was a pupil in the Duskey school. "Mr. Duskey was an able and capable teacher," wrote the Reverend George Wilding, "but he had an ungovernable temper. In the spelling class, when scholars began to miss words, teacher Duskey began to redden behind the ears; and as more and more words were missed he would step up behind the class and with his open hand strike the scholars on the back of the head and knock them down. Often the whole class lay sprawled on the floor. I happened to have a genius for spelling and so escaped the Duskey violence." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 412 In Hartford City and in West Columbia, private schools continued to flourish during the early years of the War, it is to be assumed. Regarding Schools on the South Side of The Bend after the year 1863, the significant fact was: The Establishment of a System of Free Schools. Article X of West Virginia's first constitution provided for such a system. On December 10, 1863, the new state's legislature enacted the first school law, which required every county in the state to put the system into effective operation. In Mason County an election for a county superintendent gave the office to D.C. Forbes, who in November, 1864 announced in the Point Pleasant Register that an Examination of Teachers for Free Schools would be held in Mason City on November 19, at 10 o'clock A.M. However, in April of '65 the Register had the following to say on the subject of Free Schools: We have often been asked when the free schools of this county are going into operation. We would say in reply that had our assessors clone their duty by having their books made out at the proper time and been given to the sheriff so that he could have made his report to the Auditor at Wheeling… we could have drawn our capitation tax for the county for the years 1861-64 and schools would now be under way… And thus it came to pass that Mason County had no free schools before 1865. By the end of 1866, however, Superintendent Forbes was able in his annual report to say of Graham and Waggener districts (in which districts The Bend's schools were located): "They border on the Ohio River and include the salt and coal region. In them are the best schools." Now, a view of the opening of free schools in the individual Bend towns: In West Columbia, the first free school was taught by a Miss Day in a little frame building opposite the U.B. Church. Miss Mary Mason �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 413 taught "a term or two" in a room on the second floor of a private dwelling, probably in 1865, (three terms constituting a school year) In '66 a Mr. Boggess taught a term or two in Harpold's tannery. (Whether "a term or two" meant that there may have been no school at all for one term is not made clear in our source.) During these two years the children of the lower end of town were taught "in a little log building at the left of the public road." By the fall of 1867 two new school buildings were ready for occupancy: one, a "little red school house at the right of the road just above the mouth of Ten Mile Creek; the other a larger building, not red, out on Ice Creek. Billie Gamble was the first teacher at the red school house. Miss Norris (the later Mrs. W.W. Harper) was one of the first at the Ice Creek building. One room in the larger building was set apart for those who desired to study German. Among the children who entered that room the first year and subsequently were Misses Lillie, Ida and Eva Knight; Masters Gorge Knight, George Charley and Adam Zuspan. Clifton's first public schools were taught in various rooms and buildings until January 5, 1874, when they opened in a three-story brick building erected with the help of the Masonic Lodge of Clifton. The bricks for the building were made at Clifton's brickyard; they were hand-pressed, kiln-dried, sunburned. On St John's Day of the preceding year (June 24, 1873) the cornerstone of the building had been laid with appropriate ceremonies conducted by the Grand Lodge of West Virginia, under the direction of Grand Master Logan, of Wheeling. Before the ceremonies a parade took place. Music for the occasion was furnished by the Middleport Cornet Band. A package of seven silver nails from the Clifton Iron �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 414 & Nail Mill was among the articles deposited in the corner stone. The third floor of Clifton's new school building was designed for use of the Masonic Lodge. George B. Mathews was first superintendent of the schools begun in the building. Mason City's first public school opened in the fall of 1865 in the Welsh Methodist Church on Third street; moved in a year or two to Thompson's Hall on Front street; in another year or two to the new U.B. church on Center street. By the fall of '71 it was permanently located in a new four-rooml brick structure on the n.e. corner of Horton and Second-on what then was the town commons, or "green." Teachers in the Third street church and in Thompson's Hall were the Misses Sarah Welton and Nannie Jarrett, Miss Welton teaching the boys on one side of the room and Miss Jarrott the girls on the other side. In the U.B. church school one Charlie Bird was principal, with Miss Welton and Miss Jarrott as assistants (and one other). The first teachers in the brick building were: Miss Sarah Loomis, principal; Misses Mary Loomis, Sarah Welton and Nannie Jarrott assistants. The "scholars" sat by twos (and threes on occasion) in clumsy, hand-made seats that were considered by the scholars a vast improvement over the long benches they had hitherto been accustomed to (and from which frequently some one of the very young scholars tumbled off). Each room had_ its "boys’ side" and its “girls' side." Each boy and girl was supposed to have either a McGuffey's Reader, or a Primer; and if old enough a Ray's Arithmetic, Pinneo's Grammar and a Monteith's Geography. All were supposed to have slates and pencils; and the older ones were expected to use copy books, pen and ink. By the autumn of 1871 the enrollment of the Mason City school was so large that an additional room was needed. Accordingly, the Catholic school building on Third street, which had never been used, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 415 was rented by the Board of Education and a Miss Ellen Thomas placed there in charge there of the overflow, which consisted mainly of children of First Reader and Second Reader grades. But still the enrollment continued to keep ahead of its accommodations; wherefore, by October of '75 an additional wing of two rooms had been added to Mason City's brick school building on Horton street. Nor was it more than a year or two before it was found necessary to open a school for the younger children of Adamsville-first, a one-room school in an unused office building near the Mees Mills (Saw and Flour); then replaced in another year or two by a two-room school farther up-on the County highway (the so-called Big Road). Then there were the Negro children of whom there were many in Mason by 1873. West Virginia's school law required that as soon as their number justified its operation a separate school must be provided for such children. Accordingly, in that year a school for Negro children was opened in a little office building standing on the River bank below the Mason City Salt Furnace, and a Negro from Pomeroy, Ohio was employed to teach the school. He crossed the River daily for that purpose. In the early 1870s the Mason City schools by virtue of their relatively higher standing became sharers in the Peabody Fund (the money left by the philanthropist George Peabody for the promotion of education in the Southern states. Because of that assistance the Mason schools had longer terms and better teachers than any other West Virginia school in The Bend. In the year 1867 several Mason City children attended public school in Pomeroy; but by the year 1875 no Mason City parents hesitated to send their children to their own town's schools. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 416 (a) It is true, however, that most German parents did send their children to the various parochial schools maintained by Pomeroy's several German churches. But this was not meant as a reflection on the public schools; it was simply the desire, on the part of both parents and pastors, to continue the Fatherland custom of combining secular with religious instruction until confirmation age, which was twelve years. With that event the education of German children of the villager class (from which class the majority of The Bend’s German immigrants came) was considered ended. The result in The Bend was that if, after confirmation, German children wanted to re-enter the public schools (as very many of them did) they found themselves so far behind their age groups that they were too discouraged to continue in school. Their education so far had been almost wholly religious. (More on this subject farther on) During the years of 1874-75 and '75-'76 "Prof." Kenny of Point Pleasant had charge of the Mason City schools. Assistants in those two years were Misses Sue Gale, Mary Conway, Sarah Welton, Jennie Hutchinson, Nannie Jarrott. Mason City was made an Independent School District by Act of the West Virginia Legislature passed February 21, 1871. Leaders of the movement for getting the Act passed were: G.P. Simpson, Esq.; Harvey Bailey, "Squire" George Patrick, The Reverend Jacob Bird and The Reverend P.J. Kearnan, S.J. These men, it will be noted, represented not only the professional and non-professional classes but the two largest religious bodies in Mason at that time. The object in getting the Act passed was to get independent control of its school by the town itself insofar as independence was legally possible. Hartford City's first public school was opened in 1865 in the building known by the townspeople as "The Institute,"-namely, the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 416 (b) United Church building that became Franklin Institute (see below) just before the Civil War began. Miss Rebecka Kinght and Mr. Samuel Knight, brother and sister of Dr. A.L. Knight of West Columbia, taught the younger children in one room of the building ("Miss Becky" teaching the girls on one side, "Mr. Sam" the boys on the other). S.B. Saunders, erstwhile preceptor of Franklin Institute, taught the older "scholars" in the other room. Two or three years later a second story was added to the building. New Haven children began their public school careers in the "little white school up on the hillside" which the public spirited George Wilding, Sr. had had built in the first or second year of the War. By January of 1870 they were receiving their instruction in a fifty by twenty-eight-foot three-story brick school house, the third story of which was used by the Odd Fellows. W.W. Harper, of Hartford, had the contract for the construction of the building. That real efforts were made to improve educational standards on The Bend's West Virginia side is indicated by the fact that Educational Associations, Teachers' Institutes and Select Schools for “Teachers desiring higher grade certificates" flourished during the summer months. Teachers' Institutes were a State requirement and of course were attended by every employed teacher; but the Associations and the Select Schools for Teachers purely local projects. "Wanted, Scholars for Writing School, by E.B. Starcher"-so ran an advertisement in the October 4, 1866 Telegraph. Writing teachers and their writing schools at night may have begun earlier in The Bend; but it is safe to say that none became so widely known or remained in the work so long as the above-named E.E. Starcher, though he had but one arm. His night schools were always well patronized, not only because "Prof." Starcher could teach writing but because �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 417 the writing class was “some place to go" at night. The building of churches, which had begun in the late 1840s, and was at its height during the l850s, was practically completed by the 1870s. The Episcopaleans of Pomeroy, it will be recalled, were without regular services several years in the latter 1850s. A newspaper Notice of September, 1861, informed the public that Episcopal services were to be held thereafter "every Sunday at 10 ½ and at 4 o'clock at the Court House." In October of the next year ('62) Telegraph readers were again notified that "Episcopal services are to commence Sunday next in the Chapel at 10 ½ and 3 o'clock, Rev. Maples, Rector." During the War, church notices disappeared from the county newspaper. Beginning again in 1866, a dozen or more notices and items were found in the succeeding ten years, five of which gave a fairly good view of the coming of Grace Episcopal Church onto the stage. The five items follow: [November 14, '67] The Right Reverend Dr. Bedell, Assistant Protestant Episcopal Church, Diocese of Ohio, officiated at Grace Episcopal Church on Thursday the 5th. The rite of communion was administered to ten persons. [September 10, ‘68] Funds sufficient to finish the new Episcopal church have been raised. The church is to be ready for occupancy before cold weather. The plastering is nearly finished, the main tower is to be completed. Ritchie & Son, Cabinet Makers, have the contract for seats, etc. [December 3, ‘68] The new Episcopal church will be opened for public worship with appropriate services on December 6th. The public is invited, especially subscribers to the building fund. [March 4, '69] A 1000-pound bell has been ordered for the Episcopal church. The May 10, 1871 Telegraph contained an editorial on the Consecration of Grace Episcopal Church the preceding Sunday "by the Right Reverend Bishop Bedell, in accordance with the requirements of the Episcopal Church." Then follows a brief history of the church �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 418 (which is substantially as indicated in the above items). The total cost, the editor said, was $20,000. "Not a cent of debt remains on the Church,” he concluded. Some interesting sidelights on this Church: Designated "The Horton Church," or "Horton's Church" by the public because the five Horton families were its leading members, it was in reality privately owned, writes C.H. Hatley. V.B. Horton, who actually had paid for the church's construction, gave it to his wife as a wedding gift-"a bit delayed, to await the means and opportunity as they materialize." The structure is a copy of the church in England which Mrs. V.B. Horton's mother, Mrs. S.W. Pomeroy, had attended. It was designed by an English architect living in Cincinnati, who was brought to Pomeroy to draw the plan and to supervise the erection of the building. The architect had been recommended by Robert Heslop, prominent Episcopalean then living at Mason City. The ivy to have been the ivy that wherein Mrs. that in later years completely covered the edifice is said grown from a cutting that came not from England but from grew over the aforementioned English church, the one S.W. Pomeroy once worshiped. Pomeroy's Baptist Church was regularly organized in July, 1866 by O. Branch, O.P. Skinner, D.M. Davis, B.M. Skinner. In September, 1866 Baptist services were held in Branch's Hall, over the post office. In December, '66 the Baptist church building was reported as "now under construction." In June, '67 the members of the church gave a strawberry festival at the not yet finished "new church on Butternut street." On May 10, 1870, a Telegraph item stated that if the new Baptist church, a Gothic structure costing $6,000, was entirely finished. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 419 Pomeroy Churches Listed in the Telegraph's Church Directory of July 21, 1869 were: Presbyterian Methodist Episcopal Baptist German Methodist German U.B. (on Salt St.) Catholic Episcopal Jewish (Saturday Morning) Welsh Baptist Lutheran (St. Paul’s) Evangelical Protestant (St. John’s) Trinity Lutheran on Butternut and the Evangelical church on Linn and Second, though not listed in the Directory were both very much alive in 1869. Of Pomeroy's Negro church, Built in 1869, a similar aliveness may be inferred from the words, “opposite the Colored church on Heckard's Hill," which a "Fashionable Mantua Maker" used in her advertisement to indicate their location of her residence and place of business. When, during the 1850s the up-town Germans built St. John's Evangelical church they had two bells hung in the church's belfry, one heavy and deep-toned, the other light and merry-toned. Then, continuing a custom of the Fatherland, the members made arrangements to have the two bells rung every Saturday evening at sunset, "to thank God for another week," as Philip Hepp, the bell-ringer for many years, once explained to C.M. Hartley. Now, the Catholic church's two bells had rung the Angelus every evening, of course, since they were bought and hung in the 1850s (See above). And so, when St. John's bells came into play there were four bells thereafter every Saturday evening, or Sonnabend, ringing a "requiem of the dying week." On December 23, 1866 The First Universalist Church of Middleport was regularly incorporated by Martin Heckard, D.C. Whaley, Dr. W.D. Van Duyn, Dr. H.C. Waterman and others. In August, 1867, the Press observed that the Universalist church was "going up" and would be �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 420 "the finest church in town" Sheppard's Directory locates the church on s.e. corner of Main and Fourth streets. Middleport's First Free Will Baptist Church was incorporated on December 23, 1865. Finneas Hugg was one of that year's Trustees. The church building was erected the following year, presumably, on the corner of Sixth and Palmer streets. Although “The Pomeroy & Middleport Society of The New Jerusalem Church" was not incorporated until 1876, a New Jerusalem Temple was standing on Pearl street (Lower Pomeroy) in 1874, says Sheppard's Directory. Middleport's Episcopal Church Society was holding regular services in the Universalist church building, with Rev. C.P. Maples of of Pomeroy's Grace Episcopal Church as pastor, in 1874. On April 4, 1867, The First Baptist Colored Church of Middleport was organized, with Cay Dilly as chairman and Moses Letherage as secretary of the meeting. Two other prominent members of the church were Thomas English and Richard Slaughter. The church building was erected on n.e. corner of Fourth and Main (year of erection was not given.) An A.M.E. Church (Colored Methodist) was standing on the s.e. corner of Fourth and Elm streets in 1874, Sheppard tells us. Middleport' s Heath Chapel, its First Presbyterian, its Christian and its Wesleyan Methodist, in August, ‘67-each still stood as originally built, though the foundation of the Christian church was "beginning to give way after the heavy rain" of that week. At Syracuse, in April, 1873 was organized The First Presbyterian Church of Syracuse. (When the church was built was not stated.) At Minersville, a new church was built by the five or six Calvanistic Methodists (Welsh) who up to that time had been affiliated �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 421 with the Congregationalists. Eben Williams, Peter Jones and John Phillips were among the organizers of the new church. During the War the group, assisted by the Reverend John Williams of the Pomeroy church, held services in a room of the D.N. Lewis block. Its new brick building was dedicated in 1865. Its minister gave one half of his time to the church at Coalport. At Clifton a new Methodist Episcopal church was dedicated on April 13, 1873 by Presiding Elder the Reverend Powell. The church was a brick edifice and unquestionably the finest of its denomination on the West Virginia side of The Bend. There was only one church building at Clifton. But Universalist services were sometimes held in one available room or another by the Reverend William Raybold, who had been converted to that faith at Middleport. At Mason City the M.E. Church built there in 1857 (See above) had neither bell nor cupola until ten years later. In that year ('67) James H. Shoemaker and others ordered a bell for the church, and made arrangements for a place to hang it. But the bell arrived before the cupola was finished. On the Sunday morning following its arrival Charlie Bird and Thomas Bailey, eager to hear the sound of the new bell, set it up in one of the church’s doorways and then Charlie Bird held the bell while Tom Bailey turned the wheel. The next week the bell was hung on a small trestle in the churchyard, where it was regularly rung until the cupola was finished (June, '67). It was not until several years later that a fence was built around the church lot to keep out the hogs that had been getting under the building and disturbing the services by their rooting and grunting. The cornerstone of Mason's new United Brethren Church �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 422 on Center street was laid on November 12, 1867. The Reverend John Perry of Parkersburg and The Reverend W.B. Hensley, of New Haven officiated at the ceremonies. By 1870 or 1871, however, the United Brethren, who were not very numerous in Mason, sold their building to the Protestant Evangelical Society (German) whose president was Herman Lerner and whose secretary was Ernest Troeger. The Catholic Church at Mason City in 1875 was considerably enlarged. The church was no longer a mission station (See above) but now had its own priest, The Reverend Father McKearnan., S.J. A Welsh Baptist chapel was built at Mason City in 1873, on Third street between Pomeroy and Adams streets. Edward Edwards financed the project, hence the church often was called, locally, the Edwards church or Edwards's church. The Rev. J.A. Kirkpatrick of Pomeroy was this church's first minister. At New Haven, after the school-house was built on the hillside (in '61 or '62) Robert Robinson, New Haven’s aforesaid young English blacksmith, organized a Sunday School. Young George Wilding was appointed secretary and librarian, and was "proud” as Cuffy of my honors," he wrote years later. No sooner was the Sunday School well under way than Robinson had M.E. circuit rider, The Reverend E.J. Ryan, preaching regularly at the hillside school house. The Reverend Ryan, who lived at Mason City, occasionally had Jacob Bird and L.H. Sargent, two so-called local preachers, to preach for him. New Haven had no church buildings, however, until after the "Soldiers' Revival" of the winter of 1855-56. The Revival, a local manifestation of the national religious upheaval following the Civil War, was conducted by “Rev.” Ryan and U.B. ministers Alfred Moore and Jacob Bachtel in the school-house on the hillside. The following autumn Methodists and United Brethren each built a church and there- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 423 after had regular church services and prosperous Sunday Schools. Young "Bill" Jackson, boyhood chum of George Wilding, Jr., was first superintendent of the U.B. Sunday School. Later in that period, about 1871, The Reverend E.J. Ryan conducted another sweeping Revival, this time at Hartford. Many English coal miners were converted at that revival. Bishop Cranston (?) rode up from Middleport on a borrowed mule to help “Rev. Ryan,” we are told by The Reverend George Wilding. During this period of religious enthusiasm the town council of Mason City tried to work with the churches by passing laws forbidding the running of the salt furnaces on Sunday. In one instance, at least, the law was defied. In June of 1867 the Mason City Salt Company was fined one hundred dollars for such Sunday desecration. The fine was paid, either by Proprietor L.H. Sargent or by Superintendent Col. Jones and the furnace kept right on running on Sundays. Other towns are said to have passed similar laws, but no record was found of their success or lack of success in the enforcement thereof. Organs by the early 1860s had been installed in practically all the Pomeroy and Middleport churches. On the West Virginia side the first church to introduce such an innovation appears to have been the Methodist Church at Hartford City. The older member of that church, like those of the Pomeroy Presbyterian Church (and doubtless those of all other churches) were shocked and grieved when the instrument was placed in the church. And so, when it was learned that there was no member of the Hartford church who could play the organ, can it be doubted that there was secret and even open exultation on the part of the opposers? But, alas, it was only short-lived; the ladies who had raised the funds for the organ soon made an arrangement with "Professor” Williams, Syracuse music teacher, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 424 to play the instrument for Sunday School and church services until he could teach one of them to do so. The introduction of hanging lamps, or chandeliers, to take the place of candles met with equal opposition but by 1876 the modernists had won in every instance of controversy. The Prohibition Movement got under way on the Ohio side of The Bend in the early 1870s. Middleport, especially, had long felt the need of some kind of movement to stop the drunken rows and general rowdyism that had been prevailing in their midst. In September, 1867, the Meigs County Press complained that on the preceding Saturday night there had been on Rutland street a "regular line of battle by a party of young men from Clifton, West Virginia, who arrived with revolvers, knives and sling-shots"; that the people had been badly frightened but that no serious damage had been done. The Press hoped the town council of Middleport would consider a lock-up for the town, since the iron works opposite "will attract many more to this and to the new town of Clifton." And so, it was not surprising to find that Middleport was chosen as the place for the meeting of the Meigs County Prohibition Convention in September, l871; nor that Middleport's Town Council passed a Prohibition Ordinance in January of 1875. In the autumn of 1873 the Ohio Assembly passed the Adair Law, which required saloons to be closed on Sunday and forbade the selling of liquor to minors. In the following February the saloon keepers of Pomeroy had a meeting at which they agreed to keep closed on Sunday and not to sell liquor to minors; in short, to obey the law. They were "quite proud of themselves," a reporter said. Nevertheless, there was "much going in and out of side entries" �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 425 that aroused suspicions; the suspected violators were apprehended and tried before T.A. Plants, Judge of Common Pleas Court, who, arch foe of saloon keepers that he was, gave every one the same sentence: $100 and costs. One offender refused to plead guilty, lost his case; and so he was sentenced to twenty-five days in jail, the first ten of which he was put on a bread and water diet-this, in addition to the $100 fine. In the winter of 1873-74 the Women's Temperance Crusade got into swing at Pomeroy and Middleport. The purpose of the crusaders was to overcome the enemy by the power of prayer; their modus operandi was to enter the saloons in a body, or group, and hold a prayer meeting. At Pomeroy the Crusaders were permitted to enter the Gloeckner and Hein saloons; at most others they were locked out. But they sang and prayed anyway on the sidewalks. In one notable instance they managed somehow to get through a supposedly locked door and to proceed calmly with their meeting. In a May, 1874 Telegraph appeared this editorial item: A Soda Fountain is in operation at Seebohm's Drug Store in behalf of temperance. The Mason City people in their municipal election of January, 1875 joined forces with the temperance movement. The issue was license or no license. The Anti-License ticket won, electing Jacob Bird (local preacher) as mayor; George McDaniel, recorder; Thomas Hutchinson, school commissioner; and J.U. Myers, A.E. Young, Thomas Carroll, Chris Witzgal and John Phillips as councilmen. But at unincorporated Clifton in January, '73 the Mason County Court, which was the ruling power, granted several liquor licenses, "Clifton was formerly law abiding; residents who wanted to imbibe had to visit Pomeroy," lamented the Meigs County News. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 426 Neither Hartford City nor New Haven had saloons during this period. New methods of presenting both old and new ideas and lines of thought appeared during the late 1860s and early '70s. One example: (July 16, 1869 Telegraph) We learn that Hon. T.A. Plants is to deliver a series of lectures in Pomeroy on the Divine Inspiration and Sacred Character of the Bible. The first is to be given Sunday at 3 o’clock, p.m., at the Baptist Church, free. (These lectures are given by request.) Sometimes the occasion for the implanting of a new idea took on all the aspects of a social function. Such an occasion was the celebration of the opening of the L.H. Sargent Boarding House in Adamsville (the new town above Mason City) on the night of November 1, 1864, with a supper for the employees of Mr. Sargent's Coal Company and Salt Works. The main feature of the event, as reported officially to the Point Pleasant Register, were: Tables were spread for two hundred guests. After a sumptuous repast the tables were cleared, the house called to order. Jacob Bird, Mayor of Mason City, was appointed chairman; John C. Thompson, secretary. Mr. Sargent being the first person called, stated that the object of the meeting was not wholly to feed the inner man but to talk mutually in a friendly way. He alluded to the difficulties of the miners in opening the mines, their noble triumphs over obstacles laid in their way by a society of men banded together under the name of a union. He commended the men on their fine appearance and good behavior. He spoke eloquently of Country and Flag; wished the miners and their families success and long life and happiness. The delighted men cheered heartily. Toasts by Mr. Sargent, Mr. Thompson, the new hotel's proprietor Mr. J.S. Van Buren, and Mr. Bird, followed. Mr. Sargent toasted Our Country, native and adopted; Thompson and Van Buren each toasted Mr. Sargent; Mayor Bird praised Adamsville and its founder Robert Adams, who was not present. Van Buren in the final toast lauded Agent Tucker's industry, sobriety and habit of taking long walks while others rode horseback. Mr. Tucker [who had managed the affair] being indisposed did not reply. Mr. Thomas Scott spoke briefly of the evils of unions in Europe as he had known them to his sad experience and beautifully contrasted the fine system of this his long adopted country. The meeting voted thanks to the ladies for the supper, to Mr. Sargent and to Agent Tucker for his splendid management; and to have the proceedings published in the Register. Then it adjourned with hearty cheers for L.H. Sargent, for Country and for everybody. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 427 The Tournament presented by the young men of Clifton and vicinity in the autumn of 1869 was educational in character though not primarily so in purpose. The following is a much condensed form of an account of the event which was written for the State Gazette (Mason County newspaper) some time during the year 1909 by John L. Mason, former newspaper man. Mr. Mason wrote from personal recollections: A race course full half a mile long was constructed along Clifton's unoccupied River front. Five large arches crossed the track. Knights in full armor were to ride doen the lists three times. The one who captured the greatest number of rings was to win the prize. [Manner of capture was not told.] Dr. A.L. Knight was Master of Ceremonies. Some of the knights were The Peerless Knight of France, Robin Hood, The Knight of Kanawha, Knight of the Ohio Valley, Knight of Shenandoah, Horatius Cockles, Leonidas. At the sound of the bugle the knights appeared in front of the grandstand, listened to an address on the days of old romance, knightly deeds, tournements, and so on. Then the tourney began. When it was ended the Knight of Kanawha and the Trojan Chief Hectar were discovered to have tied. The Master of Ceremonies announced that the two winners were to contest alone. Instead of complying, Hecktar bowed and lowered his lance to the Knight of Kanawha, wheeled his horse, rode up to one of the ladies in the grandstand, touched her left arm with the point of his lance. When she had tied a bit of ribbon on the end of his spear he withdrew it, backed to the center of the track, bowed to the Judge and the multitude, rode to the grove of trees along the edge of the River bank (whence he had come), and was never seen nor heard of again. [Nor does Editor Mason divulge the secret.] That night a grand fete took place in the salt sheds of the Virginia Salt Company, where Miss Lucy Coleman of Point Pleasant was crowned Queen of Love and Beauty by the victor, the Knight of Kanawha. The next night a ball in the sheds was perhaps the most brilliant and largest social event ever held in Mason County. A stage sixty feet square, was lighted with Japanese lanterns and decorated most gorgeously. The grand march was led by The Hon. James B. Menager and Miss Lillie Knight, The Hon. S.A. Heaton and Miss Lucy Summerville. Political enthusiasm, as in the ante-bellum days, centered in the Republican Party. Immediately after the Civil War closed, political rallies were begun and reached their peak in the campaign of 1868. An outstanding event of that year was the Granad Union Rally and Basket �Dinner given by the Clifton Grant Club on Friday, July 3, 1868, at Clifton. The speakers for the occasion were W.E. Stevenson, candidate for the governorship of West Virginia, and Major R.S. Brown, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 428 Elector at Large. The Charley Bowen brought a large crowd from Point Pleasant. German voters in The Bend were given special opportunity to learn Republican principles. Samuel Dana Horton, youngest son of V.B. Horton, educated at Harvard and Berlin, returned to Pomeroy about 1870 and during the next four or five years held meetings in the Court House to discuss in German the day's political issues from the Republican viewpoint. The meetings were attended by large numbers of Germans from all parts of The Bend. The Academy of Medicine of the 1850s, with name changed to Academy of Medicine of Meigs and Mason Counties, had among its objects in 1874 "the advancement of knowledge, the elevation of the character and protection of the rights and interests of those engaged in the practice of medicine… and study of means calculated to make the medical profession most useful to the public…” The Academy's regular meetings were held in Middleport, but occasionally they took place on the West Virginia side of The Bend. Dr. Knight, of West Columbia, Dr. P.H. Clark, of Mason, (and other Mason County physicians, whose names were not given) were members of the Academy. In 1874 Dr. J.Q. Hudson was the Academy's president, Dr. J.C. Bishop was its secretary-both of Middleport. A noteworthy celebration of this period was the one which took place in April, 1875 on the grounds of John Schreiner, about a mile below Middleport. The Point Pleasant "Cornstalk" Band came up on the steamer Emma Graham to furnish music for the occasion. The St. James and the Wall City brought the Ravenswood, Racine, Syracuse, New Haven, Hartford City, Pomeroy and Mason City lodges. Col. Schreiner acted as Chief Marshal. (Further details of the events were sought, but in vain.) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 429 Another special celebration took place in March, 1871, the occasion being the Peace Treaty between Germany and France at the close of the Franco-Prussian War. Only the Germans of Pomeroy and vicinity were sponsors of that celebration, of course; but others took part. The Harmonia Band (German), the Pomeroy Cornet Band and the Minersville Band were present. Addresses were made by The Reverend L. Theiss, Dr. Stieren, Hon. T.A. Plants and others. "The procession gave three rousing cheers as it passed the Telegraph office-which was evidence of good feeling toward the paper in spite of our supposedly critical remarks," concluded Editor Chapman's long account of the occasion. (The "supposedly critical remarks" could not be found; but our guess is that they criticised the Germans for their seeming preference for The Fatherland to their adopted country.) Public Amusement and Entertainment during the War years was practically non-existent. By the autumn of 1865, however, The Bend had begun to resume its normal activities. On October 4 and 5, 1865, the eleventh Annual Fair of Meigs County was held at Racine. This was the first Fair since 1860. Not before March, 1867 did Dan Rice venture back to Pomeroy with his Show. It had been "seven years since his last visit." But two years before Dan Rice's return, on August 29, 1865, the George W. DeHaven & Company Circus had come to Middleport. The steamer Jeannette Roberts brought "patrons from Mason and Pomeroy free." In the summer of 1867 a new kind of recreation was introduced into The Bend. "Our boys are not behind other towns in the way of amusement," said the Meigs County Press on July 10, of that year. "There is a regularly organized Base Ball Club in Middleport… �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 430 Our boys take to the game like ducks to water. Few of the Club ever saw the game played, yet they play remarkably well." By August of that year Middleport had three clubs, the Snowdowns, Snowdown Junior and the Lightfoots. Pomeroy had its Mohawks, its Hillsides, its Sugar Run Rattlers and its Continentals. At Mason City were the Rough & Ready Club, the Champions, the Corncrackers. These clubs played match games, now at Mason City, now at Pomeroy, now at Middleport, with successes as varied as were the number of clubs. At Mason the games were played on "The Green,"-the broad, vacant space in front of Front street, which R.C.M. Lovell had reserved for a public park. On October 16, 1867 a Baseball Tournement was held at Middleport "on the Behan lots at the foot of Third street." The Kanawha Club of Point Pleasant and the Gallia Club of Gallipolis came out best, had to play each other for the first prize of $75. (Result not reported in the next week's Press.) Skating was “all the rage" in the winter of '68-on "Leading Creek and Diamond Hollow Pond," Middleport, and on Sugar Run, "directly back of our office," at Pomeroy. "On Saturday afternoon all the 'school ma'ams' and their pupils were out. We were sorry to see a large number of boys out Sunday, to the serious annoyance of religious people," lamented the Telegraph in January of '69. Picnic Dances, on the Mason City Picnic Grounds, were frequent occurrences of the late '60s and the 1870s. Sponsored as a money-making affair by some organization such as the local brass band, a lodge, or on occasion, the Catholic or the German Evangelical Church, the revenue from the dancing platform was increased by various schemes of chance; of these the most exciting was the "voting" of a ring to the most beautiful young lady present and of a gold-headed cane to �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 431 the most popular gentleman. The picnic usually was held on Saturday afternoon. All ages and classes from nearly every part of The Bend might have been seen there, some having come merely to watch "the other half" enjoying itself, the majority to take part wholeheartedly in all the various amusements. Brass bands, which were constantly increasing in number, frequently entertained the public on Saturday afternoons or evenings-on Court street if it was a Pomeroy band. The German Band, organized in 1868 with "Prof." Stahl as director, became the proud possessor of silver instruments imported from Germany. Nonetheless the Pomeroy Cornet Band and the Pomeroy Mutuals often vied with the German Band at public functions. Middleport had its Cornet Band, of which C.B. Skinner was president, A. Murray secretary and treasurer, and Frank Grant band leader. It had also the Olympic Brass Band, composed of colored musicians. James James and Thomas McCabe were first and second leaders respectively of The Olympic. Public Indoor Entertainment consisted mainly of school and Sunday School exhibitions, and concerts by various organizations. At Pomeroy, before the fall of 1873, such entertainment took place either at some church or at the Court House. After that year the Opera House was available for local entertainers. Some amateur performances that received newspaper notice were: A series of concerts given by The Welsh Philharmonic Society, and, beginning in March, 1866. The proceeds of these concerts were to go on the debt of the Wels Presbyterian Church at Minersville. The first one was held at the Syracuse M.E. Church; the second at the Court House; the third at the Middleport M.E. Church. These concerts were �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 432 proclaimed throughout The Bend to be of a superior order. Many from The Bend's south side attended them. The Racine Philomathean Society of the Racine high school in March of '67 gave a Literary Exhibition at the Pomeroy M.E. Church. We venture to say (without newspaper authority) that the exhibition was presented at Racine also, and was a success at both places. At Middleport, in May, l866 the Middleport Gazette announced that "the long looked for and highly entertaining and instructive Cantata, THE FLOWER QUEEN, or CORONATION OF THE ROSE, was to be, presented to the public on Monday evening, May 21st, in the upper room of the Presbyterian Church and that the proceeds were "to be applied to the purchase of a TOWN CLOCK to be placed in the Cupola of the new and elegant Union School Building now being erected; so that all who patronize the Concert will be 'casting their bread upon the waters to find it again in a a few days,'" said the announcement's writer, Manager M.M. McLaughlin. Here again we presume to say without newspaper authority that Manager McLaughlin's plea for a "rousing audience to greet our own fair town children in their first essay before the public as musicians," met with satisfactory response. In August of the next year ('77) two concerts, "The Rebellion" and "The Haymakers," were given by Prof. McLaughlin and his class. It was hoped that the receipts from these would "complete the Town Clock Fund." A violin solo by Major Downing was one special feature of the second concert. In June, 1868 the Middleport Glee Chorus Troupe (members not named) gave a concert at Clifton the proceeds of which were applied to the purchase of a library for the Clifton Union Sabbath School. Presentation of the money ($63) to B.F. Wait, the superintendent, by General W.H. Powell, was one feature of the “programme.” Free ferry �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 433 transportation was given by the Middleport & Clifton Ferry Company. At Pomeroy, in March, 1875 the Harmonie, a German Singing Club, gave a concert in German and in English for the benefit of the town's poor. The following week the Club gave a second concert, this time for the destitute in Nebraska. Both these concerts were pronounced "rare treats… the ability of our German friends being well known." The same Telegraph issue contained also the following acknowledgment: The Pomeroy Glee Club Harmonie tenders its thanks in the name of the suffering poor and also to George Eiselstein for the use of the Opera House gratis, and also to the German Brass Band for its assistance. Mason City in May, 1874 gave one whole day and evening to a series of projects for the raising of money to buy window shades, dictionaries, and other schoolroom necessities. During the day and early evening the teachers and other public-spirited ladies held a Fair and Festival in the school building. In the evening a School Exhibition, presented by school and local talent, was the day's crowning feature. The performance took place on a temporary stage built on the school ground. Music for the occasion was furnished by the Pomeroy Brass Band. All in all it was a Gala Day for the whole town, especially for the children who did not have a part on the "programme.” The holiday and the free ticket to the exhibition was satisfaction enough for them. The building of the Opera House at Pomeroy (see above) seems to have inspired the forming of dramatic clubs everywhere in The Bend. The only one to attain newspaper notice before 1876, however, was The Carleton Dramatic of Syracuse, it appears. On August 11, 1875 this club played at the Opera House for the benefit of the Pomeroy Fire Department and, in the opinion of the Telegraph, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 434 "gave excellent satisfaction." In April, 1875 The Tennessee Minstrels, a Negro Troupe, gave a concert concert at the Opera House, and was pronounced, editorially, "…the finest musical entertainment Pomeroy has enjoyed for several years. Old plantation and camp meeting songs had a thrilling effect. The singers had good voices, were admirably trained and were highly appreciated by the audience. They can count on a full house if they ever favor Pomeroy with another visit. Spelling Schools were the "rage" of the winter of 1874-75 at Pomeroy and Middleport. The Spelling Match, The Battle for the Book, Terrible Slaughter of the Innocents, were the flaming headlines of a long but spicy account of a spelling match that took place at the Opera House on February 22, 1875. Said the reporter in part: The Opera House was jammed full Monday evening. Judge Stanbery was Master of Ceremonies. W.C. Penny and L.H. Lee, selected to "choose sides,” took their positions on the stage, tossed up a stick. Lee won first choice… John Stivers won the prize, an Unabridged Dictionary, latest edition. The receipts, $37.75, were given to the Aid Society… Pomeroy's Mutual Cornet Band furnished music for the occasion. Singing Schools vied with Spelling schools in providing the young folks with “some place to go” in the evening. "Professor" Tom Booth was Middleport's popular singing school leader. The River still, as always, was a significant factor in practically every phase of The Bend's life; still, by one means or another, was drawing the public at large to its banks. Wharves and wharfboats, for one thing. Every Bend town maintained some sort of wharf, or levee, nearly every one had a wharfboat-not for the express purpose of providing a convenient standing place or comfortable waiting place when the town assembled to welcome the arrival or speed the departure, on steamboat, of a fellow townsman, though levee and wharfboat did incidentally serve such a purpose quite frequently. