Tracing Our Roots: The Fobes family first to arrive at Wayne

The early settlers from New York had settled along Lake Erie, spreading out from the shoreline to settle 28 townships in Ashtabula County. Coming from Connecticut to start settlements in the south of Ashtabula County in what would become Wayne Township were the members of the Fobes family.
Making up the party were Simon Kinsman Fobes, his wife Elizabeth (Jones), their son and new bride Joshua and Dorothy (Orcutt), his brother Elias and cousin David Fobes. The little party had departed from Sommers, Connecticut, a small north central town 13 miles from the Massachusetts border and 22 miles from Hartford, Connecticut. Simon was from a family of eight children, most of whom had stayed behind in Sommers with his parents.
They left at the beginning of summer on June 21, 1803, and reached the area 49 days later that would be called Wayne where future generations would still recall their name. Nine-and-a-half months later, Dorothy and Joshua would have the first baby born in Wayne whom they named Alvin Fobes, born on April 4, 1804.
Simon Kinsman Fobes would return for a sister and his parents Simon, Sr. and Thankful Fobes in October of 1807. Baby Alvin would not grow up to know his great grandparents. They died a few months after they arrived in Wayne. Only five days separated the couple’s deaths when Captain Simon Sr. passed away at age 86 and Thankful at 87 on Feb. 4 and 7, 1808.
There were no cemeteries established because there had been no deaths those first five years. Titus Hayes donated a portion of his land at the center of Wayne and the elder couple became the first to be buried at Wayne Center Cemetery. It was prophetic. Simon Fobes, Sr. had been asked why they came so far so late in life and he replied, “To start a graveyard.” And so, they did.
Titus Hayes had first come in 1798 to meet up with surveyors. He came with just his dog, his rifle, a loaf of bread and some salt in his knapsack. Leaving Erie, Pennsylvania, he walked through unbroken wilderness with high hopes and energy, putting aside fear of the unknown. On Christmas Day of 1800, Hayes would marry Phoebe Cooley in Canandaigua.
Coming to Wayne in the winter of 1804-1805, Titus and wife Phoebe, with a toddler and one on the way, traveled by sleds pulled by oxen. Passing over frozen ground and streams, they pressed on toward Pymatuning Swamp and their claim of property.
With them was Elisha Giddings and wife Philothetta (Fish), who came in 1804-1805 from Canandaigua, New York. In the following winter of 1805-1806 came Joshua Giddings, his wife Elizabeth (Pease), son Joseph and Joshua R., 10 years of age, the youngest of the family.
With the Giddings party was Nathaniel Coleman, 1779-1868, who had married Submit Giddings in a June wedding in Canandaigua in 1804. She was the only sister of the Honorable Joshua R. Giddings.
In 1806, they arrived at the Conneaut Creek, spent the night next to a fire, then blazed a trail down the Old Salt Road, through the south part of Williamsfield and Wayne to the Pymatuning Creek. It was the first time a team of horses ever crossed the creek in Wayne near where the south bridge stood.
Great sorrow came into the lives of the Giddings and Coleman families when Submit Giddings died four years later. A year later in January of 1810, Nathaniel married Kezia Jones, who had come to Wayne in 1807 with her widowed mother and her seven children. Kezia was the first schoolteacher in Wayne in 1809 and was mentioned by Joshua R. Giddings at the Semi-Centennial Anniversary of Wayne. I wonder who will be mentioned at our county’s 250th birthday of our nation and if anyone will remember them 50 years later?
Nathaniel Coleman, a Black Stringer member during the days of the Underground Railroad, died in 1868 at the age of 90. His oldest daughter Eliza married Sylvester Ward. They named their daughter Submit after her mother.
The first settled minister was Ephriam T. Woodruff, a 1797 Yale graduate who had come to Wayne in 1819 with his wife, six children and his sister. A large group of early settlers were on hand when his log home joined the others in the wilderness of Wayne. Titus Hayes, Nathaniel Coleman, Simon Fobes, Elisha and Joshua Giddings, Sam and Jonathan Tuttle and Samuel Jones were among the group.
Woodruff spent half his time preaching and aiding the settlers at Wayne and half his time he spent in missionary work and distributing Bibles within 50 miles of his home in every direction.
Settlers met in each other homes for worship and Thanksgiving very early in those first years. At Wayne Center, folks met at the log home of Joshua and Levi Fobes. Levi Fobes and wife Eunice (Brown) lived beside the church in a home known as “Zion’s Hotel.” They had 13 children, enough to fill the church without anyone else attending. On the Hayes Road, folks met at the home of Benjamin Ward.
A church meeting house had been built in 1816 but had burned down in 1831. Services were then moved to the Hayes Road schoolhouse. It was not until February of 1875 that the First Congregational of Wayne was finished and dedicated after many years of makeshift accommodations. The first Methodist church building was built in 1840. In 1866, it was moved to the Wayne Center.
If there were bells in Wayne in the winter of 1807, they were ringing for the first wedding of the township when Philemon Brockway married Sarah Fobes, daughter of Nathan Fobes. It was a big event!
In 1823, Dr. Luther Spelman (1779-1863) came to Wayne with his wife Anna at the urging of an old classmate, Titus Hayes, for whom Hayes Road in Wayne is named. Dr. Spelman had served as a surgeon during the War of 1812. He and his wife would bear 12 children, forever intertwining Wayne and Williamsfield families to this day. Dr. Spelman served the Wayne-area community for 40 years.
Samuel Jones, his wife Deborah Hayes, and five children came from Hartland, Connecticut, in 1811. The oldest child L.H. Jones was still living on the original homestead in 1876.
These are just some of the very earliest settlers in Wayne whose descendants are still living in the area. Fortunately, several of the settlers wrote in journals or passed their stories down to the next generation who continued to pass them down so we can learn of them today. Those first settlers lie beneath the soil they first stepped foot on in the three Wayne Cemeteries. They are in the Wayne Center Cemetery, where most of the Fobes are buried, and in the Roberts Cemetery and the Hayes Cemetery.
Information for this column came from the 1798-1878 History of Ashtabula County, Ohio, History of Ashtabula County, Ohio, by Moina Large, 1924, Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve, 1896, Ashtabula County History, 1985, by the Ashtabula County Genealogical Society, Where Have All the Schoolhouses Gone? by Barbara J. Hamilton, 2004.