Page:History of Richland County, Ohio.djvu/96

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HISTORY OF OHIO.

began to manifest itself. Better dwellings, schools, churches, dress and manners prevailed. Life began to assume a reality, and lost much of that recklessness engendered by the habits of a frontier life.

Cleveland, Cincinnati, the Miami, the Mus- kingum and the Scioto Valleys were filling with people. Cincinnati had more than one hundred log cabins, twelve or fifteen frame houses and a population of more than six hundred persons. In 1796, the first house of worship for the Presby- terians in that city was built.

Before the close of the same year, Manchester contained over thirty families ; emigrants from Virginia were going up all the valleys from the Ohio; and Ebenezer Zane had opened a bridle- path from the Ohio River, at Wheeling, across the country, by Chillicothe, to Limestone, Ky. The next year, the United States mail, for the first time, traversed this route to the West. Zane was given a section of land for his path. The population of the Territory, estimated at from five to eight thousand, was chiefly distributed in lower valleys, bordering on the Ohio River. The French still occupied the Illinois country, and were the principal inhabitants about Detroit.

South of the Ohio River, Kentucky was progressing favorably, while the '' Southwestern Territory," ceded to the United States by North Carolina in 1790, had so rapidly populated that, in 1793, a Territorial form of government was allowed. The ordinance of 1787, save the clause prohibiting slavery, was adopted, and the Territory named Tennessee. On June 6, 1796, the Terri- tory contained more than seventy-five thousand inhabitants, and was admitted into t.he Union as a State. Four years after, the census showed a population of 1 05,602 _souls including 13,584 slaves and— persons of color. The same year Tennessee became a State, Samuel Jackson and Jonathan Sharpless erected the Redstone Paper Mill, four miles east of Brownsville, it being the first manufactory of the kind west of the Alle- ghanies.

In the month of December, 1790, Gen. Wayne, who had done so much for the development of the West, while on his way from Detroit to Philadel- phia, was attacked with sickness and died in a cabin near Erie, in the north part of Pennsylvania. He was nearly fifty-one years old, and was one of

the bravest officers in the Revolutionary war, and one of America's truest patriots. In 1809, his remains were removed from Erie, by his son. Col. Isaac Wayne, to the Radnor churchyard, near the place of his birth, and an elegant monument erected on his tomb by the Pennsylvania Cincinnati So- ciety.

After the death of Wayne, Gen. Wilkinson was appointed to the command of the Western army. While he was in command, Carondelet, the Spanish governor of West Florida and Louisiana, made one more effort to separate the Union, and set up either an independent government in the West, or, what was more in accord with his wishes, effect a union with the Spanish nation. In June, 1797, he sent Power again into the Northwest and into Kentucky to sound the existing feeling. Now, however, they were not easily won over. The home government was a certainty, the breaches had been healed, and Power was compelled to abandon the mission, not, however, until he had received a severe reprimand from many who saw through his plan, and openly exposed it. His mission closed the efforts of the Spanish authorities to attempt the dismemberment of the Union, and showed them the coming downfiall of their power in Amer- ica. They were obliged to surrender the posts claimed by the United States under the treaty of 1795, and not many years after, sold their Amer- ican possessions to the United States, rather than see a rival European power attain control over them.

On the 7th of April, 1798, Congress passed an act, appointing Winthrop Sargent, Secretary of the Northwest Territory, Governor of the Territory of the Mississippi, formed the same day. In 1801, the boundary between America and the Spanish pos- sessions was definitely fixed. The Spanish retired from the disputed territory, and henceforward their attempts to dissolve the American Union ceased. The seat of the Mississippi Territory was fixed at Loftus Heights, six miles north of the thirty-first degree of latitude.

The appointment of Sargent to the charge of the Southwest Territory, led to the choice of William Henry Harrison, who had been aid-de-camp to Gen. Wayne in 1794, and whose character stood very high among the people of the West, to the Secretaryship of the Northwest, which place he held until appointed to represent that Territory in Con- gress.