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 435 Pomeroy's War-time Steamboat Agent S.P. Roush, successor to George Hoadley, was in turn succeeded by Downie & Wallace (November, 1865). In 1872 Pomeroy's Town Council appointed William Downie wharfmaster of the now city-controlled wharfboat. That same Council (of '72) also passed an Ordinance pertaining to the condemnation of three small buildings on the south side of Front street near Linn street and belonging to A. Seebohm, W.H. Remington and John Strider respectively. The ground occupied by the buildings was to be used for a new wharf. Said wharf was not built, however, until about three years later. Coalport's wharfboat, owned by the Pomeroy Coal Company, in April of 1868 took fire from its signal light and burned to the deck. It was not rebuilt. Middleport's Council on April, 1868 appropriated $500 for the improvement of its wharf at the foot of Coal street. West Columbia's wharfboat, owned by John Sargent, was kept in operation several years after the close of the War. Clifton's wharfboat, brought thither in January, 1868 by W.E. Culp from Gallipolis, sank in December, 1869 from "general disability." It was not replaced by another wharfboat. Mason City never had a wharfboat but it had an exceptionally good levee that was the town's pride and a great satisfaction whenever the community had occasion to assemble there. (Chronic faultfinders maintained that the boulders, of which it was constructed, retarded one's progress when hurrying to get to the ferry-boat.) Hartford's long-serving wharfmaster Sam Lallance is still (1940) gratfully remembered by one granddad who was a small boy in 1869, the year that Mr. Lallance pulled him out of the River in the nick �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 436 of time. There are other wharfmasters possibly who are remembered for similar favors: all wharfboats were popular diving places in that period. A New River-Bank Attraction began for Mason City and Pomeroy with it the launching of the model barge Caroline (Monday, Nov. 15, 1875), the first large boat built at the John Young Boatyard. So significant for Mason City was the event considered that the public schools were dismissed for the launching. The assembled crow's enthusiasm was dampened somewhat when a hitch occurred, leaving part of the boat out of the water; and the ferryboat with the aid of a number of men wielding levers and handspikes had to pull and shove the boat into the River. Pomeroy’s River-bank by that time had a substantial railing along which spectators could stand while watching the launching. It was there, too, that they stood to watch the daily race between the Wild Gazelle and the Humming Bird for the Gallipolis-Syracuse trade. The boats, about equal in speed, had each reduced their fare to fifty cents the round trip. The Telegraph found the races "quite exciting"; and later the still further reductions in fares were pronounced "good for the people but death for the boats." Some of Mason City's children derived a special kind of entertainment from the River's steamboats. Sent to the Hope of the “Mason City” coopershop on Saturday mornings for "chips" for kindling wood, groups of little girls (of which the writer usually was one) spent most of the morning perched at the top of the bank watching the little cable cars carry the barrels of salt down the incline from the salt sheds to the deck of the Bostona, Telegraph, or other Cincinnati packet taking a shipment. Boys, more practical, were much more likely to be in the yards "rolling salt"-that is, helping to roll the barrels from the yard to the incline-and thereby earning nice little sums �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 437 of spending money. Many new towbots made their appearance in The Bend during this period, one of which was the Pomeroy Coal Company's fifth2 Condor. 2. That there were four Condors is a generally accepted fact; but whether the P.C.C. Compamy's above-mentioned Little Condor was one of the four or made the fifth, diligent research failed to discover. The only record found of a Condor No. 2 was that in O.B. Chapman's account of the establishing of the Horton Boatyard (see above). The P.C. Company's Windsor, mentioned several times in the 1850s, is thought by some to have been the second Condor renamed (for V.B. Horton's birthplace in Vermont.) The boat had been built at Cincinnati by V.B. Horton Jr. during the War and named Quaker; but in June, 1867 it was bought by the P.C. Company and its name changed as indicated. The Little Condor was sold in October, 1867 to R.R. Hudson, for the Ohio River Salt Company's use. The Windsor was dismantled by the P.C. Co. early in '67. The Charley Bowen, a fine passenger packet that saw some Civil War service, was reported by the Pt. Pleasant Register of Dec.19, 1867 as "recently converted into a first-class towboat," and owned by Capt. Ford and others of Point Pleasant. Capt. James Shoemaker's Charley Bowen of the 1870s was the Charley Bowen No. 2. New Cincinnati-Pittsburgh packets and other larger packets kept coming into the scene, their first trips always a source of special attention in every town. One such boat was the "new, large, splendid passenger steamer R.R. Hudson,” that appeared in August of ‘67. In May of the same year the Fleetwood, not a new boat but with a new Brass Band that was to be "a fixture on the boat," promised River Bank entertainment for the rest of the summer. In May, 1869 the Ohio No. 4, Cincinnati-Parkersburg, made her first trip. Three Ohios had come and gone, the first one having �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 438 been mustered into Government service during the Civil War. The Liberty of the late 1850s also had three duplicates. Owned first by Lovell & Payne, sold to the Calaway Company, the first Liberty in December, 1862 was making regular trips between Pomeroy and Cincinnati in the command of the "affable and accommodating Capt. Horace Horton… and should receive the entire business." The second Liberty and the third also are "off the record.” Liberty No. 2 was towing barges for the Ohio River Transportation Company in August of 1875. In 1873, just as the salt industry was approaching its peak, the Pomeroy Transportation Company brought out its new sternwheel steamer Salt Valley, (built at the Middleport Docks). Two years later, when Pomeroy's retaining wall was about completed, some other company's new sternwheeler, Wall City steamed into the stage, for the GallipolisMarietta trade. A River Mail Service, as shown above came into The Bend in the late 1850s. From early in the '60s until late in 1867 the Mattie Roberts, tri-weekly Gallipolis-Marietta packet, carried mail to all the larger River towns lying between those two points. Due to reach The Bend about 4 o'clock p.m. on her down trip, the Mattie’s whistle seldom failed on those days to start each Bend town's citizenry running to the post office and wanting to know of every other person on the run if "that" was the mail boat. By November, 1867 the Emma Graham, Mel Brown captain, had taken the Mattie Roberts's place as U.S. Mail packet. In 1872 or '73 the Chesapeake, with John Roedel U.S. Mail Clerk, became the regular Gallipolis-Parkersburg mail carrier. Even then, not all the mail came by River; as late as 1876 the Athens-Middleport-Pomeroy Coach Line still brought the mail from the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 439 interior of Ohio, and the smaller towns above were still served by land routes and not efficiently at that in some cases. Racine got its Telegraphs (printed Wednesday afternoons) on Saturday evening. Nor was the River service satisfactory everywhere. West Columbia complained of her poor River service from Point Pleasant and up the Kanawha. The postmastership had not yet become a political plum by the 1860s and was not in every instance a much-sought office. Graham Station, for example. On October 14, 1863 a post office was established about five miles above New Haven and given the name of Graham Station, with John Roberts as postmaster. The office was discontinued on April 7, 1865 because no one wanted it; re-established Nov. 28, same year; discontinued May 15, '71; re-established January, 1872; discontinued December 2, '72; re-opened in January of '73 by James Kelly, who had moved from Hartford to engage in farming and merchandizing near the Station; discontinued when Mr. Kelly moved away from the vicinity in March of '74 and no one else wanted the office. The subsequent history of the Graham Station post office belongs to the next period. During the first year of the Civil War the Republicans of Pomeroy and of Middleport each had meetings to elect a postmaster (presumably to displace a Democratic incumbant). On December 23, 1862 Hosmer Branch was appointed to succeed George Lee at Pomeroy; and on June 5, 1861 Benjamin Smith took charge of the Middleport office, succeeding D.C. Whaley, who had been appointed on March 4, 1859. George Lee had succeeded James Ralston in 1853. Some postmasters were rembered for certain peculiarities. Charles Juhling, when he came to the Upper Slope on l862, started a little store in the front room of his dwelling. After New Haven’s �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 440 (a) first post office was opened in that store with Charles Juhling as postmaster. Mr. Juhling, whose English was still somewhat deficient, often was heard calling to his "good, big blond wife, 'Mahala, coom here onct.'" Thomas Watkins, Scotchman, was appointed postmaster of Mason in 1866. Said the Telegraph in 1874: The Watkins Post Office has been supplied lately with boxes and lock boxes. Postmaster Watkins also runs an independent mail route between Mason and Pomeroy. The item could have had another interesting "also"; it could have said that Postmaster Watkins 'calls all little girls “Kitty Bitty” when they come to his grocery-post office for mail and for candy.” One postmaster, at least, seized his opportunities for selfimprovement. George Wilding in March of '69, while working as clerk and book-keeper for the Union Salt Company, was appointed postmaster at New Haven. "On rainy days," wrote The Reverend George Wilding in 1925 (in the Telegraph), "I used to read all the papers and magazines in the office. I had a snug corner back by the window under the big locust tree. I especially enjoyed Lewis Bumgarner's Wheeling Intelligencer, Alfred Yonker's Rural New Yorker and John Fry's American Agriculturalist… Lewis Bumgarner, or Squire Bumgarner, took so many papers and looked so wise, I often wondered should I ever attain such eminence." George Wilding it was, too, no doubt, who reported to the Point Pleasant Register in April, 1869, that "With less than four hundred inhabitants, New Haven takes 106 weekly newspapers, 106 monthly magazines, 290 Sabbath School papers-at a total cost of $45.00," and thereby winning for his town the distinction of being pointed out by the Telegraph as a “reading community." Of the many other prominent representatives of this period's various businesses and professions, a mere kaleidoscopic view of some �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 440 (b) already shown can be presented. Beginning with the Oldest of these, it was found that--C.R. Pomeroy, because of physical infirmities, withdrew from active business during the early 1870s. The "venerable William Prall" was living in Wheeling in the early 1870s. Aaron Stivers served four terms as Auditor of Meigs County, having been elected to the office for the first time in 1859. James Ralston with his son James H. Ralston were General Insurance Agents in 1867 and later. Continuing with those who came into this drama during the 1850s and early '60s, it was found that: Attorneys T.A. Plants and Samuel Bradbury in 1867 were members of the Ohio Assembly and of the Ohio Senate respectively. Judge Nathan Simpson soon after moving to Mason City in the late '60s surprised the Republicans by joining the Democratic Party. J. Warren Jones, son of Philip Jones, after selling his Keg Factory in Clifton in 1875 went to Wheeling to engage in business. Andrew Burckert, early partner of William Eichmann, married the "beautiful Portuguese girl brought from the Azores by some ladies visiting there" [in the Azores], the girl whom Miss Urania Stivers taught English with "such unlimited patience." Uncle "Haz" Chapman, at Hartford, was "revelling in Spurgeon's Sermons and living for family, Church and the Democratic Party," in the early '70s. Seth Bumgardner, New Haven's "fire-eating Republican, who swore, with father [George Wilding, Sr.] by Horace Greely and the New York Tribune," …yet for some unexplainable reason did not go the war. R.C.M. Lovell after the Civil War was over, returned to the Kanawha Valley from Kentucky and organized the Pioneer Coal Company at Malden, West Virginia, in 1870. His son James J. Lovell was made vice president of the company. Peter Huggard, free Negro plasterer living in Mason City before the War, was still engaged in that work in Pomeroy in 1870. Thayer Horton married Elizabeth Richards, Academy teacher, in the early '60s; returned East with his family about 1868. Edwin J. Horton, oldest son of V.B. Horton (born 1838), who was married in October, 1862 to Elizabeth, oldest daughter of Dr. Estes Howe, at Cambridge, Mass., was by 1875 assuming many of the responsibilities of his father's business. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 441 Samuel Dana Horton, youngest son of V.B. Horton, was admitted to the bar by the Supreme Court of Ohio, in January of 1871, whereupon he began the practice of law in Pomeroy. J.O. Myers came to Mason City from Jackson County, West Virginia, in 1868, to practice law. He opened an office first at Mason City, then at Pomeroy. Mr. Myers was one of the staunch supporters of the Prohibition cause. James Waddell, book-keeper for the Clifton Coal Company, moved in January of 1868 from Middleport to Mason City to take charge of the Mason City Salt Company’s books. William H. Grant, of Grant Brothers, Middleport, by 1875 had become a resident of Kansas. Charley Eggenswiller, clerking in the Hartford City Coal & Salt Company Store in the latter 1860s, was pronounced by his fellow clerk George Wilding as “a most lovable German.” Charkey W. Young, son of John Young of Mason City, in October 1874 returned from Germany, where he had been “attendin school the past two years at one of the leading German universities.” George Joachim volunteered for Federal service in 1861, was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant in the 7th Ohio Batter at Vicksburg. After the War he made carpentering his vocation and by 1876 was a foreman in the Davis Planing Mill. His boyhood avoxation melodeon playing, had been developed by formal instruction from Pomeroy’s best teachers so that by the middle of 1870 he had attained such proficiency as to be elected organists at St. Paul’s Lutheran church. He also had served the city of Pomeroy in several civic capacities. George Wilding in 1861 and 62 attended school at the “little white schoolhouse” on the New Haven hillside. In 1863 he aided the Home Guards? After the War he clerked in the Hartford Company Store attended Marietta College, clerked in the New Haven Company Store. (The Union Salt & Coal Company.) During the Soldier’ Revival of 1865-66 George Wilding was converted and in consequence felt himself called to the ministry. He fought off the call, got married. By 1872 while with the Union Com-at New Haven, he decided to resist no longer. When he told his �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 442 father he had accepted a circuit in the Allegheny mountains, his father called him a blockhead for giving up a good position. G.W. Moredock, when informed of the decision, called him a fool. The next morning Mr. Moredock returned to New Haven, "apologised, adding… “Refusal on my part would shake his confidence in me.” Then he shook hands with me and we both broke down and cried." On leaving the office the Company's president gave the prospective circuit rider some good advice, which the latter had been "trying to observe for fifty years." And, once more, the "Man Who Made Pomeroy": V.B. Horton by 1875 had made Pomeroy the largest town on the Ohio side of the River, between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. In that year he was either president of or influential stockholder in practically every major industrial organization of his community. He owned land in Mason county, opposite Middleport; he owned land in Middleport and below Middleport, he owned land in Sutton township- "in fact, he owned nearly all of Meigs County," the late Robert Griffith of Minersville said to the writer. Much of the Horton land was farmed systematically, the owner himself making regular visits on horseback to his various farms. Mr. Griffith's countenance beamed as he related how, when he was only three years old, he once was permitted to hold the horse of the man who was looked upon as a sort of king by the humbler folk. Which he was in effect: a ruler. Yet a so kindly and considerate ruler was he that when asked by this or that employee to take care of his savings, Mr. Horton hadn’t the heart to refuse. He didn't need the money then; he was reputed to be worth a million-a fabulous fortune at that day-yet he paid dozens of workingmen interest on their offered "loans." That the social position of V.B. Horton and his family was equally �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 443 regal is self evident. In 1875 V.B. Horton was offered the Republican nomination for the governorship of Ohio. Indifferent to politics by that time, he refused to run. He preferred to give his undivided attention to the progress and prosperity of Pomeroy and of The Bend. Yet there are indications that he was growing slightly indifferent to his business interests as well. The number of Founding Fathers still remaining in the older Bend towns was growing smaller and smaller: On March 27, 1867 Samuel Grant passed away at the residence of his son, Cyrus Grant, Pomeroy, having attained the age of eighty-nine years. He was buried in Beech Grove Cemetary, the town's recently purchased burying ground. Three and a half years later, Philip Jones was laid to rest in the family graveyard on Rutland Road (which he had a_ donated to Middleport and which therefore was that town’s first burying ground). Fissures in the soil of that region made necessary the later removal of the body of Philip Jones (and of others lying there) to the new Hill Cemetary, where it still lies (1940). On the large marble shaft that marks his grave is inscribed: Philip Jones Died October 6, 1870 Age 82 yrs., 6 mo. First Treasurer of Meigs County Served in the War of 1812 Founder of Middleport Consistent Christian In February of the next year (187l), John Smith, youngest son of Pioneer James Smith, was borne to his last resting place, the Hill Cemetary, at the age of eighty-three. With that burial the original Smith Family of Middleport came to an end. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 444 "One by one, full of years and honor the Pioneers pass away. Randall Stivers is one of the last survivers of that hardy race…”-thus was introduced the Telegraph's long obituary the week following the death of Randall Stivers on November 17, 1875, at the residence of a daughter on Butternut street, at the ripe old age of eighty-seven. (The obituary summarizes the life of Pioneer Stivers as it has been seen in several preceding parts of this drama.) Thomas Irvin, son-in-law of Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy Senior, died in Campbell County, Kentucky, on January 7, 1869, at the age of seventyfive. He died "in the communion of the Catholic Church," said the very brief obituary that was published in the Telegraph of January 11, 1869. The violent death of Harrison Cohen, prominent Pomeroy merchant of the 1850s and later, was a shock to the town and to the entire Bend. Early on the morning of March 25, 1868, before many people knew that there was a fire raging, the Cohen store building on Front street was totally consumed. The first persons to reach the burning structure found Mr. Cohen on his hands and knees trying to get out and calling for help. Medical examination showed he had been struck on the back of the neck with a blunt instrument. He died the next morning, conscious but without giving any satisfactory explanation as to the who and the why of the double crime. Rumors were afloat but none ever were verified. The murder was destined to remain an unsolved mystery. Since the West Virginia towns were much younger than those on the north side of The Bend, it was somewhat surprising to find an obituary of one of Hartford's first settlers in a newspaper of the 1860s. That settler was William Harpold, who died on October 15, 1869 at the age of forty-four. Mr. Harpold was one of Hartford's most �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 445 progressive and public-spirited citizens and his death at so early an age was an unmittigated loss to the community-so think present-day old residents. The October 20, 1869 Telegraph said of the Harpold burial: The funeral of William Harpold, Esq., of Hartford City, W.Va., on Sunday last was one of the largest we ever saw. Mr. Harpold being a member of the I.O.O.F., that Order took charge of the body and burial, using the beautiful ceremony as prescribed by that Order's laws. Over 260 members were present. The remains were interred in the family burial ground at Letart, Ohio. The steamer Oriole took more than 600 people. It goes without saying that during this period of The Bend's industrial high tide not everyone was satisfied with his own individual degree of prosperity. The several strikes that took place indicate the usual sources of dissatisfaction. The first strike found recorded was the one that occurred at the Clifton Nail Mill in the early summer of 1869. Work was suspended because the "boilers [puddlers] entered into a combination and assumed to dictate to the Company," the newspaper said; "the boilers struck, but General Powell secured a new set of men from Richmond, who were not members of the union.” Thus speedily was that strike settled. A Miner’s strike at Mason City in February, 1871 was recalled by old residents as an extremely exciting event. When William White, Agent for L.H. Sargent's Mason City Salt & Coal Company, reduced the miners' wages by about 25 percent, the miners refused to work for that price. The Company then brought in Negroes to dig their coal; whereupon the strikers threatened to kill any Negroes found out after dark, and also, it was rumored, were planning to burn down the salt works. Finally some miners did shoot and kill two of the Negroes. Arrests and a trial before the Justice of the Peace followed. The residence of the Company's attorney J.U. Myers, was stoned. The Telegraph, reporting the affair, had not heard the decision (nor was �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 446 it learned by this writer) but thought the miners probably had a grievance; and that outsiders, hoping to reap political advantages, had caused the trouble. Several old citizens were consulted but none of them recalled that anyone had paid the penalty for the murder. Miners on the Ohio side of The Bend began striking about this same time, namely 1871, and for the same reason: coal operators, of whom The Pomeroy Coal Company was the leader, found it necessary to reduce mining costs and the miners on the other hand had found it necessary to object to the reductions in wages. By the fall of 1874 a general strike in the entire Bend resulted. The miners held out until the following April; then they were compelled to yield their point by agreeing to work for the old price. POMEROY BEND-At the beginning of this work it was stated that the name Pomeroy Bend would develop with the action of the drama. It is the hope of the writer, therefore, that the reader is now ready to take as a matter of course the substitution of that name for that of Horseshoe Bend or merely The Bend. Indeed, it was surprising not to find that the name Pomeroy Bend was not used by any Bend newspaper by the year of 1876, nor even before 1888 (see below). Certain it is that rivermen several years before 1876 had so designated all that part of the River from which were shipped "Pomeroy coal" and "Pomeroy salt," the two terms meaning originally the coal and salt from both sides of The Bend, and later including even that from farther up in the boot-shaped bend: that from the Antiquity and Racine mines and salt plants. Because of all these facts The Bend or Horseshoe Bend from now will appear in this work as Pomeroy Bend; and, furthermore, whenever any town in the boot- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 447 shaped bend comes into view, whether it be an Ohio town or a West Virginia town, it will be understood by virtue of its industrial and geographical relationship to be a Pomeroy Bend town. Such arbitrary use of the term is permissable because, after all, the name Pomeroy Bend is not an officially adopted geographical term. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 448 ACT FOUR CATASTROPHE A. The First Signs (1876 to '84 Flood) If King Coal's ally, Salt, had followed the Biblical injunction regarding rock foundations-meaning to say, had Mother Nature placed The Bend's saline deposits under its surface in solid form instead of in solution-the King's production scheme (white crystals alone with black diamonds) might have weathered the marketing onslaughts on his salt structure for several years to come. However, before the close of the century other factors entered into the scene- factors which would have brought final disaster to the economic prosperity of Pomeroy Bend regardless of previous conditions. But before bringing these factors into view it is necessary to present the belated efforts of Pomeroy Bend’s business men for the regaining of their neglected business opportunities. In June of '76 the Ohio River Salt Company and the Kanawha Salt Company combined into the Ohio River & Kanawha River Salt Company, a new agency for the selling of all the salt of both regions. The work was to be under the control of a Directory. One year later (July 25, 1877) the following news item appeared: “The Kanawha Salt Company has dissolved and each company will sell its own salt.” “The Kanawha Salt Company” was without doubt the Ohio River & Kanawha River Salt Company. In November, 1878 the O.R. & K.R. Company was reorganized into �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 449 more than an agency. This time it leased all the sheds, railways, etc., of its member furnaces and took possession of all the salt in the yards. A Board of Control regulated production, prices and so on. Its officers were: C.M. Holoway, president; Lewis Glenn, treasurer; George McQuigg, secretary. H.B. Smith inspected and received the salt; George McQuigg attended to shipping and acted as sales agent. The late Ohio River Salt Company's office on the River hank below Butternut street, Pomeroy, was used by the new organization, which was to continue three years. Rejoiced the Telegraph: "…[The organization] will bring from 75,000 to 100,000 dollars per month into this vicinity, which ought to be a great lift to business. It sets on its feet again an important industry which has been very much depressed and unprofitable for several years. The organization has the best wishes of the people for its success. That same number of the Telegraph reported also that: Messrs. J.B. Speed, Louisville; F.A. Laidley, Capt. C.M. Holloway; G.Y. Roots, Cincinnati; Dr. J.P. Hale, Charleston, are here on business connected with the new organization. Seventeen furnaces joined the new O.R. & K.R. Salt Co.: Syracuse, Coalridge, Windsor, Buckeye , Excelsior, Pomeroy, Dabney, Union, Hartford City, Aetna (Valley City), Jackson, German, Hope, Mason City, Bedford, New Castle, West Columbia. On January 1, 1879 the Company's Board of Control ruled that a blow-out or blow-outs amounting to sixty days would be required of each member furnace between January 1 and August 1 of that year. Five months later the time was extended to ninety days, because "The markets are now full and it is necessary for production to be further curtailed." A June 25 item said: Nine salt furnaces are idle, the majority by virtue of the requirement of the O.R. & K.R. Co.'s Board of Control. Yet, newspaper items show that the year was a prosperous one: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 450 [Jan. 15, '79.] The O.R. & K.R. Co. distributed $40,000 in the vicinity last week. [March 5, '79.] About $42,000 was scattered around here Monday by the O.R & K.R. Salt Company. [Dec. 10, ’79.] Tom Ewing would be disgusted to see how Sherman Resumption failed to crush industry and enterprise. Salt shipments last week were about 70,000 barrels. The demand is exceeding present capacity, of the means of transportation. [Dec. 17, ’79.] Salt shipments were exceedingly lively the past week. Every means of transport was used. Total shipments the past thirty days were nearly 200,000 barrels and about 115,000 bushels of bulk salt. This is perhaps the largest exportation for the region in the same length of time, in the history of the salt business. It looks like a boom. [Dec. 31, ’79.] Salt shipments by the O.R. & K.R. Salt Company in December were 187,380 barrels. This is the largest one month's shipment ever reported. The boom came; and was overdone by overproduction, overconfidence. Reaction set in; large reductions in prices of iron, wool, cotton, salt, etc. followed. By the end of May, 1880, the Telegraph said briefly: "Business is getting dull." In June, 1880, the O.R. & K.R. Co. had a "break"; [Details thereof were not published in the Telegraph]; in July, 1880, a new Ohio River Salt Company was formed by the Dabney, Excelsior, Windsor, Syracuse, Buckeye, Hartford City and New Haven furnaces, with George McQuigg as secretary and sales manager. In September, the new company's office was moved from the H.B. Smith office on the River bank to the second floor of the Opera House building. The primary object of this latest organization was to get rid of competition from the Kanawha Valley; which object was to be attained by "dead-renting" the fifteen furnaces and then closing them down. The object was attained. Before the end of five years, fourteen of the Kanawha furnaces had gone to wreck. The salt business in the Kanawha Valley was annihilated-but at a cost of $25,000 to the Ohio River Salt Company. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 451 So many changes in ownership and so many assignments and sheriff sales of salt plants had taken place during this time (1875 to about 1883) that only the most outstanding ones can be presented. In May of '76, when the Antiquity had been idle nearly nine month prospects for starting the works were said to be "not very good." The Antiquity did not appear again as an active plant. (One authority said there was a deficiency of brine.) It was in May, 1876, too, that the Middleport Salt Company's furnace and coal property was bought at sheriff's sale by S.A.M. Moore, R.R. Hudson, H.G. Daniel and D. Reed at about one-sixth of the original cost. In January, '77 H.B. Smith advertised the sale at the Leadington Salt Furnace of kettles, engine, salt shed, settlers, etc.,-in short, the component parts of the Leadington Furnace. In '78 the Sugar Run plant went into receivership, was advertised for sale, was bought by the Pomeroy Salt Company. Three years later (‘82) the Pomeroy itself was sold to Andrew Zeiher, Fred Ebersbach and A.N. Schaeffer. In 1879 Dr. J.P. Hale, Kanawha producer, bought the Ohio Salt Furnace at Minersville, changed its name to Big Bend Furnace and assumed personal management. In April, '81 the Big Bend went back again at sheriff's sale to its original owners, Capt. W.C. Williamson and Alban Davis. Back in 1867 V.B. Horton with the Minersville Salt Company had built the Glendale Furnace at a cost of $75,000. Some time during 1876 the company was reorganized as the St. Louis Salt Company for the purpose of putting its furnace to work again. By January, 1879 the St. Louis had assigned and had been sold to Capt. W.C. Williamson for $20,000. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 452 In 1878 the Riverside Salt Company assigned for the benefit of its creditors. Assignee, S.A.M. Moore. Purchaser the next year was Edwin J. Horton, who was now taking care of the business of his father, V.B. Horton. Several items regarding the Sutton Salt Works, erected in 1869 just above Minersville, by John Davis, are pertinent: [Nov. 8, ’78]. The Sutton Walt Works were sold to John Juhler and Major McCown for $22,000 cash. [Jan. 22, ‘79]. A.F. McCown has resigned his position as assistant cashier at the Pomeroy National Bank in order to devote himself to the management of the Sutton Salt Works. Having been connected formerly with the Union Salt Works at New Haven and having managed the Jackson Works one year, Major McCown is experienced in the business. [Feb. 19, ‘79]. McCown & Juhler have changed the name of the Sutton Salt Furnace to White Rock Salt Works. [June, 1880] Juhler & McCown have dissolved partnership. Juhler is to continue the business alone. In 1882 the Excelsior Salt Company made an assignment for the benefit of its creditors. Immediate cause of the failure was the death of S.W. Pomeroy (See below), who had been keeping the business up by indorsing its notes. The furnace was bought by Mrs. Menager of Gallipolis, her mortgage being the largest-over $11,000. So much for the Ohio side. Now, over to the south side. In September, 1875, the Clifton Furnace (or Virginia Furnace), was sold under a deed of trust for $11,000 to W.P. Rathburn (Tennessee), H.H. Swallow, George Plantz and S.A.M. Moore. When built in '68 it had cost $107,000. In '79 the Virginia was sold again, Douglas Newton was the purchaser, the price paid was $17,000. In December, 1880 this furnace was sold a third time, this time at public auction to close up the business of the Ohio River & Kanawha River Salt Company," purchaser not given. "In '83," said a Clifton resident of that year, "the Virginia Furnace was a wreck." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 453 In December, '79, R.R. Hudson, acting as agent for J.N. Smith of Nashville, Tenn., bought the old Burnap Furnace at Clifton from a Philadelphia company that had bought the plant and had changed its name to Quaker City Furnace. Capt. W.C. Williamson, claiming prior purchase of the furnace, threatened to sue for damages. Whereupon the Telegraph caustically remarked: "Salt furnaces seem to be in active demand, the first time in many years." By January, 1880 the trouble appears to have been settled, for we read, "The old Burnap furnace will be called the Nashville Salt Company. Capt. W.C. Williamson holds the controlling interest. R.R. Hudson in one of the stockholders. The company will not join the O.R. & K.R. Salt Company." From West Columbia in May, 1877 came this cheering bit of news: "Col. Clarkson, lessee of the Crescent Coal & Salt Works, is driving the salt business day and night, is paying his hands and keeping up a good lively feeling among the people. (Crescent was the new name of the old King Furnace.) The Valley City in 1878 was sold to the Aetna Coal & Salt Company, a new organization whose agent was E.C. Harpold. In November, 1886, a Point Pleasant newspaper reported: E.C. Harpold, president of the Aetna Coal & Salt Company, went down the River to secure a partner with capital sufficient to lift the concern out of debt, place it on its feet. Meantime creditors have taken possession of everything loose they could lay their hands on and still are not happy. Mr. Harpold's quest having proved successful a new organization was formed. When this second company discovered that the salt it shipped to New Orleans had to compete with salt from Liverpool, England, it hit upon a happy solution of the difficulty: it printed the name Liverpool on its own salt barrels. Thenceforth that company was known as The Liverpool Salt Company. Charles Clifton was made manager of “The Liverpool" in 1882. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 454 Attempts had been made by Pomeroy Bend manufacturers to come to some kind of an agreement with manufacturers of the Saginaw region (Michigan) and of New York, but they all came to naught. A meeting in Cincinnati in December, 1878 "for consultation" with representatives of those two regions had results that were "not made public." Again, in April, 1881, a party of "salt men"-H.B. Smith, B. Koehler, E. Edwards, G. Moredook, J. Juhler, H.M. Horton-went to Cleveland to meet a party of Saginaw men to "agree on a division of territory so as to secure the common good." That Pomeroy Bend's good was secured was seriously doubted (by this writer) when a statement from the Saginaw Evening News was found in the October 25, 1882 Telegraph. Gist of said statement: The Salt Association of Michigan, consisting of seventy-five firms, had on October 1, 747,609 barrels of salt in their yards, 326,569 barrels in the hands of agents-a grand total of 1,014,208 barrels-enough to supply the market for months. Yet production was going on. And at that very time Pomeroy Bend reported an unusual demand for Pomeroy Salt: It was hog killing time and farmers considered the Pomeroy Bend product the best in the market for their purposes. In November, 1882 the Telegraph lamented: "Pomeroy salt is permitted to take an inferior place to Saginaw salt." But nothing happened as a result of the complaint. Needless to say that coal companies and individual mines reflected the unstable condition of the salt industry. In June of '78, Ebenezar Williams, operating his mine since the early 1850s, assigned to his son John E. Williams, who continued the business with more success. In February, 1879 the property of the Clifton Coal Company (headquarters in Middleport) was sold to Trustees S.A.M. Moore �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 455 and Ben J. Redmond; but on January 1, 1880 the Ohio & West Virginia Mining & Manufacturing Company was incorporated and this company took possession of the Clifton Company's mine. The Pomeroy Coal Company was undergoing changes which looked somewhat foreboding. In April of '78 its contract with the Dabney and the Peacock banks was renewed, but not its contract with the Excelsior mine. S.W. Pomeroy, owner of the Excelsior, assumed personal control of his mine in the following December; whereupon it seemed advisable to the Pomeroy Coal Company to remove its coalyard back to its old stand at Coalport. In 1881 H.S. Horton and his son Horace M. Horton both resigned their offices with the P.C. Co., the former that of secretary and the latter that of bookkeeper. E.J. Horton was elected to take the place of the former and Frank Dabney took charge of the Company's books. There were some coal operators, however, who apparently were meeting with success; such as the Ohio Coal Company at Antiquity, V.B. Horton president, E.J. Horton secretary; the Juhling & Jones Coal Works, operating the Flint Hill Mine at New Haven; the Camden Coal Works at Camden (just below West Columbia); Herman Lerner and Bluford J. Malone, each running individual mines at Mason City; Charles W. Young, operating the Sehon Coal Works. Last named in 1880 installed two iron mechanical diggers which could dig 5000 bushels of coal per day. Coal miners naturally did not look with a great degree of favor upon the introduction of iron men to supplant them in the mines. In fact, they censured Mr. Young in most unflattering terms. Frequent strikes by miners for what they considered a living wage caused operators much trouble. Because of the depressed business conditions some operators had to reduce wages, but some made the hard �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 456 times an excuse for cutting. Several strikes were caused by the opening of stores by the operators. In March, '78 the Sehon miners walked out because they were asked to take three-fourths of their wages in store goods (for which they knew they would pay more than the regular market prices). As usual heretofore, the strike ended in a compromise. The strikes affected not alone the coal industry but all other major industries. The Rolling Mill (now Pomeroy Iron Company) time and again was compelled to shut down because of an insufficient coal supply. The frequent lack of coal, along with other things due to the depressed times, had caused several changes in the ownership and consequently the name of the rolling mill. By May, 1880 it had become the Crescent Iron Company and the property of the Pomeroy National Bank. In July, 1881 that institution sold the mill to W.C. Merriman, Pittsburgh man recently from England, and T.B. Watson. Pomeroy business men were required to give the new owners $5000 to prevent the mill from being taken away from Pomeroy. By the end of the next month (August, '81) the Crescent Iron Works had secured puddlers enough to run fifteen furnaces double turn and had decided to dispense with the nail machines and the manufacture of sheet iron. The nail machines were sold to the Standard Nail Mill at Clifton. By November of the same year, A. Watson had sued his partner for alleged fraud in the purchase of the works. The case was compromised, however, and by the end of the year ('81) the mill was operating again. Then strikes and other troubles caused frequent shut-downs one of which was on when the '84 flood came (see below). �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 457 To The Middleport Marine Docks Company the depressed times brought more than discouraging reverses; it brought actual failure. For several years the financial condition of the Company had been growing more and more unstable. Finally, in the last week of April, 1878, credit being no longer available, the company went into bankruptcy, carrying with it the First National Bank of Middleport, the private fortune of it president R.R. Hudson, and involving the fortunes of several other person. The next month (May, '78) the Docks were sold to a Point Pleasant Company for $6150; the original cost had been almost $25,000. The Middleport Woolen Mills in October, 1876 was reported to have received "a Gold Medal for the best display of Jeans at the Exposition [Cincinnati]. They have taken first premium three consecutive years, the other two being silver medals." In October, 1878 the Assignment of the woolen Mill was made public. A long letter written by James Titus to the Meigs County Republican (see Newspapers) implies that bad management on the part of John Schreiner was the principal cause of the mill's failure. The following February the plant was sold to John Schreiner, who "intends to repair the mills and put them into operation." On October 10, 1884 the same paper announced: "The woolen mill's machinery was shipped off last week via the Ohio Central Railroad." That the Clifton Iron & Nail Mill was having its troubles too is indicated by the fact that it was sold in May, 1876, by B.J. Redmond and Judge J. Cartwright, Bondholders' Trustees. The purchasers, W.R. Rathburn, (of Tennessee); H.G. Daniels, of Pomeroy; and H.H. Swallow and George Downing, of Clifton, started the mill immediately. By October, 1878, however, the company had been reorganized and George �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 458 Downing had been made treasurer and George Plants secretary in place of H.H. Swallow (holding both offices) resigned. The name of the Company was changed to Standard Nail & Iron Company. At the end of the next year there appeared in the Point Pleasant Register three items, short but of seemingly vast significance for the future of Clifton: [December 10, 1879] The Clifton Nail Mill has been sold to a Mr. Greene of Portsmouth and is to be put into immediate operation. [January 1, 1880] Messrs. Greene & Son, who bought the Clifton Nail Mill, will start a store; but they will sell for money and will pay money for work. [February 2, 1880] The Standard Iron & Nail Mill Company of Clifton has been organized. Three Greenes own practically all the stock. The Clifton Keg Factory (Holland & Maxwell) experienced serious trouble. On February 21, 1877 one of its boilers exploded, killing several men and injuring many others. The factory was rebuilt at once, however. The Glass Factory at Mason City was spared the possibility of failure by never getting started to operate. By 1876 the buildings were all finished and the machinery was ready to be put into motion. Workmen-men, boys and girls-had been promised jobs and were eagerly waiting to get orders to start working. Fires had been "laid" in the furnaces. Only the striking of a match was needed to put the plant into operation. The match was never struck. Insufficient capital was the reason, in brief. John Young's Boatyard had more success. During 1876 and '77 Foreman Capt. William Larimer supervised the building of several barges and boats and also the hull of Capt. Rhodes's new propeller Silver Star. Heretofore propellers plying the Ohio were built at Buffalo, New York and at much greater cost. On February 20, 1878 Foreman Larimer launched also a 220-foot Model Barge, the first of several such barges built at Young’s Boatyard during the next two years for �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 459 the Mississippi Valley Transportation Company. One of the several steamboats built was the St. Jacob's Oil, for the patent medicine company of the same name. The attractive little steamer was used for advertising the company's product along the Ohio and Mississippi. At the Mees Boatyard, on the River shore below the Mees Saw-mill, were built a number of barges before 1880; also the steamer Ike Bonham for Capt. W.H. Sargent, who took the boat to Louisiana to enter the Deer Creek trade. This last-named boat was built in the summer of 1878. Smaller industries already in existence prospered fairly; as for example: Pomeroy’s Brick Flour Mill, assigned to A.W. McCown in January, 1879, was bought by G.W. Moredock, mortgagee, put into repair and then (Feb 25, '79) sold to Geyer (D.L.), Johnson & Sayre. These men "completely refurnished the mill and made of it a strictly merchant mill.” By September of the same year "the old Pomeroy flour mill" was said to be "making excellent flour by a new process." Horton's Boatyard was still making barges in 1880. Ben Wadman, who had been boss at the boatyard since its establishment in 1846 and had "quit several times but always went back," resigned and retired in February, 1879, "having grown gray in the service of the Pomeroy Coal Company." Eli Whipple took Wadman's place. But on October 5, 1881, "Capt. Horace Horton presented Robert Richardson, foreman of the Boatyard, with a gold watch, chain and seal," a news item said. Some new industries ventured into the scene during this discouraging period: The Pomeroy Soap Company, T.R. Jones business manager, announced �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 460 its new factory "just east of the Catholic cemetary" in August of 1876. The following year a second soap factory was put up "in the lower part of the Third Ward" by the Soap Factory Company. Soaps made by the T.R. Jones Soap Company were shipped East to Philadelphia, west to Louisville, into the interior as far as Zanesville. The names of its Laundry soaps were: Champion, Victor, and Chief. In September, 1880 J.C. Probst & Son began the erection of their two-story Brick Furniture Factory "on Sugar Run near Union Avenue,” with George Bauer doing the stone work and J.C. Harper the brick walls. The Pomeroy Machine Company, with Alban Davis as its Agent, apparently was prospering in July, 1879. At Middleport[April 25, 1877] The new pressed-brick machine of Frank Grant and A. Murray is working daily at the brickyard at lower end of Third street. It will have a kiln of 75,000 brick ready to burn in three weeks. & [August 15, '77] Messrs. Grant and Murray have finished the burning of their kiln of pressed brick. The result is more than gratifying. The Ohio Machine Company, with George Plantz pres., J.W. Bogess sec., and treas., and Lewis Haag supt. of all departments; and the German Furniture Company, incorporated in &77 with Peter Gloeckner pres., S. Engelhart Jr. vice pres., C.N. Marihugh sec., both still were leading Middleport industries. Commenting in September, '78 on the Middleport Flour Company, the Meigs County Republican could say, "…It is the only real busy place in town. It runs about sixteen hours daily." And in January of '79 Editor Dumble lauded further: The Middleport Flour Company is perhaps the only company in The Bend that makes its official salaries dependent upon the profits in business. