Page:Women of Ohio; a record of their achievements in the history of the state (Vol. I).djvu/37

Rh to the Baptists of Columbia Township by Benjamin Stites, the erstwhile trader. It became the community cemetery.

The Stites family figures conspicuously in the list of names on the monument. This marker has a history of its own. It played its first role as one of the Corinthian pillars of Cincinnati’s early postoffice.

The names, as inscribed, are: Major Benjamin Stites, MRS. BENJAMIN STITES, Ben Stites, Jr., RACHEL STITES, ANN W. STITES, Greenbright Bailey, MRS. GREENBRIGHT BAILEY, Jas. F. Bailey, Reason Bailey, Abel Cook, Jacob Mills, Jonathan Stites, Ephraim Kibby, John S. Gano, MRS. MARY S. GANO, Thos. C. Wade, Hezekiah Stites, Elijah Stites, Edmund Buxton, Daniel Shoemaker, John Hempstead, Evan Shelby, Allen Woodruff, Joseph Cox, Benjamin Cox. To this list should be added leaders not with the group, John Riley and Francis Dunlevy among them.

The little settlement throve. Block houses were built first, for protection, then log cabins for the families. Everybody worked. They raised corn enough in ‘‘Turkey Bottoms” to supply themselves and, when it was established, the Ft. Washington garrison at Cincinnati. It is said that from nine acres, 963 bushels of corn was produced the first season. Before they could raise corn, however, the women and children scratched up the bulbous roots of “bear grass” washed and dried the roots, pounded them to a sort of flour. But for these and other women’s ways of meeting innumerable emergencies, things might have gone very badly.

Even then, women settlers realized that decent ways of living must be established within and without the home. Three women, MARY DAVIS, ELIZABETH FERRIS and AMY REYNOLDS were “constituent members” of the Columbia Baptist Church organized— first in the Northwest Territory — in 1790.

The women struggled to clothe their husbands, their children and them- selves, as fittingly as possible. They even did what they could to keep up with the modes of the civilization they had left behind them. Their bodices were neat, their petticoats numerous, to distend properly their bouffant skirts. Henry Howe, in his historical collections, tells how this is said to have saved the life of a Mrs. Coleman soon after she had joined the Columbia colony.

She was in a canoe with two of the men and a lad, Oliver Spencer, when they were fired on by Indians from ambush. Mrs. Coleman promptly jumped into the river. She could not swim. But her bouyant skirt floated her two miles down the river, to safety. The boy was captured, taken to the Maumee country and held eight months, when he was ransomed. But it took him almost two years to get back home.

Now for the second group to settle in the Miami Purchase. The three leaders, with their eager parties were together, you recall, at Limestone (Maysville, Ky.) eager to start. Stites got off first, with his settlers. Denman’s party— or Patterson’s party or Filson’s— historians vary in their