Centennial History of Columbus and Franklin County. William Alexander Taylor
the Indians returned, with their tiny captive smiling and cooing in the arms of the bronzed chieftain, and she too was resplendent in gala attire. In addition to the other gay outfitting, her feet were encased in a pair of dainty and artistically beaded buckskin moccasins.
The Wyandot manteaux and moccasin makers, for the purpose of giving the mother a happy surprise, had unceremoniously carried the child to their own town, where she could be fitted out and become a Wyandot Princess, and as such they had evidently adopted her before returning her. For many years Keziah retained the moccasins and trinkets, and told the story of that adventure to her children and her children's children. Finally the younger generations a few years ago unconsciously imbibed iconoclastic ideas, and the relics disappeared piecemeal.
Keziah Hamlin married David Brooks, who came from Massachusetts and settled in Columbus on the 19th of December, 1822. She died February 4, 1875, leaving three sons and two daughters. One of the sons, David W. Brooks, was prominent in business and banking circles in the city. Herbert Brooks, a grandson, is prominent in the same circles in the Columbus of 1909.
The First State Senator.
The first year after his arrival Culbertson was elected to the Ohio legislature, being the first member elected from the Franklin county section of Ross county in the senate of the first general assembly of the state in 1803.
The First Mill West of the River.
The first mill was located in the Franklinton section in 1797 or 1798. It was a public utility and the first instance of public ownership, hereabouts at least. All the people helped to build it and all the people helped to run it.
The contemporaneous chronicler describes it as "a kind of a hand mill upon which they (the inhabitants) generally ground their corn; some pounded it or boiled it." The latter were probably opposed to public ownership. "Occasionally," says the pioneer historian, "a trip was made to the mill at Chillicothe." One may easily conjecture why this long trip to mill, through the wilderness, was made. The housewife was expecting company, no doubt some Revolutionary hero or some grand dame, coming from the east perhaps, and she wanted fine meal to enable her to furnish her guests with tempting johnny cake, and perchance the guests were coming from "Ole Ferginia." and what would be more to their liking than the peerless crackling shortened corn dodger, heightened to the seventh gastronomic heaven with the pale ambered and divinely saccharined maple molasses! It was worth an hundred mile round trip to secure the ingredients for such a feast.
The First Mill East of the River.
"In 1790 or 1800 Robert Balentine," says the early historian, "erected a poor kind of a mill" on the Run, near the present line of Gay street, but whether east or west of Gay street it is not stated. The Run, however, is not there at the present writing.
The First Up-River Mill.
"At about the same period John D. Rush erected," in the frank language of the historian, "an inferior mill on the Scioto a short distance above Franklinton." They were, however, both poor concerns and soon fell into ruins, and clearly enough the "sound of the grinding" was not only "low," but the grasshopper had no musical rival to divide the honors with him; but not for long.
The First Horse Mill.
Then, as a last resort, some pioneer, whose name is lost to immortal fame, erected a horse mill and managed to eke out sufficient corn meal to meet the demand of the growing metropolis.
The First Successful Mill.
Then it was, in 1805, that at a point near Worthington, Colonel James Kilbourne erected a mill imbued, as it were, with the spirit of the eighteenth century. It was a mill built on modern lines and principles and turned out wheat and buckwheat flour and corn meal in a steady stream and started Franklin county on the road to greatness, and after this there were mills and mills erected on all the streams in the vicinity of Columbus; men laid by a competence for themselves; became more than honest millers—leading citizens of county and state, whose names will continue to grace and ornament the general local annals for decades, and in many instances for centuries yet to come, as may be well and truly said of the proprietors of Carpenter's Mill on the Whetstone, Dyer's Mill on Darby, Nelson's on Alum creek and others contemporaneous with them in the first decade and the first half of the second decade of the century.
The First Mercantile Venture.
Nearly all, if not all, beginnings are small, and in accordance with that recognized law it is to be expected that the first things are small, although when we contemplate them in their fully developed form it staggers our credulity to think of them as merely tiny bubbles on the ocean of mercantile adventure.
Mr. James Scott in 1798 or 1799, the precise date being in doubt, opened "the first small store in Franklinton, which added much to the convenience of the settlers." It was certainly a great convenience to the Franklinton housewife, since she could get breakfast, wash the dishes, tidy up the cabin, go to Mr. Scott's store, purchase three yards of brown muslin and a skein of thread, return home and cut out and make a shirt for her husband, get dinner and supper meantime, and have the garment finished in time for her husband to wear down to "the public square," where the men folks met and told hunting stories in the gloaming of the forest twilight and on contemporaneous subjects, while her ears tingled, a la telepathy, at the praises of the young men touching the neat hemming and hemstitching on the shirt aforesaid.
The next store, and probably a larger one, was started by Robert Russell, Esquire, in 1803. So far as can be learned, there are now no direct successors to those merchant princes of the then unbuilt city.
The First Unseen Terror.
This was what was variously designated "ague, ager, fever'n-nager, chills and fever," and now recorded in the books as "malaria" or "malarial fever."
The original, however, could have gotten in its work on the pioneers even if it had been unnamed.
The First Capital Execution.
The first execution in the county, and within the suburbs of the present city, was that of Shateyaronyah, Anglicized into Leather Lips, a celebrated Wyandot chief and philosopher. The account was originally recorded by Otway Curry, the poet and magazine writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, and from which his nephew, Colonel William L. Curry, a valiant cavalry officer in the civil war and present pension commissioner of Ohio, furnishes the following tragically interesting synopsis: The Doomed Wyandot.
"The great northern family of Indian tribes which seems to have been originally embraced in the generic term Iroquois consisted, according to some writers, of two grand divisions—the eastern and western. In the eastern division were included the five nations or Maquas (Mingos), as they were commonly called by the Algonquin tribes, and in the western the Yendots, or Wyandots (nick-named Hurons by the French) and three or four other nations, of whom a large proportion are now entirely extinct. The Yendots, after a long and deadly warfare, were nearly exterminated by the Five Nations about the middle of the seventeenth century. Of the survivors part sought refuge in Canada, where their descendants still remain; a few were incorporated among the different tribes of the conquerors, and the remainder, consisting chiefly of the Tionontates, retired to Lake Superior. In consequence of the disastrous wars in which they afterwards became involved with other powerful nations of the northwestern region, they again repaired to the vicinity of their old hunting grounds. With this remnant of the original Huron or Wyandot nation were united some scattered fragments of other broken-up tribes of the same stock, and though comparatively few in number they continued for a long period to assert successfully the right of sovereignty over the whole extent of country between the Ohio river and the lakes as far west as the territory of the Piankishaws, or Miamis, whose eastern boundary was probably an irregular line drawn through the valley of the Great Miami (Shimeamee) and the Ottawah-se-pee, or Maumee river of Lake Erie. The Shawanees and the Delawares, it is believed, were occupants of a part of the fore-mentioned country merely by sufferance of the Wyandots,