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 461 In January, '79 Grant & Son's Novelty Works on Front street, Middleport, were still making all kinds of brass and iron castings and also were manufacturing the "celebrated Champion School Desk." The old Carleton Sawmill opposite Hartford City was still running in 1884. William Carleton, who had taken charge of the mill after his father's death in the late '50s, retired some time during the '70s, whereupon his brothers Isaac and John undertook the running of the by that time "old landmark." Racine's Woolen Factory by 1879 had passed into the possession of Mallory & Mallory. Its Old Reliable Marble Works and its Racine Marble Works were owned respectively by L.A. Weaver and G.W. Wolf; its two Carriage Factories by McCullough & Haning, and by Richards, Reed & Lasher (the latter firm succeeding A.E. Sibley). And Racine's Star Flour Mills in '79 were the property of Messrs. Clark & Wolf. At Hartford City in January of 1877 the Saw and Stave Mill, located above the Creek near the salt works, burned down. By September of the same year Winkleblack and Donnally, who operated the mill, had a new one running one the same site. (The mill was the property of Hartford, Connecticut capitalists. Winkleblack & Donnally rented from them.) In May of the same year (‘77) Harpold & Harpold (brothers Baxter and Curtis) were reported as doing a big business at their sawmill below the Creek-the mill their father started. Bromine Manufacturing actually flourished during this period. By 1876 John J. Juhler, fellow countryman of Gustav A. Hagermann (see above), had acquired the latter's leases and, besides, was in control of the bittern of nearly every furnace on the Ohio side and of several on the West Virginia side. In 1876 Mr. Juhler received the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 462 award for bromine, which was given by the Philadelphia Exposition. He was believed to be at that time "the largest bromine manufacturer in the United States." Dr. Hermann Stieren, bromine manufacturer at Quaker Salt Furnace, when his output was said to average 30,000 pounds a year, was reputed "the most extensive bromine manufacturer in the world." Evidently that was long before 1880 when Juhler's yearly average had reached 175,000 pounds, and Juhler in fact had practically ruined Dr. Stieren's business. By 1880 Newton & Donnally had bromine factories at New Haven and at Hartford City. Herman Lerner had stills at the German, the Hope and the New Castle furnaces and had begun one at the Dabney. Root & Kilbreth had a factory at Mason City. Early in the '80s Herman Lerner was reported to have "organized a company of Cincinnati capitalists to get control of the bromine business at all the salt furnaces in the country. He has already leased those here." Mr. Lerner’s dream was never realized-not only was it never realized but it also brought about his own ruin. One dream, however, a Pomeroy Bend dream thirty or more years old did come true in the year 1880. The Bend got a railroad in that year! In February, 1876, for the purpose of bringing to life the movement begun in the preceding period, V.B. Horton and George McQuigg attended the annual meeting of the A. & L.E.R.R. and reported that that the completion of the road to the Bend "looks favorable." By May, 1878The ladies of Pomeroy and Middleport are working in committees to raise subscript ions for the railroad [The Marietta & Shawnee] �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 463 In that same month Mrs. Wm. Kraemer and Mrs. A. Blumenthal went to Cincinnati and secured $300. A little later Wm. Kraemer himself went to Cincinnati, likewise on money-raising bend. Of Mr. Kraemer’s trip the Telegraph said: William Kraemer secured $1000 in Cincinnati for the railroad. He said it required all his persuasive powers and a great deal of persistence to secure it; at one place he was almost driven out of the store and dogs set on him. Before he left, the same parties came down with a subscription and a bottle of wine to boot. In August, same year, President Green of the A. & L.E.R.R., came to Pomeroy, asked for a donation of $50,000 and a right of way, the money to be paid when the road was completed, equipped, and cars were running into Pomeroy. An extract from the Pt. Pleasant Register of Oct. 2, 1878 helps to recall the earlier efforts to secure a railroad and to connect them with the final success attending these efforts: …About forty miles of the Gallipolis & Columbus Railway (begun in the '50s) was graded and ready for the rails. Pomeroy subscribed stock and built a tunnel to their own end of the route, through Monkey Run… The road was sold under foreclosure. It has now been bought by a new organization with a charter from Ohio, under the name of Ohio & West Virginia Railroad, to be finished from a point on the Marietta & Cincinnati Railroad, near Hamden to Gallipolis and Pomeroy… On November 27, 1878 the Telegraph announced: The Ohio & west Virginia Railway Company has bought the road-bed, right of way, etc., of the late Columbus & Gallipolis Company. The raising of some money is necessary but none is to be paid until railroad connection is actually established. Operations are to begin in early spring. On May 28, '79: The Railroad prospect is booming! …It will be completed during the summer! On July 16, '79: The president of the O. & W.Va. Ry Co. has resigned; the president of the Hocking Valley, Columbus, and Toledo roads was elected president of the O. & W.Va Co. On October 29, '79: The right of way was secured from Middleport to Addison, ten miles. Some discouragements…but… �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 464 On November 12, '79 a Railroad Meeting was reported (date not stated) at which meeting S.W. Pomeroy was selected as Trustee to hold subscriptions and to receive money when due. On December 3d of '79 a Railroad Meeting at the Town Hall, Middleport, was announced. Two weeks later the Telegraph chortled: Middleport has shown most commendable spirit and energy in the matter of raising money for the railroad. Middleport may be counted on to do its whole share. On September 1, 1880, the Gallipolis Bulletin said that passenger trains were bringing passengers to Gallipolis. On October 20 the Telegraph proclaimed the joyful news thatThe Leading Creek bridge is going up. The whistle of the locomotive is heard at Middleport. People go to see the pile driver working. Also that Crescent Iron Works had shipped iron over the new road by having it hauled to Cheshire. In November (1880) George Bauer secured the contract for building the stonework of the Roundhouse and Turntable "near the Dabney Salt Works!" By December 1, the rails had been laid to "Monkey Run, the terminus of the Ohio & West Virginia Railway." On December 1 was reported also the first railroad accident: three head of cattle, killed on the trestle below Silver Run. They had been shoved off but had run back when the train (a gravel train) started to move. On December 29, 1880, O.B.Chapman had reason to think that: George McQuigg was the happiest man in town last Wednesday. He had been in Cincinnati and he came home on the first passenger train that ever arrived in Pomeroy, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, having left Cincinnati at 7 o'clock in the morning. George's pluck and perseverence are partly responsible for the railroad being an accomplished fact; he worked for it for years, never gave up. Now that the iron horse comes snorting into town with handsome passenger coaches attached, Mr. McQuigg is happy. So are we all. Long may we live to enjoy the benefits of the railroad. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 465 Not until January 12, 1881 was the Railroad Station at Pomeroy reported ready for business. Middleport's station was placed in the lower end of the town, at the corner of Front and Locust streets. On the Sunday between May 11 and May 18, 1881, twenty-ome coaches took the first excursion from Pomeroy to Columbus over the Ohio & West Virginia Railway, at $2.50 the round trip. The cars were literally jammed. Little more than a month later: [June 22, 1881 Telegraph] The Columbus & Hocking Valley; the Columbus & Toledo; and the Ohio & West Virginia, all under one management, have been sold to a Cleveland organization which was thinking of building a rival road. Thus had Pomeroy Bend's new O. & W.Va Railway suddenly became the C., H.V. & T., (Columbus, Hocking Valley & Toledo) and was very soon to be simply "The Hocking Valley." THE FINAL BLOW (Floods and Aftermath) By the year 1883, unusual floods had become things of the somewhat distant past to inhabitants of Pomeroy Bend. Many could recall the famous “'47 Flood" the earliest recorded flood), "which reached to the Court House steps" and the '52 Flood, the stage of which was only two or three inches lower than that of the '47 inundation. But the snows of December of 1882 and of January, '83 were unusually heavy and continuous; so also were the rains which began to wash away the deep snows. Therefore, when the River started rising, everyone-at least all the older inhabitants-were sure that the water would come very close to, if not actually surpass, some nota- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 466 ble high-water mark of earlier years. On February 9, when the crest reached The Bend, it left a mark at Pomeroy that was almost equal to that of ‘47, or "nearly to Second on Court, on Second between Butternut and Mechanic and between Linn and Sycamore." The Ohio had made another top-notch record. The loss to salt furnaces from the 1883 flood was slight. The heaviest probably was that of the Buckeye, which had left 15,000 bushels of bulk salt exposed to the water. All the furnaces on the West Virginia side escaped loss, as did also the Dabney furnace. Nor did any other industry suffer serious loss. The next winter the snows were heavier and the rains that carried them down the mountain sides were more continuous than were those of the preceding winter. And yet, when a special message came from Pittsburgh th Editor Dumble (Middleport) warning The Bend to expect a ten-foot higher stage than it had experienced in ‘83, the people flatly refused to believe it; they couldn't think it possible. And so they made almost no preparations for such a flood. Therefore, when on February 11, two days later than on the preceding year, the ‘84 Flood came to a stand (in the end) at a mark nearly eight feet above that of '83, thousands of dollars' worth of property were ruined that might have been saved had the warning been taken seriously. At the salt plants the losses were terrific. Coopershops, black-smith shops,-everything that could float had done so; what remained was either wrecked or otherwise ruined. The first salt losses reported were: 2,500 barrels of salt and a badly damaged furnace by the Syracuse Company; 1000 barrels by the Coalridge; 1000 bushels bulk salt and 500 barrels by the Buckeye; 20,000 bushels by the Pomeroy, 5000 bushels by the Dabney. The Excelsior furnace was thought to be totally ruined. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 467 On the West Virginia side: the Bedford and Newcastle each lost heavily; the Quaker and the Virginia, already dilapidated, were completely destroyed; the Hope lost less than 1000 bushels of salt but its furnace, sheds, etc., were greatly damaged. The Jackson lost over 2000 bushels of salt, its furnace was hopelessly damaged, as was also those of the German and The Mason City. The Liverpool lost about 6000 barrels of salt, the Hartford City Company’s total loss was between $50,000 and $60,000. Coal mines at Minersville, Syracuse and Hartford City were flooded, requiring months and great expense to free them of water. These losses, with many other ones not realized until later, completed “what the Saginaw manufacturers had left undone in knocking the bottom out of the salt business in the Pomeroy Bend.” In June, 1884 fourteen furnaces were reported inoperative, three in ruins, seven idle. Of these twenty-four furnaces, three-the Mason City, the Quaker and the Virginia-remained inoperative permanently. The Minersville and the Harmony (the former King Furnace) lived only a short while. The Windsor, assigned to the Pomeroy National Bank, was sold at sheriff’s sale to G. Schoeneberger for $3,000; then in ’86 or ’87 assigned by Schoenenerger to the Ohio River Salt Company, which wrecked the furnace and used the best parts for repairing other furnaces. The Excelsior was bought at assignee’s sale by Bernhardt Koehler. Others changed owners so frequently (by sheriff’s sale or otherwise) that it was impossible to make note of them. By the end of the century only eight furnaces at most-the Syracuse, Buckeye, Excelsior, Pomeroy, Hartford, Liverpool and Hope-were making salt. Strenuous efforts were made to revive the salt business. In May �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 468 1885, a meeting of salt men was held at the Grand Dilcher Hotel, Pomeroy; all the furnaces were represented except the Pomeroy, White Rock and Syracuse. The men decided to organize a pool and agreed to sell no salt at less than 65¢ the bushel. The pool was called The Ohio River Salt Company. Its officers were: George W. Moredock, president; George McQuigg, general agent; A.D. Brown, treasurer. In August of '88 the Telegraph reported that the Mills Bill had put salt on the free list, thereby reviving the salt business in England but ruining that of Pomeroy Bend. But in the ensuing November to Ohio River Salt Company got out about 40,000 bushels of salt. From the December 12, 1888 Telegraph, readers learned that: Pittsburgh wants to control Pomeroy salt; it has over $1,000,000 invested in the salt industry; three firms of the city merged into one, the Pittsburgh Salt Company. Agents of the company are leasing River territory and are hoping to get Pomeroy companies into the Pittsburgh Company. In May, 1889 a Syndicate was reported to be about to get control of the salt output of the United States, England and Canada. Which report gave rise to the question, Shall owners of salt plants in Pomeroy Bend sell out to the Syndicate and trust to Pomeroy and to fresh capital for its continuance, or become competitors and die? Someone, probably Editor Russell, quick to see the question's Shakespearian slant, parodied: To sell or not to sell, that's the question. Whether it is better to take a fair price, And trust to luck and a good location, Or take up arms against the Syndicate And by opposing end the business. To figuratively Fall asleep and by that sleep to end The wretched competition and the shock of failures That must follow; 'tis a misfortune Too sad for contemplation. To die, to sleepTo turn the town into a pasture, Aye, there's the rub! Whether or not it is safe to say that the Pomeroy Bend would be More prosperous if there were less competition in salt. The "rub" continued throughout the next ten years, during which �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 469 time agents of the Salt Trust visited The Bend at intervals to try to induce Bend manufacturers into the Trust. Meanwhile efforts were made to start some of the furnaces. In July of '94, Ebersbach, Schaeffer & Company did start their furnace, the old Pomeroy, and kept it running more or less (mostly less) regularly. Prevailing prices for salt were so low that there was little or no profit in the business at best. In March of '97 the Tribune-Telegraph rejoiced that prices would rise in consequence of the restored salt tariff. The Middleport Republican thought that inasmuch as orders for salt were so numerous they were not being filled by Bend furnaces, low prices could not exist “If we had a few enterprising men willing to pay for labor performed… and to employ men who understand the business." In the autumn of 1899 Pomeroy Bend furnaces succumbed at last to the Salt Trust's importunities. Six furnaces-the Syracuse, Coalridge, Buckeye, Hartford, Liverpool and Hope-sold their entire output of the next five years to the National Salt Company; the Pomeroy was bought outright by the National, the others were dead-rented. The N.S. Company reserved the right to discontinue its contract at the end of two years on a six months' notice. Immediately the salt business boomed. It was still prosperous at the close of 1900, though with unfavorable conditions looming. The coal industry suffered no less, comparatively, than did the salt industry from the '84 Flood. Its most disastrous blow was the collapse of the Pomeroy Coal Company. That company had been deep in debt for many years but not especially embarrassed until the preceding year ('84). Its Minersville mine had been flooded in '81, causing the Company great expense and �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 470 loss of time. In April following the Flood its towboat Condor was destroyed by fire at the Coalport Landing; and, due to difficulties the insurance company experienced in its investigations of the origin of the fire, the P.C. Company's insurance claims had not yet been settled. Five months of low water during the summer of '84 increased the Company's loss of time for that year to nine months. Hardly had the mines begun putting out coal the next year ('85) when the miners struck for higher wages. By April a compromise had been effected whereby the men signed for another six months. But when the Company arranged with the Horton & Owens store to furnish goods to the miners the latter struck again, this time for money long due them. Finally, in the week preceding July 20, several miners brought suit against the Company; whereupon president V.B. Horton and secretary Frank Dabney on Monday, July 20, filed a deed of assignment in Probate Court conveying all the Company's real and personal assets to Hiram H. Swallow, in trust for the Company's creditors. The Pomeroy Coal Company had gone under. The crash was one of the greatest ever to have happened along the Ohio River. The loss of money and of work-involved both sides of The Bend. Discouragement and gloom prevailed for many months. The workingmen who had deposited their savings with V.B. Horton, some of them a few hundred some several thousand dollars, lost every cent. Naturally they felt bitter; yet not one accused V.B. Horton of dishonesty. “If the men only could have waited, the Company could have gone on and could have paid them in time,” E.J. Horton thought. In September following, the Probate Judge ordered H.H. Swallow, assignee of the P.C. Company to operate the mines (Minersville, Dabney and Peacock). Mr. Dabney found Martin Ebersbach willing to take �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 471 charge of the Peacock mine but not able to pay more than $1.75 per hundred bushels. Whereupon the miners of The Bend had a mass meeting at Kerr's Run and resolved that no coal should be mined for less than $2.00 per hundred. But former miners of the Peacock held meeting of their own; and they signed a contract to start work immediately at the price offered. The Peacock's former men were to reemployed, 1000 bushels were to be mined per day, pay to be once a month, and a few minor difference settled. This last meeting resulted in the re-organization of the Peacock Coal Co., or, better, the organization of a new Peacock Coal Company, with N. Bengal president and Fred Ebersbach secretary. Four days after the P.C. Company's crash-on July 24, 1885 the Dabney Salt Company assigned for the benefit of its creditors. This assignment was necessary because the Dabney Estate was a member of the Pomeroy Coal Company. John Grogan was the Dabney's assignee. Soon afterward the Dabney Mining Company was organized on a cooperative plan with over fifty members. In February of '86, when it had dwindled to sixteen members this Company assigned to C.J. Hess. By October 1, 1890 another assignment evidently had been made, for a newspaper item of that date said that "Improvements have been made in the Dabney mine by L.L. Hayman, receiver." In January, 1890, the Antiquity coal property was sold to the First National Bank of Gallipolis, Antiquity's largest creditor. On the West Virginia side, in October '88 Dr. Wilson, former Pomeroy resident, took over Clifton's Sterling Coal Works. In April, 1890 the Camden-Spilman Company (Consumers' Coal & Mining Company) was said to have bought the lands, houses and coal property of the "old New Castle Furnace and will re-open the mines.” �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 472 On April 27, 1894 Telegraph readers were told thatThe Great Miners' Strike went into effect Saturday evening. About 130,000 idle in the country. All mines in The Bend except Charter Oak and Spilman are idle. On June 15, they learned thatThe Camden miners joined the strikers Tuesday. The Camden-Spilman mine was the last one in the Valley to shut down. And on June 22The Strike, the greatest in the country's history, is ended. In this vicinity it was conducted in an orderly, decent manner. The strikers practically gained their point as to increase in the price of mining coal. An item a week later (June 29) showed further gains: The suit brought by Consumers' Coal & Mining Company the Camden-Spilman Co. against the miners for possession of the houses occupied by the miners has been compromised. The miners hold possession till July 11, free of rent; they will be paid for their gardens when the premises are vacated, get paid for the coal mined and unpaid. The miners are satisfied and their attorney J.B. Menager can feel proud. A little more than a year later (October 2, '95)The Consumers' Coal & Mining Company at Spilman and New Haven announced an advance to miners of from $1.75 to $2.00 per hundred for digging coal. This is one of the largest industries in the county and employs a large number of men. Col. H.E. Spilman, the manager of the company, brought the advance about. The miners expressed appreciation of the raise in a most grateful way. In the last half of 1899 and the first half of 1900 the Herald-Republican contained several items that were good news for Middleport and West Columbia but not so good for New Haven: [Sept., ‘99] The Camden-Spilman Company have leased several hundred acres across the River and will ship by rail and river, employing about a hundred men. In a few weeks the old rolling mill mine will be opened, an incline built to the river. All cars, locomotives, etc. are to be brought down from New Haven. [December 3, '99] The coal works opened by Camden & Spilman are doing well. They have their own steamboat and barges. "Cedar Hill Mines" is to be the name because of the proximity of Cedar Hollow. [July 6, l900] The new mines opened at West Columbia by the Consumers' Coal & Mining Company Camden & Spilman employs a large number of men and boys. Everybody is in a happy-go-easy mood. Arrangements are soon to be made to coal all trains on the O.R.R.R. down at the river instead of in the narrows as formerly. ��A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 473 Other seemingly prosperous mining companies on the West Virginia side were the Juhling Coal Company at Hartford, with William Juhling as manager, and the Beech Hill Coal Company below Mason. Of the latter it was reported in August, '99: The Beech Hill Coal Company at Mason furnishes coal for the lower end of the O.R.R.R. and the Bauer Brick Works at Mason. Josephus Icenhour is general manager and Mayor Harry Hart is mine boss. On the Ohio side the new Peacock Company was operating a mine on the "old Horton farm back of Minersville." B.J. Malone, "one of the most extensive producers of the Pomeroy Bend," was operating Charter Oak Mine (the old "Golden" bank), where he had built "one of the most extensive coal tipples on the River." A new company, to be called the Pittsburgh Coal Company, was to be formed by Mr. Malone and another man, and a new mine was already started. The Antiquity mines were to be pumped out and the Calaway Works were to be leased by a Gallipolis company, the Pomeroy Leader further stated. The John Williams mine at Minersville too was still in operation. Not only in operation was the Williams mine but keeping ahead of other operators in equipment. In 1895 John Williams introduced into his mine a gasoline engine to haul out coal, "the first of its kind ever introduced into mines." The new Peacock Company, too, was progressive. In October, 1900, it began using a small locomotive engine to haul coal cars in the mines, replacing the eight horses used heretofore." Such was the happy outlook for the coal industry in the Pomeroy Bend in the last year of the century. So encouraging, in fact, was it that the Pomeroy Leader in June, 1900 was moved to exclaim joyously: "King Coal is bringing old-time prosperity back to the Pomeroy Bend!" �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 474 Several other major industries met their death or the beginning thereof in the '84 Flood. Several died as the result of the generally depressed conditions. A meeting of business men (with Dr. Whaley as president and Ben Remington as secretary) "to ascertain the cause of the depression and to suggest a remedy," was held in July, 1885-the week preceding the Pomeroy Coal Company's fall. The remedy suggested was not published. Whatever it was, it failed to remedy. The Crescent Iron Works suffered little damage from the Flood, only its machinery having been under water. But because "the iron business was flattened out pending the great presidential election just passed," T.A. Watson & Company in January of 1885 was forced to make a deed of assignment to Judge Bradbury for the company's creditors. Watson had the works "in the best shape ever," but they had been idle since midsummer-one of the many shut-downs from various causes they had experienced in recent years. In February, 1885, the Valley Iron & Steel Company, a cooperative concern, was organized with John Daker for president. There was to be no company store. All skilled workers, besides some others, were to have shares. The mill was to run steadily at fullest capacity six months. By March 25, ('85) the V.I. & S. Co. found it had to pay cash for new material. It had no money. Its creditors appointed H.H. Swallow as Trustee with power to control the concern's money. The thirty workmen had agreed to leave half their wages as capital, etc. The business men of Pomeroy were asked to help the company; since there was to be no company store they should be interested, the company thought. The rest of the V.I. & S. Company's story is told in a few brief Telegraph items: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 475 [Aril 8, '85] The Rolling Mill scheme looks bad. [October 23, '88] The Rolling Mill is virtually sold. W.G. Merriam of Youngstown is the buyer. It has been idle two years. Operations are to begin a few weeks. [January 1, 1890] The Rolling Mill has been sold (by the Pomeroy National Bank) to a Youngstown company, Cartwright, McCurdy & Company. [May 14, 1890] The Rolling Mill is booming. Six cars of pig iron and four of iron ore have been received. [February 3, ‘93] The Leading Question: Is the Rolling Mill going to leave us? A dispatch from Youngstown to the Cleveland Leader of January 30 says: "A large deal is on here…Capitalists from Huntington, W.Va. wish to purchase the rolling mill at Pomeroy, owned by the Union Iron & Steel Company of this city…" [February 24, ‘93] A Citizens' Meeting was held at the Court House to consider the rolling mill matter. The Rolling Mill wants: 1. Cheaper coal (Mr. Vohres asks too much); 2. A free railroad; 3. The use of Front street. These "wants" were all virtually granted. By 1900, however, the American Steel & Hoop Company of Pittsburgh owned the mill. By September of that year the outlook looked good; for, Conference committees of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel & Tin Workers, of the Republic Iron & Steel and the American Steel & Hoop Companies agreed Sunday at Cincinnati upon a scale for the year ending July, 1901. Supt. H.A. Zeller says the mill here will resume work Monday… The Standard Iron Works at Clifton had 5000 kegs of nails under water in the ‘84 Flood. The Clifton mill did not die, however; it merely started to migrate. First, it moved over to the other side of the River (to Middleport); then later it moved again, this time out of Pomeroy Bend and up to Columbus, Ohio. The inside story of the mill's removal from Clifton to Middleport was found by this writer in a 1905 issue of the State Gazette of Point Pleasant, to which paper it had been contributed by John L. Mason, former newspaper editor. Shorn of many of its details (all interesting but too numerous to be used here) Mr. Mason's story runs, in substance, as follows: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 476 After Greene Brothers & Company got control of the Standard Iron Works Company (in 1879 and 1880; see above) they decided to move the mill because transporting facilities were not satisfactory. The Middleport Town Council did not want the mill to leave the vicinity; and so it proposed to the town's citizens a bond issue "for needed city improvements." The bond measure passed; the Council used the money ($30,000) to bribe Greene Brothers & Company to move the mill to Middleport, where it was to constitute “a needed city improvement.” Soon after the mill went across the River (in '86) it was bought by Messrs. King, Gilbert & Warner, who forthwith "dumped more than three hundred fine nail machines onto the scrap heap" in order to fit the mill up for the manufacture of Bessemer steel. For eight years the steel plant was the industrial mainstay of Middleport; for eight years the reflection from its converters lighted the skies at night as far as New Haven; Then came disturbing rumors. Said a local newspaper on November 25, 1894: At a meeting of business men on Saturday evening a committee was appointed to visit Columbus with Messrs. King, Gilbert & Warner. The committee returned very little wiser. Middleport may loose the steel plant… and will have $30,000 to pay for nothing… The mill will not be moved without a protest from its citizens. Middleport's council did protest, claiming that the terms of the contract forbade removal of the mill. Unfortunately, no copy of the contract could be found. And so, in February of 1895, the removal to Columbus was begun. In August, 1885 a Middleport paper in announcing the removal of the mill from Clifton to his side of the Bend had sung joyously: "The night is passing away; how brightly breaks the morning!" In February, 1895 the same paper in telling of the plant's move to Columbus wailed laconically: "An unlucky day for Middleport!" �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 477 Not for Middleport alone was that an unlucky day. The entire Bend suffered, perhaps more, in a way, than it did from the Pomeroy Coal Company's collapse. Employees of the latter had the prospect of finding employment at some other coal works or in the various other industries; hence they did not immediately leave The Bend in great numbers. Steel Mill employees, on the other hand, especially the skilled workers, were left with no other resource but to follow the mill. Forty families left Middleport within two weeks after the mill's removal began. At Mason City the John Young and John Mees saw-mills each lost great quantities of lumber in the '84 Flood. John Young, deep in debt before the Flood, was ruined. His boatyard had to cease operating; as did also his sawmill. The Mees boatyard continued, with the Larimer Brothers as its boatbuilders, until almost the close of the century. In September following the '84 Flood, Herman Lerner, Mason City bromine manufacturer, found it necessary to turn all his property over to his creditors. The destruction of the Lerner Factory by the Flood (see above) was but the last straw upon the back of several unsuccessful Lerner business ventures. The Clifton Keg Factory, by 1885 grown into the Maxwell Manufacturing Company and making besides kegs such other things as "staves, cooperage stock, boards, etc. ," nonetheless went out of business soon after the Nail Mill went to Middleport. The manufacturing of nail kegs had been its chief business. In March of '89 E. Grant's Vulcan Machine Shop was sold by the sheriff. The company which bought the Vulcan had its office in Clifton. B.J. Redmond, John A. Redmond, H.G. Nease and other Mason County men were the controlling stock-holders. In January, 1898 �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 478 the Republican-Herald announced that Mr. E.K. Ascher had leased the Vulcan Machine building for a term of years and would start "works of some kind soon." How long the building had been vacated by the Vulcan was not stated. In March, 1891 "The old Woolen Mill at Middleport caved in," sail a news item. The extension of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's Ohio River Division from Parkersburg to Point Pleasant gave hope of a revival of industrial prosperity to inhabitants of both sides of the Bend. When on Christ mas day of 1886 the first passenger train came speeding down through the boot-shaped bend and stopped at each town's newly erected station, some imaginative souls were sure it was bringing to the Bend the gift of a glorious future. The O.R.R.R. brought no industrial revival to the Bend. Only for transportation was its coming an advantage. True, that was a by no means small advantage, appreciated alike by business men and by travelers; so much so, in fact, that the non-arrival of new industries was for the time being forgotten. At Mason City one result of the coming of the railroad was that business men suddenly learned that they had two addresses, a shipping address and a mailing address. The railway company as a matter of course had named its station Mason City. But the town's official name, both post office and corporation, was simply Mason. Wherefore the several Mason merchants soon found it necessary to include both addresses in their business correspondence; otherwise their freight consignments were likely to travel merrily past their destination and on the Masontown, in the eastern part of the state; while their letters, if addressed Mason City, might arrive �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 479 several days late and conspicuously stamped with official admonitions regarding correct addresses, or might even not arrive at all. Not only business men but private individuals often experienced inconvenience and annoyance due to their use of the little word City in their letterheadings. MORE MISFORTUNE In April, 1877, when salt interests were at a most discouraging point, there occurred at Pomeroy the most disastrous fire the town ever had experienced. A whole block of business buildings and its several dwelling houses were wiped out. It was on Wednesday night, April 11, only about fifteen minutes after David Geyer had closed his store (on Front, six doors below Court street) that fire broke out in his ware room back of the main store. In half an hour the whole square, from Court to the Opera House and to the Lasley Building on the corner of Mulberry and Second streets, was one blazing, smoking mass. When, toward morning, the Fire Laddies finally succeeded in getting the fire extinguished, the following buildings were seen to have been more or less completely destroyed: West of the Geyer store, Adolph Seebohm's residence and Nicholas Klein's furniture store; eastward, the Jones, Thomas & Genheimer hardware store; Henry Neutzling's saloon and dwelling; J.C. Probst & Son's three-story brick sales rooms; Mrs. Diebach's saloon and dwelling; Charles Bichman's building (with E. Feiger’s gallery on second floor); George Huttel's tailor shop and dwelling; the building occupied by W.J. Prall; the two store rooms of Dr. Whaley and S.A.M. Moore; On Second: street, J. Huntley's residence and store room; Mrs. Humphrey's dwelling and blacksmith shop; Walter Hysell's dwelling. On Court street the three-story brick belonging to D. Reed, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 480 and the First National Bank remained standing but with the roof fallen in and the wood work of the upper story gone. The Lasley Building was saved by the prompt action of the firemen. The cornices and window frames of the Pomeroy National Bank on the east side of Court (southeast corner) caught fire several times but the fire was put out each time. Almost no wind was blowing-a fact which helped to prevent the flames from crossing to the east side of the street. Mr. Geyer maintained that neither fire nor light had been left in his building; and others reported hearing suspicious noises and seeing suspicious looking characters shortly before the fire started. The Great Fire of 1856 burned over twice as much ground but only about half as many buildings as did this Great Fire of 1877. On May 7, 1879 the public was apprised of ANOTHER FIRE! …The fire started in the basement of a frame building between Mechanic and Butternut streets. A furious wind drove the flames against the back ends of Vincent Brothers’ Marble Shop, John Probst’s carpenter shop and Henry Priode’s livery stable, all old frames; then across the street Mechanic to Fletcher’s livery stable (a large brick) and Jacob Elberfeld’s stable and dwelling adjoining, both frame. The residences of William Lee, E.L. Wolfe, S.W. Pomeroy, the Court House and other buildings, were saved by great effort. Middleport too, as if not to be outdone by Pomeroy, staged a Big Fire in December of the same year of her neighbor’s Bid 1877 Fire. The Middleport Herald’s report of the town’s calamity reads (slightly condensed) thus: The work of an Incendiary! Between two and three o’clock Saturday morning last Dec. 22 fire broke out in Ben Hysell’s barn Hysell the omnibus driver in the alley near the Ohio Machine Shop. The fire was well under way before it was discovered. The barn was filled with hay, straw, etc., and also three horses, gotten out alive. From the Hysell barn the fire spread to the barn occupied by H. Condee. The barn contained the family horse, a fine buggy, several sets of harness, lap robes, etc., valued at $700. All, oncluding the barn, destroyed. The Hysell residence was next destroyed [the fire engine, etc., �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 481 being out of order but most of the household goods were saved. (Mr. Hysell is insured in the Continental, Ralston & Son, Agents.) Runion's carpenter shop (formerly the Crosbie tailor shop) and Clark's wood and willow ware shop went next. Most of the goods were saved but the building was totally destroyed. The building belonged to S.P. Coe. The M.J. Hamilton shoe shop adjoining Cooper's store on Second, and the Rayford & Lewis barber shop were next to go; (also were S.P. Coe buildings). Then the Rathburn Building on Second, owned by I.N. Rathburn of Rutland, occupied by Lawson Bros. Notion & Variety Store; the Grange store, Dr. Sisson's office and residence, Dr. Clarke's office, and perhaps some others-totally destroyed but all loss covered by insurance. The small frame next to the Rathburn Building, occupied by J.S. Boggess [Ohio Machine Co.l as office; the unoccupied brick on Mill street across the alley from the Hysell residence, destroyed except the walls-the latter left standing but unsafe. The progress of the on Mill street was stopped by the new brick of Bradbury & Johnson; on Second by the iron roof of the Ohio Machine Company's shop and foundry. The unseasonable hour of all Middleport fires strengthens the belief of incendiaries in our midst. Another item in the same paper said: On Saturday last Mayor J.B. Smith by direction of the Council offered $200 reward for the arrest and conviction of the person who set fire to the Hysell barn. Succeeding numbers of the Herald reported no arrests. Nor was the West Virginia side spared the horrors of fire-and fire bugs. Mason City was visited by two fires before the 1880s. In January of '78, very early one morning, the Mason City Salt Company's one-story frame building on Anderson street (near the salt furnace) burned down; in December of the same year, about the same hour of the night, a similar fate befell the Hope Company's store on Front (between Center and Brown streets). In each instance the building was gone before many of the townspeople knew there had been a fire. Next came the Flood of 1884. The destruction brought by that disaster upon the Bend's salt furnaces and coal mines has been shown. Now comes a general view of the Bend as presented by the Meigs County Telegraph (much condensed): ��A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 482 …All the floods of this or of previous centuries in the Ohio Valley so far as we know, are dwarfed by that which has come upon us in this year of our Lord, 1884. Last Wednesday the merchants and residents on Front street and those living on Sugar Run, began leisurely to move out; by Thursday their leisure changed to hast, and on Saturday the leisure became almost a panic; the water was invading the second floors… Skiffs and boats of all kinds were in extraordinary demand, and in some cases, we are sorry to say, the prices charged for the brief use of those crafts was so high as to amount to genuine imposition… Between Linn and Sycamore streets four buildings floated away; two moved, but lodged. Between Naylor's Run and Kerr's Run not fewer than twenty-four buildings-barns, dwellings, store rooms, offices, cooper-shops-were either carried away, moved from their foundations or turned over… J.C. Brinker's store at Kerr's Run was the only store that had no water in it. Seven inches were lacking to bring it into the room. Our office [Telegraph] was the only other business house in Pom- to escape the invasion of the water. Between Court street and the Middleport line, twenty-seven or twenty-eight buildings, including dwellings, stores, barns, two copper-shops, the Juhler bromine factory, the soap factory, C.H.V. & T. depot and platforms, either floated off or moved from their foundations. About $30,000 worth of goods and property which was stored on Capt. W.L. Downie's wharfboat was taken care of by the captain… The back water in Sugar Run extended to near the residence of Adam Long on the road leading to Beech Grove cemetary; also about 200 yards beyond the residence of N. Bengel on Union Avenue road. The street leading out to "Nebraska" was overflowed to a short distance beyond Mr. Witzgal's place. Along the Run nine dwellings moved from their foundations; also the planing mill of Pfarr & Genheimer on Mechanic; also twenty barns… Telegraph's Report on Other Bend TownsMIDDLEPORT has suffered severely. The whole town was under water. Many merchants lost a great portion of their goods. Our regular report has failed to reach us in time for this issue but next week we will give full particulars. At MINERSVILLE the saloons of John Rettich and Val Gress were moved from their foundations. The water commenced to flow into the Minersville coal bank Saturday at the old entry and will no doubt cause the Pomeroy Coal Company much trouble. It took tem months to pump out the water that flowed into the mine last year. The mine of Ebenezar Williams is flooded. It is thought almost impossible to pump the water out. SYRACUSE is overflowed as far back as Third street; the lower part of town �is entirely covered. The miners have not been working for two months and there is much suffering and want of provisions. Fifteen families are quartered in the Odd Fellows' Hall �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 483 The greatest loss to the town will be the damage to the Syracuse Coal & Salt Company. Water broke through the bulkhead at the Slope mine Saturday and the mine was flooded in a short time. The water thence flowed into the Syracuse Shaft mine through the air entry of the Slope mine and the Shaft mine also was soon full of water. It will probably take four or five months to pump the water out. J.H. Schoeneberger's bromine factory floated away. WEST COLUMBIA, which is on low ground, was entirely flooded and many people have taken refuge in the caves under the hills. At CLIFTON, the Standard Nail & Iron Works are completely submerged. At MASON CITY the water reached Second street First Street. The upper part of town is flooded. John Young and John Mees each lost heavily by having lumber float away. A part of Herman Lerner's bromine factory floated away. The Hope Furnace was again lucky; it lost less than 1,000 barrels of salt. The telegraph office on the River bank turned over but lodged. Several small houses in the lower part of town were carried away. Mason City on the whole has suffered as little as any town in the Bend. The main part of the town lies on high ground. At HARTFORD CITY there were only four houses with no water in them. A large number of families is camping on the hill tops back of town. One of the Liverpool Salt Company's barges broke loose, lodged in an orchard below Mason City and sank. It contained 1900 two-bushel sacks of salt. The GERMAN SALT FURNACE is flooded and entirely surrounded by water… The sheds and buildings will be left in bad shape. The furnace may be a total wreck. The Company will lose about 5000 barrels of salt. LOUIS SEHON had ten horses in his barn and couldn't get them out because the water rose too rapidly. He offered a reward of $200 for their rescue. A squad of men from Minersville went across and got the horses out. (Another item said: Lewis Sehon, of Hartford City, had nine head of cattle drown.) The village of NEW HAVEN stands high and dry, and has met with very little damage. (RACINE was not mentioned in The Telegraph's Special Flood Edition, hence it is inferred that the town, since it is located on high ground, was out of the waters' reach.) ANTIQUITY is overflowed. Seven or eight buildings, including Peter Harpold's sawmill and the school house, are under water. -The Telegraph's Report on RELIEFRELIEF COMMITTEES.-The citizens of Pomeroy met at the Court �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 484 House last Saturday afternoon February 10 for the purpose of taking steps toward organizing a Relief Committee for the relief of any suffering that might occur in this vicinity… The meeting resulted in the appointment of the following Relief Committee: Mayor Charles Weidt, Rev. R.H. Wallace, G. Wildermuth, Judge P.B. Stanbery, J.S. Blackaller, Major D.A. Russell… Sub-committees were appointed to look after the interests of each ward… It was decided also to send telegrams to the Mayors of a number of larger cities, stating the condition of our people and soliciting assistance. Telegrams were accordingly prepared and John S. Giles, Esq., volunteered to carry them to Athens to be forwarded by wire, the W.U. telegraph office here being under water. Mr. Giles started on his mission Sunday evening. RELIEF TELEGRAMS Received: F.C. RussellWashington, D.C. Feb. 11 Congress has appropriated $300,000 toward the relief of sufferers. Will urge Secretary of War to reach Pomeroy soon as possible. [Signed] A.J. Warner This appropriation was, of course, for the whole Ohio Valley. The Mayor of PomeroyWashington, D.C., Feb. 12 You are authorized to purchase and distribute subsistence, stores, clothing and other necessary articles to persons made destitute by floods within your reach to an amount not exceeding $1000. Careful record… to enable Department office to adjust accounts when he is sent. You… will act as agent for this Department for the distribution. Please advise by wire the number of destitute and whether purchases can be made in your vicinity. [Signed] Robert T. Lincoln, Secr'y of War. The Mayor of Hartford City received a tele6ram from Robt. Lincoln, Secr'y of War, authorizing him to spend $500 for the relief of flood sufferers in that vicinity. -Telegraph item. Donations of various amounts-$50, $75, $100 were wired from lodges, commanderies, business firms, private individuals. The Pomeroy & Mason City ferryboat took Ma or Russell to Syracuse, Minersville, Hartford City, to distribute supplies from the Pomeroy �Relief Committee. J.C. Blackaller crossed over to Mason City for the same purpose. The Jim Montgomery brought supplies from Charleston and Gallipolis to the Committee. Commissary Stations were set up in the towns. Flood victims, (and some who were not victims), made daily visits to the stations �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 485 For their rations. With the first emergency supplies came a large quantity of “hardtack”; very moderate portions of this article satisfied most sufferers. Two Additional Calamities befell Pomeroy in 1884: In August of the year fire started in Weiskettel's Bakery and Confectionary on Front street between Linn and Sycamore. Almost the whole block, which consisted largely of old frames almost ready to fall, was destroyed. A few were good buildings-such as the Blumenthal residence and store building, the Silverman business building, the Lutheran church, the Bichman residence. Some were two-story buildings with families living in the second story. The fire alarm had come at three o'clock a.m. Almost exactly two months after the Weisskettel fire came that of the Pomeroy Opera House on Sunday morning, October 19. On the preceding night the Young Men's Blaine & Logan Club of Pomeroy had been joined similar clubs from Middleport, Syracuse, Racine, Chester and Hartford City in a Grand Republican Jollification. There were gorgeous decorations, still more gorgeous fireworks. Sparks from the latter were believed to have caused the fire. The building was owned by George McQuigg and Capt. Sam Davis, who had bought it from George Eiselstein in 1876. Its third floor, the opera house, gave its name to the building. On the second floor the Telephone Exchange, the City Council Chamber and the Misses Reuter's Dressmaking Shop were located. The two store rooms on the first floor were occupied by D. Geyer Jr. and A. Blumenthal. A little less than a year after the 1884 Deluge came what many Pomeroyans considered "the last straw." Here again we let the Telegraph present the picture: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 486 FALL OF ROCK:-A large rook, estimated at 2500 cubic yards, about 2:30 p.m. yesterday afternoon fell from the cliff and crashed into the engine house on Second street demolishing the whole building [brick]. The engine sustained but small damage, the reels none. Two horses and a cow in the adjoining stable were not hurt… Before the fall a large overhanging cliff about fifty feet high frowned down upon the city; beneath it was a cave about fifteen feet deep; back of that, a stratum of poor coal; severe freezing is supposed to have caused the fall. The rock was broken into about twenty-five pieces of various sizes… COMMENTS.