Tracing Our Roots: New Lyme pioneers settle in South County

What defense Joel Owen presented to his wife in 1803 to convince her to leave Tolland County, Connecticut, and come to the untamed, undeveloped wilderness of Ohio we will never know, but she followed him and they have the honor of being the first settlers of New Lyme, Ohio. The area was first called Lebanon. Ohio was admitted as a state in 1803, becoming the 17th state to join the Union. New Lyme would be the 10th settled township in Ashtabula County
The Owens could not call for help from a neighbor, as the closest one was seven miles away, and the distant relationship continued for seven years before another white man ever came to the area.
Joel Owen and his wife were not the first people to inhabit the area. When they broke through the forest, they found sixty Indians already happily living off the land. According to several indigenous native online sites, the tribes most likely living in the New Lyme area in 1803 would have been the Wyandot, Seneca and Ottawa tribal members. They were descended from the original inhabitants of Ohio, which included the Erie, Kickapoo and Shawnee tribes.
I find it interesting that the Indians had lived there for years but did not feel the need to cut down the trees or clear the land. They existed with the trees, utilizing their worth where they stood. They lived in animal skin tents rather than log cabins that required the cutting down of trees.
The Owen family got along peacefully with the Indians, trading items they had or made for game killed by the Indians. It was a peaceful, compromising cohabitation that would not last.
By 1811, more folks began to arrive from Connecticut. In the new party of settlers was Peter Chapman and his family. A few years later, Mrs. Chapman was visiting at the home of Vinton B. Way, one-and-a-half miles south of her house. On her way home, she encountered a bear with a hog in his mouth. She screamed and chased after him as he dropped the hog as ran off. Another time, she found a sheep that had been killed by a wolf. Knowing her family could uses it, she saved the wool and mutton. Later the wolf returned and she chased after him with a knife and drove him away.
What daring and brave women those early female settlers were. We would not have known their stories if their children had not written them down. One of the Chapman daughters would marry Jeremiah Dodge, who would become the first merchant in New Lyme. The Dodge family came in 1812 with a land grant of 2,000 acres in the New Lyme area. Hiram L. Dodge would build a large home in what would be called Dodgeville. He had a general store and a “North Farm” where he raised cattle.
In the 1811 party was Joseph Miller and his wife Elizabeth (Huntley). They were having a very difficult time as they walked and rode along the shoreline of Lake Erie. When Elizabeth learned they were only 2 miles from their destination, she could not hold back her need to get there. Leaving the party, she went on ahead with instructions from her husband that she was to follow the marked trees through the forest and stop at the first felled tree. It had been cut down by an earlier party to mark the spot of their destination.
When the rest of the party caught up with her, they immediately cut down brush and started a fire, but the eager Elizabeth was ready to set up housekeeping after all that travel. She grabbed some nails from the covered wagon and started pounding them into the trees. Then she unloaded her iron ware and towels and hung them up until she could hang them in her log house to be built. The Millers’ daughter, Temperance, would marry Nelson Hyde. Temperance Hyde would share the story of her mother’s eager anticipation of reaching New Lyme for the 1896 book, “Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve” under the chapter on New Lyme pioneer women during 1803-1850. Hyde’s Corners at today’s Routes 6 and 46 was named after the Hyde family. Another smaller settlement was Sentinel on the eastern border of New Lyme.
Another ten years would go by before a large party would leave Lyme, Connecticut, headed for the “new country” of Ohio and the settlement of New Lyme. In 1821, crossing creeks and thickly wooded forests were 24 adventurous settlers walking or riding with four teams and four covered wagons. Two were pulled by horses and two by oxen.
One of the families traveling in the group was Rumsey Reeve and his wife Mary Ann (Baldwin) and their three children, the youngest being only six weeks old. Mary Ann hung a basket from the iron hoops supporting the roof of the covered wagon and placed her baby inside. The rocking motion made the perfect cradle. The hard trip must not have broken them, because the Rumseys would eventually have a total of nine boys and one girl.
It took six weeks to make that arduous journey of approximately 438 miles if driven today on smooth, paved and well-mapped roads. In 1803, they had to make adjustments and detours when they met obstacles, greatly adding to the length of the trip.
The women insisted on stopping every Saturday night to wash the few clothes they brought with them. It must have been bath night also. Upon their arrival at New Lyme, they were greeted by the peaceful Indians who were reported as being “quiet and friendly,” but the children were terrified of them.
Life was hard in the wilderness, and the men were gone from home for hunting and clearing land, leaving the wives and children at home alone. A daughter of Rumsey and Mary Ann married John Peck. She would later write, “I well remember of hearing my mother tell of sitting in her log house, with her little ones around her, listening to the fearful howling of the wolves, fearing lest they might climb to the roof and come down the wide chimney and of her joy at the arrival of my father, when they slunk away into the forest.”
One of the sons of Rumsey Reeve became the Honorable Leander C. Reeve, born in 1828 in New Lyme. He became the manager and proprietor of the celebrated Lone Tree Stock Farm at Rome Centre. Leander Reeve married Harriet E. Peck, born in New Lyme in 1827 to Samuel G. Peck, one of New Lyme’s first settlers.
The early settlers met for worship on the Sabbath as soon as they had enough folks to gather together. Zopher Gee and his wife and their two sons, Elmore and Essley, were regular attendees. Mrs. Gee was a woman of prayer and gladly prayed on her knees as a leader in prayer. John Gee came with the group in 1811 and by 1812 was teaching to 18 children of the settlers he had travelled with in the first log school. Nearly 100 folks now called New Lyme home.
The very first church to officially form was the Closed Communion Baptist Church built in 1832. The Free Will Baptist Church was organized in 1826. They erected a church building on Dodgeville Road in 1846. The Presbyterian Church was organized much later in 1887, with their present building being erected in 1890.
Another woman in the party, Sarepta Reeve, the wife of Elijah Brown, learned to provide extra income for her family by weaving cloth and braiding hats. She would then trade or sell the items for family necessities by traveling to Austinburg. The New Lyme settlement of Brownville was named after Elijah Brown, who came from Connecticut in 1822. Brown would build the first hotel in 1831.
Sarepta Reeve Brown’s daughter, Mary Ann, would marry Judge William S. Deming who was instrumental in developing the New Lyme Institute, the Presbyterian Church and the Town Hall. As a young woman, Mary Ann would watch her mother braid hats, then transport them on horseback to exchange for goods in Austinburg. Sarepta would run a string strung with braided hats on both sides of the horse and away she would go to market to trade her wares. Behind her on the saddle she carried a large bolt of cloth to add to a hat if it was needed.
A young girl of 17, Sophia A. Handcock, of New Lyme, would marry 23-year-old David Hall in March of 1837. David Hall was a hard worker and cleared his land of trees and built them a log home. In a very short time, he cleared 40 more acres on their farm, all by his own axe, only hiring help to remove the trees after he felled them. The next year he cleared 10 acres and the next 15, all by his own hand.
To raise money, families had to clear the land then leach ashes from the wood, boil it down to black salts or lye which they sold by the hundred weight for about two dollars and a half a hundred. To raise money enough one season to buy seed wheat, David Hall chopped 40 cords of wood for 10 dollars, much of the time the snow being a foot and a half deep. The 10 dollars bought only 3 bushels of wheat. This is just one example of how hard the settlers had to work to survive.
Next week, we will look at the struggles and triumphs of the first settlers of Williamsfield who came from Connecticut in 1803 led by Charles Case.