Page:Women of Ohio; a record of their achievements in the history of the state (Vol. I).djvu/49

Rh The bodies of Sarah and John lie in a small plot of ground surrounded by a high iron fence in the estate surrounding the Mclntire Children’s Home. The setting sun seems always to shine with particular radiance upon these secluded graves and in the spring the children, whom their forethought befriended, bring bouquets of wild flowers from the nearby woods to lie upon their quiet breasts.

TALITHA ELDERKIN is said to have been the first white woman to step foot in Cleveland. Talitha was the bride of John Phelps Stilles.

Both were born in Granville, Mass., both had taught school in Vermont. So they both decided to accompany the Moses Cleveland expedition and they both did.

They arrived in what is now Cleveland in June, 1796.

REBECCA CARTER and her husband, Lorenzo Carter, were the first two settlers to follow the original surveying party into Cuyahoga County. They came in 1797. They came to what is now Cleveland, Ohio, and was then a wilderness. More than that, Rebecca Carter and her husband were the only two white persons in this wilderness from January, 1799, until the spring of 1800.

Imagine what this meant. Lorenzo and Rebecca Carter had in all nine children. Their mother bore the earliest of them without benefit of physician or medical skill. These and the children of other settlers who came later must go to school. But where and how? Rebecca Carter answered the question—right there, in the Carter cabin. Who would teach them? Rebecca solved that question too—ANNE SPOFFORD could—and would. That was how Anne came to be the first teacher of any school in what later became Cleveland, Ohio.

Meanwhile Lorenzo Carter was equally well occupied. A ferry was badly needed to get across the river—he started one. Permanent settlers were now arriving in the community but had no temporary place to stay. Lorenzo built and opened the first inn. Until there was an inn, the Carter home was a free and hospitable substitute.

Lorenzo and Rebecca opened it for the first ball ever given in Cuyahoga County. Lorenzo — doubtless assisted by Rebecca, closed it—and barred it—against an especially violent attack of drunken Indians. Although their intoxication brought on the attack, it contributed definitely to the doughty major’s victory. Knowing the redskins were more or less incapacitated, he assaulted them single-handed with no better weapon than a fire poker and drove them off in panic.

But there were evils that even the bravest could not dispel by force of arms, Ague, “low fever.” Days and nights of shivering, burning, shaking as if palsied, broke the spirit of most of the early Cleveland settlers—they moved to the highlands. They had no doctor—so they doctored themselves. Not so the Carters. They had no quinine—so they steeped dogwood and cherry bark—and they carried on.