-Judge Bradbury: "It's no use flying in the face of Providence. He don't want a town here and won't have it. If you don't believe it, just think of the floods and fires and now the likelihood of the whole hill falling in on us and burying us from the sight of man." Judge Brewster: "Well!!!! (with four inflections-more or less-on the word. The loss to the city is considerable. Small boys are in the habit of prowling in the cave. Fortunately it was a sunny day and they were all skating. Rocks had fallen from the offset at varying intervals from various points ever since Pomeroy was founded. But this one was decidedly the largest. Yet a few more straws, in the form of fires, were due. About three months after the fall of the rock (May, '85), F.F. Fletcher's brick Livery Stable, between Mulberry and Mechanic streets, burned down along with several adjoining buildings. This was Fletcher's third fire since he began business in the early '70s. Five years later (in January, 1890) he had his fourth and last fire. In January, 94 the Telegraph Printing Office on Second street was totally destroyed by fire, the Jail Building gutted, the new Opera House next to the jail considerably damaged. The fire originated in the job department, supposedly from the heating of the wooden wall by the engine boiler, which stood near the wall. Editor E.S. Trussell and family, who lived on the second floor of the building, barely escaped with only a few articles of clothing. Their household goods and also the whole printing plant was destroyed. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 487 On New Year's morning of the year 1895 the "Hulbert House [the old Edwards Building] and two other Fire Traps between it and the Biggs Undertaking Establishment were wiped off the face of the earth!" Starkey's Shoe Store, R.W. Vaughn’s Musical Instrument Store, T. Wheatley’s Sewing Machine Store and a millinary shop went up in smoke with the Hulbert House. The burning of the Remington Block in April of '96 and that of the Baptist Church in '99 completed the list of fires as reported for that century. Middleport, too, had some conflagrations after the year of '84. In fact, so many were reported during the late '80s that only the most destructive can be shown here. In August of ‘84 fire started in Taylor Grogan 's saloon on Second street "in the side next to Mack's Millinary Store." Ten buildings, nearly all of them two-story frames, several of them residences, were laid in ruins. One large brick, belonging to W.V. Lasher, was badly damaged. Less than three weeks later Middleport was reported as "Again Scorched," when the 3-Big-3 Store Building on the lower side of Mill street was destroyed and two stables, two ice houses, one dwelling and one store-house for beer-all belonging to Wm. Swisher-were in ruins. "Middleport Gets Worst Scorching for Years!" was the newspaper headline for the account of the fire that roused the citizenry at 2:30 in the morning and consumed "Mrs. J.A. Rumsey’s Millinary Store and dwelling; "Sporty" Sayre's Restaurant and building; Taylor Grogan's Saloon and residence (owned by Dr. D.S. Gartinger); George Womeldorf's Livery Stable, and several dwellings." The account appeared in the April 19, '95 Republican-Herald. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 488 On September 2, 1899 the "Old John Fisher Homestead, in the mouth of Fern Hollow, was reported in ruins. The house was occupied by Mr. Fisher and his daughter, Mrs. Beiler, the Reverend Mr. Beiler and his two daughters having gone to Washington a few days previously. Middleport's most generally lamented fire probably was the one of April 9, 1900, when the Canning Factory and several fine residences went up in flames. The factory, put up in 1895 (see below) was one of Middleport's consolation prizes for the loss of the steel plant. "Nothing was left of the factory but a heap of cans and bricks; there was not a cent of insurance, nothing was saved," deplored the Republican-Herald. The most terrifying fire of Mason City's whole existence perhaps was the burning of the Hope Salt Furnace. On an unusually windy evening in March, 1887, fire broke out in the Hope cooper-shop and spread with lightening rapidity to the salt sheds. As Mason was without fire protection of any kind it looked for a while as if no town would be left on the site by morning. Happily, the wind's fury was too great. When burning pieces of wood from the blazing plant fell upon a house roof they were not permitted to remain long enough to set fire to the building; almost instantly they were seized by a gust of wind and whisked away, in some instances as far as Hartford City, it was claimed. The town's life was saved by the force that seemed bent upon its destruction. Mason was left gloomy and despondent; its one remaining industry had been wiped out. Before the end of the year, however, the rebuilding of the plant was on its way; the town acquired an unexpected air of prosperity, the townspeople a new feeling of security.1 �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 489 1. The Company's charter would have expired "on the 21st day of May, A.D., eighteen hundred and eighty-seven" not quite three months after the fire. By May 1, '78, the Company had been reorganized, the furnace rebuilt and Edward Edwards, heretofore Mine Superintendent, had displaced Moses Morgan as Company Agent. D.C. Davis, of Pomeroy, (a stock-holder), was elected as Secretary and Book-keeper. At Hartford City in January, 1898, the beautiful brick residence of the late Major Brown burned down. With the destruction of the Brown homestead Hartford lost one of its finest houses and rivermen the night mark that had been serving them faithfully the past twenty-four years. The most complete holocaust of that period of destructive fires took place at Clifton on Friday, April 7, 1893, shortly after the noon hour. Burning soot from the stack of a pumping battery fell on an old nearby building. A high wind happened to be blowing; result: The Clifton Salt Works (the old Bedford) and forty-two other buildingstwenty-six dwellings, three stores, seven barnsquickly disappeared. The other fourth of the town would have met the same fate had not the Middleport Fire Company come to the aid of its sister town. The loss was immense; most of the buildings either were not insured at all or not sufficiently to cover the loss. George Clifton, lessee of the salt works and owner of the store goods in the Montague Brick, lost on salt from $2000 to $3000; his stock of goods, valued at $4,000, was insured for $1600. His household goods also were greatly damaged, as were likewise those of many other residents. With the destruction of the salt plant disappeared Clifton's only remaining industry. "During the progress of the fire the Ohio River Railroad Company appealed to Pomeroy and Middleport for aid in saving its station and rolling stock. The fire lad- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 490 dies of both towns responded promptly; they were not even thanked by the O.R.R. Company, "wrote John L. Mason in 1905 (for the State Gazette). Ice Gorges, which usually attended the passing of the Allegheny ice through The Bend, seem not to have received newspaper notice until the year 1877. In January of that year the ice was "piled up from bank to bank; in many places it was raised seven or eight feet above the water." Destruction was likely to occur when the gorge began to move. The '77 gorge caused the New Castle ferryboat Lizzie to sink. Another loss was reported in the same paper (Jan. 1, 1877): Capt. Shoemaker, of the Charley Bowen No. 2 lost $3,000 by the ice gorge Monday, the day the ice began to move, yet he is happy that he saved anything at all. He was sure Monday that he had lost everything. An item in Meigs County Republican two years later, (Jan. 22, '79) reveals the public interest in ice gorges: The shrill whistles of the steamers in port last Saturday afternoon was the signal for the people to line up on the bank to watch the ice disgorge itself. This had been expected for 24 hours. The bank was literally black with thrilling humanity on both sides of the river. There was great anxiety on faces of those directly interested. [salt men, coal men, rivermen, etc.]. Losses there were that year too, but not unusually great. Fire, flood, wind, ice-these agencies were of destruction beyond human control. Several calamities occurred during that period that should not have occurred. One of these was the Boiler Explosion at the Holland & Maxwell Nail Keg Factory at Clifton in February, 1877, resulting from the engineer's carelessness. Three employees were killed, twelve wounded; four houses were damaged and other property destroyed. (This was the third misfortune experienced by that industry; the two previous ones having taken place when J.W. Jones owned the factory.) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 491 Another explosion, due likewise to the engineer's negligence, was that of the little steamer J.N. Roberts. The explosion occurred at noon of a September day in 1876, while the boat was landing at the Pomeroy wharfboat. The J.N. Roberts belonged to Capt. "Bill" Roberts, of Letart Falls, Ohio. And, to crown all, came Pestilence to the gates of The Bend, knocked, -and was secretly handed the key. An epidemic of smallpox had visited The Bend in the late '70s, had caused some deaths. The visitation was regarded by the vast majority as were all such visitations then regarded: purely as acts of God; at least, there had arisen no authoritative question of specific human responsibility. Circumstances attending the smallpox siege experienced by Pomeroy and Mason City in the spring and summer of 1892 did give rise to such a question. Some time in April of that year David Geyer Jr. purchased some dry goods at a fire sale in New York City. Very soon afterwards an unusual number of cases of illness, diagnosed either as chicken-pox or as measles, appeared in Pomeroy, among grown people as well as children. On May 28 (Friday or Saturday) Judge Brewster died after a short illness. Upon the assurance of the attending physician that the Judge had died of smallpox all church services in Pomeroy were suspended, and all other cases of Chicken-pox or measles (so pronounced by other physicians) were quaranteened. Meanwhile young Peter Roseberry, while visiting friends in Mason City, bought some wearing apparel at the Geyer store; in due time young Roseberry became seriously ill; a Pomeroy physician was called, first pronounced the young man's disease to be chicken pox, then changed his diagnosis to black measles; then, when his patient died on Saturday evening, advised that he be buried the next �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 492 morning. Very soon every young man who had visited hid friend “Pete" Roseberry-which was practically every young man in Mason-was ill with the dreaded disease, which Mason County physicians unhesitatingly pronounced smallpox. The town was quaranteened. The deaths, numbering nearly a dozen, included the elderly Mrs. John Mees, who as kind and sympathetic neighbor also had visited young Roseberry several times during his brief illness. By the time the disease was pronounced smallpox in Mason County, Pomeroy doctors had begun asserting in newspaper articles that smallpox could develop from chicken-pox and that such undoubtedly had been the case in Mason City. The reply of Dr. A.L. Knight, Mason County physician of long experience and high standing on both sides of The Bend, ended the controversy. The gist of Dr. Knight's reply was: …In my judgment no other place [than Pomeroy] is supplied with more able physicians; …yet I am compelled to accept the official report as conclusive of the radiation of the disease from one central point in Pomeroy… and that unfortunate mistakes in diagnoses were made there and in Mason City. We in West Virginia can find no trace of the disease except that traceable to Pomeroy, there being several cases besides that of Peter Roseberry whose infections are clearly traced to that source… By the end of August City's quarantine lifted. including Pomeroy!-ceased to come into their midst, shop. the epidemic's force had been spent! Mason Yet it was weeks before neighboring townsto shy away from Mason Cityites who happened even when they came into a Pomeroy store to David Geyer, the innocent cause of the epidemic, was permanently ruined; this, in spite of the efforts of Pomeroy physicians to save his business-or was it perhaps because of their misguided efforts in that direction? �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 493 THE LAST OF THE PIONEERS Many Pomeroy residents of the 19th century's last quarter were surprised when they learned from the January 23, 1889 issue of the Telegraph that their town's founder lay buried in almost the very heart of the town. Said an item of that issue: In a little graveyard on Naylor's Run near the residence of the late V.B. Horton many of the earlier citizens of Pomeroy lie buried. The place is seldom visited and appears neglected. It was probably Pomeroy's first burying ground. Prominent is a plain marble shaft of respectable height, bearing the following inscription: "He finished an honorable and useful life in this town, to which his name has been given by its inhabitants as a testimony of their respect for his character," The new generations now on the stage knew very little of the first Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy. Nor could those new generations fully realize that the passing of nine adult members of Pomeroy's two founding families during that darkest hour of the town's life was a truly sorrowful coincidence. Only the old inhabitants of that period knew that each of those nine Pomeroys and Hortons had taken an active part, if not in the actual founding then in the later upbuilding of Pomeroy. Charles R. Pomeroy was the first of the nine. Physical infirmities having forced him years ago to retire from active business, his death on June 28, 1878 at the age of seventy years was not unexpected. "He was respected and loved for his spotless integrity, his kindness of heart and purity of life," eulogized his long-time friend O.B. Chapman. "Funeral services were conducted at Grace Episcopal church… the remains taken to the family cemetary [the above-mentioned "little old graveyard”] attended by a large concourse of friends." Four years later (January 31, 1882) Samuel Wyllys Pomeroy fol- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 494 lowed his younger brother in death. Funeral services were likewise at Grace Episcopal church, "to whose building he had so largely contributed and of which he was a constant member," on Saturday, February 4. His remains were sent to Spring Grove, Cincinnati, of which he was "one of the original proprietors and where his wife and three of his children are buried." Comments O.B. Chapman further: "His wish was that no circumstance be made of his death in any way; yet, when a man of high character and position, who has lived to a good old age, suddenly passes away from the sight of his friends and townspeople who respected and loved him, it is almost impossible not to voice the general grief."2 2. S.W. Pomeroy the Younger had a rather eventful life before he came West. Born at Brighton, Mass., in September, 1801, he entered the business house of Baker & Hodges when quite young. In 1827 he sailed for Arica, Peru, as agent for Alsop & Co., Philadelphia. On the voyage he landed with the mate and four seamen on a bleak island near Cape Horn, for water. A violent storm suddenly drove the vessel off the coast. It did not return and reported at Valparaiso that the six men were dead. They were rescued, after many days of suffering from cold and hunger, by a passing whaler. News of S.W. Pomeroy's supposed death reached home and he was long mourned as dead. He remained in South America with Alsop & Co. till 1830; returned home that and married Catherine Boyer Coolidge of Boston, February 3, 1831. He went to Philadelphia to live but the illness of his wife caused him to go to Fayal, Azores Islands. In 1834 he went to Cincinnati; remained there till 1867, when he came to Pomeroy and engaged in the coal business. V.B. Horton Jr., the nephew who had come West about 1846, died in November of 1884 at the home of his daughter, Mrs. Tyler, then living on the Sehon Place below Hartford. Born in 1826 he thus died at the age of fifty-eight. He lies buried in Beech Grove Cemetary. Thayer Horton, youngest Horton brother in the West, was the first of those brothers to pass into the beyond. He was born in 1827, came west some time in the late 1830s. In January of '87 after a lingering illness (which had caused the family to reside in the East from 1867 to '79), he was laid to rest in Beech Grove. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 495 V.B. Horton lived only two and a half years after his business failure, his death occurring on January 14, 1888. Funeral services at Grace Episcopal Church were followed by burial in Beech Grove. Pall bearers Asa Barringer, Isaacher Jones, John Grogan, Martin Ebersbach, Philip Hepp, and Robert Dyke were all employees of the deceased.3 3. Valentine Baxter Horton was born at Windsor, Vermont on January 29, 1802. He is said to have told with pride that when he was a boy he once was employed by a butcher to peddle meat about town in a basket. He was educated at the Military Academy of Norwich, Vermont. Later he studied law under Samuel Dana, U.S. Senator from Vermont. A special clause in V.B. Horton's will, made January 1, 1885, provided for the payment of all his debts… authorized his executors "to act in all respects in regard to my said property claims and liabilities, either in my favor or against me, the same as I would do when living." V.B. Horton is known to have been a most charitable man. In the Pomeroy Coal Company's prosperous days more than twenty old, decrepit employees who were unable to work were kept on the pay rolls. Some who were crippled in the mines were sent to Cincinnati for treatment at the Company's expense, receiving their regular wages all the while. It was claimed that Mr. Horton gave away in this way more than the Company owed the men when he failed. Nor was it done with a blast of trumpets. Few people knew of it until after his death. Once again, in November, 1890, the solemn tolling of the Episcopal church bell announced funeral services for a Horton brother this time for the last one, Horace S. Horton.4 Born in 1808, H.S. Horton thus attained the age of eighty-two. 4. H.S. Horton lost heavily-in fact, practically everything-when the Pomeroy Coal Company collapsed. He too had assumed the role of private banker, his "depositors" being mainly his household servants. At very great sacrifice he was enabled to pay back to each one the entire amount of money entrusted to his care. One woman was made happy by the receipt of $600, the amount she had saved while working in the H.S. Horton home. Samuel Dana Horton, youngest son of V.B. Horton, (born in 1844), died in February, 1895 at Garfield Hospital, Washington, D.C., and ��A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 496 was brought to Pomeroy for burial in Beech Grove Cemetary. He had come to Washington from abroad at the request of leading members of the Administration for consultation on the financial situation. He had left his wife and his son in Switzerland, where his son was attending school. His friends were sure he had died of overwork.5 5. Samuel Dana Horton spent the greater part of the 1870s and '80s in Europe, though for a short time in the latter '70s he resided with his wife and infant son in the Heckard property on Lincoln Hill and practiced law in Pomeroy. His wife was the daughter of a British army officer (Gen. Lydiard). After returning to Europe, S. Dana Horton resided in Switzerland, travelled extensively, became a noted French scholar, as did also his wife. This son of V.B. Horton is the only native of Pomeroy Bend known to have attained world-wide reputation. In 1879 and again in 1881 he was appointed by President Hayes to serve as Secretary of the Monetary Commission for the United States at the International Conference held in Paris. His monetary works, on which his reputation is based, were the result of his experience at these conferences. The best known were The Silver Pounds and Silver in Europe. Summed up briefly, S.D. Horton's writings advocated international parity of gold and silver. They still can be found in large libraries. President McKinley said that all he knew on the silver question he had obtained from Dana Horton's works on the subject. Edwin J. Horton, recalled as the real head of his father's business from the late 1870s on, left Pomeroy for the East soon after the P.C.C. failure. In July, 1897, he died at Flushing, Long Island. His remains were brought to Pomeroy for burial beside his brother Dana Horton in Beech Grove. He was born in 1838. Mrs. V.B. Horton (Clara Alsop Pomeroy) survived her husband by six years, her death occurring in October, 1894 at the Sandusky Soldiers’ Home, to which place she had retired after her husband's death. She too lies in Beech Grove Cemetary. Only one first-generation male member of the Pomeroy and Horton families was living in Pomeroy at the close of the nineteenth century; namely, Horace M. Horton, first child of Horace S. Horton. He �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 497 was born at Pomeroy in 1836. And only four Pomeroy and Horton descendants were living in The Bend in 1900: Mrs. Helen Horton Keiser, daughter of Thayer Horton and wife of George Keiser; Miss Grace Horton, daughter of Horace M. Horton; and Miss Grace Horton's sister Edith, who was Mrs. George Newton, of Hartford. Lewis Sehon Pomeroy, son of Charles R. Pomeroy, was a citizen of Point Pleasant; he had married Miss Pauline Vollert of that town in September, 1897. Many other pre-1850 pioneers, doubtless the great majority of them, were destined to end their earthly careers during this period of adversity. Death notices of only a few, with such data and newspaper comments as have not already been presented, can be used here. Judge Martin Heckard lived only long enough to see the beginning of The Bend's industrial decline. He died in July of 1877 after many years of failing health. His funeral services were conducted by The Reverend Jones of the Unitarian church. William McIntyre, the husband of Betty Williamson McIntyre, died in May, 1878. "One of the first settlers and oldest citizens of Pomeroy," the reporter said unwittingly. A look backward will find William McIntyre living on the Virginia side in the 1840, in Pomeroy not until the early 1850s. The death of Nial R. Nye on May 30, 1879 should have received more newspaper notice than the few lines accorded it. Nial R. Nye was one of the Sons of "Nial Nye & Sons" of Nyesville. In 1837 he married Rhoda Smith, daughter of Benjamin Smith and granddaughter of James Smith of Leading Creek Settlement. At the time of his death Nial R. Nye was living in Middleport, where funeral services were held in the Christian Church. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 498 The death of Edward M. Nye, sixth son of Nial Nye, in November of 1879, was given somewhat more newspaper space. Born in "the old Nye house" in Kerr's Run in October, 1826, E.M. Nye began his business life as a miller. After the destruction by fire of Coalridge Mill, of which he was the manager, he engaged in salt manufacturing, first at Syracuse then at the Windsor furnace. He was manager of the Windsor at the time of his death. Marcus Bosworth, who spent some of his later years in Cincinnati, died at Middleport in December, 1883 and was buried in Chester by the Masonic Lodge, which organization, next to the Presbyterian church, always had been Mr. Bosworth's chief interest. William H. Remington died in January, 1885. When not much more than a boy this early contributor to Pomeroy's mercantile progress had left the parental roof with one dollar-all that his father could give him. With his wife and two children he came from the East to Pomeroy, that dollar already having given results of wise investment by its owner. Remington Block was Pomeroy's finest material acquisition resulting from that dollar's work. Royal Clark Grant, who was a pioneer resident of both Pomeroy and Middleport, spent his latter years making inventions and improvements in machinery. His Rotary Self-Feeding Machine, invented during the 1870s, is only one of a number of inventions. Royal Grant died in Middleport in January, 1885 at the age of eighty years. Mrs. Ben Smith, widow of Pioneer James Smith's grandson Ben Smith and herself a direct descendant of Leading Creek pioneer----(?) died in Middleport in April, 1887. Mrs. Smith was the mother of Mrs. D.C. Whaley. Captain Edmund Williamson (son of Major Andrew Waggener’s friend Archibold Williamson), general store-keeper after his retirement from the river, died on November 20, 1890, after a long illness. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 499 Pall bearers at the captain’s funeral were: M. Blaettnar, R. Dye, J.P. Gonheimer, Major B.M. Skinner, D.W. Daniels, George Eiselstein-all old friends of the genial Virginian. Burial was in Rock Spring cemetary near the Williamson farm. The death of Hon. Alban Davies occurred in January, 1892. Mr. Davies was born in Wales in 1832, came to Pomeroy in ’49. He learned the carpenter trade, with B.F. Biggs the reporter said, (meaning, no doubt, as fellow apprentice; for Ben Biggs came to Pomeroy in 1853 when only nineteen years old). By the late 1850s Alban Davies was a prominent school teacher in Meigs County. Later he practiced law and also had interests in one or two salt furnaces (as shown above). Robert L. Winkleblack, Virginian, served an apprenticeship with William McMaster in the late 1830s, did building and contracting in Pomeroy during the 1840s, and in ’53 or ’54 went to Hartford City to take part in the building of that town. About 1888, Mr. Winkleblack moved with his wife to Mason City to live in retirement; there he died in February, 1893. His remains were taken to Beech Grove for burial after appropriate funeral rites were held at Grace Episcopal Church. James Ralston, another Virginian, had come with his parents to Gallia county when but a boy. At eighteen he was apprenticed to a tailor in Gallipolis; at thirty he was holding the office of sheriff of Meigs county. A mercantile career in the latter ‘40s and the ‘50s in Pomeroy, then a longer period in the insurance business, ended in retirement about 1886. In March of 1894 at the age of eighty-eight James Ralston died at the home of his son-in-law Judge D.A. Russell in Pomeroy �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 500 Philip Hepp came to Pomeroy in 1849 from the Rhein Pfalz, Germanv. He was employed at Horton's Boatyard, first as carpenter then as "boss" and confidential employee. S. Dana Horton once said of Philip goes Hepp, "There goes a MAN." Mr. Hepp’s death occurred in March, 1897 at his home in Naylor's Run. Funeral services were held St. John's Church, whose Sonnabend bells he had rung so many years. John S. Davies, who was nearly twenty years older than his brother Alban, outlived the latter by three years. In the early '70s John Davies had leased his planing mill and turned his interests to salt manufacturing. At the time of his death, however (December, ‘95), he was operating the mill again with his son W.H. Davies as partner. The deaths of Thomas T. Fesler and Zacharias Beatty within two days of each other was indeed a "strange coincidence." Fesler, a Pomeroy merchant, was the brother-in-law of Beatty, whom he had helped to found Meigs County's first newspaper (see above). In 1846 Fesler married Almira, daughter of Melzar Nye; in 1850 he went to California, mined gold with great success, then returned to Middleport. There he died on September 6, 1896 at the age of seventy-three, in the old Melzar Nye home, the brick house built by Hamilton Karr in 1816. Two days later (Sept. 8, 1898) Zaccharias Beatty died at Galesburg, Illinois, where he had lived many years. John Probst, proprietor of the Probst Furniture Factory, died in October, 1899. Funeral services were conducted at the Presbyterian Church. The funeral procession was the largest seen in Pomeroy for a long time. The factory hands attended in a body, led by the G.A.R. post, with one hundred veterans in the ranks. Captain Albert McDaniel, who was born in 1809 and whose home since early in the 1830s had been the large farm opposite Kerr's Run, died in Texas of paralysis in March, 1900. Capt. McDaniel was �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 501 the oldest Odd Fellow in West Virginia and perhaps in the United States at the time of his death. Another rather strange coincidence was the passing of James Crosbie and William L. Downie in the same year. Both were born in Scotland in the year 1829. Their accidental meeting on shipboard and the resulting establishment of their relationship as brothers-in-law has been shown. Both died in the year 1900, Capt. Downie in January and the vetaran tailor in June of that year. Many of the Second Period's pioneers, the period ushered in by King Coal's ally, Salt, made their final exit during this last quartercentury. Among these were George W. Moredock, town builder, and James A. Payne, assistant town builder. George W. Moredock, the real founder of Hartford City and of New Haven, died at the former place on November 11, 1893, at the age of seventy-seven years (born July 28, 1816). On Friday, the day of Mr. Moredock's funeral, …Business was suspended at Hartford City, stores and shops closed, and the town's population paid fitting respect to the citizen who had been most influential, the most public spirited for forty years. The steamer C.A. Hill carried the Masons from Pomeroy and Middleport. Services were held in the house by Rev. L.E. Peters of Parkersburg. The remains were taken to Beech Grove Cemetary, Pomeroy, on the steamer G.W. Moredock. So wrote one of Mr. Moredock's fellow citizens to the Telegraph of November 19, 1893. James M. Payne, co-partner of R.C.M. Lovell in the development of Mason City, passed away in 1880 at the residence of his daughter, Mrs. Waggener, at Charleston, W.Va., and was buried in Mason County, near the town of Leon. The Reverend Jacob Bird died at Mason City in February of 1877. Besides his work as licensed local preacher, Mr. Bird served his town one year as mayor, Mason county four years as superintendent �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 502 of schools. He also was a Justice of the Peace. On the afternoon of August 7, 1868, at Mason City's M.E. Church was held the double funeral of Capt. James Shoemaker and Pilot William Jones, the two pioneer citizens who were killed the preceding Saturday in the explosion of the towboat Brilliant (see above). The funeral was one of the largest, if not The largest, ever seen in Mason City. Practically every Masonic, Odd Fellow and Forester lodged in The Bend was in attendance. Both men were buried in the Adamsviilile cemetary, Mason City. Frederick Besserer, prominent Middleport business man, died in September, 1879. Born in Stuttgart, Wuertemberg (Germany), Mr. Besserer migrated with his wife in 1854 to Pennsylvania and the next year to Mason City. Having served as butcher's apprentice in Germany he was immediately employed by Mason City's “Butcher Hildebrandt” But in '59 Mr. Besserer moved with his family to Middleport where, up to the time of his death he has been seen in this drama as the business partner of J.W. Worley. The only public office Mr. Besserer ever accepted was that of member of the local board of education. Charles Bichman, one of Pomeroy's first Jewelers, died some time in the 1870s of that dreaded disease, smallpox, which was epidemic in The Bend at that time. As burials from that disease were kept as secret as possible, newspapers carried no report of Mr. Bichman's interment even though he was one of Pomeroy's most prominent and respected citizens. Andrew Burkhart, Mr. Bichman's former partner, moved to Cleveland after the ’84 Flood. There he died the following summer. Captain James N. Williamson, owner of many steamboats and super- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 503 intendent of the Cincinnati-Pittsburgh Packet Line, died of tuberculosis (then known as “consumption”) in California in January, 1885. "Captain Jim" was noted for his "honesty, integrity and business judgment." He was the son of W.C. Williamson, who came from Virginia to Pomeroy some time during the 1850s. Though only forty-one years old Capt. Williamson was a wealthy man, the property he left being valued at between $55,000 and $60,000. Captain Jim's father, W.C. Williamson, (familiarly, “Buckeye Bill”) made and lost a fortune in Pomeroy. He was manager of the Buckeye Salt Furnace from the time it was built until 1880. He lived next door to Capt. Edmund Williamson-to whom he was not related-in an equally commodious home. He had three sons and one daughter, all of whom died of tuberculosis. His wife died of exposure during the '84 Flood. Broken in spirit and in health after the death of his son James N. Williamson, Buckeye Bill became bankrupt. He took his daughter-in-law (wife of Captain Jim) and three grandchildren to California, died there. His body was cremated and the ashes were brought back for burial beside his wife and children in Beech Grove. In January, 1884, W.P. Rathburn of Pomeroy's first banking firm (Daniel & Rathburn), died in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Mr. Rathburn was a son-in-law of Banker H.G. Daniel and brother-in-law of Banker George Plantz. He left an estate of from $800,000 to $1,000,000. His remains were "to be brought to Pomeroy for buriel," the news reported stated. H.G. Daniel died in Springfield, Ohio, in December of '93, at the age of eighty-four. Of New England parentage, he had come to Pomeroy in 1852 and with W.P. Rathburn went into the banking business. While president of the bank (re-organized during the Civil War into �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 504 First National Bank; see above), H.G. Daniel was instrumental in establishing the Clifton Coal Company, the Clifton Salt Company and the Clifton Nail Mill. He lost very heavily from these various undertakings. Major Albert McCown, characterized by George Wilding as "a sweetspirited and lovable bachelor,” was fifty-nine when he died at the home of his father in Ashland, Ky., in October, 1893. Major McCown was said to have left quite an estate. In May of 1894 Samuel Powell, who opened Clifton's Sterling coal mine in the very early 1860s, "when most of the place was a forest and part of Middleport a cornfield," died at his home near that same Sterling Mine. In August, 1895 Adam Brandenburg died at his home near the H.V. & T. Railway station, Pomeroy. Mr. Brandenburg came to Pomeroy about the time the old Dabney coal bank was opened. He was immediately employed as blacksmith at the mine; and he continued at that post during his entire residence in Pomeroy. He was a member of the City Council from the fourth ward for several terms. Funeral services for Mr. Brandenburg took place at the Catholic Church. Mrs. Barbara Russel, "Grandma Russell" to the whole community in her later years, died at the home of her son Capt. Timothy Russell, in Middleport, in November of 1898. Mrs. Russell lacked only a few days of being ninety-six years old when she died. She probably was the oldest person in The Bend at that time. A shock to the entire town was the death of George Luikart, aged and partially blind pioneer architect and contractor of Mason City. On Thanksgiving evening of that year Mr. Luikart left his home on a brief errand. It was snowing and getting colder. Mr. Luikart did �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 505 not return home that night. Early Friday morning several parties went out in search of the wanderer. On Sunday afternoon his frozen body was found under the river bank near the Bauer brick yard. Young Jacob Dornick, who was assisting his father Marshal John Dornick in the search, was the successful searcher. Michael Schlaegel, veteran Pomeroy shoemaker and shoe dealer, in September of '98, while painting the roof of his barnfell to the ground and was instantly killed. Dr. C.R. Reed, "one of the oldest and best known physicians in the county" (Meigs) died at Middleport in October, 1898. Dr. Reed had been a member and president of the Middleport Board of Education for twenty consecutive years. In March, 1900, Henry Dilcher died at Charleston, W.Va., at the home of his son, Charles Dilcher. The Dilchers had gone (to Charleston during what might have been termed the Great Exodus from The Bend about 1885 to the latter 1890s. Bernhard Koehler, proprietor of the Excelsior Salt Works and onetime manager of the Herman Coal & Salt Company, died in January of 1900 and was buried from St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Pomeroy. In 1878 while still in the shoe business Mr. Koehler had been elected a member of Pomeroy's Board of Education and in 1880 was made president of that body. Mr. Koehler was born in 1841 of German parentage. Erasmus Chapman, Hartford City pioneer, died at that place on November 20, 1900. Mr. Chapman was born in Putnam county, Virginia, in 1806, came to West Columbia in '52 and to Hartford in '56 when he took charge of H.C.C. & S. Company's packing department. “Uncle Raz,” as he was familiarly known in his later years, was married twice and had seventeen children. He was characterized by the Reverend George �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 506 Wilding as "a sturdy Virginian who reveled in Spurgeon's sermons… lived for his family, the Baptist Church and the Democratic party." In that same month of November, 1900, the passing of three Civil War veterans on three successive days moved a reporter of the Pomeroy Leader to begin his write-up with the following paragraph: MUSTERED OUT: Comrades Skinner, Haag and Feiger, worn and weary from fighting the battles of Life, surrender to the Grim Messenger and join their fellow heroes at the Great Camp Fire above. W.H. Skinner, of Middleport, was the first to surrender. He died on November 22 of that year. Unfortunately for this work, the details of his death were too badly blurred to be readable, as were also those of the other two comrades. From another source, however, was procured the following details on the other two comrades' deaths. Louis (Ludwig) Haag, also of Middleport, died on November 23, at Hartman Sanitarium, Columbus, Ohio, where he had sought relief from several years of suffering. In 1852 at the age of fourteen Ludwig Haag came to The Bend with his parents from Wuertembarg, Germany. In September of '61 he enlisted in Company M, First Regular Virginia Cavalry, as a private; from private he rose to the rank of sargeant, then to that of second lieutenant. Mr. Haag's connection with the Ohio Machine Company since its beginning in 1874, first as Master Mechanic and finally as general superintendent, has been shown above. On the third day (November 24) Ernest Feiger, The Bend's "Master of the philosophy of lights and shadows" since 1858, died at his home on Lincoln Hill at the age of sixty-eight, after a long illness. Of German parentage Mr. Feiger was, however, a Pennsylvanian by birth. In earlier life he had painted bridges for the Pennsylvania Railway Company. In Pomeroy Bend he became one of Ohio's leading photographers. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 507 PROGRESS NOTWITHSTANDING What's In A Name? Away back in the 1850s Dan Rice is said to have made Pomeroy known to the outside world as “a town seven miles long and as far back as you can see1.” Showman Rice's principal error-probably an 1. An item in the June 5, 1855 issue of the Telegraph reads: "A facetious writer in Knickerbocker's Magazine describes Pomeroy as "seven miles long and as far back as eye can reach." There is more truth than first imagined… Some years later another editor credited Dan Rice with the above description but gave no proof. intentional error--was in implying that the six towns then on the Ohio side of The Bend were all a part of Pomeroy. The witty exaggeration took and held (much more firmly than the later "string-bean town" or the "shoe-string town"); in fact, it was frequently quoted seriously as authority for the supposed length of Pomeroy. It was the Telegraph's Editor Trussell (see Newspapers, below) who first thought of combining the seven-mile idea with the word Pomeroy so as to make an acceptable name; it was he, we believe, who first used the term Pomeroy Bend in print (see below). In a very exhaustive perusal of all the Meigs County newspapers to he found in the Ohio Historical Library's newspaper File (See BIBLIOGRAPHY) we did not come across the name before the Telegraph's November 1, 1888 issue. In many preceding numbers the word bend, not capitalized, occurs frequently. Editor Russell's Special Advocate, published in 1885, located Middleport “at the foot of the Great Bend.” Then, in the aforesaid November 1, 1888 issue was found a long editorial entitled "Bird's Rye View of Pomeroy Bend." And soon thereafter, in both Middleport and Pomeroy newspapers, the name appeared, first occasionally, then frequently; by the close of the *Rivermen used the name rather loosely long before This Time so it is claimed by ****** �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 508 century it had become the generally accepted name for the horseshoe bend that extends roughly from West Columbia to New Haven on the West Virginia side and from Leading Creek to Syracuse on the Ohio side. Practically all the items in which the name was found happened to refer to events on the Ohio side only. This did not mean, however, that the name was meant for the Ohio side alone; news reports of 1901 and 1902 make that clear. It was in Editor Trussell's newspaper, too, that was found the first suggestion of co-operation between the towns of Pomeroy and Middleport. One paragraph in his Bird's Eye View will illustrate: …The rivalry of Middleport and Pomeroy is merging into a united effort for collective prosperity. Pomeroy is power, Middleport is skill; Pomeroy, weight, Middleport, momentum; Pomeroy knows WHAT to do, Middleport knows HOW to do it; Pomeroy makes a man respectable, Middleport makes him respected; Pomeroy is wealth, Middleport has ready money; for practical purposes one is as good as the other. In neither Pomeroy nor Middleport newspapers of the century's last ten or twelve years were found any editorial items that plainly were meant to be hurtful thrusts or stabs at the hitherto rival town. Whether this was due to the influence of Editor Trussell's conciliatory paragraph or whether it was the natural result of the broadening of editorial views there is no way of knowing. Both were indications of the general progress that characterized the period. We, The People of Pomeroy Bend's 1876-1900 period now appear in a close-up view: That the POPULATION of Pomaroy Bend decreased during this quarter century is to be expected. The wonder is that it did not decrease more. The exodus that followed each disruption, industrial or otherwise, would lead one to expect smaller figures than the Census of 1900 shows. The following table will help when �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 509 one tries to visualize the decline since 1880, at which time the figures were at their highest in all The Bend’s towns excepting Pomeroy (which in 1860 had a population of 6,338): Pomeroy Middleport Mason Hartford 1880 5,560 3,032 1,186 567 1900 4,639 2,799 904 515 The remaining Bend towns were not recorded separately in the Bureau of Census, whence the above figures were obtained. Some allowance must be made for the decrease in the average size of families, a condition noticable in all the towns by the year 1900. Middleport’s smaller proportionate decline as compared with that of Pomeroy is probably due to the great increase Middleport acquired with the acquisition of the steel plant in 1886. The mixture of races, or nationalities, which Dr. Hulbert considered a vital factor in the progress of the Northwest Territory, reached its flower in Pomeroy Bend during this quarter century. Noticable results of such intermarrying were: By the end of the century nearly all German churches were holding English services at regular intervals. One reason: Most Germans think it is the wife's duty to attend the same church that her husband attends; and many Lutheran, Evangelical and German Methodist housefathers had non-German wives. By the end of 1900 the German and Welsh communities-Monkey Run, Dutchtown, Walshtown-had lost their nationalistic stamp. Germans were rarely called "Dutch" any more, their apparel still less frequently "Dutchy." German parents spoke English in their homes-that is, a sort �of English; they sent their children to the public schools, let them graduate from the high schools. This, in turn, resulted in- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 510 The abandonment of Lutheran and Evangelical parochial schools and of the teaching of German in the grade schools of Pomeroy and of Mason. The study of German became a high school elective in both places (see SCHOOLS farther on). In brief, the erstwhile large foreign element of Pomeroy Bend had become fully Americanized by the end of the 19th century. Furthermore, the population of The Bend became more stable. While it is true that many who left The Bend owned property there, it is likewise true that the great majority of those who remained owned their own homes and moreover had some business, industrial, professional or other kind of interest that held out a fairly reliable promise of permanence. Most of the families living in The Bend in 1900 were likely to become fixtures. Very many of them were descendants of the very early settlers, descending quite frequently from two or three or four such pioneering families, and proud to be thus distinguished. Even those of the second pioneer period-that of the 1850s-they, too, felt themselves entitled to the distinction of being classed among the "old families" of The Bend. Nor was there in sight the likelihood of a mass inflow of new inhabitants to disturb the tranquility of this aging process. Rising From Their Ashes Pomeroy editors of the '70s, '80s and '90s, unlike those of the 1850s, wasted no space for visualizing their town as "rising Phoenixlike from its ashes," etc., etc., after every fire. The Telegraph’s long account of the 1877 conflagration (see above) ended with the prosaic statement that none of the losers were impoverished and that the work of erecting better buildings was already begun. