Page:History of Richland County, Ohio.djvu/667

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��HISTORY OF EICHLAND COUNTY.

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��British and Indians at the massacre at Wyom- ing, and for this crime, was afterward com- pelled to flee for his life and bury himself in the great forests of Ohio. He can hardly be considered a settler in the proper sense of that word. He was a renegade, and did not come here with the intention of settling in a particu- lar spot, and did not probably remain for any length of time in one place. He was here years before any survey had been made ; he could not and did not enter land ; he did not, probably, want land, or a permanent home ; he resided with the Indians, and probably hunted, fished and traded for a living. He might have planted corn and tilled the soil to a certain ex- tent, but so did the Indians. His name, how- ever, is perpetuated in the village, and, if de- serving of an}' notice whatever, it belongs in the history of this township. He cannot be classed with the Grirty and other renegades, as they were nomadic in their lives, while Green appears to have stopped on the Black Fork, at least long enough to establish a permanent village, and had influence enough among his dusk}' neighbors to give it his name. Grreen may have been the first white man in the county, but it is not likely, as Girt}^, McKee and other renegades were through here thirty or fort}' years before the surveyors came.

Mr. Norton, in his history of Knox County, makes Andrew Craig the first settler in Green Township, and also in Ashland County. He gives this description of Craig : "He was, at a very early day, a sort of frontier character, fond of rough and tumble life, a stout, rugged man, bold and dare-devil in disposition, who took delight in hunting, wrestling and athletic sports ; a ' hail fellow, well met ' with the In- dians then inhabiting the country. He was from the bleak, broken mountainous region of Virginia, and as hardy a pine knot as ever that country produced. He was in this country when Ohio was in its territorial condition, and, when this wilderness was declared to be in the

��county of Fairfield, the sole denizen of this entire district tabernacled with a woman in a rough-log hut close by the little Indian field, about a half mile east of where Mount Vernon now exists, and at the point where Center Bun empties into the Ko-ko-sing. There Andi-ew Craig lived when Mount Vernon was laid out, in 1805 ; there he was upon the organization of Knox County, its oldest inhabitant, and there he continued until 18U9. Such a harum-scarum fellow could not rest easy when white men got thick around him, so he left and went to the Indian village — Greentown — and from there emigTated further out on the frontier, preferring red men for neighbors."

If the above is a true picture, even Andrew Craig cannot be called the first settler, or a set- tler at all, as he appeared to be one of those restless border spirits that do not come under the head of "settler." He did not propose to be hampei-ed in his movements by civilization. The first settlement of the township, however, occurred in 1809, as others besides Andrew Craig came in at that time and remained. Henry JMcCart was in that neighborhood ; and Henry Newman says that one peculiarity of McCart was that he dressed his children, of whom he had half a dozen or more, girls and boys, all alike. The dress was buckskin throughout^— buckskin pantaloons and long buckskin coat reaching nearly to the knee and confined at the waist with a belt. No one was able to tell his girls and boys apart, as they all lived a good deal out of doors, and there was little difference in their complexion.

The Moravian missionary, Heckewelder, passed through Greentown, with other white men, in 1808. He says : " In the year 1808, while I was riding with a number of gentlemen through Greentown (an Indian town in the State of Ohio), I heard an Indian in his house, who, through a crevice, saw us passing, say in his language to his family : — • See ! What a num- ber of people are coming along ! What ! and

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