Winameg, Ohio
In 1992, I had occasion to visit Winameg, Ohio, a hamlet in Fulton County. At one time, Winameg was the home of a band of Pottawatomie Indians, whose chief gave his name to the town. Chief Winameg was a good friend of one of the settlers in western Fulton County named Dresden Howard. Howard and Winameg met under a large oak tree that became known as the Council Oak. The Council Oak saw the landscape drained of water through ditching, and was a landmark for the area for 300 years before disease struck. After the tree was cut down, a modest ceremony performed by a modern Native American drew a small crowd, including me.
Twenty five years later found me studying a letter from a man named Jesse Taylor. Written in 1856 to friends, it was postmarked Toledo but written from “Pike.” It took some digging, but I finally found the location of Pike. This is a story of Jesse Taylor, Dresden Howard, and pioneer Fulton County.
The letter started with this line:
I found Mr. Howard’s folks in Toledo and came home with them.
The writer certainly had Toledo connections, but I wasn’t sure who “Mr. Howard’s folks” were. Could “Mr. Howard” be the well known pioneer Dresden Howard? The dates were about right, Howard having lived from 1817 to 1897. Having no other clue at hand, I dug out an 1888 atlas of Fulton County and located Dresden Howard, living just south of Winameg. Across the road from Howard lived another farmer, a Mr. Jesse S. Taylor. I could not help but notice that Howard and Taylor lived in Pike Township. The mystery was solved!
Jesse Taylor was an even bigger landowner than Dresden Howard. Taylor (1828-1905) owned 347 acres of land in various parts of Pike Township in the same atlas. He was born in Massachusetts, coming west with his father and settling near Winameg. By 1880 he was married and had three children. One son became a farmer, the other became a dentist. Married twice, he was a farmer all his life.
The letter was mysterious in other ways. Further down the page, he wrote:
. . . . plenty of work to do. The ditch not finished. I have worked in [the ditch] two days with the team & hired Mr. Kirkman to ditch across Waffles. We have it finished from Waffles up within a few rods of the house. . . .
Waffles? Breakfast waffles? Again the atlas helped. Although outside of the worst of the Black Swamp, Fulton County is flat as a pancake, and even moderate rainfall has nowhere to go. Starting in 1859, the state and county began financing the construction of an enormous system of ditches. By 1888, Pike Township had sixty ditches. The county was thus transformed into a farming paradise. Jesse Taylor appeared to have anticipated the government program by three years, digging his own ditch from his property to that of his neighbor, William Waffle. This waffle was not a pastry, but a person!
Farming virgin land was not easy. Taylor wrote:
I am very much disappointed in our crops. . . .We have been husking [corn] . . . and find it very light about one third of what we expected. . . . buckwheat is a failure. Our potatoes are small.
He was also concerned about a “bird” belonging to his wife, Harriet:
I forgot to tell you the instruction which James gave me in relation of that bird – that it needed a larger dish and clean water to bathe in – the cage kept clean & so on. . . . does it sing any yet?
Not farm chickens, but a pet bird. Residents of Northwest Ohio have kept birds from the beginning. An 1835 letter from Maumee mentions a pet robin in Sylvania Township. Birdcages likewise have been around for centuries, but in frontier Ohio, the cage would likely have been home-built. While Jesse did not mention the type of bird, it was almost certainly a native species and caught locally, as there were no pet shops even in Ohio’s cities until after the Civil War and fast railway delivery.
Initially the letter was a mystery surrounding a dateline ended up being interesting after all. Ditches, pet birds, and frontier Fulton County do not often appear in the same article. Reading old letters can be that way, and learning in a roundabout way is still learning. Just ask Jesse Taylor.
by Alan Borer