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 511 This unusual haste on the part of business men to put up new and better buildings was the result, no doubt, of the wise decision of the Pomeroy City council to prevent such wholesale destruction of property from happening again. On April 14, three days after the 1877 fire, Pomeroy's City Fathers passed an Ordinance forbidding the erection of wooden buildings over ten feet high unless the outer wall be of "brick and mortar or stone and mortar or iron and mortar…" Accordingly after the fires in their respective blocks, (the ‘77, ‘84, the ‘94 and ‘95 fires) the property owners between Butternut and Sycamore streets promptly sent in petitions; and the Council just as promptly passed the special Ordinance necessary in each case. Wherefore, by the end of 1900 all the frame structures between the Edwards Building and Sycamore street had been replaced by either two-story or three-story bricks, all proving that Editor Chapman was not far wrong in his estimate regarding the financial status of Pomeroy's merchants. Among the first new buildings completed by old residents in the "burnt district" after the April '77 Fire were those of S.A.M. Moore, Dr. D.C. Whaley, W.J. Prall and Charles Bichman, all on Court street's west side. These four buildings (all brick, of course) were opened for business in the autumn of 1877. The veteran stove man's two-story structure had been properly indicated by the memorable sign, the-manwith-the-stove-on-his-back, and the proprietor, W.J. Prall advertised himself as The Stove King of the Ohio Valley. Charles Bichman's advertisement directed patrons to "the new Brick Building at the Old Reliable Stand." On Front below Court, Nicholas Klein’s Furniture Store, the Jones, Thomas & Genheimer Hardware Store, and J.C. Probst & Son's New Sales Room were completed before the end of 1877. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 512 The Klein and Bichman buildings like the Prall building were twostory; the other four, three-story structures. In December, 1878, when business was already on the down-grade, the Telegraph said of one of Pomeroy's oldest merchants: "George Eiselstein has faith in the revival of business; he always keeps an immense stock." It was that faith, doubtless, that impelled Mr. Eiselstein in 1880 to buy the lot adjoining Abe Geyer's Flour & Feed Store on Second and to build thereon a two-story brick store-his fourth brick (including his residence on Front below Butternut). With his son Theodore he opened in the Second street building a Dry Goods store under the firm name of Eiselstein & Son. It was faith like George Eiselstein's that led some other older business men also to put up new buildings in spite of the gloomy outlook. By June of ‘77 Peter Gloeckner's new frame "just above the Gibson House" was ready for occupancy. A short time before the Fire (of '77), B.F. Biggs & Ernest Fowler had bought "forty feet off the upper end of O. Branch's property, corner Butternut and Front," and each had put up one-story frames, Mr. Fowler (with George Bell) opened a grocery store, Mr. Biggs a Hardware & Coffin Establishment. In 1880 Mr. Biggs added a second story to his building. By 1900 this, "the Finest Undertaking Establishment in the Southern Part of the State," had become Biggs & Rappold by virtue of son-in-law George Rappold's having been admitted to the business. Though the Seebohm Corner escaped the '84 Fire, one of the first, if not the first brick building to go up in that burnt district was the Eagle Block of A. Seebohm and John Franz (a newcomer of the 1870s). The building contained three store sections: the corner section for the Seebohm Drug Store, the middle one for �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 513 Frank Gloeckner's Meat Shop, the third for the John Franz Grocery. Some of the old establishments changed their locations, some made new business connections before the end of the century. Ernest Feiger immediately after the '77 Fire had moved his Art Gallery to Middleport; in September of the same year he moved it back to Pomeroy to "Front street below the Remington House." It was still there in 1900 but with his son Harry Feiger in charge of the establishment. Bernhardt Koehler's Shoe Store. still to be found on Court street in 1876, was sold in 1885 to John Schlaegel, who, in 1877 had bought Henry Dilcher's People’s Shoe Store then located under the Gibson House. Some time during the '70s T.H. Davis, Coalport's meat dealer, opened a second shop of Court street, which later he moved to Front, "two doors below the Remington Block." There it was still in 1900. The New York Clothing House, when Silberberg & Wolff became its proprietors in 1878, was moved from the Edwards Building to the building next below the Jones & Company Hardware Store. In '81 Mr. Silberberg retired, Mr. Wolff took sole possession; but in '91 he was joined by I.L. Oppenheimer. By 1900 the New York House was occupying the corner store-room of the Remington Building and was advertising itself as "the oldest, largest, and best." H.H. Blackmore, "former experienced Racine druggist," was in charge of sales. The Jones, Thomas & Genheimer Hardware Company underwent an unusual number of changes. After its dissolution in May of '79, J.W. Thomas became sole owner. After several years, Thomas sold out to the Skinner Hardware Company, which in turn was reorganized (in 1892) and became the Pomeroy Hardware Company. Failure of the Pomeroy Company in November of 1893 resulted in further changes. Finally, in August of 1900 the name of the firm became Nye & Bearhs. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 514 By 1879 William Kraemer not only had "learned the value of printers' ink" (to O.B. Chapman's delight, be it hoped) but was calling his establishment "Kraemer's Great Grocery House," which was "now located under the Gibson House, with the finest stock of liquors in the county." He had moved from above Linn in April, '76. S. Silverman & Son, Merchant Tailors on Front below Court in the early '70s, had moved above Court to one door below the Gibson House. In 1888 this firm was compelled to close its business. In March of '79 David Geyer Jr. moved his Dry Goods Store from "the building next to the Jones & Co. Hardware Store" to the Huttel Building on Court and soon afterwards was advertising "New Goods at the 'Little Store around the Corner.'" But after the '84 Opera House Fire he and N. Bengel bought the site of the building and the walls that remained, had the building repaired and then moved in with their respective businesses: dry goods and groceries. New mercantile enterprises by former clerks in old establishments and old establishments taken over by sons of the founders-these were further indications that business was not yet dead in Pomeroy. Some undertakings of this kind were: George Keiser, clerk at the New York Clothing House since 1878, began an independent clothing business in 1883 in the Remington Block. After the failure of Silverman & Son in '88 the Keiser Clothing Store moved into the vacated Silverman Building, was still doing business there in 1900. Frank Diehl, clerking for A. Blumenthal, opened a Dry Goods Store of his own in the late '70s in the Silverman Block on the corner of Front and Sycamore. In the early '80s he combined with Mrs. M.M. Kennedy, Milliner, under the firm name of Kennedy & Diehl. After the '84 Fire this firm moved into one of the new bricks between �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 515 Linn and Sycamore. After 1895 Mr. Diehl continued his Dry Goods business alone. In June, 1880, C. Ihle, head salesman the past twelve years in George Eiselstein's general merchandise store, started a Grocery Store of his own, in the Edwards Building. In 1873 Charles Bichman had taken into his employ a young German who had recently arrived in Pomeroy. By 1882 this young man was advertising as "August Goessler, Successor to Charles Bichman, corner Court and Front." By the close of 1888 the Goessler Jewelry Store had moved to the east side of Court, where it was still doing business in 1900. The reason for Mr. Goessler's change of location was that in November of '88, William Bichman, son of Charles Bichman [deceased], announced that he had opened a Jewelry Store "in the room occupied by his father twenty-seven years," that he was specializing in musical instruments and that he had Come to Stay!...On Corner of Court and Front Streets." Among other sons who found it not unprofitable to continue the business of their fathers were those of Jacob Elberfeld. After the 1877 Fire the new Elberfeld store room was a frame structure, hence only ten feet in height. In '87 Jacob Elberfeld died, whereupon the firm name, in compliance with the father's request, became Jacob Elberfeld's Sons. By 1900 this new firm was located in a two-story brick on the site of the frame building and was using also the Huttel Building on Court street-(the rear ends of the two buildings practically adjoining each other). The firm advertised that year as Elberfeld's Cash Store, family changes having made necessary the adoption of a new name. The firm of George Eiselstein & Son in April of '92 sold its �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 516 store to E.E. Jones and Martin Ebersbach. The father, George Eiselstein, retired from business; the son, T.P. Eiselstein, likewise retired, but to engage in farming. In a few years, however, T.P. Eiselstein was again in the dry goods business, this time in the Geyer & Bengel Block, where he was still located in 1900. Schlaegel Brothers, John and George, sons of Michael Schlaegel, (rolling mill boot-and shoemaker), in 1877 bought out Henry Dilcher, whose People's Shoe Store was in the Gibson Building. In 1885 John Schlaegel bought the Koehler Store and kept that place open for a while. By 1900 the Schlaegel Brothers were "under the Grand Dilcher Hotel," which was the former Gibson House. The W.H. Remington Book Store as early as '79 was in charge of Ben R. Remington, son of W.H. Remington. The sale of dry goods at the Remington Store had been discontinued long ago, but in '79 B.R. Remington advertised that he "lately has added a full line of Cheap Hardware to his book store at No. 97, Front street"-(that, of course, was the corner of Linn and Front). Reed's Drug Store, still at its old stand on Court in 1900, was managed by Curtis Reed, son of its founder, Darius Reed. Osborn's Book Store AD in 1900 read: "…established in 1880 by Will Osborn, Ticket Agent for the O.R.R.R. thirteen years and Agent for the Adams Express Company twenty years." The Will Osborn establishment occupied the building put up by Judge Henry L. Osborn & S.A.M. Moore after the 1856 Fire. Some of the older merchants were in their same old stands without any change of management. Two of these were: W.A. Aicher, Jeweler of the 1850s, from his old stand on Front below the Remington Block could advertise in 1900 as "oldest Jeweler in the county." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 517 A. Blumenthal had been singularly unfortunate. His store building on Front near Sycamore, and all his goods (general merchandise) were carried away by the ‘84 Flood. His residence, next to the store, was burned during the big ‘84 Fire; in partnership with his son he started again in the Opera House building, only to lose in that fire not only his store goods but also his household goods, which he had stored in the building. In October, '94 Mr. Blumenthal moved with his family to Cincinnati. Individual Tailor Shops, such as were not connected with any of the large clothing stores, continued throughout the century. Some wellknown proprietors were: George Huttel, recalled as one of Pomeroy’s first, formed a partnership with John Gissel in the latter 1870s, then retired soon afterwards. After Mr. Huttel's death in (?), Mr. Gissel carried on the business alone for several years. James Crosbie, another of Pomeroy's first tailirs, and seen in Middleport in 1874, was found in Pomeroy again in '77 in the firm of Wolfe & Crosbie, in 1878 with Silverman & Son, as cutter. Soon after the Silverman assignment in '87 we find "Crosbie & Son, Pomeroy Merchant Tailoring Company," advertising for business in the National Bank Building, up stairs." Adam Darling, too, remained but a short time in Middleport. In the year of 1877 he was on the east side of Linn street and in his own shop. From that year until 1887 he was fitter for the Silverman & Son establishment. Early in 1890 the AD, "A Darling! Merchant Tailor!" was designed to draw the attention of prospective patrons. In a few years this Ad was succeeded by that of "Darling & Davis, Merchant Tailors, Front below Court." Of the numerous public service establishments such as marble �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 518 works and livery stables, begun in the late '60s and early '70s, only a few survived until the end of the century. By 1877 the only Pomeroy marble works advertising was that of John Priode. In that same year Priode sold out to C.J. Vincent. By 1900 the firm name of the business was Vincent Brothers, who were located on Front street below the Edwards Building's former site. Livery stables, too, had proved too numerous. Whereas in 1879 there were three flourinsing-apparently-in Pomeroy: J.V. Smith's on Butternut, Fletcher's on Mulberry, "adjoining the post office," and the "Priode Livery, Feed & Boarding Stable, on Second in the rear of the Opera House," by 1900 only the last-named, under the firm name of Priode & Stander, was doing business. (F.F. Fletcher's great misfortune has been shown above.) W.B. Curtis, Portrait and Landscape Photographer of the 1870s, was absent from Pomeroy for a time but returned again in 1890 and was still there in 1900. Barbers Schorn, Zweifel and Spaniol of the preceding period were Hair Dressers also by the close of the century. However, John Spaniol's Advertisement of 1876: "Umbrellas and parasols neatly repaired… Shears and Scissors sharpened, Corns extracted without Pain," had disappeared from the newspapers, by 1900. Up-town near the rolling mill several old establishments continued into the beginning of the next century; as, George Faehnle, "old-time Cabinet Maker," who in the '90s "had for sale not only modern factory-made furniture but the hand-made article." W.G. Geiger, early Middleport Saddle and Harness Maker, who had moved his business to Pomeroy in 1872, was still selling harness, saddles, etc., near the rolling mill in 1900. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 519 At Coalport, the general store of Horton & Schreiber by 1877 had become Horton & Geyer (John), and by 1884 was Horton & Owen, Thayer Horton having retained his interest in the business during all the time he lived in the East. Not long after the '84 Flood the store was closed permanently. Several other Coalport merchants continued in business throughout the century, but names are not at hand. The large number of new mercantile enterprises undertaken during the 1876-1900 period is further evidence of the aliveness of business notwithstanding. Pomeroy's principal New Dry Goods Stores were: The Red Anchor. This was the store sold by George Eiselstein & Son to Jones & Ebersbach in ‘92. Soon thereafter, Martin Ebersbach & Son were sole owners and the store had acquired its new name. By of October of 1900 the Red Anchor was occupying, in addition to its Second street building, the building on Front street vacated the preceding April by Probst Brothers. It had a hydraulic passenger elevator for its patrons and Edward Ebersbach was the store's "genial and accommodating manager." T.P. Eiselstein's Dry Goods Store above mentioned. Some new Grocery Stores, Restaurants and Confectionaries: George Massar’s Grocery "opposite the new freight depot," (originally the Fowler Building.) Guth & Whitlock's Grocery & Restaurant, "Second street opposite the post office." F. Steinbauer’s Midway Bakery & Confectionary, on Front, opposite the passenger depot," and sold to Wash Roush in 1900. Some new Millinary Stores: Hauck Sisters, "near the post office and opposite the Soldiers' �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 520 Monument." Mae Blazer, Koehler Block. Allard & Armitage, Remington Block. New Shoe Stores in Pomeroy, by 1900: George Rubenstahl's Boot & Shoe Emporium, "four doors below Court” in 1882). Smart Brothers, in Remington Block. Andrew Zeiher, Front, "between Elberfeld's and the Red Anchor. Cobbling and Custom Work, one of our Specialties, to be in charge of George Rubenstahl." (This store was opened in September, 1900; was later called Sunlight Shoe Store.) Pomeroy's new Jewelry Stores of this period were: Milton Koehler (came in '75), "under the Remington House" in 1880 captured a big order: "the silver for the steamer St. Jacob's Oilteapot. sugar bowl, cream pitcher, syrup pitcher, castor, knives, forks, spoons, etc., all engraved 'St. Jacob's Oil.'" Nonetheless, by 1900 M. Koehler had left the Pomeroy Bend. Hart & Company, Mammoth Jewelers, were established by 1900 in the Midway Block, Pomeroy, and also at Mill and Third, in Middleport. Other new Pomeroy mercantile establishments noted, in the late 1890s: Schoenlein's Harness & Leather Shop, on the former J.B. Hampton site, corner Second and Court. David Lark's Five Cent Bargain Store, in the Post Office Buildingby 1900 this store was called the Bee Hive. Some others noted in 1900 were: L. Rump's Furniture Store; Meier Brothers' Meat Shop; George Wilhelmi's Merchant Tailoring Shop; E.D. Jones & Son's Shoe Store. The Pomeroy Plumbing & Supply Company, A.P. Ashworth Manager, handled a wholly new kind of merchandise the demand for which had �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 521 been created by the coming of the water works (see below). Schwegman & Roedel (successors to M. Pilchard on corner of Nye and Front), appear to have had the general-merchandising field around Kerr's Run all to themselves in 1900. Middleport’s 1877 Fire likewise resulted in bigger and better business buildings for the destroyed area. Owing to the incompleteness of Middleport's Newspaper File, it is impossible to give details of their erection. On June 5, 1878 a news item said: "The brick work on Coe's new building was commenced yesterday." In news items of the late '70s "Schreiner's Opera Block" and William Hordon’s "new and elegant building on Second street," were mentioned. Many new pre-1884 merchants were found-some appear to have succombed to the Flood, others to have survived until the end of the century and longer. Philip Huber's retirement preceding his death in 1878 left the field open to new watchmakers and jewelers. But the "New Jewelry Store opened by H.C. Witte on Second, next door above the Downing Insurance Office" in June of '76 either was short-lived or failed to give satisfaction; for in September, 1978, when Milton Koehler, Pomeroy jeweler, opened a branch store in "the old bank building on Second street," the Meigs County Republican expressed the public's approval thus briefly: Kohler, the jeweler, has supplied a long felt want in Middleport by opening a first-class Watch, Clock and Jewelry establishment… In July of '79 Andrew Burkert, former Pomeroy jeweler (as partner of Charles Bichman), after trying first Racine then Ravenswood (W.Va), opened a new jewelry store in the William Harden Building. "We have another jeweler," announced a local newspaper brief]y. In January of '84 appeared the advertisement of "C.C. Williams, Practical Watchmaker and Jeweler.” �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 522 Andrew Burkert left Middleport in August after the '84 Flood. The other two were gone by the close of the century. Newton Barnes in 1877 were advertising as "Baker, Confectioner and Grocer on Second, opposite post office." In l900 he had a Chinaware & Queensware Store on Mill street. Some other new businesses that appear to have disappeared from Middleport with the ‘84 Flood or before it were: A.H. Miller's Coffin Depot on Mill street; the Undertaking establishment of Charles O. Probst "at the furniture store of his father, W.B. Probst"; Ed Lark's Harness and Saddle-Making Shop on Mill street; the drug store of P. Hugg & Son; the Dry Goods Store of Schreiner & Company. Some new pre-'84 mercantile establishments that survived the Flood and were still prospering in 1900 were: W.E. Stansbury's Wholesale & Retail Drug Store, opened in 1881; the E.A. Davis & Company Pharmacy, about '78; the "Griff Michael Store," founded in ‘74; William Horden's Shoe Store, in operation since 1878; Marble Dealer Val Drummond's business place, since l886; J.J. McElhinney’s Flour & Feed Store (also Grain, Lime, Cement, Garden Seeds, Etc.,)since ‘81; Calderwood & Son's Dry Goods & Groceries store of pre-Flood days, Calderwood's Book Store, after the Flood; Mrs._J.A. Rumsey's Millinery Store; the Great Eastern Clothing House of the Wertheimer Brothers (‘76); F.P. Bryan (soon to be F.P. Bryan & Son.) Some mercantile firms and merchants that came in after the Flood and were still doing business in Middleport in 1900: The Murphy Grocery, F.P. Murphy, '84; Buckeye Bakery, W.A. Covert & A.W. Hattinger, 1890; W.H. Woodward, general merchandise, about 1890; J.W. Wells & Son, Furniture, Carriages, Wagons, Agricultural �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 523 Implements, etc., Rowley & Berry, Hardware, ’85; S.M. Hysell, Hardware Store, about ’87; R.E. Grant, Dealer in boilers, engines, saw mills, machinery of ever description, ’91; F.P Bryan & Son, Dealers in Saddlery, Harness, etc., and manucaturers of Horse Furnishing Goods; Mrs. Mary Mack and Daughters, Millinery; Ira Hulbert, Photographer, ’89; Story & Sanburn’s Jewelry Store; the Standard Drug Company; Lewis & Coe’s Mammoth Clothing House, “Largest Clothing House in Meigs County” its Ad said in 1895. Of "old time merchants" those of the '50s and '60s, only one was found to be still in business in 1890; W.B. Probst, Dealer in Furniture-(by 1900 had been succeeded by his son Earl). The Worley & Besserer meat company of the '60s and '70s was dissolved after the death of Mr. Besserer in 1879. By 1900 a new Meat Market had been established by Mr. Besserer’s oldest son: the “Little Fritz" in local items of the '70s, but "C.F. Besserer, our Jolly meat man," in local items of the 1890s. Middleport's two most ambitious and most widely known mercantile enterprises were: "The Big Three Stores," opened just before the January '84 Flood by J.W. Talbot & Brother "in the room formerly occupied by them on Mill and Fourth street." The new establishment was virtually three stores: Dry Goods, Notion, Boot & Shoe. Its most widely read sign, probably, was the one painted on the face of an immense rock on the West Virginia side of the River just above West Columbia. In 1900 people from every town in The Bend, to say nothing of those from the rural regions, were shopping at "Talbott's." �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 524 The other establishment was that of T.H. Davis, the Pomeroy Meat Market proprietor. In 1883 Mr. Davis bought the former Worley & Besserer Building and opened a branch Meat Shop therein. An ice business, begun in a very small way by packing River ice away in sawdust-lined “ice-houses” for the summer, meanwhile had grown and grown until it was the largest ice-house in the vicinity. In 1893, at the cost of about $40,000, this building was made over into an Ice Factory for the T.H. Davis Meat & Ice Company (father and five sons), which by that time had acquired a substantial local trade besides practically the entire trade of passing steamboats. Nearly every Pittsburgh towboat either slowed down or merely floated by Middleport to permit a skiff or skiffs to be rowed ashore and to be brought back loaded with meat and all kinds of provisions for the remainder of the trip. The HOTELS of Pomeroy and Middleport indicated that business was not yet dead in those two towns in 1900. Pomeroy's Gibson House by the end of the century had become the Grand Dilcher Hotel, up-to-date in every respect. In the early ‘80s Henry Dilcher, shoe dealer, had bought the building, had enlarged and remodelled it, had its stables torn down, and its new name in immense lettering painted across the front of the building. The Remington House immediately after its fire in '96 also was completely remodeled and modernized. William Dixon, native of Scotland, had charge of the Remington in the late 1890s. Mr. Dixon in 1877 had opened the Farmers' Exchange on Second street; had gone from that hostlery to the Hein House on Front above Linn; then had opened the Dixon House in the old Edwards Building. From the Dixon he had come to the Remington. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 525 The Hulbert House was the Dixon House renamed when Ira Hulbert became its manager in 1888. Hulbert was succeeded by George Patton; Patton by J.J. Jones. By 1900 the building's career as a hotel had ended (see Fires, below). Among Middleport hotels, the Continental, the St. James and the Walnut Street House are mentioned in local newspapers of the 1870s. Of the last named George Womeldorf became proprietor upon his retirement from the mercantile business in 1876, and continued in possession during the 1880s. But from the Railroad Reflector of May, 1897 it was learned that: The announcement that Col. A.C. Beall has leased the Walmut Street House met with popular favor expecially among the boys on the road. …since the fire of '96 it had been rebuilt and refurnished… It is to be called Hotel Beall and to be in the hands of his son-in-law Carl C. Berry… But from the Herald-Republican of May, 1899: The Walnut Street House has changed hands again. The new proprietor, Mr. McBrian… During the 1880s and '90s the St. Albert Hotel, the Grand View, the Commercial, the National and the St. James appear frequently in the local newspapers. Only two items, however, gave any information regarding the location of any of them: [August 11, '99] Mrs. S.E. Starcher [print is blurred here] hotel business in the Rice Brick, known as the National Hotel, corner Front and Race streets, opposite the new H.V. & T. Ry depot, also opposite the ferry and steamboat landing. [January 4, 1900] Mr. Moore, landlord of the St. James, has leased the Commercial Hotel on Front street… The Walnut Street House was located on the southwest corner of Second and Walnut streets. The continuance of several BANKs was likewise an index of some degree of prosperity. "The First National Bank 'winds up its business'… the First City Bank takes its place,” �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 526 so announced the Telegraph in March, 1878. The next month appeared the new bank's advertisement: FIRST CITY BANK OF POMEROY, In rooms lately occupied by the First National Bank, corner Court and Second streets. General banking business to be transacted. T.A. Plants, President, George W. Plantz, Cashier. On August 21, 1889 The Pomeroy National Bank, founded by H.S. Horton in 1872, announced the elect ion of new officers: George McQuigg, president; D.H. Moore (Athens banker), vice president; John McQuigg, cashier; E.M. Nye, assistant cashier. By 1900 this bank's president was P.B. Stanbery, its cashier was John McQuigg; its Directors were: P.B. Stanbery, E.M. Nye, and D.A. Russell. Middleport's First National Bank and its Bank of Middleport both had left the stage by 1900. However, in 1890 the Middleport National Bank had been established, with F.C. Russell as president, R.A. Manigal vice president and E.O. Fox cashier. By 1898 this bank's advertisement was listing Griff Michael as its president, E.O. Fox as cashier and F.E. Bolton as assistant cashier. Industries That Had Made Business Possible Now, what was the industrial situation that had permitted so great a degree of mercantile enterprise in spite of the "paralysis of the region's great manufacturing interest"? Beginning with the smallest factor, there were the few remaining salt plants and coal companies that gave irregular employment to a relatively large number of men. True, their company stores did not greatly help other merchants; but their occasional pay-days did help a little. Company employees did not spend their cash at the Company store; they usually managed to save it for necessities not generally carried by the Company store. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 527 Pomeroy’s rolling mill, too, because of its many idle periods, had only intermittent pay-days. But rolling mill men's wages were goodthose of the skilled-labor class-and although some of the pay-day money was taken across the River by Mason City employees, the greater part of it was brought pack again to Pomeroy merchants. Clifton’s nail mill and Middleport's steel plant until the latter's departure in '95, did as much or more for the mercantile business at Middleport. Pomeroy merchants, too, reaped a direct profit when the mill was at Clifton: a goodly number of the mill's employees lived at Mason City. These two mills were by far the largest factors in the preservation of Pomeroy Bend's industrial life during the passing of King Coal's Ally, Salt. But many smaller industries, also, were contributing factors. Some were old, some were new. At Pomeroy there wereThe Probst Furniture Company, shut down in the winter of 1895-96 because of a boiler explosion, but started again in November of '96, immediately after the election of President McKinley. "Business confidence is coming back on the wings of the morning," exulted the Pomeroy Leader in announcing the resumption of operations at the factory. The Davis Planing Mill, under John Davis & Son in 1890; still active under Will H. Davis, the Son, in 1900. With its machinery imporved and increased in quantity, Davis & Son in 1900 were "prepared to furnish everything from the foundation to the roof of a house; also to ship house patterns and building materials to other parts along the River and railroads." The old Pomeroy Flour Mill, secured in 1879 by G.W. Moredock �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 528 (on a $10,000 mortgage), owned in '96 by the Pomeroy Milling Company, of which Geyer & Newton were the largest stockholders. The Sugar Run Flour Mill (Model Mills, moved from Leading Creek in 1871), owned in the late '90s by Theo Jacobs and Frank Gloeckner, Sr. The Wildermuth Brewery, with an Ice Factory added in the late 1880s. The Blaettnar Carriage & Wagon Shop. The Sweepstakes Planing Mill on Mechanic street (advertised for sale by Pfarr & Genheimer in '96; name of purchaser not given). The brick Foundry & Machine Shop put up by the Pomeroy Machine Company on that part of the old Horton boatyard site that had not been sold in ‘85 to the Peacock Coal Company. O.H. Myers' new Livery, Feed & Sale Stable on Mechanic street. The bromine factories, helping to keep the salt industry alive and still valuable in themselves. In November of '98 the Pomeroy Salt Company shipped a carload of bromine from its works. The value of that shipment (at about 35¢ the pound) was "not often equaled by any other single works in the world outside of Pomeroy Bend," the Pomeroy Telegraph claimed. The Niggemyer Stogie Factory in the Second ward. The Henry Koehler Bottling Works out Sugar Run (manufacturing and dealing in Sarsaparella, Mineral and Seltzer Waters, Ginger Ale, Etc.)— All these, and others, each doing its bit, large, smaller, small, very small, toward making possible the local newspaper's jubilant front-page item on December 14, 1898: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 529 PLENTY OF MONEY Last Saturday the shops, factories and mill of this city put about $10,000 in cold Klondike cash into circulation among the laboring people. This week $25,000 to $50,000 in pensions will be scattered throughout the county. Add to this $5,000 turkey money and it will be seen that out people ought to have some Christmas money. By February 14, 1900 Pomeroy had cause for still greater rejoicing; but for considerations which the following item of that date reveals, the writer thereof refrained from an excessive outburst: "…Had the good people of our sister town stood loyally by Mayor Williams in his vigorous and well-meant efforts, it would today be their industry instead of ours. But Middleport got a shoe factory and we are glad. We got the organ factory and we hope our neighbor will be equally glad. What is a benefit to Middleport is a benefit to Pomeroy… Yes, Pomeroy got an Organ Factory in 1900! The facts leading up to the tragedy of Middleport were these: Through the efforts of W.J. Bramlage, local piano dealer, the Barkhoff Church Organ Company at Latrobe, Pa., was induced to offer to remove its plant to Middleport on condition that a bonus of $4000 and a plant site be given the company. When Middleport's Town Council rejected the proposition it was offered to Pomeroy's Council and promptly accepted. The nineteenth century's last year held for Pomeroy a bright promise for its twentieth century. Middleport, with Clifton's Nail Mill and its own Steel Plant, enjoyed remarkable prosperity up to the year of '96. Even after the steel plant's departure (see above), there was stillThe German Furniture Company "doing a booming business" in the spring and summer of 1899, with Stephen Engelhardt, of Pomeroy, as manager and chief stockholder. The Excel Docks, brought from Point Pleasant in '96 by Capt. Cole �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 530 and (?) Flesher of Antiquity. "Mr. Flesher has a complete saw-mill connected with these docks, placing him in a position to do anything from building a boat to repairing a skiff," said the Railroad Reflector. The Middleport Boiler Works, with J.H. Williams as Manager, a “firm of some 25 years's standing in marine work,” was still specializing in high grade boilers. The Ohio Machine Company, equipped for Hot Water Heating and Plumbing, J.S. Boggess was now the company's agent and Louis Haag was still its general superintendent in 1900. Two Brickyards: the Riverside Brick Works, founded in '89 by S.J., M.N. and A.H. Grant but by 1896 owned by a Cincinnati firm; and Middleport Granite Company. In May of '99 the local newspaper said: Bricks made at the two brickyards in the lower part of the city are being loaded in barges to be shipped to lower markets. The clay is excellent; if the yards were placed under skilled management they would employ a large force of men… The old Grant Flour Mill, which, owing to the death of John Grant in 1889 and various other causes was placed under a receivership in July of '94. In February, 1895 the mill was bought at sheriff's sale by Austin Vorhes, largest claimant. John N. Hayman, of Letart Falls, who had been appointed receiver, was operating the mill in 1900, at which time its trade "extends to all the neighboring states and three travelling men are kept busy," the local newspaper reported. The Canning Factory, built by local capital in 1895. In August of ‘99 the factory had "a large force at work… 16,000 cans of tomatoes put up for shipment… tomatoes all raised in the neighborhood of Middleport." Unfortunately, that industry died �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 531 with the century (see Middleport Fires, above). The Shoe Factory, secured in the autumn of ’99 by paying the company about $4000 to locate in Middleport. The old woolen mill was put into shape and used by the company for its shoe-making operations. At full capacity the factory was said to employ 150 men. There was alsoS.D. Webb’s Lumber Manufactury on Second below Short. The Carriage & Wagon Shop of Joseph Faehnle & Sons, on Mill street, directly opposite the Central School Building. And other smaller induestries employing one, two or three men. Last, but not the least significant factor, the new Camden-Spilman coal works across the River. Middleport business men looked hopefully unto the new century just ahead. The Outlook in the Smaller Towns Minersville, its corporate limits embracing little more than the two hollows: Welshtown and Dutchtown, never had any other industries besides its two salt plants, (Minersville and Windsor); and only one or two grocery stores. After its furnaces were gone (if not long before that time) the town was virtually a part of Pomeroy. The old Carleton Sawmill just above Minersville also had ceased to operate. The advent of the portable sawmill, a cheaper and more convenient mill, gradually had made 'the old Carleton a back number. Syracuse, with one of the very few salt plants still alive, (The Syracuse Salt & Coal Company Works) and its Bromine Factory, besides its reported move in 1894 to secure the county court house, could scarcely have considered itself a dead town, not in face of the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 532 fact that three general stores, two drug stores and a Meat and Ice Market were going business concerns in 1900. The merchants were: G.W. Gilliland, E. Mallory, J.P. Capehart; the druggists: A. Roush and T.A. Lallance. R.S. Hess & Company (L.J. Hess), were proprietors of the meat market, which supplied not merely its own townspeople but those of villages as far distant as Letart Falls, Ohio. At Syracuse was located also the W.F. Bartels Livery & Feed Stable and the terminus of the Battels Hack Line (see Transportation). Racine's Salt & Coal Company had vanished completely by 1900 (one cause said to have been depletion of brine), as had also its Ohio Coal Company. Its woolen mill was reported idle in ‘88 and was not heard of after that year. Racine had, however, the Bell Skiff Company, founded in 1890 by C. Bell and H.G. Bell. This little industry employed "four to ten men and its trade extends to Poughkeepsie, N.Y. and to Helena, Arkansas." Racine had, also, the Granite & Marble Works of L.A. Weaver, corner Pearl and Second streets, and established in 18--; and the Star Flour Mill, J.M. Ehodes Manager. The Cross Store, owned now by Waid Cross and "his five boys," was still “Racine's Big Store.” In '92 a three-story building with full basement had been erected, making it "one of the finest in southern Ohio" at that time. Other general merchandise stores were those of W.A. Ellis & Company, and of Dale Roberts. There was also the drug store and book store of H.M. Danley & Company (H.W. Pickens), opened about '79 by B.E. Sibley; the J.C. Hayman Hardware Store, established in '78 "at Philson's old stand"; and the Saddlery & Harness Store of H.K. Coe. (In 1891 on the advertising pages of Racine's Tribune (see NEWSPAPERS) appeared the Ads of S. Curtis, Undertaker; D.D. Garen, Har- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 533 ness Manufacturer; D. Murdock, Carriage & Wagon Maker; H. Kesterton, Livery; J.A. Cowdry, Livery; J.R. Ellis, Furniture; Miss Amden, Millinary; Cooper House and Racine Hotel. How many of these had disappeared by 1900 and how many merely did not advertise in the Pomeroy newspapers could not be ascertained.) Little Antiquity-familiarly, Antik, with accent on tik-was a busy place in 1900, with its Riverside Mills owned by A.J., M.F., and A.F. Flesher and M.V. Sayre. Of this industry the Leader's Intelligence Column said in December of '96: One of the old-time and reliable establishments on the Ohio River in the RIVERSIDE MILLS at Antiquity. Some of the finest wharfboats between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati were built by these mills; as also ferryboats and all kinds of water craft. Letart Falls did not get a salt furnace, never seriously expected one. Hence it was quite content to continue as the quiet, pleasant little country village it had always been. Its Tyro Mill, Wright Alexander, proprietor; and its two general stores, R.J. Allen and Charles Hayman, proprietors respectively, were both flourinshing in 1900. The five towns on the south side of Pomeroy Bend, chronically short on local capital, could hope to maintain a fair degree of economic well-being only by inducing outside capitalists to establish industries or other business enterprises in their midst. To Mason City, because of its exceptionally attractive site, the other four towns looked as their last industrial hope. Accordingly, in 1885 Pomeroy Bend's whole south side, and the north side too, had a few happy weeks helping Mason City to enjoy its wellfounded prospect of getting the new West Virginia Insane Asylum. In August of that year a mass meeting held at Mason was attended by almost all of New Haven Hartford, Clifton, West Colum- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 534 bia, Camden, and a considerable portion of Pomeroy and Middleport. There were addresses by chairman Dr. A. Knight, Dr. J. Hensley, Judge Redmond, Redmond, T.J. Booth, Judge Brewster, and others. H.B. Smith, owner of the hills part of the old Brown Farm, offered to donate ten acres of land and to sell at the State's own price the remainder of the amount of land needed. A committee was appointed to bring the desire of the people before the committee appointed by the State Legislature to locate the Asylum. The local committee went to Charleston (Capital of W.Va.), presented its plea to the State's committee, andThe town of Spencer secured the asylum. Again in 1894 Pomeroy was jubilant, this time over Mason's apparently good prospect of securing the new Camp Grounds for which the Conference of the Methodist Episcopal church was seeking a location. As an inducement, local leaders selected a site on the Mason City hills and there conducted a summer Chatauqua. A course of lectures by such prominent men as The Reverend Sam Small, John Temple Graves, and others held the whole Bend's interest. The Conference failed to make a selection during the year of '94, therefore the local work was renewed in April of '95 by the organizing of The West Virginia Camp Grounds & Inter-State Chatauqua Assembly. A Board of Control was chosen, with Hon. James M. Hensley as president, the Reverend E.D. Hanna as secretary and general manager; Mrs. Jessie Redmond, treasurer; and Judge P.B. Stanbery, Capt. Albert McDaniel, Henry Mees, George Tucker as members. Hon. Rankin Wiley of Point Pleasant was appointed attorney for the organization. On May 15, 1895 readers of the Tribune-Telegraph (Pomeroy newspaper) reacted variously-some with I-told-you-so's, some with just �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 535 plain D---!'s, some even with sarcastic smiles, to the following item: SITE CHOSEN.-The West Virginia Chatauqua will be located at Mt. Pisgah, [50 miles up Elk river], amid the grandest scenery in America… Extract from the Charleston Gazette: Yes, Mt. Pisgah was chosen by an almost unanimous vote… No Chatauqua meetings were held at Mason during the summer of 1895. On September 29 Pomeroy Bend was editorially informed that The Mason City Camp Grounds were sold at auction. John Rawson, Cincinnati, held claim of $15,000, bought the grounds. The $1000 paid on the grounds (200 acres ) is lost. Two industries did come to Mason, and operate successfully a short time. In ‘92 the Mason City Handle Company built its factory on the site of the former Young saw-mill. In the same year Messrs. George Bauer, Sr., George Bauer, Jr., both of Pomeroy; R.L. Winkleblack of Mason; and the Mason City & Pomeroy Ferry Company, incorporated as the Mason & Pomeroy Brick Company and built its works at Mason City (near the former glass factory site). In May, '97, after a change of ownership, the "prosperity of the Mason City brickyard" was noted by a news reporter. By 1900 both industries had closed down permanently. In January, 1900 the rumor was current in and about Mason that "with proper encouragement" the J.C. Probst Sons Furniture Company would move its plant to Mason City. The proper encouragement evidently never was forthcoming. And thus Fate decreed that Mason City during the 1880s and '90s should have no other employment producing enterprises besides the Hope Salt Works and the Mees Brothers' Sawmill and Boatyard. Family heads and others needing employment usually sought it at Pomeroy and were usually successful. Stores naturally were very few. After the demise of the Mason �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 536 City Salt & Coal Works (Roots & Kilbreth) that company's store was closed, of course. The Hope Company's store after its Front street building burned down continued throughout the period in the John Young brick (corner Pomeroy and Second street). William Veith opened a furniture store in the Mason City Company's old store building; the venture proved unsuccessful, Mr. Veith changed it to a grocery store, but by the end of the century had closed out and gone to Texas. William Ruttencutter and Edward Blaetner were more successful; each had a flourishing general store on First street, opposite the O.R.R.R. station, by 1900. Mrs. Lutz was doing a good grocery and confectionary business on the corner of Center and Second. Thomas Ryan's grocery store in the Winters building (former shoe shop), corner Second and Horton, was equally prosperous. West Columbia's doom was sealed when John King left the town in 1873. But it had two brief revivals. The first came in ‘76, when John N. Clarkson, veteran Kanawha salt manufacturer and "polished, dignified, deliberate and precise Southerner," rented the King furnace for a term of years. Busniess began to "hum" immediately and everybody was happy. Instead of a regular store Clarkson kept a kind of commissary for his workmen. The commissary was opened once or twice a week and the supplies were rationed out to each workman according to the size of his family. Rarely, if ever, did the men receive any money. They took their pay out of the commissary at Clarkson's prices or lost it. Most of the employees were Negroes from Middleport and Charleston, many of them former slaves of Clarkson. Colonel Iager, "a man of unlimited means, generous, kind at all times," took the West Columbia furnace after Clarkson's departure, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 537 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx called it the Harmony Furnace. Col. Iager maintained a large store but "paid his employees money without hesitation whenever they asked for it." Unfortunately for West Columbia the Colonel closed the furnace down several years before the ‘84 Flood. West Columbia's second brief interval came at the very end of the century, when the Camden-Spilman coal work and brickyard were put into operation (see above). The end of this revival came soon after the beginning of the next century. Clifton died industrially when its one remaining salt plant, the Bedford, burned down in 1893. Two or three general stores and a drug store represented the town's mercantile activities in that year. Only one store, a grocery store, was still there in 1900. Hartford City in 1900 still had two salt plants: the Hartford City, D.E. Newton and son George Newton managers; and the Liverpool, owned by E.A. Smith & Brother. In May of 1900 the Town Council of Hartford granted to a certain firm (name not given), a license to build a tin mill. The mill itself failed to materialize. Business activity at Hartford was on the up-grade apparently. B.J._Lerner in December of ‘95 "opened an Eating House and a Livery Stable in connection with his Barber Shop and Grocery business." Hugo Juhling's sons Hugo and Oswald opened a new general store about the same time. The Allen store, under the management of Richard Allen's son William Allen, and the Liverpool's general store were both thriving. "Sleepy New Haven" was a newspaper reporter's characterization of the town in February, 1888, after passing by it on his trip up the River via the new O.R.R.R. But very wide awake did New Haven's �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 538 in several items of the 1890 Telegraph: [February 19, 1890]. New Haven Citizens had a Meeting to see what inducements could be offered to a rolling mill or iron plant to loace in the town. -New Haven Correspondent. [February 26, 1890]. At the Citizens' Meeting last week The NEW HAVEN IMPROVEMENT COMPANY was organized and officers elected… -New Haven Correspondent. Two weeks later the town's correspondent reported that the new company had leased three tracts of land. With regret it must be stated that those zealous efforts met with no success. During the last decade of the century Dr. L.F. Roush's coal bank, the New Haven Coal Company William Juhling, Manger), the Juhling Brothers’ Flour Mill (the old Leitwiler Mill), and the mines of the Consumers’ Coal & Mining Company furnished spasmodic opportunities for employment. New Haven's mercantile needs were supplied by Juhling Brothers' and Guinther Brothers' stores during the greater part of the decade. Its tin ware was mad and its tin roofing, etc., was done until 1895 by Philip Jones, great grandson of Seth Jones (see above). In that year Mr. Jones moved his business to Parkersburg, W.Va. At Letart, West Virginia, in 1885 was W.T. Hayman's “extensive sawmill, produce boat and barrel manufactury which employs about twenty hands, making 20,000 to 30,000 barrels yearly for produce shippers,” so stated the Special Advocate. By 1900 farmers on both sides of the River were shipping their produce by the O.R.R.R. and the Hayman Boatyard had correspondingly declined. The Zeitgeist in Town and Home One Sunday morning in the year 1879 or '80 two cultured Pomeroy Germans, each silk-hatted and carrying a gold-headed cane, stood near the railing of the Mason City Pomerov ferryboat. