Page:History of Richland County, Ohio.djvu/652

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��HISTORY OF RICHLAND COUNTY.

��CHAPTER LXIV.

JACKSON TOWNSHIP*

Crestline — Its Early History — Vkrnon Station — The First Railroap — Laying-Out oe Crestline — First Buildings — A Railroad Town — Incorporated — List of Mayors — Educational Matters — The Churches — Secret Societies — Growth, Hotels, Etc.— Mills— The Press — AVater Works.

��THIS is comparatively a new place ; a little more than thirty years ago, it was not thought of; consequently the "oldest inhabit- ant " is not in particular requisition in gather- ing its history. Men comparatively young remember when its site was a good place to hunt deer. It is generally flat about Crestline, and it has something of the appearance of a frontier railroad town, being very muddy when muddy an3^where, though its general elevation is about the average ; indeed, when laid out it was thought to be the highest point above sea-level in the State, hence the name — Crest- line.

John Newman, who lived in the village of Leesville in 1840, says he was in the habit of coming down into the "big woods," where Crestline stands, to hunt deer, which were plenty, even at that late day ; also wolves, wild turkeys, etc. It was a country very similar to certain portions of the Black Swamp, in the western part of the State, to-day ; flat, swampy, but the soil is rich and very valuable, when cleared of timber and cultivated. A Dutch- man by the name of Harvey Aschbaugh, owned eighty acres of this valuable land, including the present site of Crestline. All that appeared to him valuable on the tract were the game, the timber, and a fine sulphur spring, the latter at present within the corporation limits. His cabin stood on the narrow, winding, muddy road that led from Mansfield to Leesville — the first road through there.


 * Now in Crawford County, formerly in Kichland.

��North of the Aschbaugh place, was a cabin occupied by a negro family, who owned the eighty acres upon which they resided. Where this family came from, what was their name, or what became of them, is not remembered. Their cabin stood at what is now the west end of Main street, and was erected after the Asch- baugh cabin. About the time the negro cabin was erected, another cabin was erected directly east of it, on the adjoining eighty acres, at what is now the east end of Main street, by Samuel Rutane, who had entered and purchased the land from the Government. Still further east of Rutane, was the cabin of Benjamin Ogden, on another eighty-acre lot ; further east still, on the Leesville and Mansfield road, stood the old log house called Seltzer's Tavern, in which, for many years, while all was a wilder- ness around, one Seltzer kept weary travelers in his rude loft, and fed them on "corn pone " and venison.

This was about the state of affairs, when the wave of civilization approached, and came down upon the doomed settlement, through the blare of a head-light and the fuss and thunder of a locomotive.

John Adam Thoman — a well-known name in Crestline — first saw the locomotive coming ; he could see the headlight through the dense woods in the direction of Cleveland, and knew it would strike that wilderness and scatter the wolves, deer and timber, like chaff before a hur- ricane, and immediately began his preparations to meet it and accept the inevitable. He pur-

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