A Madman's Will by Gregory May

Author:Gregory May
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2023-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

MERCER COUNTY SITS at the midpoint of Ohio’s western border astride a summit in the state’s Till Plains. The wide plateau at the top of the summit stretches away in all directions, broken only by a few hillocks that look like wooded islands in the flat landscape. This summit has long been important. Its south face marked the line excluding white settlement from Native American territory agreed at Fort Greenville in 1795, and Mercer County did not become a white political jurisdiction until 1824. A dozen years later, builders of the Miami Canal extension decided to use a shallow fold in the plateau to capture the enormous amount of water they would need to lift boats over the summit through a new series of locks. When completed in the year of Judge Leigh’s visit, the Grand Reservoir created there was said to be the largest artificial lake in the world. Nine miles long and up to 4 miles wide, it had flooded more than 17,000 acres.33

The earliest white settlers in Mercer County bought land in the townships south and east of what became the reservoir. They were from Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and more settled parts of Ohio, but a second wave of settlement in the 1830s brought mostly German immigrants. The Germans usually came in groups and settled in clusters near others from the same part of Germany or others of the same religious faith. The result, as two scholars have so vividly noted, was more a checkerboard than a melting pot. Although German Protestants established the canal town of New Bremen, most of the Germans in Mercer County were Catholic. They included merchants, teachers, and tradesmen as well as farmers.34

Mercer County was on the frontier of agricultural settlement. Most of the land remained uncleared, and a farmer’s life there was hard. Whether he bought prairie or woodland, he needed three to five years to tame it into a self-sustaining farm. Felling trees and plowing around massive roots was only somewhat more difficult than trying to break up deep prairie sod. It could take a man and his family ten years to clear three or four 10-acre crop fields.35

One settler long remembered that the native grasses on his land were so thick and tall that he had to begin by pulling them out by hand to make enough room to swing a mattock. The wolves creeping through the dense cover made him nervous. But his alarm at the sound of movement vanished one day when he looked up to see “the loveliest picture on earth, my young wife coming towards me holding her first born in her arms and smiling so kindly . . . to encourage me in my work.”36

The diaries kept by immigrant farmers are less sentimental accounts of constant toil. “Wirking on Cleering” is the ceaseless refrain throughout one of them, occasionally relieved by the notion that it was “a fine day.” The diarist plowed a small field for corn in the late springtime. When summer came, he made hay, and by July, he was cutting and tramping wheat.

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