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 539 "Das Pomeroy steht da gerade wie ein Moskau!" said the one, pointing out with his cane the beautiful curve of the "crescent city of the cliffs." "Es IST ein Moskau!" asserted his companion warmly. “Bombastic” and “fantastic” some Mason city by-standers derisively whispered among themselves; they were unimpressed by the genuine civic pride that had prompted the comparison. It was true, however, that Pomeroy's civic pride still needed newspaper prodding at times. In September of '78 the Telegraph's Editor O.B. Chapman advised the public: If your cow does not come home, call the Pound. You have had ten days' notice to shut up your cattle. The warning appears to have had immediate favorable results. By the year of '85, however, Pomeroy cows were again running at large. Editor Trussell's admonition had permanent results, though, it is inferred-or was it civic pride, perhaps, that kept him and succeeding editors from making public the City Council's laxity. There were other evidences of seeming indifference to editorial admonitions. In the August 25, 1880 Telegraph issue appeared a notice which, to O.B. Chapman's disappointment doubtless, did not have the desired result; FIRST NOTICE:-The enterprising agent of the enterprising proprietors of a patent medicine known as St. Jacob's Oil has desecrated one of the most prominent and beautiful cliffs in the rear of the city by painting upon it in GREAT YELLOW 10-FT LETTERS the flaming advertisement of the aforesaid nostrum; it was done without the permission of the land owner or of the city authorities, we learn. We like enterprise, have no objection to the medicine; but defac-natural scenery, especially in the most public part of the city, for the simple purpose of filling the coffers of a foreign patent medicine manufacturer is overstepping the bounds of propriety and presuming too far on the good nature of the people. Very considerable indignation has already been expressed on account of the defacement of the cliff, and public sentiment is coming rapidly to demand that the objectionable ad be removed. We hope the persons responsible will take the hint. The ad remained until washed away by the elements. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 540 In August of '88 an editorial item called attention to the numerous chuck holes in Front street between the Pomeroy Salt Works and John Epple's store in the Second ward. "I'm tired of people coming into the store with bruised and sore bodies and uncomplimentary language," one business man said. "It gets me so mad I can't give a decent answer even to someone buying a hundred-dollar coffin!” Very soon thereafter 500 cubic yards of good gravel was contracted for, and meantime a good cindar dressing was given the whole of Front street. Meantime, too, all Pomeroy sidewalks had been paved with either brick or flag stone-paid for by property owners, of course. In January, 1878 Pomeroy bought a team of horses for its Fire Engine. In July of the same year Pomeroy's Post Office was moved from Court street to the Russell Building on Mulberry street. Pomeroy's nearest approach to a zoological garden was the window of the Hein House, a few doors above Linn; in that window the proprietor, Capt. Hein, kept on display alligators, turtles, and other specimens of interest. In September of '76 the "garden" was "enriched by the addition of a big buzzard from up Kanawha," the public was informed editorially. Beech Grove Cemetary (see Purchase of, above) through carelessness and neglect in the keeping of records had finally reverted to the original owners, Horton & Dabney Estates, and in the late '80s was bought at public sale by Judge Lasley. In the summer of 1892 the City Council appointed a committee to confer with Judge Lasley in regard to the purchase of the cemetary by the city. In March of '94 the purchase was finally completed; Beech Grove thenceforth belonged to Pomeroy. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 541 Civic Improvement in Middleport was ahead of that of Pomeroy in some respects, it seems. Pomeroy had no paved streets before the end of the century; whereas, at Middleport the work of paving Second street from Mill to Walnut began late in '97 or early in '98. Mill street at that time extended only to Second. But during the next year it was opened to the River. On February 2, 1890 Middleport held an Election for a Postmaster, the first election of the kind in Meigs county "since the Tribune got dry behind the ears," commented that Pomeroy newspaper. Probably it was the only one of its kind in Middleport since the first year of the Civil War. The election was ordered by the Republican Central Committee, Reason for the order was not stated; but public sentiment was said to be overwhelmingly against it. Two of the candidates were: George Womeldorff, who had been Middleport's postmaster from 1878 to 1886; and Capt. Asa Barriner. The names of the remaining candidates were not given. Capt. Barringer was elected, succeeding J.W. Talbot. New Public buildings, in both Pomeroy and Middleport, were provided mainly by outside interests. In April, 1877 the County Commissioners contracted for the enlarging of the Court House by the addition of a West Wing at the front of the building. By the ensuing August the work had advanced to a stage that caused some people to see in it a resemblance to the front of a steamboat. "People are constantly asking when she will start out, what trade she will run in, who the chambermaid will be," wrote Editor Chapman. By September the public mind was at rest, though not quite satisfied. “The stairways by which the second floor is reached and the balcony in front hardly come up to �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 542 public expectations but will do for a while," O.B. Chapman consoled. J.S. Harper, Pomeroy brickmaker, had been assigned the contract for the brick work, which included two massive columns. These were pronounced a masterpiece; many who had not seen them in process of construction could hardly be convinced that they were not solid stone. [The name of the bricklayer who did the actual work could not be found. Some persons consulted thought it probably was Mr. Harper himself.] Other contractors were:- (?) Baker, carpenter work; C.J. Vincent, stone work; Dietrich Findling, plastering; Arch Crary, roofing, cornices, etc. On Saturday, August 4, before the columns began to rise, the "chaps about the court house" caused to be deposited beneath one of the columns, in a sealed can embedded in cement, the following articles: "A list of the county and city officials at this time; copies of all the county newspapers; the sheriff's Proclamation for the presidential election of 1876; a postal card; some corn, some wheat, etc., etc." In the autumn of 1895 Pomeroy got a new County Jail (the present one), the old one having been destroyed when the Telegraph's printing office was burned in February of '94. The loss of the old Edwards Building by fire in 1895 was, like the loss of other old structures on Front street, considered good riddance. But several years earlier (May of '89), when a son of one of the Edwards Brothers wrote to the Telegraph asking about fate of the two locust trees which he as a boy had planted in the building's back yard. the editorial comment thereon struck a wholly different note. Said the Editor in part: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 543 …Floods cover the face of the earth, fire consumes fire- proof buildings in the same block, but the ancient structure remains. With timber and lumber enough in it to make a Kansas county seat, it stands there a monument of stability of the wooden age. Men come and go; this old house, sometimes a residence, sometimes with store rooms, of late years a hotel, occasionally harboring all these industries under its roof, takes no note of time, is here to stay. The two locust trees in the back yard, though somewhat worn and weather beaten, still defy the storms of winter, cast their grateful shade in the afternoons, Middleport's finest public building during this period was the Hocking Valley Railroad Station built in 1899 to take the place of "the old barracks in the lower end" that had been destroyed by fire some time during 1898. The new building was erected on the "lot owned by Dr. Whaley, just above the flour mill trestle and known as the Eckman property," and was said to be the finest station ever put on the River Division of the H.V.& T. Railroad. The finishing in the smaller waiting room of the new station is the "old walnut which formerly adorned the parlors of the old Eckman house," [the Philip Jones brick residence] "and which is rendered doubly valuable by age and association of long years of family and social life forming a connecting link with the past and the present.” On Tuesday evening, August 2, 1899 the new station was opened to the public, whenOfficials of the Road and prominent Citizens of Pomeroy and Middleport Met around Banquet Table.-A special train with the officials of the Road was met by a committee of Pomeroy and Middleport business men and headed by Selby's Band. After the introduction of the business men to the officials, the line of march, headed by the band, proceeded to the Hotel Walnut where a grand banquet was held. [After the band concert, presumably following the banquet, there was dancing till a late hour. The dancing was intended originally to be in the station but the latter was found to be not quite large enoughthis seems to be the meaning of a paragraph the construction of which was somewhat puzzling.] In the Ohio towns above Pomeroy the Zeitgeist unquestionably was effecting changes; but if any such changes had newspaper �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 544 recognition it escaped this researcher's eyes. The rumor of one attempted change did get into a newspaper and did not escape our eyes: namely, the report that in the spring of 1894 public meetings were being held in Syracuse the object of which meetings was to get the Meigs County court house moved to that town. Whether there was any basis for the report was never discovered. In several of the West Virginia towns, some changes are worthy of notice: Graham Station's post office, the instability of which was noted above, finally became a permanent institution-"re-established September 8, 1879 and is still in operation," reported the Post Office Department on January 3, 1938. Hartford City on June 29, 1892 had the name of its post office changed and soon thereafter the town, itself, made a corresponding change in its name. Thenceforth the new name of both town and post office was simply Hartford. The "City" was dropped. At Mason City was erected one public building of importance. In April of 1896 fire had destroyed the Odd Fellows' two-story frame building that stood on First (or Railroad) street; whereupon the organization (Almeda Lodge) proceeded at once to plan for a new building. The new structure, a two -story brick, on the northwest corner of Pomeroy and Second (now Main) street, was formally dedicated. The first floor of the structure was designed for use as a public hall, to be called Washington Hall. The removal of a former public building from one Mason street was of two-fold aesthetic significance. The Payne Hotel of the late 1850s (on Center street) after its brief come-back as a hotel in the '70s had a second and briefer career as a tenement. By the end of the '80s the building (still the "Big House" and the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 545 “Martin Box”) was tenentless, doorless, windowless and almost plasterless; in 1889 the framework, including weatherboarding, was taken apart and shipped by T.H. Davies to Point Pleasant, where it was rebuilt into an attractive cottage. Mason's Center street and Point Pleasant's Main both gained by the removal and the transformation. On January 6, 1899 appeared the following serio-comic item in a Pomeroy newspaper: The Ruttencutter Store had a narrow escape when its ware room took fire from a defective flue last week. The timely arrival of the "bucket brigade" averted the destruction of the whole "business section" of that "good old German town." [The “business section” consisted of the store.] Two weeks later readers of that same paper were told that, Mason City has organized a Volunteer Fire Department. Secondhand pumps, hooks, ladders, etc., have been secured… By the end of the century another part of Mason had been improved in appearance by the method of subtraction. The material remains of the glass factory were all gone: the ware house, a long, wooden structure, had glided into the River in one of the Floods, the main building had been torn down and the bricks used to construct an engine house for the Bauer Brick Yard. And far back in the beginning of this last quarter-century, (possibly earlier) one Mason City building after its rise from the utilitarian plane to the intellectual and the spiritual, was fated to return to its original low estate. The old Brown smoke-house-schoolhouse-church-house finally after a long period of desuetude was bought by Jacob Roush and reconverted into a cow stable. Regarding West Columbia's public buildings we have first-hand information. In July of 1900 Editor John L. Mason (Herald-Republican), who had spent his boyhood in West Columbia, paid a visit to "the old home town"; from the published “Sketches” which followed we quote: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 546 "Taylor Bumgardner… recently purchased the old brick hotel property and is having it fixed up in handsome style. The old three-story U.B. church was torn down and rebuilt into two stories several years ago. Mr. and Mrs. Battrell furnished the necessary money and took a mortgage on the property for $400. Reverend Slaughter is now trying to pay off the mortgage. Regular services are to be held there again; there have been none for several years. The old Harpold Tannery (where ye editor attended his first school) is entirely gone and is now replaced by a cornfield. The foundations of the old “Pease” well engines were seen in the distance. The old Hill Cemetary is sadly neglected." Homes, in general, kept pace with the progressive spirit of the times. During the high-tide period (1870s and early '80s) countless one- and l 1/2-story cottages and numerous two-story residences of varied styles of architecture rose on the Run slopes and the hilltops of the Ohio side and spread over the hitherto vacant parts of the south-side towns. Before 1900 the rain barrel had practically disappeared from house corners, lawns had taken the place of flower beds; every recently-built house had a front porch and every porchless older dwelling was being equipped or about to be equipped with a front porch. Among the last log houses to disappear was the spacious log structure owned by Andrew L. Sehon at Valley City (below Hartford). Though a wealthy land owner and prominent in county affairs, Mr. Sehon and his family had clung to the old log dwelling with its modernized interior until the year of 1883, when it was demolished and a commodious and attractive two-story residence built on or near its site. Home interiors kept up with the times in corresponding degree. By the close of the century families of average income were buying �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 547 upright pianos instead of organs; plush upholstered furniture in place of mohair or horsehair; Brussels carpets to replace ingrains; massive lamps with double or tripple burners instead of the hanging lamps with crystal pendants. Daughter's hand-paintings-rural scenes or bunches of roses-were hung on the walls and fine old steels engravings relegated to the garret. What-Nots (made of spools when the manufactured article had been beyond reach) filled with bris-a-brac, stereoscopes-these were just beginning their garrott-ward move in 1900. From bedrooms had been removed the bed canopies of mosquito netting; for the new window screens recently installed to keep flies out of the house, kept mosquitoes out too. The screens served a third purpose: they were an imagined protection against burglars for the advocates of the newly promulgated sleep-with-your-windows-open health rule. Dining room tables were set (for company) with dishes decorated, not with embossed or with blue floral patterns as of yore but with floral designs of gilt or of several colors; and with plated silver knives, forks and spoons. That time-honored centerpiece, the castor, was rarely seen on dining tables by 1900. The Pomeroy Bend's kitchen by 1900 was the Zeitgeist's crowning achievement.-from the viewpoint of the one who did the kitchen work, at any rate. Back in the 1870s a housewife's pride was one whole wall hung with bright, shiny tinware; a kitchen floor scrubbed clean enough "to eat off of"; a stove polished till "you could see yourself in it." One whole day a week she herself, or the hired girl, if she kept one, had to scour, scrub and polish. By 1900 enameled cooking utensils, an oilcloth or carpet-covered kitchen floor and a gasoline cooking stove were features of the ideal �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 548 kitchen. Washday's drudgery could be greatly lightened by means of a washing machine (hand operated) and that of ironing day by letting the steam laundry do the most exacting part of the ironing: the shirt bosoms and cuffs and collars of the men's part of the laundry. All these labor saving devices could be procured at the Middleport, Pomeroy and Racine hardware stores, the laundry work at the two recently established laundries, H.G. Smith's at Pomeroy and that of Taylor Robinson and Charles Mees opened at Mason City but soon moved to Middleport (in 1899). (Pomeroy and Middleport homes had the advantage of two additional labor-saving conveniences; but the means by which they were made available requires that they be presented under another topic.) New Food Luxuries came in during this period. Most markets during the 1890s were advertising Chicago Beef, Boneless Ham, etc. These were brought in by the railroads in the newly invented refrigerator cars, as were also the tropical fruits such as bananas, oranges, lemons, etc., that local grocers now could keep the year around; also Michigan celery, cranberries and bulk oysters. Fresh oysters were advertised as restaurant specialties in the late '60s but bulk oysters were not found in grocers' ads before the early ‘80s. Granulated sugar had completely replaced Coffee A Sugar by 1900. Public Utilities Brought Up To Date Telephone Service came to Pomeroy Bend seven years after the introduction of the telegraph (see preceeding period). Telephone Exchanges were established in Pomeroy and Middleport in 1882. Long distance wires were put up in 1897. In 1884 or '85 a telephone exchange was installed at Mason City was abandoned in '88 but restored in '96 or '97. All the other �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 549 West Virginia towns in The Bend were included in this system. The first departure from the use of oil for lighting was found to have been in September of 1877, when The Coleman Gas Generator was reported to be furnishing light for the Eiselstein Store and the Opera House, and two such machines were in use in Middleport (names of users not given). On June 26, 1899 the Telegraph carried this "illuminating" item: TO ILLUMINATE! Twenty-five electric lights to blaze on the streets of Pomeroy! The Council has said, "Let there be light," and it will be so. The contract is closed to dissipate the dark-ness of the darkest town on the continent. And still taxes are not to be increased and the debt is to continue decreasing. And on October 16, same yearPomeroy has taken another step forward, a great long springy stride. It is now to be abreast of the times in the matter of light at least. In March of 1898 a Waterworks Ordinance gave the Pomeroy & Middleport water Company the franchise for laying pipes and making all necessary provisions for suppling the city with water. On April 15, 1898 Middleport's Council granted the Mutual Electric Light Company a franchise for furnishing the city with electric lights. By November of the same year the local newspaper was able to report that“Our Electric Light Plant is a credit to the promoters of the scheme and also to the city and the people. The building is a substantial brick 33 by 60 feet, one-story.” Middleport's ordinance granting the P. & M. Water Company a franchise was not found. It is assumed, however, that the franchise was granted early in 1898. On the electric lighting of stores and private dwellings was found only two items: �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 550 [June 26, 1892]. The public was interested by a small electric light in Dr. Whaley's office window Saturday evening… four candle power, not brilliant… [March 22, 1893]. The Commercial Hotel Middleport is to be lighted by electricity. The fact has been established, however, that by 1900 practically all public buildings and many private homes were lighted by electricity. Street car service, agitation for which had begun in the early 1870s (as shown above), encountered numerous obstacles before it was finally secured. In November of '81 the "Union Street Railway Company of Pomeroy" and the "Pomeroy, Minersville & Syracuse Street Railway" were incorporated (whether as two companies or two names for the same company was not made clear). Not until February of 1888 was "the ground for the street railway broken" (the years '86 and '87, missing from the File, may have given reason for the delay). By October of '88 "work was begun on the lower end of the route on Monday," and in November of same year, "street railway bonds are on the market." But in March of '89, "six months were granted to the street railway company to complete the line"; and two weeks later, “… a 'bluff' of the street railway to get extension of time. There is a new deal on.” Meanwhile the Bartels Bus continued to operate between Syracuse and Pomeroy. In '82 August Bartels, founder of the business, was succeeded by his son, W.F. Bartels. The younger Bartels had, in place of the old omnibus-"a kind of lumbering Noah's ark"-a light, comfortable hack, but was still blowing the German bugle. As successor, or competitor, to Swink's Pomeroy-Middleport bus, F.E. Fletcher, proprietor of the Fletcher Livery Stable, in the late 1870s "equipped ‘Governor’ Burns, Negro, with a one-horse, two-seated carriage and a tin horn," to convey passengers from �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 551 Pomeroy to Middleport and vice versa. The 'governor' took passengers to their own doors. Then in June of 1880 J.V. Smith, Pomeroy Livery Stable proprietor, put "new double-seated carriage on the road between Pomeroy and Middleport to compete with Fletcher's and other rigs." Whereupon, two months later, came the news thatAugust 11, 1880. Fletcher has put on another gorgeous new cabhas revolutionized the carrying business between Pomeroy and Middleport. ButBy October, 1890, "-work was begun on the Belt Railway, a Pomeroy project which was to extend from the C.H.V. & T. terminus to Pomeroy, with passenger station on Front between Linn and Sycamore streets. When the line was completed a Commuter was put on by the C.H.V. & T. to run between Pomeroy and Middleport, the Belt Railway Trustees (P.B. Stanbery, W.H. Lasley, Austin W. Vohres) having given the Hocking Valley the right to run such a train "for a somewhat indefinite time." The people were "indignant at the commuter project"; they considered it "in opposition to the street railway project." On January 1, 1894 a Tribune-Telegraph reporter (probably C.A. Hartley) had occasion to observe: The beginning yesterday morning of hourly train service over the Belt and the Hocking Valley roads between Pomeroy and Middleport marks the decline of the long e stablished cab system. The bus business will be crippled at first; probably never will assume its present proportions; but it will not be annihilated… It might be safe to predict that the shrill blast of Billy Bartels' bugle will crack the ears of Kerr's Run, Minersville and Syracuse people for the next decade even though an electric line should be built to Racine. The bus cannot be stamped out in a day. And "Slightly disfigured but with plenty of grit and grace it may still be in the ring," opined another newspaper's editorial on the same subject. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 552 (By this time Charles Stander and Henry Priode had bought out the Fletcher line, the victor in the Pomeroy-Middleport cab race.) By April, 1898, the commuter had been taken off the Belt Railway; and through the efforts of I.L. Oppenheimer and U.S.Grant, both of Pomeroy, the Spilmans and Camdens of Parkersburg were induced again to seek a railway franchise for a line to extend from the K. & M. Junction to Racine. In Pomeroy the line was to run through "Front, Salt, Railroad, New, Bridge, Williams and Short streets." On November l6, 1900 the Tribune-Telegraph's outstanding front-page item was: STREET RAILWAY BETWEEN RACINE AND MIDDLEPORT FORMALLY OPENED THIS MORNING Invitations were mailed by the president of the Construction Company, John Blair Macafee, to city officials of Pomeroy, Middleport and Racine, county commissioners and the press. These made the initial trip over the road early Wednesday morning; two cars were needed. J.B. Macafee, Gen, B.B. Spilman, Col.Harry Spilman, Dr. Camden, and others were in the party. At Racine, school children who were out were given a free ride. Some people even decorated in honor of the event. At the power house a banquet was tendered by the street railway people; speeches were made by prominent citizens. P.M. Chandler, president of the Company, was not present but sent a telegram. The street railway had arrived. The Bartels bugle's call ceassed resounding through The Bend. Two weeks earlier (November 1) C.A. Hartley's long TribuneTelegraph write-up on The Bartels Hack Line had ended thus: It is like the passing of an old landmark to see the SyracusePomeroy -Middleport hack line go out. The street car did it. The Times and the River The coming of the railroads and the decline of the salt industryeach in its own peculiar way affected materially the Pomeroy Bend's River transportation. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 553 The dissolution of R.R. Hudson's two Salt Transportation Companies and of the other transportation companies accompanying the decline of the salt business, left The Bend's towboating at the disposal of individually owned steamboats. It was this situation, probably, that induced several business men to make steamboating their chief interest. Prominent among these was Horace M. Horton. In November of 1878, H.M. Horton, with thirty or more years of steamboating experience to his credit, joined Captains James and William Kirker in buying Capt. Shoemaker's Charley Bowen No.2 and three barges. About three years later he bought the Kirkers' interest in the boat and, after severing connections with the Pomeroy Coal Company, took command of the Bowen himself. In August of 1880 Capt. Horton sold the Bowen but almost immediately thereafter purchased the Pittsburgh towboat Diamond, traded the Diamond for the Charley McDonald and in January of '94, in partnership with H.C. Pownell, bought the Bob Pritchard. With the last two boats Capt. Horton continued in the Pomeroy-Cincinnati and Pomeroy-Louisville towing business until April, 1897, when he was appointed Master of the U.S. lighthouse tender, Golden Rod. This boat's business was to supply lighthouse keepers along the Ohio and Tennessee rivers with oil and other materials needed in their work. Most of the coal operators, too, bought boats or had them built for their own use and for a towing business generally. As early as April, 1877 E.C. Harpold, president of the Valley City Salt Company, bought the towboat Robin at Louisville, paying for it with 3,200 barrels of salt of seven bushels each. During the remainder of that year and all the next year Capt. Harpold took salt and coal down the Ohio and up the Wabash and Cumberland rivers and to St. Louis. On February 27, 1878, along with his �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 554 fleet of ten barges, three of salt and ten of coal, he took also from the Mason City boatyard the Mississippi Transportation Company's model barge, just launched at Mason, and conveyed it as far as Cairo. In 1876 or 177 G.W. Moredock bought the Liberty No.4 (also a former R.R. Hudson transportation company boat) for the Hartford City Coal & Salt Company. In November of '78 Mr. Moredock sold the Liberty to Dr. J.P. Hale of Charleston and soon afterward had the G.W Moredock built at the Mees boatyard. The fate of this boat was not learned. But in February, 1893 a new G.W. Moredock came into the scene, this one owned by the Juhling Coal Company and the Messrs. Newton (father and two sons) of Hartford. Engine and fixtures of the new boat, formerly on the steamer Chancellor, had been put on by Middleport's Ohio Machine Company and the Pomeroy Machine Company. Boilers, etc., were made by J.P. Williams, Middleport Boiler Maker. The boat was intended for towing in the Pomeroy Bend. By September, 1898 the G.W. Moredock belonged to the Val. P. Collins Towboat Company and had entered the Kanawha trade. In December of '99 Captain William Juhling was reported as "master and joint owner with Val. P. Collins of the G.W. Moredock…" The story of the Bob Pritchard after Captain Horton left the towboating business is told in three Middleport newspaper items; [October 14, 1898]. A large force of men is rebuilding the Bob Pritchard at the Excel Docks. Capt. Billy Haptonstall, Mississippi river pilot, is supervising the work for T.H.Davis, who will run the boat until he can sell it… [November 25, 18961]. The Bob Pritchard after its overhauling is to be named the T.H. Davis. Capt. T.H. Dav1s will sell the boat if possible; if not he run it… [Ju1y 21, 1899]. The towboat T.H. Davis left for Memphis, to be used by the Government. After a test by Capt. Gerig, of the U.S. Engineering Corps, the boat raised steam…in charge of Capt. Billy Haptonstall, well known Mississippi river pilot… �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 555 In December of 1899 a new Towboat Company appeared: Capt. Jake Riggs of New Haven; Austin Vohres, wealthy capitalist of Pomeroy; and B.J. Malone, Pomeroy coal operator of Minersville, are members of a new towboat company formed at Pomeroy a few days ago. Capt. Riggs, prominent Kanawha and Ohio river pilot, has gone to Pittsburgh to buy a boat to tow coal and salt for the Syracuse and Cincinnati trade in opposition to the Moredock, the Jessie and the New Haven. Tow rates are to be cut, and a lively towboat war is likely to result. The war, if it resulted, seems not to have been of proportions serious enough to merit newspaper space. In the fall of 1899 the New Haven Towboat Company (Capt. I.N. Flesher, O.A. Roush, Harry Spilman) had the Excel Docks build the H.E. Spilman for the Camden-Spilman company's towing business. In 1900, the Convoy Towboat Company (time of organization not found) of which Fred Ebersbach of the Peacock Coal Company was manager, owned the Eagle and the Convoy. The Gus Genin had been owned by this company also. Two towboat disasters mark respectively the beginning and the close of this quarter century's towboating in The Bend. The first of these, though it did not happen in Pomeroy Bend it resulted in the death of The Bend's leading towboat owners. On August 3, 1878, while his own boat, Charley Bowen No.2, was laid up for repairs, Capt. James Shoemaker chartered the Brilliant to take six barges each of coal and salt to Louisville. When the boat reached Gallipolis Island its boiler exploded, killing Capt. Shoemaker and Pilot William Jones and severely injuring the captain's two sons, all of Mason City. The other disaster was the sinking of the New Haven Towboat Company's new towboat H.E. Spilman on a Sunday afternoon in January of 1900. Capt. I.N. Flesher, who was in command of the boat, had secured permission from his Insurance Company to break up the ice in The Bend. From the ice harbor at Middleport the captain had �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 556 Worked the boat nearly down to Webb's sawmill when it got caught between two immense cakes of ice. One side of the boat's hull was crushed in and the boat sank on a bar about one-third across from the Ohio side, settling perfectly flat and even. No one was even seriously injured. Later the hull of the H.E. Spilman was reported raised and rebuilt for "towing out of The Bend"; but in July, 1900 another item stated that the New Haven Towboat Company was to build a new boat to take the place of the Spilman. The other factor affecting the Bend's river traffic, the coming of the railroad, finally did accomplish what many cold-water throwers predicted every time an effort was put forth to secure that means of transportation: railroads will ruin the steamboat business. It was not until the O.R.R.R. was built through the West Virginia side, however, that the disappearance of the steamboats became noticeable. Three palatial Cincinnati-Big Sandy sidewheelers of the White Collar Line provided daily passage to and from Cincinnati until far into the 1890s. The St. James, St. Lawrence, Telegraph, Potomac, Bonanza, Bostona, Fleetwood, Henry M. Stanley---each of these was in the Cincinnati-Pomeroy packet trade making semi-weekly trips some time during the last quarter century. That they gradually ceased taking salt at the various salt plant landings was due not so much to the presence of railroads as to the presence of the towboats that were taking care of the depleted salt shipments. To the O.R.R.R., however, may be ascribed the ever decreasing length of wharfboat stops and number of landings at the West Virginia towns, of the Pittsburgh & Cincinnati Packet Company's three semi-weekly sternwheel packets. The Emma Graham, Buckeve State, Granite State, Ohio No .4, W.P. Thompson, Katy Stockdale, Kevstone State, Andes, Hudson, C.W. Bachelor, Scotia, Louis A. Shirley, Iron �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 557 Queen---each had been for a longer or shorter time owned by or in the service of the Pomeroy & Cincinnati Packet Company (J.N. Williamson president until his death). The fate of one of the Company's boats was thus briefly and tersely reported by a Pomeroy Bend newspaper: [April 10, 1895]. The Iron Queen is burned up. The palatial Pittsburgh-Cincinnati packet is in the bottom of the River at Antiquity. All the passengers were saved. The fire occurred Wednesday morning about 8 o'clock. On January 30, 1894 someone wrote in one of the local news-papers: People declared the O.R.R.R. would put an end to the steamboat business. Well, the steamboats are still here in great plenty, and probably have nearly if not quite as much business as before the advent of the locomotives. The railroads have increased traffic all along the River, and steamboats get no small share of it. But on April 20, same year of '94, someone else wrote: There is a rumor that the White Collar Line is about to withdraw its palatial steamers, abandoning the Pomeroy-Cincinnati trade to the smaller boats. By 1900, only one White Collar boat, the Bonanza, was plying between Cincinnati and Pomeroy. Passing through Pomeroy Bend to and from Pittsburgh in 1900 were the Queen City, Virginia, City of Pittsburgh, Kanawha, and Greenwood. The first three were Cincinnati packets, the last two were CharlestonPittsburgh boats. But the Cincinnati-Pittsburgh boats were very close to extinction in 1900. The short-run boats--propellers and smaller sternwheelers-continued the rate-cutting scheme begun before '76 for driving one another out of The Bend. In the latter '70 the Wall City (meaning Pomeroy- with its now wall along the River-bank) was put into the Ravenswood-Pomeroy trade in opposition to the propeller Clipper; then in 1880 into the Gallipolis-Syracuse trade in opposition to the brown Brothers' new boat, the Luella. The Wall City �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 558 was the first to withdraw. How many left the scene during the next decade and how many new ones appeared is impossible to determine. But after Pomeroy and Middleport shoppers from up-River and downRiver points began coming to Pomeroy and to Clifton on the O.R.R.R and crossing to the other side on the local ferryboat; and mail for both Pomeroy and Middleport and other Bend towns began coming on the O.R.R.R. as far as the opposite W.Va. station, to be transferred to its final destination; and freight shipments were made in the same roundabout way-then, if they had not done so before 1887, the GallipolisSyracuse propellers Humming Bird and Silver Star and other smaller boats had to make their exit; and also the mail boat Chesapeake whose whistle had become familiar to Bend inhabitants generally. The Luella continued in the Gallipolis-Syracuse trade until succeeded by the C.A. Hill, another Brown Brothers boat, but bought by W.H. Newton in March, 1890. In '87 came the Valley Belle into the Ravenswood-Middleport trade and was still there in 1900. (Likewise the Klondike, which had displaced the Hill.) By the early 1890s there came into the picture a new incentive for the building of short-run boats. A railroad had been built from Ripley, West Virginia, to the mouth of Mill Creek five miles above Letart, W.Va. A town, Millwood, sprang up at the railroad's River terminal, and grew so rapidly that it promised a flourishing steamboat trade. Accordingly, in 1896 Messrs. B.F. and M.F. Fletcher, proprietors of Middleport's new Excel Docks, built the Little Queen (the Docks' first steamboat) to capture the newly established prize. Soon also appeared the Nancy in the same trade and immediately the Little Queen and the Nancy were "having it hot and heavy for the Middleport-Millwood trade." The Millwood boom �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 559 was short-lived and likewise, in consequence, was the coveted trade. It barely survived beyond the century's close. Ferryboats, still, by their kind and their number indicated the Bend's industrial condition. As observed above, the Mason City-Pomeroy and the Clifton-Middleport Ferries were especially favored by the advent of the O.R.R.R., the former so much so that in the latter '80s a larger and better boat was built to replace Champion No.1. The new boat was named Champion No. 2. Clifton's Acorn (built in '71 by R.R. Hudson and the two DeWolfs) was owned in the '90s by Mrs. Jessie Redmond, daughter-in-law of B.J. Redmond of Clifton. In March of '95 the Acorn took fire in mid-river from an exploding or falling lamp and was burned up. The Herald-Republican lamented the resulting "loss of trade from the other side"; however, by July of the same year, Mrs. Redmond's Little Ben, with Pete Shutt and Jeff Gardner in command, was ready to recapture that trade. So much superior was the Little Ben to the Acorn that the Republican-Herald warned: "Pete and Jeff must not put on too many airs when they start out with the 'Great Eastern.'" The hull of the Champion No. 2 was built outside of Pomeroy Bend but the remainder of the work-cabins, machinery, etc.-was done in Middleport. The Little Ben was wholly a Pomeroy Bend product, Mees Brothers Boatyard and the Ohio Machine Company having been entrusted with that boat's entire construction. The Lizzie, little Greasy's ferryboat (at Middleport's lower landing) was succeeded in the late '70s by the Newcastle, the new boat's name being more euphonious real name of the little settlement around the salt furnace just across the River. At the time the O.R.R.R. was built, that ferry either had ceased running or was about to do so, due to West Columbia's decline. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 560 The ferryboat at Enterprise Landing (put in in the early '70s) was discontinued long before 1900. With the decline of the old Strider Mill back of Kerr's Run, the landing ceased to be a real landing; wherefore that part of Kerr's Run gradually dropped that part of its name by calling itself merely Enterprise. The advertisement below, found in the September, 1877 Telegraph: "For Sale, Steam Ferry at a Bargain. Apply to Lucius Cross." seems to indicate that such a ferry had been plying between Racine and Graham Station, perhaps in the early '70s. Nothing more regarding a steam ferry at Racine at that early date could be learned. Wharves and Wharboats lost in importance with the decline in the number of steamboats. As public assemblying places none of them ever had reached the degree of popularity attained by the new Ohio River Railroad stations. Until near the end of the century the whistle of the O.R.R.R.'s six daily passenger trains brought half of the town (more or less) running to the "deepo" as many times a day. Pomeroy's wharfboat continued under the management of the Downie family-first, Downie & Sons, then William Downie-throughout the century. Mason City's very fine levee was widened (by Ferry Company and Town Council) in 1877 to 100 feet, making it 225 wide and "one of the best." By 1900 it had been considerably narrowed by gradually narrowing the part kept in repair. Hartford City in April of '91 had a new wharfboat built at the Mees Brothers' Saw Mill. The hull of the boat which the new one displaced originally belonged to the towboat Petral, that in 1873 met disaster (see above). Flatboats, so called, were still to be seen on the River during �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 561 the century's last quarter; but newspaper items regarding them suggest a picture far different from that of the flatboat of pioneer days. For instance, the following items from the Telegraph: UPPER OHIO FLATBOAT ITEMS (October 30, 1878). W.T. Hayman is building a 25009-barrel barge for the Capt. Bill Roberts to ship potatoes south. Capt. Roberts will tow the barge with is own propeller, the J.N. Roberts. Capt. Thomas Alexander is taking general merchandise; he is using his propeller, the Waverly. Alexander and Roberts are taking a load of coal. (Nov. 27, 1895.) A Meigs County Fleet of Produce Boats is waiting for arise in the river, to go south. Because of the poor potato crop the shipment is not as large as usual; it will consist of potatoes, apples, crockery war. The fleet is to be towed by ____________. 