Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Early Clark County, Ohio History by Joanna Smith Miller

1887 Newspaper Article 
Early Clark County, Ohio 
by Joanna Smith Miller


Joanna Smith Miller (1806-1891), the daughter of Samuel Smith and Elizabeth McCleave, was married to John Miller.  John Miller was the brother of Mary Miller Leffel, our 3rd great-grandmother, and son of Frederick Miller, our 4th great-grandfather.  When Joanna was 80 years old, her son Samuel Smith Miller interviewed her for a newspaper article, which was published in the Springfield Daily Republic on 17 January 1887.  The article was titled "Clark County's Infancy," with a subtitle: "An Intensely Interesting Chapter of Early History - The Ways of Our Forefathers Charmingly Described."


In order to enlarge the newspaper article to a size big enough to be easily read, please go to Chronicling America.  The above newspaper article can be found on the Library of Congress website, Chronicling America.
 Springfield daily republic. [volume] (Springfield, O. [Ohio]), 17 Jan. 1887. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. 
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87076917/1887-01-17/ed-1/seq-2

Joanna's history includes information about the Smith, Miller, and Leffel families, as well as many others.  At the bottom of the second column is an excerpt about Joanna's father-in-law, Frederick Miller, and brother-in-law, Anthony Leffel.


I love the part about the Indians living in their wigwams near Anthony Leffel's cabin -- 
"While Mr. Leffel lived there the Indians had a dozen or so of wigwams, built of bark, a short distance west of their cabin, and Samuel, Mr. Leffel’s son, who is yet living and not very old, used to play with the Indian children.  When a tall, good looking Leffel of eighteen years would go to see the Indians, a comely young squaw always came out and sat on a log as if to court the young man into an attachment."

Birch-Bark Indian Wigwams
loc.gov

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link to the Chronicling America site. It seems easier to zoom/scroll in to read the paper than on the Newspapers.com site. I would like to print the article but it is so large I am not sure how to do that?

clm said...

The original newspaper article was the size of full newspaper sheet. If that's what you want to print, you will need to download a pdf of the article and take to a print shop. Otherwise you can go to the loc.gov site and copy/print sections of the article until you have copied the whole paper.