1st item shows the Zeitgeist's work continuing throughout the century. "A Crockery Ware Boat from the Muskingum is at the wharf," the public was informed by the Telegraph in October of 1877. Now and then throughout the whole century such a boat- popularly called rag boat or iron boat- landed at several Bend Towns? But children gradually lost interest in gathering up rags and old iron; and so the crockery ware boats finally found it unprofitable to stop in the Pomeroy Bend, probably had ceased coming down the river at all. Gasoline Yachts were the closing century's latest thing in the way of small river-craft, for ferrying, etc., and for pleasure. Probably the finest boat of that type was the pleasure craft Edith Newton, named for the wife of George Newton (of Hartford), to whom the boat belonged. Mental Culture: The old way and some New Ways During the first week in June 1876, two things happened in Pomeroy which, unwittingly enough, sounded the keynote for educational �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 562 high school commencement had taken place, and the salary of the next year's school superintendent had been decreased from "1200 to $1000. Intellectual advancement and financial retrenchment were to go hand in hand. The Commencement Exercises took place on the night of June 2, at the Opera House, which was crowed to full capacity. The stage was decorated with flowers and appropriate mottoes. After the opening prayer by the Reverend P.S. Davies, the following original essays, interspersed by sons by the high school, were delivered by the graduates: Co-Education……………………………………………………Nettie Grow Nothing……………………………………………………………..Charles Huntley The Progress of Our Nation…………… Alice Grant Woven of Many Threads……………………………Enest Roehm Training The Memory……………………………..Zora McKnight Life …………………………………………………………………….George Smith After the reading of the essay each member was roundly applauded and showered with bouquets (in keeping with the custom of the times). After the song, Farewell, by the school, Principal J.Q. Speaker presented the diploma to the members of the class. This was followed by remarks by the Reverend C.P. Maples. A "parting song" by the graduating class and pronouncement of the Benediction brought Pomeroy's first high school commencement exercises to a close. In October of '79 a "colored high school" was opened in the second. Ward near the rolling mill. "Charles Huntley, to his surprise and astonishment was made teacher," reported the Telegraph. By June, 1881 the Ohio Legislature had legalized so-called "mixed schools" in the state of Ohio, whereupon Pomeroy's Negro and White's schools were merged. The first Negro to graduate in Pomeroy under the new system was James H. Jones, who at the June, 1881 commencement �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 563 exercises carried off the highest honor given by the school: that of class valedictorian. Jones's essay, "The Iconoclast?" was considered a masterpiece of high-school accomplishment. Middleport did not avail itself of the law regarding mixed schools but retained separate schools for Negroes, with Negro teachers, throughout the century, --elementary schools, it should be said. Negro pupils who wished to go to high school were permitted to go to the White high school. Not many did so, however. Middleport's Negro population was growing continually smaller. The two-story brick building put up for Negro children was too large by the close of the century. In 1875 the Reverend H.B. Scott, "a gentleman of culture and of pure moral and religious influence," was made superintendent of the Middleport schools, which office he retained until 1885. In that year he resigned the superintendency and was succeeded by W.H. Davis. In June of 1879 Miss Clara Chalfin, a teacher in Pomeroy Academy, was appointed as teacher in the Middleport high school. On May 24, 1894 at Coe's Opera House was held the first Annual Commencement of the Middleport Grammar Schools. This, be it noted, was five years before Pomeroy authorized a grammar school graduation. An admission fee of 10¢ was charged. Racine's First High School Commencement took place on the evening of May 2, 1890. S.F. Smith was principal of the Racine schools at that time. The three graduates were: Charles S. Hayman, Earl T. Smart and Ben Eber Cross. Mason City's public schools in March, 1877 were said to be "making excellent progress under the superintendency of Prof. W.H. Pilchard." Mason's share of the Peabody fund enabled the Board of Education �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 564 in 1879 to employ Spicer H. Patrick, A.M., son of George Patrick and principal of the Charleston, W.Va schools, to take charge of the Mason City schools. Mr. Patrick's first work in the autumn of '79 was to grade the schools and to take steps for the establishing of a high school. In the spring of 1881 Principal Patrick was ready to hold Mason City's first high school commencement. The exercises took place in the Odd Fellows' hall on First street. The five graduates, Jennie Paden, Lizzie Stone, Clara Mathews, Ella Hart and Josie Hart (all teachers in the Mason grade schools) read their essays and gathered up the floral tributes thrown at them (according to the custom of the time) by friends in the audience; three of the graduates sang solos; the town's best singers sang choruses; and the audience followed with keen interest each number as it was announced on the printed programme (1881 spelling) distributed among the audience- printed announcements the first printed announcements used in a Mason City audience. In the autumn of 1880 the study of German, with Miss Eva Knight as teacher, was introduced into the Mason grade schools. In 1879 the one-room school at suburban Adamsville, opened in 1875, had to be enlarged to two rooms. By 1879 Negro children had become so numerous in Mason that a larger school room was needed. By that time, too, race prejudice had cooled to such a degree that Negro families one after another dared to move out of their hither to "exclusive" section (so-called “niggerben”) into other parts of the town. And so, in '79 the Negro school was moved from the little office on the River bank to the old Welsh church on Third street and a white girl (Jennie Paden) was appointed as teacher. This girl had no experience as a teacher; but so well did she succeed that in two years she was promoted to the brick school's grammar grade. Again, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 565 a White girl with no experience was placed in charge of the Negro school-and likewise promoted later to the white school. The Negro school in effect had become a sort of training school for inexperienced White girls asking for teaching positions in the Mason City schools; and so it continued to be until 1895, when a Negro man from Pomeroy was employed to teach the Negro school. In the school year of 1881-82 Mason Independent School District received its last help from the Peabody Fund; and in the fall of 1882 Mr. Patrick did not return to the Mason schools. These two events together were largely responsible for the decline of the Mason City schools during the ensuing ten or twelve years. After the spring of '82 there was no graduating class until the year 1896. In that year the new principal, Seth Thomas, assisted by state Superintendent Virgil A. Lewis, re-established the high school and in April of that year four girls: Sadie Mathews, Belle Myers, Maude White, and Mattie Brennan were awarded diplomas at Mason's third commencement exercises, which took place in the M.W. Church. By 1900, due to the decrease in the town's population, the Adamsville school had been reduced to one room, the two-room annex to the brick building had been discontinued, and the Negro school was about to be closed. Also, due to changes an educational theories and policies, the study of German had been taken out of the grades and made a high elective. Pomeroy Bend's colleges, those earlier founded and those attempted during this period, all came to naught before the end of the century. Pomeroy Academy's advertisement for its third term (in the new building) in the spring of 1876, still announced Henry J. Galton as the school's head master. But when the second year opened in the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 566 following September, the Reverend Mr. Maples was to be principal "until the income is sufficient to justify the employment of a permanent principal." The institution's third year opened (Sept. 3, 1877) with Miss Clara Chalfin as principal. In 1879 the Academy was discontinued; opened again in the early '80s as Madison Seminary. In the fall of '84 the building was leased to the City Board of Education to be used as a high school. Its career as a private school had ended. Carleton College after the 1870s ceased functioning as a college (if it really ever had so functioned). A short career as a Normal School, then incorporation as a high school into the public school system of Syracuse—such was the fate of the institution that had opened with every promise of a long and prosperous career as a seat of higher learning. Mason City for a short period just before the close of the century posed as a college town. In 1896 the United Brethren Church of West Virginia was seeking a location for the college it proposed to found. About the same time a group of local educators organized a joint stock company for the purpose of establishing in The Pomeroy Bend a Teachers' Training School and a University Preparatory School. Charter members of this organization were: C.E. Peoples, Virgin A. Lewis, C.T. Coates, Seth Thomas and J.M. Hensley. The two projects united and founded Union College at Mason City with Virgil A. Lewis as president. The new school began operations in the spring of 1897, using Washington Hall, the brick school house and other neighboring buildings for class rooms. The outlook was very bright indeed- for a very brief period. First, there were rumors of dissention between Church and stock company; next, rumors proved to be founded on facts; by 1899 the U.B. Church had moved its school to �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 567 Ravenswood (W.Va.), changed its name to Ohio Valley College, retained Virgil A. Lewis as president. Union College was a thing of the past. Literary societies flourished on both sides of The Bend during the greater part of this quarter century. Regarding Pomeroy's Lincoln Hill Literary Society, it was surprising to find only one item: In March of 1880 the Society gave a masquerade party at the residence of Capt. W.L. Downie. Pomeroy's East End Society, however, got its name in the paper quite frequently. In May of '99 in Schwegman & Roedel's Hall this organization met the Philomathean Society of Ravenswood (U.B. College's Society) and debated the question, resolved that the United States is in greater danger from foreign complications than form internal dissentions. And in February, 1900 the East End Society went to Letart, West Virginia, to debate the question, Resolved, that the happiness and the welfare of the country demand prohibition of the liquor traffic, A. Kautz, A.P. Daniels and W.O. Arnold of the Pomeroy Society taking the affirmative side of the question. Results of neither of these two debates were reported in the Telegraph. Middleport's Literary Society in December of '76 elected new officers; namely, J.L. Lasley, president; B.L. McElroy, vice president; Mary C. Besserer, recording secretary; Manning Webster, critic; Helen Waterman, treasurer; George E. Evans, Laura Williams, Carrie Nobles, executive committee; M.M. Laughead, Mittie E. Giles, editors. This society unquestionable had debates and other literary activities characteristic of the period's literary societies, even though none seem to have been given newspaper notice. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 568 Throughout the 1870s and '80s many such societies sprang up, flourished a while, then died. Every Bend town had a succession of them, and unquestionably were conrrespondingly elevated thereby. The last such effort made at Mason City was that of 1894-95, when local meat dispenser Augustus Roush, school principal Seth Thomas and O.R.R.R. station agent [name forgotten] currently, the town's literary lights, debated such thought-provoking questions as, Resolved, that there is more pleasure in pursuing than in possessing. Public Library facilities were offered at Pomeroy early in the period, as the following item reveals [March 5, 1879]. The City Library was opened to the public the first time last Saturday afternoon. Mr. Penny, the clerk, is to be at the office of the Board of Education on the first and third Saturdays from three to five o'clock to let out books. By the last decade, advancement had been made to the extent indicated by the next two items: [January 1, 1892]. A Reading Room has been opened at Pomeroy, on the corner of Linn and Second streets, by the W.C.T.U. This is the first attempt of its kind and it is very welcome. [April 12, 1899]. A PUBLIC LIBRARY. In February, 1898 the legislature passed law making possible a library to be maintained by a levy of not less than .3 or more than .5 of a mill upon all taxable property within the school district. The Pomeroy Library Association has secured a charter form the Secretary of State and asked the Board of Education to make the levy. Rev. Thomas Turnbull is one of the charter members of the association. The high school library is to be placed in the public library. Regarding private libraries, the following item was found: [June 27, 1900]. V.B. Horton's library, about 1500 volumes, goes to Rio grande College for almost nothing. It was sold to the college by V.B. Horton's daughter, Mrs. Force. Newspapers increased greatly in number between 1876 and 1900. In January, 1878 the Telegraph was owned by The Telegraph Printing Company and edited by O.B. Chapman with associate editor E.S. Trussell. The office was on Second street, just east of the Court House. In September, 1882 O.B. Chapman retired from the newspaper �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 569 business, E.S. Trussell bought the entire stock and became sole editor of the Telegraph. In 1885 the name of the paper was changed from "The Meigs County Telegraph" to "The Telegraph." On April 13, 1887 there was published at Racine Vol. I, Number 1, of a newspaper called The Tribune. W.G. Sibley, son of Judge Sibley of Marietta and graduate of Marietta College, class of 1881, was editor and proprietor of Racine's new publication. "We have bravely undertaken to meet a longfelt want…" said Editor Sibley in his first issue. On November 5, 1890 The Tribune was sold to Messrs. Will H. Huntley and Charles A. Hartley, both of Pomeroy. The former had been editor of the Middleport Herald several years and the latter for the past six years had had complete charge of the Telegraph's local news; and also had given Editor Sibley occasion to chuckle in the February 5, 1891 Tribune: "Brother Hartley is in command of the editorial sanctum and is scratching his head in an effort to scare out a batch of 'idees.'" The Tribune's new proprietors immediately moved their printing office to Pomeroy. And almost immediately the Telegraph began a subscription-rates war on the new rival. By January of '93 Telegraph had reduced its price to 50¢. On February 27, 1893 Tribune and Telegraph were united, the two being published thereafter under the name of Tribune-Telegraph by the Union Printing Company, which also took over the two Middleport papers, merged into the Republican-Herald. (Middleport's Meigs County News of 1871-76 had been purchased by J.W. Dumble, in March of '76, its name had been changed to Meigs County Republican. It was this paper that had merged with the Middleport Herald.) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 570 On January 10, 1876 the first number of The Meigs County Herald was published at Middleport by the News Printing Company. Of this organization F.C. Russell was president, John Schreiner treasurer, H.C. Teeter secretary and manager, Charles Shepard editor. In May of '78 George Wise superseded Mr. Shepard. In August, 1880, the stockholders of the company having become dissatisfied, the Herald was sold to Major Austin Russell, who then became its editor. On February 1 of '93 a Telegraph editorial observed that "The Middleport Herald has had eleven editors since starting. The present one, Esta Arnold…" The Herald's proprietors at that time were Russell & Bryant. On February 28, 1894 Herald and Republican combined into the Republican-Herald, with Joseph W. Dumble as editor. The new paper was published by the Union Printing Company, the organization that was now publishing the Tribune-Telegraph. In May of 1897 Editor Dumble died and his wife continued to put out the Republican-Herald until October 7, 1898. On that date Mrs. Dumble resigned and was succeeded by John L. Mason. In September, 1900 Hon. John Hayman tendered his resignation as general manager of the Union Printing Company. Judge D.A. Russell, who had bought Mr. Hayman's stock in the company, was elected to the office resigned by Mr. Hayman. On August 1, 1895, S.F. Smith, prominent Meigs County educator, issued the first number of The Leader from his recently established editorial sanctum on Front street, Pomeroy. The Leader continued to appear as a leading Pomeroy paper until far into the next century. All the papers just mentioned were Republican in politics. Meigs County since the founding of the Republican party had been a Republican stronghold and all efforts to establish a Democratic paper �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 571 in the county had resulted in failure. True, the Middleport Herald was Democratic up to the time of Grover Cleveland's election to the presidency in l885; but Judge Charles Russell, the Herald's publisher at that time, being opposed to Cleveland, changed his own and the Herald's politics to Republicanism. But in September of '88 C.I. Barker started a paper in Pomeroy, calling it The Democrat. In three months Barker sold The Democrat to Thomas Craig and Calvin Walsh, two Athens men. Being absentee owners, Craig & Walsh assigned to a young man named Friesner the running of their paper. Friesner, in turn, applied for help to Charles E. Peoples, a recently established Pomeroy lawyer. Peoples began editing The Democrat in December of 1888 and in February of '89 bought it of the owners.1 1. This information was obtained from the Democrat's Special Edition of October 6, 1938, which edition was issued in commemoration of the Meigs County Sesqui-Centenial Celebration of October 9-11, 1938. Only the Democrat, the Tribune-Telegraph, the Leader and the Republican-Herald lived beyond the close of 1900. Other papers came, lived a while, then passed out of the scene. Some of these latter were: The Pomeroy Journal, a German newspaper published by Karl Weidt, who came to Pomeroy in '79 from Memphis, Tenn. The Journal disappeared with the '84 Flood or very soon thereafter. On June 22, 1882 James M. Evans issued the first number of a paper which he called The Meigs County Democrat. After fourteen numbers were published Evans sold out and retired. The paper very soon retired too. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 572 Another Democratic newspaper, the Mosquito, came out some time in 1884. "In a few short months it folded its wings and disappeared; but its 'bills' remained with friends to remind them of its brief visit," commented J.M. Evans in Hardesty's Meigs County History Ed. Hearne was publisher of the Mosquito. The Shining Light a monthly publication devoted to temperence, religion, Sunday Schools, churches, ets., P.S. Davis publisher, had a brief existence. These last four papers were all published in Pomeroy. Middleport's Meigs County Bee, put out by Farrell & Butler in September of '81 was another one of the newspaper failures. Butler soon disposed of his interest in the Bee, the press was moved to Pomeroy, where it was soon lost in a fire. On the West Virginia side Journalism made several unsuccessful attempts to establish itself. The Mason County Journal, (See above) moved from Clifton to Mason City in 1875. There it continued several years, first under the management of W.H. Pilchard (Principals of Mason schools), then with Allan Mason and his son John Mason as editors and proprietors. In the spring of '89 a second journalistic attempt was made at Mason City by T.L. Davies, Charles Edwards and John L. Mason. The name of the new paper was The Mountain Messenger; its politics, Republican. On May 8 of the same year Pomeroy's Tribune said of Mr. Davies, the Messenger' s editor-in-chief: …T.L. Davies, Republican member of the W.Va legislature, was elected last fall. After his nomination Mr. Davies bought the Point Pleasant Gazette on easy terms, but couldn't meet his obligations and had to give it up. Now, after support from the Gazette in his political aspirations Mr. Davies blossoms forth as an opposition editor. This is neither good politics nor good business sense. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 573 Before the end of its second year came the end of the Messenger's career. Clifton's last paper was the Valley Tribune, published in the late 1870s and early '80s by J.A. & M.S. Gibbons. This publication lived longer than did any other newspaper on The Bend's south side; it lasted five years. Uplifting the Spiritual and the Moral Side Religious zeal expressed itself materially in the building of new churches to replace the outmoded ones of earlier times. At Pomeroy, St. Paul's Lutheran Church, built in 1846, was destroyed in the fire of 1884. By July 19, 1885 a new brick edifice stood in its place, ready for dedification. Between 1890 and 1900 the Presbyterians, the English and the German Methodists, the Catholics—each had a new church building. The Catholic church was a stone structure, the others were brick. Each was opened with impressive ceremonies. Some time between '93 and 1900 was built the Episcopal Rectory—the gift of Judge P.B. Stansbery and wife to commemorate their young daughter Cecelia, who died at Ashville, N.C. in 1893. On December 20, 1899 the Baptist Church on Butternut street was seriously injured by fire. (A new Baptist church was erected in the early part of the next century.) Welsh churches, owing to the departure of so many Welsh inhabitants, declined greatly in number during this period. As shown above, purely German congregations had become things of the past by 1900. Efforts were made in the 1870s to found a Swedenborgian, or �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 574 New Jerusalem Church in Pomeroy. Judge T.A. Plants, who held the office of Lecturer at the Middleport church, gave a series of lectures on swedenborg's doctrines at the Court House on the Sunday afternoons of the month of December, 1877. If ever founded, the church was of very short duration. At Middleport, the New Jerusalem (later, New church), the Baptist and the Christian churches all were replaced by new substantial brick buildings. The new Christian, or Church of Christ, building was dedicated on February 9, 1890. "Rev. Ira J. Chase, Lieutenant Governor of Indiana, is to preach the dedication sermon. The church is not strong numerically, hence any aid… will be gratefully received," said the official announcement of the dedication. "Miss Ida Semple entertained the members of New Church, Middleport…" a news item stated in the late 1890s. Two facts are revealed in this item: 1st, that Middleport's Swedenborgian organization was still functioning; 2nd, that its name had been shortened to New Church. Said the Meigs County Republican on May 30, 1877: Miss M.M. Laughead, Mrs. Wm. Skinner, Mrs. S.F. Berry, Miss Ida Van Duyn, Mrs. L. Cheatham, Miss C.R. Strider, Mr. & Mrs. J.W. Worley, Mrs. S.D. Webb, dr. Dan Hartinger and wife, Henry smith, Mr. Charles Mathews and others, will attend the Universalist State Convention at Belpre tomorrow, May 31. In January of 1877 the Reverend C.P. Maples of Grace Episcopal Church was still announcing evening prayer and lectures to take place at Middleport's Universalist house of worship. But no Episcopal church building ever was build in Middleport. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 575 On the West Virginia Side— A Lutheran church was built at New Haven in the year 1873. Hartford's Baptist minister, The Reverend L.E. Peters, ranked high among The Bend's clergy of the 1870s. Its very versatile local preacher, W.W. Harper, "clerk, school teacher, brick-maker, contractor and builder, and politician between times," joined the Universalist church at Middleport in 1877. Mason City's M.E. Church upon the death of the Reverend Jacob Bird fell heir to several hundred dollars with which to make some needed repairs and alterations on the church building. In 1887, only a few years after said repairs and alterations had been made, the O.R. Railroad was built through First street (on which street the M.E. church stood), whereupon the M.E. church building was moved to Second street. In the middle of the '90s the coming of Union College to Mason brought with it the need of a local United Brethren church. By that time the great decrease in the membership of the German Evangelical organization made the holding of services for that denomination impracticable; and so the latter sold its church building to the United Brethren, which denomination had built the church origanally. Episcopal services had been held in the Mason M.E. church during the late 1880s by the Point Pleasant rector. In 1890 or '91 the Mason City Episcopalians had a small brick church built on Second street. By 1900 the building had been sold to the Seventh Day Adventists, who had recently effected a church organization in Mason City. Mason City's Catholic church, (St. Joseph), suffered a serious depletion in membership. By 1900 the large number of Catholics �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 576 that had been coming regularly to St. Joseph's from West Columbia, Clifton, Hartford, New Haven and Graham Station, had been reduced to such degree that the few remaining members no longer could support a priest of their own; and so St. Joseph's became a mission church again. The little Welsh Baptist church on Third street was closed long before 1900. Several years after the church was built (see above) Capt. James Shoemaker and other local Baptists, assisted by Charles Branch of Pomeroy, united with the Welsh congregation to organize a Sunday School. The school's first sessions were held in the Odd Fellows' Hall; but soon they were moved to the old Welsh church on Third street (before it was occupied by the Negro school), and finally to the new but smaller Third street church building. There the Sunday School finally expired in 1878 or '79. (This Sunday School was held in the afternoon, hence had been attended by children of other denominations also.) Mason City's Negroes during the town's industrial high tide had been strong enough to support a regularly organized church. Its services were held in the Negro school house on Third street (the old Welsh church). By 1900 Negro services, both Church and Sunday School, had been permanently abandoned. Clifton's one church organization, the Methodist, owned also a parsonage. That fact may have been one consideration when in the early 1880s it had been decided to unite under one minister the Mason City and the Clifton churches. The Reverend William Raybould, pastor of Middleport's Wesleyan Methodist Church in 1874 (so 1isted in DIRECTORY), soon afterwards joined the Universalists. After opening his meat market in Clifton in the latter '70s Mr. Raybould "propounded Universalist doctrine �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 577 on Sundays to a small congregation. He was often assisted by Rev. W.W. Harper of Hartford." [Correction made to conform to quotation]. West Columbia's Welsh church of the 1850s was only a fading memory during this last quarter of the century. Its U.B. church, likewise almost forgotten, was recalled when the United Brethren brought their college to Mason City in the latter 1890s. Someone remembered the U.B. church bell that had served also as town bell in the "days of yore." After long searching the bell was found, brought to the Washington Hall "campus," erected on a scaffold, unveiled with a befitting ceremony; after which it was used again to call workers to and from their work: namely, the students of Union College. The Seventh Day Adventists, or Latter Day Saints, became numerous in The Bend during the century's last quarter. They built a church at Syracuse as early as 1882; they also had church buildings at Pomeroy and at Mason (See above) by 1900. A Ministerial Association was organized in the fall of 1877 at Pomeroy, meetings held every Monday. In the spring of '78 the Association "extended sympathy to Rev. L.E. Peters at Hartford on the death of his wife." In November, same year, it listened to a discussion by the Reverend W.W. Harper of his new religious views, (see above). The Temperence Cause introduced in the preceding period was given a new turn in April of '77 when Messrs. Truman and Kemple, travelling campaigners for the Murphy Temperence Movement, came from Wheeling, W.Va to Pomeroy. The basic idea in this movement was the signing of a pledge to abstain from the use of intoxicating liquor. Meetings were held for the purpose of persuading �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 578 men, women and children (non-drinkers as well as drinkers) to sign the Murphy Pledge. The movement spread to every other town in The Bend; two of the leaders in the mission work were W.J. Prall and the Reverend P.S. Davis. Scores of confirmed drunkards became pledge signers-that is, "teetotlers;" Children were worked on with as much zeal as were adults. At one Sunday afternoon meeting in the Mason City M.E. church a group of children were induced by an over-zealous audience worker to sign the pledge. One of the group was a little German girl whose parents, like most of The Bend's Germans, scoffed at the temperence cause; consequently the child's pledge became a family joke. To the child, however, the pledge was a serious matter; hence the clash between the parental view point and the popular view point was a secret mental trial for that child for many years. Another instance to show that the temperence cause was taken seriously by some of The Bend's children was the composition written by a little Middleport school girl. The composition ran: FOAMING LIQUOR: The foaming liquor is not good. Only drunkards drink it. When they drink it they stagger around the streets till the policemen take them to jail. Sometimes they go home and when they cannot find what they want they beat their wives and children. They sell furniture to buy liquor and leave nothing to buy bread. [Signed] Lettie Besserer. In a comparatively short time the Murphy Movement lost its force. The regular weekly meetings became more and more irregular, finally died out completely. But the State of Ohio continued its efforts to control the liquor traffic. The Dow Law, passed in 18(?), increased the tax on saloons. This had the immediate effect of reducing Pomeroy's saloons to twelve. But in the early '90s "Middleport had eleven saloons, Pomeroy has twenty-three," a newspaper item reported. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 579 The Salvation Army made its appearance in The Pomeroy Bend in the summer of 1885. Said the Middleport Herald on August 8 of that year: The Salvation Army struck Middleport last Saturday evening and struck it hard. An open air meeting was held on the Central School lot, the exercises continued later in Coe's Hall… Everyone was impressed with the earnestness… If nay good is done in Middleport everyone will say Amen. Later, the Army came to Pomeroy. By the following summer, however, the organization had departed from The Bend. The Camp Ground Movement at Mason City (see above) was in part a religious movement inasmuch as regular religious services that partook of the nature of camp meetings were held on the grounds every Sunday during the summer of 1895. Mason City's town council in the spring of '76 passed an ordinance that brought forth sarcastic and otherwise unfavorable comments from the Telegraph. Quoth the editor (presumably O.B. Chapman): Doctors of Mason City when summoned out at night have to explain to the police or be put in the calaboose and fined. …Fellows who go to see their girls if they remain till relic of the "effete despotism of the East. …We recommend the blue Law regulation prohibiting a man from kissing his wife on Sunday to the attention of the intelligent council of Mason City. To all of which the editor of the Mason County Journal replied that it was none of the Telegraph's business what kind of laws the Mason City council passed. And to which he might have added the suggestion that Editor Chapman look up Pomeroy's ordinances of the early 1850s (See above) and the editorial comments thereon. Had Editor Chapman been in The Bend in the early '90s [he had left Pomeroy by that time] he would have had occasion to ridicule his own side of The Bend for passing of the despotic ordinances. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 580 In 1894 the council of Middleport, alarmed about the moral effect of progressive euchre, which had become exceedingly popular, passed an ordinance making it a $50 offense to be caught playing the game. The Cincinnati Tribune's comments thereon ran thus: The City Council of Middleport, Ohio, seems to have distinguished itself by passing a sensational ordinance prohibiting that mild game known as progressive euchre. Young girls, matrons, middle-aged men and callow youths who play euchre for paper-cutters, book marks, tin rattles, stuffed donkeys, silver-mounted brushes and whisk brooms, scarf pins, or whatever may be offered and given as a prize, are liable to a fine of $50, and, according to a dispatch printed elsewhere, may be imprisoned if the fine is not paid. We do not know what the peculiar conditions in Middleport are that makes this once popular but rather tedius game so objectionable to the City Fathers of that municipality, but we presume that the Councilmen have not had good luck and that they have generally borne away the "booby" prize, which ought, we are sure, in this case to be either a stuffed donkey or a toy monkey on a pole. The Council of Middleport is taking a too serious view of life. Progressive euchre, if it is to be stopped at all, should receive the death blow from the pulpit and not from the law-makers. If the public men of Middleport and all other towns will look a little more closely after the purity of politics and leave dancing and card-playing to the churches, their value to the public will be less questionable. A Glance at Things Political That the Telegraph had experienced no change in politics was readily noted in the headlines above the reports of the two State Conventions held in the summer of 1877. On July 18 appeared the first report; its headlines ran: Democratic Convention! A Fair Attendance of the Unterrified! A Dog Fight to Begin With. Bombastic Resolutions. An Easy Ticket To Beat! The second convention was reported on August 8, with the following headlines: Republican State Convention. An Enthusiastic and Harmonious Gathering. Good Ticket and Excellent Platform. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 581 During the presidential campaign of the preceding summer (1876) Hayes & Wheeler Clubs had been organized at Pomeroy, Middleport, Mason City, Hartford City and probably at Racine and Syracuse. The speakers at the meetings were the prominent men of The Bend, such as V.B. Horton, Dr. D.C. Whaley, O.B. Chapman and others. A Tilden & Reform Club, also, had been organized at Pomeroy. Dr. N.D. Toby, of Clifton addressed the first meeting of the Club. "The speech was about one year out of season," commented the Telegraph, "and after the usual manner of Democratic demagogue harangues. It boded no serious alarm to the Republicans." The Woman Suffrage Question appears to have become threatening enough during the '70s to seem to require a public squelching. The second Mrs. T.A. Plants (formerly Mrs. Wheaton, M.D., of Kalamazoo, Michigan), lectured on the subject of Woman's True Mission, in March of 1877. Due to bad weather, Mrs. Plants's first audience, at Pomeroy, was small; but inasmuch as …Judge Plants several years ago made a speech in Congress advocating woman suffrage, he must have had some of the underpinning knocked out of his faith in it. Mrs. Plants concludes that the woman's rights agitation has done more harm than good. And she is probably right, concluded likewise the editor of the Telegraph (obviously B.B. Chapman). By special request Mrs. Plants gave her lecture at the Universalist church in Middleport one month later. And therewith was the agitation for woman's rights in Pomeroy Bend settled for that century; at any rate, settled sufficiently to keep itself out of the newspapers. Public Entertainment Up to the year 1884 the Pomeroy Opera House had furnished entertainment for the entire Bend. Some of the professional enter- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 582 tainers that came to Pomeroy during that period were: The Clara Wildman Comedy Company, in January of '76, with three plays: Married and Divorced, Rip Van Winkle and Two Orphans–on three successive nights. The Jubilee Singers, of Tennessee, in June of '78. The Singers "gave good satisfaction and had a fair house…" was the editorial comment thereon. The Mr. and Mrs, Arthur Love Entertainment, in April, '79. Though not well attended this entertainment was "the best in Pomeroy for a long time," said the Telegraph. It consisted of vocal music and character sketches, "the latter quite refreshing." Mr. Love played twenty-seven different instruments and Mrs. Love sang. She was pronounced a "very fine singer." In May, 1880 the Vincent Comedy Company "gave good entertainment for three evenings at the Opera House; but the attendance was small." But in June of the same year the Duprez & Arnold Minstrels "had a large attendance. There was much amusement and nothing objectionable." Among the performances given by amateurs was a concert given by Marietta College in April, 1878. "… good but not attended according to its merits," was the editorial verdict. The musical entertainment given by the Pomeroy Choral Society in November, 1878, upon which no editorial comment was made. The Society was composed of Germans. The Cantata, Ruth the Moabitess, by Middleport talent in December, in '78 was "well attended, gave good satisfaction. There was some fine musical talent; all were well trained," the Telegraph thought. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 583 The Stereoptical Panoramic Exhibition, in April, '79, "illustrating in a continued series, the Life and Death of Jesus, A Drunkard's Progress, an Ill-Fated Ship, and other things, some comical, some mysterious. Proceeds for the Baptist Church." After the destruction of the Opera House in the '84 Fire Pomeroy was without such a place of entertainment until the year 1889. In December of that year the new Play House built on Second street by the Pomeroy Opera House Company was "dedicated" by the Lizzie Evans Comedy Company. The P.O.H. Company was organized in January, 1890, with Gottlieb Wildermuth, president; H.V. Bailey, vice president; John Franz, treasurer; Roll. P. Skinner, secretary; Will S. Davis, manager. The Opera House attraction that ranked far above all others of the 1890s was billed for Saturday, February 8, 1896. It was to be the "First Appearance in Pomeroy of the eminent young legitimate actor Mr. John Griffith, 'The Greatest Living Mephisto,' in Henry Irving's spectacular dramatic version of the's FAUST" Newspaper comments after the play summed up to: Superior performance, crowded house, most enthusiastic audience. At Middleport's Opera House (Schreiner's corner, Rutland and Second streets) on December 22, 1876, local talent presented a dramatic entertainment consisting of the two plays, Married Life and That Rascal Pat. The players were: Messrs. Murray, N.I. Behan, Will J. Hudson, H.C. Teeter; Misses Mary Skinner, Lucy Grant, Nettie Logan, Callie Grant, Ida Van Duyn, Katie Skinner. In 1878 Coe's Hall (Opera House) was erected in Middleport, on corner of Second and Mill streets. That none of the professional plays, which presumably appeared at Coe's, can be given here is due to the fact that the Middleport newspapers which are in the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 584 Meigs County Newspaper File do not record such entertainments. The smaller towns, too, had their dramatic clubs wherein local talent could find opportunity to shine for the entertainment of the public. In the towns which had no public halls, one of the church buildings was usually available-- inasmuch as the performance generally was given for the benefit of one or the other of the local churches. Mason City was fortunate in having a fairly adequate public hall, the Odd Fellows' Hall on First street and later the I.O.O.F.'s Washington Hall, on Second. When the Arthur Love gave their entertainment at Pomeroy in April of '79 they gave it also at Mason's Odd Fellows' Hall the succeeding night. There it was well attended and thoroughly appreciated. Mason City's star dramatic entertainment was given in April 1897 at Washington Hall, as one feature of the series of functions celebrating that building's completion. The play given was Uncle Tom's Cabin; the performers were: Seth Thomas, Thomas Mason, E.A. Allemang; Misses Blanche Roush, Lulu Hanna, Ada Batterson; and Mrs. Jack Myers. For musical entertainment the, Amy Whaley Concerts had no peer. In 1896, after a thorough course in voice culture in the East, Miss Whaley returned to Pomeroy and with the aid of other local talent immediately launched forth on a series of concerts that took The Bend by storm. A few newspaper items will give an idea of those concerts and the impression they made on the public: [July 15, 1896, on Miss Whaley's First Appearance]. --The Whaley Guckenberger Concert, with Miss Whaley soprano and Prof. Guckenberger at the piano, assisted by Dr. T. Spencer Owen basso and Prof. Jacob Mees viol1nist and the Pomeroy Mandolin and Guitar Club and the Hotchkiss Band, was truly a great musical treat-the greatest of many seasons. [Pomeroy Opera House]. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 585 [February 4, 1898]. A crowded house of admiring friends greeted Pomeroy's talented soperano, Miss Amy Whaley, Friday night at Coe's opera house. Miss Whaley is always greeted with a good audience; "strong reason why". [October 26, 898]. The Amy Whaley Concert Company will give its opening concert of the season at Coe's Hall, Middleport, on November 3. The company is strengthened by some metropolitan talent… Bands and Orchestras, of which Pomeroy always could boast a goodly number, furnished public and private entertainment during this period. Prominent among them was the Hetzel Orchestra, of which unfortunately, no information was available. A group of headlines in the October 11, '99 Leader caused many Pomeroy readers to open their eyes in questioning bewilderment. The headlines ran: OUR GERMAN VISITORS For the Dewey Celebration in New York and the Soldiers' Reunion at Pomeroy, a Band direct from the Fatherland! Best of all Europe, Attached to the Royal Hussars, at Kaiser Wilhelm's own Request. But perusal of the article itself revealed to their amusement that Herr Adolphus Wandel, Heinrich Scharf and the several Wilhelms in the Band were their own town boys. Editor Smith's little hoax was based on the fact that "A Little German Band" recently had been organized by Adolph Wandel, Henry Scharf, William Bichman, William Hetzel, George Frick and Thomas Crosbie-all Germans except the last-named. This band made its debut by masquerading as grotesque-looking Germans and starting out on a serenading tour, making the first round in Pomeroy, the second in Middleport. On these jaunts they stopped in front of the homes of all prominent Germans and of several non-Germans, rousing them from their slumbers with the "awe -inspiring strains of Die Wacht(??) Rhein, and the livlier ones �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 586 of Lauderbach. Middleport's bands and bend members appeared as follows: [About 1877]. Our Silver Cornet Band, with Capt. S.B. Womeldorff as Band Master, made an excursion trip to Cincinnati last week for Mardi Gras festivities. They went down on the Telegraph and returned on the St. James. [June 20, '77 Herald]. Our band boys are putting on more airs. Charley Probst, celebrated E b player, just received a new instrument from Germany; it is silver, gold mounted, and cost $85. It is finely engraved, was tested by Hi Henry the renowned cornet soloist and pronounced the very best. It can be changed from E b to B b and from A sharp to C sharp, is really four horns in one. [July 4, '77 Herald). W.B. Probst has received from London a Solo trombone. The instrument is double silver plated, gold mounted, and cost $75. [July 13, 1898]. Selby's Concert Band, of Middleport, gave a street concert in front of the J.A. Franz store Wednesday evening. Franz Brothers had a fine supper for the boys. There were fire works by the Franz Bros. and also by Judge Stanbery. AD in Middleport Republican-Herald: Selby's Concert Orchestra, under the direction of Harry Selby, ten pieces. Also Selby's Concert Band of fifteen uniformed musicians. Music by either band or orchestra furnished promptly at reasonable prices. Mason City's brass band, The Mason City Cornet Band, in August of 1878 was employed to play at the Ripley Fair (Jackson County, W.Va.) The Ripley Herald said the band furnished good music and added much to the interest and attractiveness of the fair. "A good set of fellows; we hope to see them again next year," the Herald concluded. Mason's most outstanding musician of the 1890s was Jacob Mees, violinist. In April, 1897 Mr. Mees gave at Washington Hall what was the town's highest type entertainment not only of the year but of the whole period: the Mees Concert. The young violinist was assisted by the Pomeroy Mandolin Club, Cornetist Prof. Lewis of Middleport, Dr. T. Spencer 0wen basso, and Miss Amy Whaley. "Profs." Scharf, Bichamn and Crosbie, though not on the program, favored the �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND, 587 audience with excellent banjo and guitar selections. Again in January, 1898 Mason City was treated to a Mees Concert, this time by the Mees Orchestra assisted by both Pomeroy and Mason City talent. Among the latter was Willie Diehl, youthful violinist of exceptional ability. These two concerts were attended by many of Pomeroy's music lovers; they were the second and third occasions on which Pomeroy could come to Mason City for high class entertainment, the first being the Chatauqua lectures of the summer of 1894 (See above). Such occasions were unprecedented in Mason City annals; nor were they ever again presented. Circuses came to Pomeroy during the 1876-1900 period but with decreasing regularity. Middleport, because it had more room, became The Bend's “show town,” with show grounds on the corner of Third Avenue and Locust street. The special feature of John Robinson's Great World Exhibition when it was in Middleport on May 6, 1880 was a "New Electric Light Show, the Brush Electric Light, in many respects preferable to the Edison Electric Light." In September of '96 the John Robinson & Franklin Brothers' Big Show put up its tents "near the site of the old steel mill plant at the lower end of Middleport." Mason City was seldom visited by circuses, hence May 23, 1888 was a Big Day for the town; for on that day Robinson's "ten Big Shows were to be brought to the Mason wharf "in three model barges and three open floats by str. “Ben Hur”-so the bills said. The "Green" between Front street and the River bank served as a show ground. There was a parade, of course, and throngs of people-and �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 588 unalloyed disappointment in the show. French’s New Sensation, popular River show boat (theatrical shows), visited The Bend regularly during the 1890s. Its caliope made known the boat’s arrival throughout the entire Bend. Baseball reached its climax in Pomeroy Bend during the last decade of the 19th century. Spectacular games, near-professional games, games with professionals, characterized the period. On Tuesday, August 25, 1891 was played at the Pomeroy Ball Park in Suger Run “That Famous Game” between two groups of Pomeroy Gray Beards, the “Excelled Nine” and the “Cracked Nine.” The players began to appear on Court street soon after one o’clock said the newspaper account of the game, the “Excelled” in white pants, black stockings and black caps; the “Cracked” in blue pants, white stockings and black caps, contributed by the New York Clothing House. The cheers and jeers, cries and guys of the irreverent public were borne in a manner becoming to the station of the players and the object of the game. John S. Davis & Son’s band wagon, and four princely grays took the players to the grounds. Henry Priode’s big wagon, drawn by Judge Stanbery’s high stepping sorrels and Dr. Whaley’s shining blacks bearing the Middleport Cornet Band, followed. The procession paraded the city the band wagon, players, the “Ambulance” (Davis meat wagon), footmen with stretchers; Hezekiah Peyton’s inky person in calico of many colors, plug hat, candy bucket and immense sponge on one arm, a monster bottle labeled “Arnica” on the other, a towel on his shoulder, brought up the rear. The procession went up Second to Sycamore, down Front to Butternut, then to the grounds. Sam Wallace entertained the onlookers with a jig, Dr. Whaley executed a waltz. Harry Feiger took the players’ picture. The battle began at 2:15, raged till nearly 5 o’clock. There were many wonderful plays, numerous bad ones, roars of applause, laughter at the amusing mistakes. Ben Biggs took a stitch in his thigh, had to stop early but remained on the ground and later a duster helped to keep them in place (except when he was batting and running). At the middle of the second inning Steinbauer & Dixon’s free lunch stopped the game temporarily, while the band filled the space with sweet music. At the end of the fifth inning the game was declared closed. The Excelleds came off victorious by two runs, but the Crackeds played the evenest game. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 589 Gate receipts were $201.95. The ladies at the refreshment stand took in $29.40. Expenses were about $16.00, leaving about $215 to be divided between the building funds of the two churches [M.E. and Presbyterian]. The Players and Their Ages (Year of Birth) EXCELLED Nine Capt. D.C. Whaley 1828 P.B. Stanbery 1832 E.D. Robinson 1841 B.F. Biggs 1833 George Minich Sr. 1822 T.C. Flannegin 1829 A.W. Seebohm 1826 L.H. Lee 1827 W.L. Downie 1829 S.A.M. Moore 1823 R.H. Brewster 1830 CRACKED Nine Capt. W.J. Prall 1826 George McQuigg 1830 S.D. Wallace 1836 J.V. Smith 1816 John A Franz 1842 Lewis Paine �1833 George Joachim 1834 Alban Davis 1832 A.D. Brown 1827 A.B. Donnally 1827 Charles J. Prall, Umpire, 1859 (Reason for extra Excelled was not given.) On October 9, 1893 a second sensational game was played, this time at Middleport, by the Overfeds and the Underfeds of the town. OVERFEDS Nine (Fatties) Capt. John Grogan Walter Cushman Robert Ellis J.W. Dumble Jeff Gardner D.S. Hartinger W.A. Hanlin (M.D.) O.A. Rowley Lutie McCaskey John Custis Average weight, 219 pounds UNDERFEDS Nine (Leanies) Capt. S.P. Humphrey L.A. Thomas Dr. C.R. Reed J.B. Hysell A** Starkey J.T. Lewis J.E. Dowling R.A. Bryant Henry Wessa O.N. Marihugh Average weight, 127 pounds �The Fatties were the victors. George Clifton acted as Umpire Fred Eisele as Score Keeper. “The uniforms of both sides were stunning,” wrote the reporter. “The most amusing thing was the many quarrels between Captains Grogan and Humphrey. The merest trifle set them to spitting and spatting like two Thomas cats.” (Special purpose of the game and gate receipts, if any, were not included in the Republican’s account of the game; nor was the placewhich was surprising inasmuch as an item of September, 1885 said that 80 men were making the “famous baseball ground” ready for the mill. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 590 Mason City’s first baseball ground of the 1890s was the aforesaid “Green”-exalted to “Dog Fennel Park” in a Pomeroy write-up of a certain Pomeroy-Mason game early in the decade. By the middle ‘90s the Green was abandoned and a part of the Batterson farm in Adamsville secured for a ball park that better suited the needs of the many games that were now played on the Mason grounds. Mason’s ball team had acquired a reputation in The Bend by that time. The summer of ‘95-Mason City’s Chatauqua summer-was especially favorable for games on the Mason grounds. A “crack team” from Carbon Hill, Ohio, another from Gallipolis, others from other points outside Pomeroy Bend played the Mason team on its own park. “About 1000 onlookers,” and “Attendance from Pomeroy equals that from Mason City,” were some of the items descriptive of the popularity of the Mason City games. And whenever the Mason team was the victor, it was “The Camp Grounds City” that won the game, in that summer’s newspaper nomenclature. An item of June, ‘99 suggests further changes at Mason: The Clerks of Middleport and the Clerks of Pomeroy played a game at the Mason City Ball Park Association Park last Thursday. Victory for Pomeroy, 14 to 4. The game was replete with brilliant plays on both sides. That item suggests that ball playing at Mason had taken on a commercial tone. As indeed it had. The town had produced several players who showed professional ability. During the summer of ’98 the Mason team played a number of games that brought these boys into prominence and great crowds of fans to Mason City. In two games with Columbus, Ohio the C.H.V. & T. railroad ran excursions from Columbus, most of the 200 or more excursionists attending the ball game. (In the first game the Mason boys downed the Columbus team but in the second-in October-Columbus was the victor.) �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 591 Wherefore it occurred to some of the twon’s business minds that the time was ripe for putting ball playing on a business basis. Accordingly E.A. Allemang, who had as a sort of pastime managed the Mason team the past few years, in the fall of ’98 organized the Mason City Ball Association, rented grounds above town and by the beginning of ’99 had the game on a strictly commercial footing. During the year of ’99 some of the outstanding games were: [July 1, ‘99]. Great Game at Mason Sunday between the famous Mason Ball Club and Charleston, W.Va., which Charleston lost. [September 2, ‘99]. The Lancaster team suffered its first defeat at Mason City Sunday afternoon. Upwards of 1000 people were in attendance. The H.V. & T. brought several hundred excursionists from Columbus and Lancaster; the K. & M. later in the day brought a crowd from Kanawha. Gate receipts were $106.00. The BIG game of the season was to take place on September 5. It was to be between the Cincinnati Reds and the Mason City club. The Reds arrived at the appointed time; but they arrived in a rain storm; and the game couldn’t come off. But it did come off a month later-on October 2, Sunday. On the grounds was the largest crowd ever seen there. The Mason boys lost, as they expected to do. But they were considerably encouraged by the compliments they received from their opponents. The next year (1900) the Mason ball park was moved to the large vacant space between Mason City and Clifton. By that move the PomeroyMason ferry company’s loss became the Clifton-Middleport ferry company’s gain. Meanwhile amateur games by special groups for special purposes drew crowds of spectators to the Pomeroy and Middleport ball grounds. During the summer of 1900 the “Doctor and lawyer teams met on the field of battle at the Sugar Run ball park.” The players on the Lawyers’ side were: R. Russell, McQuigg, Hartley, Peoples, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 592 Blackmore, A. Russell, Miller, Ihle, Lee, Shannon; on the Doctors’ side were: Stobert, W. Hanlin, B. Hanlin, Gribble, C. Downie, Hartinger, Ebersback (names are given here exactly as listed in the newspaper write-up). The lawyers were the victors. Proceeds were for the public library. Social Diversion Benefit balls in the winter, benefit picnic dances in the summerboth continued poplar during the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Masquerade balls were “all the rage” during the winter of ’79. They were usually given by one of the local bands at some public hall-Silverman’s at Pomeroy, the Odd Fellows’ at Mason. Mason City’s Picnic Ground (in the woods out beyond Anderson street), broad and level and only slightly elevated, was usually chosen for The Bend’s more widely attended picnics. On June 19, 1977 the Independent Order of Foresters held its annual celebration on those grounds. All the lodges of The Bend as well as several from “up Kanawha” and from farther up on the Ohio were present. Dr. Toby of Clifton made the welcoming address, Dr. D.D. Lane of Point Pleasant was orator of the day. Charles E. Hogg, County Superintendent of Schools (Mason county), made the closing address. There was feasting and dancing throughout the day. In July of ’76 the Catholics of Mason, Hartford, Clifton and West Columbia held a grand picnic on the Mason Grounds. Catholics and nonCatholics from Pomeroy and other places attended. A silver-headed cane was voted (at 10c per vote) to the most popular gentleman present, a diamond ring to the most popular lady. The winner of the cane was Dave Stephenson of Clifton, the ring was won by Miss Anna Cunningham of Mason. �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 593 In September of 1880 Mason City’s German Church held a Harvest Home Picnic on the same Grounds. B.J. Redmond of Clifton was voted a horse, bridle and saddle for being the most popular candidate for the office of county sheriff. In acknowledgment of the compliment Mr. Redmond presented the outfit to the Church. C. Handley, Democratic candidate for the same office, donated $75. At each of those church picnics dancing was the principal moneymaking social diversion of the day. In 1883 or ’84 the owner of the Mason Picnic Grounds cleared a large part of them for cultivation; thereafter the M.C. Salt Company’s salt sheds, along the River bank, were used for picnic dances and other similar occasions. Sleighing parties, whenever a “good old-dashioned winter” came along to make them possible, were occasions for social enjoyment. In January of ’79 a sleighing party from Middleport to Gallipolis was pronounced the “largest and merriest of the season.” The participants were: Mr. and Mrs. J.S. Blackaller, Mrs. E.L. Menager, Miss Ella Train, and Fred Train Esq., of Pomeroy; the Middleport members of the party were: Misses Lillie Weldon, Lillian Skinner, Libbie Watkins, Ella Womeldorff, Lillie Worley, Mamie Kennedy, Ada Lindsey, Mary Ritchie; Mrs. Electa Shore, Mr. and Mrs. O. Mauck, Mr. and Mrs. C.E. Hudson; Messrs. J.W. Worley, J.B. McElHinney, C.C. Mauck, J.B. Lindsey. The winter of ’99 was another good sleighing winter. “Capt. C.F. Besserer seems to be out all the time in one of the handsomest sleighs drawn by a pair of fast horses,” Editor Mason thought. Skating on the River and on Clifton’s Blue Goose Pond was a special enjoyment of extremely cold winters only. And after Middleport’s Colossal Skating Rink was opened in the winter of �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 594 1884-1885, there was roller skating too. The “Gay Nineties” brought Society (society with a capital S) into the Bend. Middleport, notwithstanding its prohibition Ordinance (See above) appears to have assumed the role of Society Leader (for reasons not discoverable by this writer). The month of January, 1899 was an unusually gay one for Middleport’s social set, what with card parties, balls, musicales, teas, etc., and with the “Grand Euchre Party” given by “Middleport’s Four Hundred” at Coe’s Opera House” during the week of January 13. The party was described in the Republican-Herald’s “Smart Set” column as the largest social event ever held in Middleport.” Pomeroy, too, had its “Gay Nineties” whirl of social functions but were not so glowingly written up editorially as were those of Middleport. Also, every other Bend community had its “social set” that could boast of its card club and its occasional “swell ball.” The few more affluent families in the smaller communities, however, unually found their way into either Middleport or Pomeroy Society-as, in fact, they always had done heretofore. EPILOGUE When at twelve o’clock midnight of the last day of the year of 1900 Pomeroy Bend’s numerous bells united to “ring out the old, ring in the new,” as they had been wont to do for many years past, doubtless there were more than a few hearts hoping that those bells were ringing a return of, or something akin to, former industrial prosperity. Even at that very time some trusting souls were engaged in �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 595 reorganizing old salt manufacturing companies or forming new ones. In a very few years, however, all but three furnaces not only had ceased to operate but in many instances had been demolished. The First World War did indeed bring a brief period of revival of coal, salt and bromine production, all of which, however, ended with the end of the War. Three furnaces-two at Pomeroy and one at Hartford-did survive and are still in operation. But Pomeroy Bend still lives-and even prospers in its own newlyfound way under newly-found conditions. Employment is furnished by the three remaining salt plants, several individually-owned-and-operated coal mines, various other minor industries and the Philip Sporn Power Plant at Graham Station, a short distance above New Haven. (That Plant, built in the 1950s, is said to be the largest Steam Generator of Electricity in the World.) Even The Bend’s part of the Ohio River itself has undergone a great change. A super-dam (Eureka Dam, Gallipolis), constructed about 20 miles below Pomeroy during the 1937s, maintains the same year-around depth of water for some distance beyond, or above, Pomeroy, giving that part of the River the appearance of a placid lake (and covering permanently some heretofore low-lying summer gardens). But the old stern-wheel towboat has practically disappeared from The Bend. The salt made at the three salt furnaces is packed in bags instead of in barrels as formerly and is shipped by rail or by truck to the purchaser of the commodity. Consequently coopering, or barrellmaking, has become one of the lost industrial arts of the Pomeroy Bend. Not only from Pomeroy Bend has the stern-wheel steamboat vanished but even from the entire Ohio River; steam power has been prac- �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 596 tically displaced by motor power throughout that waterway’s entire length. Hence it is the diesel boat that is quite frequently seen making its way around the Horseshoe curve with its tow of coal or steel or petroleum products on its frequent trips between Pittsburgh and New Orleans or intermediate points-, seen, but scarcely heard is the newstyle tow-boat; for, instead of the loud, noisy “scape”, or puffing of the old-style steamboat there can be heard only the almost noiseless beating of the craft’s diesel engine. Yes, Pomeroy Bend is still alive-not merely alive but is actually growing. The growth can hardly be called a material one, however; it is rather an intellectual and cultural growth resulting from a keepingabreast-of-the-times spirit educationally and spiritually. Schools on each side of The Bend are up-to-date, progressive. From the Ohio side’s Middleport, Pomeroy and Syracuse high schools and the West Virginia side’s Wahama High (Waggener Dist., Hartford, Mason) are graduated boys and girls whose grandparents in some instances were either almost if not quite illiterate or could speak, read and write only in German. Some of those graduates go on to college after graduation, some enter the teaching or other profession, others remain in The Bend, marry, and become the parents of future Pomeroy Bend children-each one thus reflecting credit in one way or another on his or her Ohio River birthplace. Among The Bend’s older residents cultural, social, religious and business interests are furthered by garden clubs, business men’s clubs, church organizations, etc., etc. FINALLY.-It can be safely assumed that if the history of Pomeroy Bend’s latter twentieth and (or) its twenty-first century history ever is written, such a history will present that Bend, �A.F. Lederer, POMEROY BEND 597 NOT as a separate industrial unit but as a part of the future “RUHR OF AMERICA,” which some far-seeing writers are visualizing as the appropriate appellation-to-be of the entire Upper Ohio Valley, of which The Pomeroy Bend with its coal-laden hills is, after all, only a comparatively small part. �Anna F. (Frederica She always used initial F.) Lederer Author of "Drama of the Pomeroy Bend" Miss Lederer was born July 27, 1867 at Mason, WV and died Oct. 13, 1959 at Columbus, OH. She was buried in the family plot in the Mason Memorial Hill Cemetery. Her parents were Jacob and Frederica Lederer who were formerly of Stuttgart, Germany but were married at Pomeroy, OH on Jan. 22, 1856 by the Rev. John Grimm, minister of the Peace Evangelical and Reformed Church. Anna graduated from the high school at Mason, WV. Later she took a secretarial course at Mountain State Business College at Parkersburg, WV and was employed there for several years. Still later she returned to Mason when she was needed at home. She took a course at Marshall College, Huntington, WV preparatory to becoming a school teacher. She taught in the grade school at Mason for a couple of years and then in the high school at Ceredo, WV. In the meantime she was taking correspondence courses from Columbia University with German language as a major. She spent her summers working on the correspondence courses and winters teaching at Ceredo. Finally she took a year or so from teaching and studied at the University of Chicago and graduated with an AB. degree. Then she was accepted as a teacher in the high school at Charleston, WV where she continued until her retirement from the teaching profession, about 1926. After retirement she began work full time on her book, The Drama of the Pomeroy Bend. She traveled to various parts of Meigs and Gallia counties, Ohio and Mason County, West Virginia - to Washington, D.C. and wherever she could find histories recorded of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers area in an endeavor to clarify the descendants of the pioneer residents of the Bend. She concluded the book not too long before her death in 1959 while living in Columbus, OH. The above information was provided by Katherine (Kitty) Allen Skeels who was born at Letart Falls, OH on April 7, 1889 and now lives at 2675 Summit Ave. Columbus, OH 43202. Mrs. Skeels is a niece of Miss Lederer Rewritten 1/25/80 by Charles Blakeslee Kitty Skeels died Sept, 1984 �INDEX Alexander Adams, Robert Anderson, Frank Antiquity Mills-Named By Pictured Rocks Appleseed, Johnny, Visit The Bend Ackley, Dr. Jeremiah At Letart Falls Antiquity Mills In 1861 Arnold, Rev George, Methodist At Mason, 1854 Aid For The Poor Amusements And Games Appomattox, The Close Of The Civil War Adamsville Coal Company 1864 Adamsville, Town Allen, Ricard, Store At Hartford 1864 Adamsville Celebration Aetna Coal And Salt Company 1878-1880 Attempts To Build Up Industry Antiquity 1900 Asylum For Insane Proposed At Mason 30 78-219 78 98 109 126 194 254 268 276 229 337 339 385 432 461 480 To 483 544 544 �Battle Of Point Pleasant Boone, Daniel Boundry Of The New Nation Boat Shaped Bend Described Barges Boat Yards Bradshaw Opens Coal Mines 1819 Brown, John Burthistle, George Behan, Isaac 1837 Branch Of O & Co. Dry Goods Bosworth Hotel Business Places 1845 Brick Yards Business Establishments At Coalport Brick Yards Broad Making 1837 Boats: Pirogue, Coal Boats, Flat Boats 1829-1846 Boats: Steamboats For Transporting Coal Boats: Packets In 1851 Boarding Houses: Our House Bosworth, Marcus Blaettner, Michael, Wagon And Carriage Shop 1857 Boats At Mason City: Lake Erie No.2, Liberty, Baton Rouge Bird, John Egan Bird, Jacob Bridge Across Sugar Run 1850 9 10 12 14 47 48 54 78 79 79 90 �91 91 92 95 102 110 118 119 122 124 157 181 200 211 213 222 �INDEX 2 Bridge Over Ice Creek, West Columbia 1850 Barton, Dr. Thomas, Syracuse And Hartford 1850 Banking Service 1852 Bus Service Bradbury, Samuel Bosworth, Marcus Bumgarner, Lewis Barringer, Captain Elisha Bushwackers Busy Times At Boat Yards Business Revival After Close Of The Civil War Beford Furnace Brown, Major, Plots Of Land For Brownsville Bromine, A New Industry 1869 Bromine At Mason City 1870 Bromine 1871 Boats And River Transportation Barbers In Pomeroy 1876 Banks In Pomeroy 1876 Board, Abe Kept Lincoln House In Hartford: Civil War Boats: Packets, Towboats Etc. Bromine, Manufacturing Flourshed 1876 Beech Hill Coal Company At Mason City Boiler Explosions: Clifton 1877 Pomeroy Boat 1876 Bird, Rev. Jacob Died 1877 Business Revival And New Buildings At Pomeroy Business Revival At Middleport Bank, Pomeroy National 1889 To 1900 Banks, Middleport, First National 1890 Blaetner, Edward, Store At Mason 1900 Beech Grove Cemetery 1892 Bus Service Pomeroy And Syracuse Belt Railway Commuter Service Pomeroy To Middleport 1890 Boats 1900 Boat Disasters: Charley Bowen 1878, H.E. Spilman 1900 Boats Produce Bands: German And Others 1877 To 1900 Base Ball Games: 1893 To 1900 Bend After 1900 Still Alive �Clark Nathaniel Chapman Church Organizations, First Permanet Communication Coal, First Mined In The Bend 1805-06 Carleton, William Coal Mine Chester Cross, Lucious, Tannery Coalport, Town 1830 Courthouse Moved From Chester To Pomeroy 1841 Chapman, O.B. Discuss Pomeroy’s Business Activities Councilmen: The First Council Meeting, First May 1, 1840 Coal, Second Mine On The Virginia Side Of The Ohio Condor, First Steam Towboat Condor No. 2 1846 Or 47 Carding Machine 224 231 234 238 297 298-324 299-324 306 319 330 332 332-334 345-404 347 347 350-351 354 377 378 390 434 To 444 469 To 470 �481 499 521 521 To 531 531 To 535 536 537 547 552 552 562-563 566 To 572 567 573 597 To 599 600 To 602 607 To 609 29 30 38 39 53 55 56 58 64 67 70 72 73 79 83 88 89 �INDEX 3 Cohen, Harrison, Ready Made Clothing Coal Mining At Middleport 1844 Cotton Factory At Middleport Clothing Clothing, New Style 1846 Charles Dickens, Trip On A Steamboat 1842 Cultural And Political Life In The Bend Churches And Early Ministers 1820 Church Services At Pomeroy 1838 Church, First Presbyterian, First Lutheran, First Episcopal Church, Catholic 1848 Churches At Sheffield And Middleport Church, First Methodist Organization 1850 Church, Swedenborgian Church, Sabbath School At Graham Station Church, Methodist On The Virginia Side Church, Rev. Gideon Henkle 1806 Church, Rev. Moses Michael At West Columbia, United Brethern 1830 Crosbie, Peter Coal Business Increases By Reason Of Salt At West Columbia Coal Ridge Salt Company Near Kerr’s Run 1852 Coalport Salt Company Coit, Samuel Chiselburg, 1854 Afterwards Named Letart Coalridge Flour Mill Reverses 1861 Condor 3 Built 1853 Coalport Salt Works Etc. 1857 Capehart, Henry, Flour Mill At New Haven 1861 Coalyard At Baton Rouge, La., Destroyed 1860 Churches 1850 Civic Improvement 1851-1861 Clothing 1850-1860 Chase, Dr. O.G. At Hartford Carleton, Thomas, Lawyer 1858 Chester Academy Churches In The Bend 1850 Church Bell, First In The Bend, At West Columbia Church Bell, First In Pomeroy Cox, George, Hotel Burns �Cahoon Gang Circus Comes To The Bend Courses In Lecturing Concerts Crystle Hill At Middleport Flag Raising Carleton Brothers Civil War Begins, Activities At Pomeroy Civil War, Activities In The Bend Carleton, Isaac At Syracuse Civil War Confederate Soldiers From The Bend Civil War, Deaths Civil War, The Fourth Va. Regiment Organized April 11, 1862 Convention, First Wheeling 1861 Second Wheeling Coal Companies Calaway Mining Company 1850 Camden Coal Works 1871 Calico Mines 1863 90 95 96 113 113 121 135 137 138 140 140 141 141 142 143 143 143 144 158 165 168 168 �176 177 181 181 190 201 205 219 220 228 231 232 242 250 257 257 260 261 263 264 267 291 303 305 307 317 318 322 324 324 336 336 338 339 To 224 To 230 To 257 �To 307 To 323 �INDEX 4 Carleton Coal Company Clifton, Town Carletonville, Town Coalport 1867 Clifton Iron And Mill Company 1867 Clifton Brick Yard Cotton Ties Coalridge Flour Mill Condor, The Little, Last Boat Built At Boatyard Capehart Flour Mill At New Haven Carleton Sawmill And Plaining Mill California Mining And Manufacturing Company Formed 1871 Clifton Keg Factory Clifton Stores And Business Places 1867 Civic Improvements In Pomeroy Car Line Proposed, Pomeroy To Middleport Carleton College 1874 Coates, C.T. Principal Churches At Pomeroy 1869 Churches At Middleport Church At Minersville Church At Mason City 1870 Church At New Haven Church At Hartford, First Methodist To Have An Organ Condor The 4th May Have Probably Been The 5 th Changes Made In Numerous Salt Companies Clifton, Charles, Manager Of Liverpool Salt Company Crescent Iron Company Sold 1881 Conditions Unstable In Numerous Industries Carleton, William Operates The Carleton Saw Mill 1884 Clifton Nail Mill Moved To Middleport 1866; To Columbus 1895 Clifton Nail Mill Made Great Light At Night In The Bend Clifton Keg Factory Goes Out Of Business Clifton’s Disastrious Fire April 7, 1893 Chapman Erasmus O. Dies 1900 Carleton Saw Mill Ceases To Operate 1900 Camp Grounds At Mason Proposed Chatauqua 546 Clifton’s Decline �Civia Matters In Pomeroy 1879-1880 Cows On Streets Carleton College 1870 Clifton’s Newspaper: The Mason County Journal 1875; Valley Tribune Churches And Buildings Circuses: 1870 1900 Catholic Picnic 1876 339 339 339 339 340 340 341 342 342 346 346 350 353 382 390 400 414 414 424 425 426 427 428 429 443 459 461 464 462 464 483 484 486 �493 515 542 545 546 548 550 578 585 585 599 605 Denny (Or Dana) Opens First School Dill, Major Josiah Opens Tavern Dillsburg, Town 1827 Dabney, C.W. Dudre, A.V. Makes Barrels Donnally Andrew 1921 Deaths Of Prominent People Of The Bend Downie, William Dabney Salt Company 1855; Becomes Excelsior 1860 Deed, For Land At Sliding Hill Creek 37 55 56 61 64 66 To 296 152 157 169 175 To 383 To 415 To 461 �To 467 To 485 To 590 To 604 �INDEX 5 Dwelling Houses Dutch Town: Minersville Domestic Service Dil Vernon, Side Wheel Steamer Dewolf, Daniel Demand For Salt In The Civil War Decline, The Starting Of 1871-1876 Diamond Glass Company At Mason City 1874 Decline, Forebodings Dress, Changing Of The Foreigners 1870 Deaths Of Prominent People Death Of Harrison Cohen, Violent Decline Of Industry In The Bend Decline, Further Causes And Depressed Conditions Deaths Of Prominent People Of The Bend 216 218 235 266 302 331 349 350 355 366 450 452 456 476 502 Early Settlers Of The Bend Ervin, Samuel Elliott, Fuller Education, Early Edwards, E.S. And Brother, Merchants Eggerswiller Charles, Native Of Switzerland Education 1850 �Edwards, Arthur Essays And Poetry Edwards, Edward Edwards Brothers Eiselstein, George Merchant 1856 Elberfield Philip, Store Near Stone Bridge 1868 Elberfield, Jacob Clerk For S.A.M. Moore 1865 Episcopal Church At Pomeroy 1850-1870 Elberfeld And Sons 1900 Ebersbach, Martin Electricity Comes 1898 To 1900 Entertainment, Public 1878 To 1898 8 28 30 36 90 210 – 385 242 254 278 304 308 368 368 368 422 To 424 526 526 561 594 To 597 French And Indian War Flat Boats Flanagin Daniel Made Boots And Shoew Fleming J.P. Drug Store Farm Life 1878 Flood 1840 Flood, First Mentioned February 1814 �Floods, 1832-1847 Fire In Pomeroy 1851 Fish, John, First Post Master At Hartford 1858 Food, 1850-1860 Ferry, West Columbia-Pomeroy And Maso 1854 Fourth Of July Celebration Fair, First In Meigs County Fire, Sash Factory Burns Flood, 1851-52 Fugitive Slave Case June 7, 1859; The Story Fisher, John 5 46 90 90 105 109 126 127 182 201 226 To 228 237 266 269 269 278 295 303 To 219 – 356 – 452 To 480 To 516 �INDEX 6 Ferries And Ferry Boats In Thee Bend Free Schools In Mason County 1865 Forbes, D.C. First County Superintendent 1864 Free Schools At West Columbia And Clifton First Public School At Mason City 1865 First Teachers In Mason City Free Schools Etc. First Teacher In Hartford’s Public School Floods, Cause Great Destruction 1883-1884 Fire At Pomeroy 1877-1879 Fire At Middleport 1877 Fire At Mason 1878 Fire At Pomeroy 1884 Fall Of Rock At Pomeroy 1884 Fire At Middleport 1880-1900 Fire At Mason 1897 Fire At Hartford, Major Brown’s Home Burns Ferryboats 1900 357-358 416 416 417 418 To 420 416 To 420 421 473 To 486 487 To 489 490 490 493 495 495 - 496 496 498 570 Great Bend Gallia County Formed Gaston, James Early School Teacher �Galley Boats Grant, Samuel 1817 Grantsburg, Town Goulding, Thomas “Golden Bank” Gander, Slave Sold Down The River Gray Edmund, Late On The Condor Graham Station, First Frame Building In The Bend 1809 Grant, Samuel First Frame Building In Pomeroy Built By Philip Jones Guthrie, Dr. G.S. 1837 To 1844 George, Billy Open Coal Mine At Hartford Geter’s Soap And Candle Factory 1852 German Free School Gamblers Grand Union Ball At West Columbia German Furnace Glass Factory At Mason City – Never Operated German Furniture Company 1877 General View Of Destruction In The Bend Grant, Royal Clark, Died 1885 Graham Station Post Office 1879 2 18 37 47 54 To 226 57 63 79 84 99 100 126 176 181 243 262 271 332 – 334 466 �468 490 – 493 507 555 Hughes, Frank Houdeschelt, Adam Harpold Clearings Hayman Horton, Valentine Horton V.B. Saw Mill 1834 Horton, Horace Howe, Uriah And Dr Estes Build Shovel Factory Howe, Dr. Estes, First Recorder Harpold, William, Son Of Adam Come To Antiquity 1842 Or 43 Home Of John Brown 1840 Home Of John Sehon Home Of Michael Segrist, First Brick Home In The Bend 29 30 30 30 61 – 299 62 63 – 300 64 72 98 101 101 101 �INDEX 7 Horton, Horace S. General Merchandise 1834 Howe, Dr. Estes Pomeroy 1846 Horse And Buggy Days 1840 Hard Cider Campaign 1840 Henry Clay At Pomeroy 1844 Harpold, Henry At Graham Station Henckle, Rev. Gideon 1820 Huber, Philip Harpold, Lemuel At West Columbia Healy, W.H. Hartford City Named 1853 Hogg, Thomas Survey The Town Of Hartford 1853 Humpghrey, John Erect Salt Furnace At Hartford 1865 Haag, C. Gun And Locksmith 1857 Horton’s Boat Yard 1861 Hartford City Industries, Post Office August 16, 1858 Hartford City Carding Machine And Stave Mill Harpold, William Saw Mill, Boat Yard Chief Industry Hartford Home Life In The Bend Hartford Population 1858 400 Hotels In Pomeroy Hartford Tavern, N.B. Newell Keeper Harpold, William Had No Slave Quarters Hartford City School Harpold, Philip Furnish Lumber For Mason City Church Hartford Welsh Baptist Church 1855 Harpold, William Furnish Lumber For Hartford Methodist Church Halliday, Samuel Heckard, Martin Horton, Taylor Horton, V.B. Jr. (Van) Horton, Merrill Hartford And Mason Citizens In The Civil War Hartford Visited By News Paper Editor 1862 Hope Furnace Harpold, William And Peter: Valley City Furnace Hartford 1867 Hagermann, Gustava Makes First Bromine 1868 Hartford City Oil Excitement 1869 �Hartford 1870 Mostly English Miners Hartford City Stores And Business Places 1854—1875 Hartford City Physicians 1860—1867 Hensley, Dr. William B. New Haven 1867 Hotels In Pomeroy: Gibson 1861, Remington 1861 Hotels In Middleport Hotel At West Columbia: Van Matre House Hotel At Mason City: Payne, The Wallace House, Jarrott House Hotels At Hartford: Wilson Mcbrial 1860 Sattis 1875, Lincoln Hartford, Build A Calaboose-Grade Front Street 1876 Hartford City And Pomeroy Telegraph Company 1875 Hartford City, Mason City And Clifton Proposed Railroad Co. 1875 Home Of H.S. Horton Described Home Of V.B. Horton Home Of C.R. Pomeroy Home Of Judge Irvin Home Of John King At West Columbia 106 126 126 136 137 143 143 156 168 176 176 176 176 181 181 201 201 201 207 208 214 216 �218 2** 254 256 256 298 298 300 305 307 318 331 332 334 345 347 349 362 385 387 387 388 389 389 389 390 399 399 400 400 401 402 402 402 – 303 – 303 – 334 �– 390 �INDEX 8 Home Of W.A. Powell At Clifton Homes At Mason Home Of, Major Brown At Hartford Hartford City’s First Public School Hartford And New Haven Have No Saloons Hartford Wharfboat 1865 Horton, V.B. Offered Governor Of Ohio Harpold, E.C. President, Aetna Coal And Salt Company 1880 Hartford City 1877; Saw And Stave Mill Burned Harpold And Harpold 1877 Have Big Business With Saw Mill Hartford City Co. Lost $50,000 In 1884 Flood Hartford City 1884 Flood Hartford City Gets $500 For Relief Hartford City, Major Brown Residence Burns Horton, V.B. Jr. Died 1846 Horton Thayer, Died 1887 Horton, V.B. Died 1888 Horton, Horace S. Died 1890 Horton, Samuel Dana Died 1895 Horton, Edwin J., Died 1897 Horton, Mrs. V.B. (Clara Aslop Pomeroy) Died 1894 Hartford Population: 1880-567; 1900 51* Horton And Schreiber Store 1900 Hotels Pomeroy And Middleport 1900 Hartford’s Business Hocking Valley Railroad, New Station At Middleport 1880 Hartford City’s Post Office Changed To Hartford 1892 Homes Described, Interiors, Kitchen, Food Etc. Harpold, E.C. Salt Shipment 1877 Hartford’s New Wharfboat 1891 High School Commencements 1876 Hartford’s Baptist Church Rev. L.E. Peters 1879 High School For Colored Children 1876 Harper, W.W. Local Preacher Joins Universalist Church 1877 Hayes And Wheeler Clubs; Republican Formed 1876 403 404 404 �421 432 442 450 461 469 469 475 492 493 497 503 503 504 504 505 505 505 519 529 525 To 536 548 554 555 558 To 560 565 572 573 – 575 567 574 587 593 Indians Itinerant Methodist Preachers Ice Creek Irvin, Thomas, Residence Interior Decorations Of Homes Immigration To The Bend 1844—1846 Ingles, Mary Captured By The Indians �Industrial Growth In The Bend Industrial Establishments Industrial And Merchantile Establishments Industrial Depression In The Bend 1855 To 1861 Immigrants Come To The Bend Improvements, Civic 1851-1861 Improvements In The Bend Intermarriage Of Different Nationalities Ice Creek Fill Made At West Columbia 1875 Institutes For School Teachers Icenhour, Joseph-Beech Hill Coal Co., 1899 Ice Gorge 1877 Industries, New Come To The Bend 3 38 80 92 103 123 169 179 182 184 202 208 220 224 364 398 421 481 498 537 To 190 – 205 To 214 To 224 �To 542 �INDEX 9 Jones, Benson Jones, John And James First Welsh People James River And Kanawha Turnpike 1849 Jackson, William 1850 Jenny Lind On The Steamer Messenger Passed Pomeroy Joke At Mason That Was Not Pleasant Jones, Philip Jarrett, Lemuel Joachim, Wedel Jenkins Raid, Civil War Jackson Furnace Juhling, Charles, First Post Master At New Haven 1864 Juhling, Hugo Jackson, William John Young Boat Yard Successful 1876-1877 Juhling, William: Juhling Coal Company John Young Boat Yard Lost In 1884 Flood Juhling, Hugo Sons: Hugo And Oswald 1895 Juhling Coal Company But New Boat G.W. Moredock 1893 Juhling Brothers Flour Mill New Haven Juhling Coal Co. Buy Boat: G.W. Moredock 1893 25 63 116 213 268 271 295 305 308 321 332 362 364 365 466 461 485 �548 549 549 565 King George Grants Of Land Kerr, Hamilton Keel-Boats Knight, John Opens Coal Mine 1820 Kerr, Hamilton Inn-Keeper Kraufter, Gottlieb 1853 Knight, Dr. Aquila At West Columbia 1851 Kelly, James W. Hartford Kelly, Oliver Hartford Knights Of The Golden Circle Kenney, Professor At Mason City School 1874-76 Klondike 1900 16 25 45 54 101 212 221 – 386 310 310 325 420 570 Laballe, Voyage Of Letart, Now Named Leading Creek Settlement Lallance, Peter Large Scale Development 1830 Letart Falls- Post Office 1826 Lard And Oil Factory 1845 Lee, Watch Shop Lighting Of Homes �Liquor Letter Writing Extension Lovell, Richard Charming, Moore And Smith Letart Post Office Established 1854 Leadington, Town Leadington Salt Company Lederer, Jacob Comes To The Bend From Germany 1853 Livery Service 1855 Lincoln Hill Named Lightburn’s Retreat; Civil War Lerner, Hermann, Make Bromine 1870 1 4 27 30 58 59 89 90 104 111 115 170-302 177 177 212 235 291 320 348 – 427 �INDEX 10 Lerner, Hermann And Bernhardt Lawyers At Mason And Clifton Liverpool Salt Company, How Named Lerner, Hermann Bromine Still At German Furnace Liverpool Salt Company Lost 6000 Barrels Of Salt In 1884 Flood Lerner, Hermann Bromine Business Lost By The 1884 Flood Letart Falls 1900 Lerner, B.J.: Eating House And Livery Stable 1891 Letart Store And Business 1891 Literary Societies And Libraries 351 387 461 461 475 485 544 545 549 579 – 581 Marietta Settlement Marriages, First In The Bend Mortality In The Bend Middleport 1846 Why Named Michael, Moses Minersburg, Town By James Foley And Griffith B. Thomas 1849 Miles, J.M. Tannery 1845 Magnetic Telegraph Office, First In The Bend Middleport First Business Street- Rutland Road Maddy, Charles; Dentist And Physician At Middleport Mathew, J.W- New Hotel At Middleport Mills: Flour And Meal Mill, Floating, At Letart Mill, Horse Power Of Timothy Smith 1820 Mills, First Steam Mail Service Michael. �Mason City, Early Beginning And People Mason City, Sale Of Lots Mason City Salt And Manufacturing Company 1855 Mason City; Town Incorporated February 26, 1856 Mason City, First Election; George Patrick First Mayor 1856 Mason County Mining And Manufacturing Company May 6, 1852 Moredock, George W. Middleport 1857 Minersville 1860 Mason City Growth: Industries Znd Business 1860 Miners Strike: Mason City,West Columbia And Hartford Miners Strike Pomeroy 1861 Monkey Run Myers, Dr. D. (Electric Physician) 1859 Mannassas Gap Railroad Proposed Middleport Schools Mason County Schools 1858 Mason City First School 1853 Mason City Church Mason City Picnic Rally 1860 Mason City Race Course Mixture Of The Different Nationalities Meeting At Point Pleasant: Sentiment For Secession 1861 Moore, S.A.M. Moccasin Rangers Civil War Morgan’s Raid 1863 Mason City Salt Works Company 22 39 44 45 80 80 89 94 96 97 97 107 �107 108 109 115 158 170 171 173 173 174 176 176 190 193 199 203 204 217 231 239 245 247 248 254 273 274 275 292 308 519 326 331 – 311 To 200 – 205 – 246 – 329 ��INDEX 11 Mason City Coal Company Marine Docks At Middleport 1866 Middleport Industries 1867 Mason City Industries 1867 Mee’s Mill And Others At Mason City Middleport New Companies Merchants Of Pomeroy 1860 To 1870 Merchants Of Middleport Middleport Business Places 1870 Minersville Stores 1875 Mason City Merchants And Stores 1870 1875 Meeks, Dr. James, Hartford 1861 Myers, John W. Lawyer At Mason 1868 Middleport Improvements Etc. Middleport Big Fire 1870 Mason City Wharf Grade Improved 1874 Mason City Independent School District 1871 Mason City Election---Temperance 1875 Mail Service By River 1850 To 1872 Miners Strikes 1869 Middleport Flour Company Mason City: Railroad Called It Mason: Two Names For Town Many Industries Go Out Of Business Moredock, George W. Died: Funeral 1863 Middleport Population: 1880-3,032; 1900-2,799 Mason City Population: 1880-1,186; 1900-904 Mixture Of Races And Church Services Middleport Revival Of Business Etc. Money Etc. 1900 Minersville 1900 Mason City: Two New Industries Come Middleport Post Master Elected Mason City New Odd Fellows Building Etc. Mason City Fire Department Organized Merger Of White And Colored School 1881 Mason Schools Mason City College Town Ministerial Association Pomeroy Mason City Ordinances �Middleport Ordinances 336 343 343 344 344 352 368 372 380 382 383 387 387 395 397 398 420 431 445 453 468 486 486 510 519 519 519 53i 539 542 546 552 555 536 574 576 578 590 �591 592 McMaster John Makes Furniture McDaniel, Ezekial McAboy And Spaulding Foundry 1845 McKee, John Came To Hartford 1859 McDaniel, Albert McMahan Murders Charles Waggener 64 78 89 210 217 – 306 268 McQuigg, George 1875 McCown, Moses; Drug Store At Hartford McDaniel, Captain Albert Died 1900 368 385 570 – 344 – 353 To 372 To 376 – 381 To 385 To 397 – 39 – 520 – 542 – 547 – 557 – 575 – 577 ��INDEX 12 Northwest Territory North Side Of The Ohio River Settlement Nye, Colonel Nial, Early Saw And Grist Mill 1820 Nyesville, Town Established 1827 Morgan, L.I. And Brother; Taylor Shop Nye, Nial; General Store Navigation On The River Helped By The Government New Haven, Originally Called New London Nye, L.S. Steam Saw Mill 1861 New Haven 1861 New Haven Without A Post Office 1861 New Dresser Newspaper Items Newspaper, Democrat Founded 1855 Newspaper At West Columbia 1852 13 23 55 56 90 106 119 117 181 201 273 278 280 To 286 286 287 New Haven: Boys Demonstration- Civil War New State Meeting And Speakers 1862 New Salt Furnaces After Close Of The Civil War New Castle Furnace Neuton, Douglass E. Nail Mill New Towns Adjoining Mason City �New Haven Post Office, February 23 1865 Negroes 1870 Story Of Oliver Meade Negroes; None At Hartford Or Syracuse Newspapers In The Bend 1860 – 1870 New Haven; First School Teacher0 Dan Duskey New Haven; First Public School New Industries Naylor’s Run Grave Yard New Haven’s Stores And Industries 1900 New Court House Negro School At Mason 1879 Newspapers 1876 To 1900 Negro Church 319 324 332 – 333 332 334 338 339 362 362 364 405 To 410 415 421 468 502 549 552 576 581 To 585 589 Ohio River; How Named Ohio Company Of Associates Ohio Lot Drawing Old Time Drinking Habits Ohio River; Sine Qua Non �Oil Well At Coalport 1851 Oil Fever 1861 Oil In Virginia; Companies Formed 1861 Ohio Coal Company Organized 1855 Ohio Hotels 1856 Out Of Town Travel Ordinances –Town Oyster Suppers 1 13 – 14 24 113 117 201 202 202 206 215 238 258 264 Ohio River Salt Company Oil Excitement 1865 Omnibus Service Omnibus By River Ordinances By Pomeroy Council 335 348 359 360 391 �Ohio River And Kanawha Salt Company Organized 1879 Ohio River Salt Company Formed 1880 Ohio Machine Company 1877 Ohio River Railroad, First Passenger Train 1886 Organ Factory At Pomeroy 1900 Partlow Pioneer Life Pomeroy, Samuel Wyllys Purchase 1804 Pomeroy, O.R. Pomeroy, Sons Company 1833 Pomeroy, Clara Married V.B. Horton 1833 Pomeroy Names; “Royal Apple Of The Ohio Valley” Prall, Wm. Makes Coffins Pomeroy, Town Incorporated Feb. 19 1840 Pomeroy, No Cross Streets Mentioned By Robert Ripley Paine, Samuel S. First Mayor Pomeroy Sons And Company Business Not Flourishing Pomeroy Coal Company Organized 1845 Peacock Mine 1849 Population Of Pomeroy 1850: 3,480 Post Offices, Early Post Office Changed From Nyesville To Pomeroy Oct. 29, 1840 Post Offices On The Virginia Side In 1851, West Columbia Pomeroy, Samuel Wyllys Died 1841 Probst, John Pomeroy Salt Company Organized Patrick, George; Saw Mill At Mason 1854 Post Office At Mason, January 27, 1855 Pumphrey, Nimrod Pomeroy Coal Company Has Many Banks Pomeroy Foundry 1851 Plaining Machine And Sash And Door Factory 1861 Population: Ohio Side Of The Bend: 1850, #,480 Population Of West Columbia 1860: 6,418 Population, Pomeroy 1860: 3,500 Population, Mason City; 1860; 1,016 Population, Middleport 1857: 1,590 Population, Syracuse And Hartford, Each 400 In 1858 Professional Services 1850—1860 Patrick, Dr. Alfred; Mason City �Pomeroy Academy Pomeroy High School Perry, John Teacher At Hartford 1860 Political Meetings Prominent Men Of The Bend 1850—1860 Payne, James A. Phelps, Oliver Pomeroy, C.R. In Libby Prison In The Civil War Pomeroy Iron Company 1869 Pomeroy Machine Company 1867 Proode Brothers And Company 1874 Population; 1870: Pomeroy 5,824 Population; 1870: Middleport 2,236 Population; 1870: West Columbia 778 Population; 1870: Mason City 2000 Population; 1870: Hartford 918 New Haven 489 Population; 1870: Racine 700 457 458 468 486 540 29 30 60 61 – 301 62 62 62 64 65 68 72 – 298 86 87 88 97 116 117 �117 156 157 167 172 173 175 180 – 338 180 181 207 207 207 207 207 230 230—236 251 243—244 245 250 287 296 To 311 301 309 323 341 342 351 361 361 361 361 361 361 �INDEX 14 Physicians At Pomeroy 1876 Priode, Henry And John 1849. Have Livery Stable In 1875 Physicians At Mason City 1870 Pomeroy Street Improvement Prohibition Movement 1870 Political Rallies Pomeroy Celebration Treaty Of Peace Between Germany And France Public Amusements In The Bend 1865 Post Offices And Post Masters 1870 Prominent People Of The Bend 1870 Pomeroy Bend Described Pomeroy Soap Company 1876 Pomeroy Machine Company Pomeroy, Charles R. Died 1878 Pomeroy, Samuel Wyllys Died 1882 Payne, James M. Died 1880 Pomeroy, Revival Of Business Etc. Pomeroy And Middleport Hotels Pomeroy Post Office Moved 1878 Pomeroy Fire Engine Produce Boats Pomeroy Academy Political Clubs And Conventions Pomeroy Bend After 1900. Still Alive 377 378 287 391 To 395 430—431 433—435 435—441 435 445—447 447—450 454 468 468 502 �503 511 521—531 535—536 551 558 573 578 593—594 607—609 Roush Brothers Roush Brothers Fought In The Revolution River, The Ohio Roosevelt, Nicholas Wedding Trip Root, Stephen Makes Shoes Rolling Mill Remington, W.H. Merchant Ralston And Stivers Dry Goods Reed, Darius Drug Store 1848 Racine, Town And Post Office 1852 Roseberry, James Makes Liquor Roehm, Dr. Sebastian Racine Coal Company 1860 Rolling Mill And Spike Mill 1856 Racine 1860 Remington House Roaws Of Houses: Welsh, Irish, Dutch Etc. Railroad Talks And Rumors 182-3 Racine School 1858 Ryan, Joseph Racine River, Frozen Over 1852 Republican Meeting 1855 Republican Grand Rally 1860 At Pomeroy Republican Victory Announced Roush, Jacob Rockhill, T.B 20 �43 45 48 64 88 89 90 91—107 97 113 158 178 180 196 215 216 239 246 255 273 279 289 290 291 299 309 Rolling Mill At Pomeroy 1871 Racine, Town Growth 340 346 �INDEX 15 Railroad Prospect 1867-1871 Racine Stores 1867 Racine Woolen Factory Railroad Interest 1880 Railroad Efforts And Labor Railroad Construction Railroad Station At Pomeroy Railroad The Hocking Valley Railroad Ohio River Division 1886 Relief From Congress For Flood Sufferers 1884 Reed, Drug Store 1900 Racine Business And Industries Ruttencutter, William Store At Mason River Transportation; Boats Etc Railroad, Millwood To Ripley 1890 354--355 382 469 470 471 472 472 473 486 492 497 543 547 564--572 570 Settlements In Virginia Smith, James Sayre, Daniel And Thomas Slaves; Waggeners Stedman, Rev. First Baptist Preacher Social Gatherings St. Clair: The First Ocean Boat On The Ohio �Steam Boat, The First: Orleans Stivers, Randall; Open Coal Bank 1818 Salisbury, Post Office Sprague, John Start A Foundry Stacy, Lyman, Prescribe Medicine Sehon, John, John Sr., Edmund And James Steamboat Aids Business Steamboat, Condor First Built Schaeffers Brewery Stivers, Benjamin, Sold Buggies Sugar, A Problem In 1816 Sugar Maple Steamboat Transportation: Passenger School Laws Before 1850. Ohio And Virginia Schools On The Ohio Side Schools; German Furnace, Keer’s Run, Graham Station Schools; Private Or Select School, Pomeroy Academy School House Near Hanging Rock School, Daniel Roush Barn Singing School 1840 Sheffield, Samuel Grant Shakes Hands With Henry Clay Slavery And Indentured Servants Story: Aiding Slaves To Escape By John A? Smith 1823 Story: Slave Woman Cross The Ohio River Slaves, The Underground Railroad Simpson, Nathan For Slaves Salt, First Beginning And First Made Salt Licks And Buffalo Trails Salt Licks In Ohio 1806-08 Salt At Kanawha Salines 1808 Salt At Leading Creek 1820 Salt Deep Wells First By Billy Morris 17 25 28 34 38 41 �48 50 55-296 59 64 64 78--219 81 83 94 94 110 111 120 128 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 145 148 149 150 151 159 160 161 161 162 162 �INDEX 16 Salt Great Salt Lake Underground Salt Furnace At West Columbia. Well 700 Feet Deep Salt First Manufactured At West Columbia In 1850 Salt Furnaces At Most Coal Banks Salt First Manufactured At Pomeroy 1848 Or 49 Sugar Run Salt Company 1854 Sliding Hill Creek Town Site Sayre, Charles First Post Master At Letart Syracuse Salt Company 1854 Sheffield 1851 Merged With Middleport Syracuse 1858 St. Charles Hotel, Middleport Slave Quarters Schaffer, Dr. At Minersville Syracuse School 1858 Schools In Virginia Saloon At Mason Syracuse 1858 Spoil System Tactics 1853 Slavery Question In 1857-1859 Story Of The Fugitive Slave Case Slave Drowned Starr, William C. 163 163 164 166 167 169 174 177 178 190--193 193 216 218 231 246 �272 274 281 289 293 293--294 296 304 Soldiers Relief Society Civil War Sibley, H.E. Sent To Libby Prison Suffering Of People In The Civil War Sugar Run Flour Mill Stieran, Dr. Herman Makes Bromine At Mason City Schswarz, Edward Where First Bromine Was Made Syracuse Stores Simpson, Judge Nathan And Son Perry Move To Mason City 1866 Soldiers Monument 1865 Unveiled Oct. 17, 1871 Schools And Education 1870 Steam Boats: Tow Boats Etc Strikes By Miners Salt Lost By Floods 1884 Smallpox Epidemic 1870- 1892 Syracuse Business And Industries Streets Paved Sign On Hill: St. Jacobs Oil 1880 Sehon, Andrew L. New Home 1883 Street Car Service: Pomeroy To Syracuse Street Railway, Between Racine And Middleport 1900 Spilman, H.E.: A New Tow Boat Schools, Mason The Peabody Fund 1879 Schools, Negro Mason 1879 Salvation Army In The Bend 1885 Sleighing Parties 1879—1899 Skating On The River And Pond Skating Rink 1884—1885 Society: Gay Nineties 332 323 �329 342 345 348 382 387 395 410 443 453 474--475 499--501 540 551 550 558 551 563 566 576 576 591 605--606 606 606 606 �INDEX 17 Tupper, General War Of 1812 Trade Boats Temperance Movement 1830 Travel 1851 Telegraph Service 1848 Tonsorial Service Travel: Intra—Bend Temperance Lectures Turnbull, Edward Tucker, William A. 43 106 113--144 124 233 234 236 265 304 308 Travel Between Towns 1871—76 Thomas Stephenson, Butcher At Hartford 1864 Temperance, Woman’s Crusade 1873-74 Tournament At Clifton 1869 Temperance Cause 1877 367 385 431 433 590--592 Union Mill Company Organized 1829 Union Mill Managed By Aaron Murdock And Lewis S. Nye 1845 Underground Railroad 1840 Union Salt Company 1857 United States Hotel �United States Mail; How Delivered 1850 Unted States Mail; Postage Union Schools Union Meetings 1861 56 99 150 176 215 240 241 243 292 Union Salt And Coal Company Union Of Several Salt Companies 1870 Union Coal Manufacturing Company At West Columbia 1866 Undertaker At Pomeroy Unstable Conditions Reflected In Coal And Salt Industries 1878 334 336 337 379--380 462--467 Virginia Shore Setting, The Vansickle, Captain A Company In War Of 1812 Voters, Names Of The First Vinton House Vote For Abraham Lincoln 1856; Three In Mason City 16 44 75 215 290 Valley City Furnace �Valley City Salt Furnace Sold To Aetna Coal And Salt Co. 1878 Valley Belle: Boat 1890 332 461 570 Washington, George Journey On The Ohio River Waggener, Colonel Andrew; Settlement Wolf, George Warth Brothers, Mail Service War Of 1812 Washington George: Steamboat 1816 Waggener Colony; Failed And The Cause Waggener, James Waggener, Major Moves To Point Pleasant 1820 West Columbia Wharfboat, James Martin 6 21 30 43 43 51 77 78 78 80 92 �INDEX 18 Waggener, Major, How Obtained Liquor William Henry Harrison Speaks At Pomeroy 1840 West Columbia, Town Growth West Columbia Mining And Manufacturing Company Winkleblack, John Winkleblack, R.L. Contractor At Hartford 1853 Wilding, George Open Mine 1857 West Columbia, Business Activities 1851-1860 Wallace House At Mason 216 Wharf Wilding, George Wiley, Rankin: Own Ferryboat-Kate Howard 1857 Worthington, Thomas, Governor Of Ohio 1814-1818 West Columbia 1851 Williams, Ebenezer Williamson, Captain Edmund Wilding, George Willia, Wiatt At Hartford Williams, Simon And George Moredock 112 136 164 166 170 176 176 195--199 216 223 250 238 264 281 305 307 304 310 311 �Whaley, James In The Civil War Wheeling: First Convention Women Of Hartford And Other Towns Flee To Ohio In The Civil War West Columbia, Tannery Burns 1875 West Columbia Wharfboats In The Bend Wilding, George Williamson, Captain Edmund Died 1890 Winkleblack, Robert L. Died 1893 West Columbia: Business Decline West Columbia: Public Buildings And Homes 1900 309 314 314 353 382 441--442 449 508 508 528 557 Young, John Boat Yard At Mason 351 Zeitgeist Zeitgeist 34 80--550 Zeiher, Andrew: Store At Pomeroy 530 Edit View Public Page Delete �Item Drama of the Pomeroy Bend - Full Text Direct Links • Original • Fullsize • Thumbnail • Square Thumbnail Format Metadata Filename: 9a7642263f52b5f2b6bcd581fc964dba.pdf Original Filename: Final Book.pdf File Size: 2558407 bytes File History Date Added May 22, 2018 Date Modified Mar 2, 2020 Authentication 6aa1859558ff6010303cfa52618f590b Type Metadata Mime Type: application/pdf File Type / OS: PDF document, version 1.5 Embedded Metadata • mime_type: application/pdf • omeka-xml Output Formats �� https://history.meigslibrary.org/files/original/b81deb608cfca9c6577c4ff6e313a323.doc 438b71110f2dab7411a09ec8177ef4f2 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Misc Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Drama of the Pomeroy Bend - Full Text Subject The topic of the resource A history of the Pomeroy Bend area and its inhabitants from the 18th century to the mid-1950s. Description An account of the resource This is a transcribed version of "Drama of the Pomeroy Bend," written by Anna F. Lederer in 1959, and rewritten by Charles Blakeslee on 1/25/80. The resulting manuscript is a mixture of the original Lederer text and the handwritten Blakeslee edits. The transcription follows the Blakeslee edits, when available. Additionally, any typos or grammatical errors were left in place. Words or passages that were illegible or ambiguous are marked with asterisks (***). Each page is a one-to-one transcription, ending where each physical page ends. Therefore, passages may end in the middle of a page. The back of the book contains an index, referencing historical figures, locations, and events. The entire document is downloadable in PDF or DOCX format from the "Files" section below. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF, DOC