President's Son, President's Father: John Scott Harrison

In 1804, William Henry Harrison, then territorial governor of Indiana, was carrying his newborn infant son around the Governor’s Mansion. Suddenly, a shot rang out; the bullet only narrowly missing the father and son. John Scott Harrison avoided death that evening, as did his father. The similarities between William Henry and John Scott Harrison continue. They both cultivated large farms, but were always looking around for public employment to bolster their fortunes. They were both Southerners in temperament if not in actual residence. They both served terms in Congress. They both fancied themselves writers, although their writings are filled with nineteenth century hyperbole. John Scott Harrison never reached the White House, as both his father and his son did, but he carried on a Harrison tradition of being landed gentry, penniless though proud.

John Scott Harrison (1804-1878) was born in Vincennes, Indiana, but spent most of his life in Ohio. He was raised listening to tales of pioneers and Indian wars. In 1834, he took a flatboat of farm produce to New Orleans, only to see the boat wrecked. Like his father, he briefly studied medicine, but also like his father, gave that up to become a farmer. William Henry Harrison owned 2,800 acres in western Hamilton County, and when John Scott came of age, the elder Harrison cut off 600 acres and gave them to John Scott. The new farm, which would be called “The Point,” or Point Farm, was as far to the southwest as one can go in Ohio, where the Great Miami River ends at the Ohio River.

600 acres was a huge farm by the standards of that time. Harrison raised corn, wheat, and hay, hunted bear and deer, and caught fish. “Hogs, cattle, and sheep were raised and marketed….much of the family clothing was woven on the premises.” A surviving latter mentions two fat steers sent to Cincinnati in 1845; livestock was shipped to Cincinnati or New Orleans. Peach and apple butter was homegrown and home processed, as was hominy and Johnny cakes, both a corn product. John Scott himself wrote,

My lot in this life has been to raise hogs and hominy to feed my children and I have devoted but little time to fancy articles. (January 21, 1856).

Harrison could not have done this alone. Farm records are spotty at best, but Harrison employed farmhands, shepherds, and household servants. In 1860, Harrison had two “Domestics,” three “Day Laborers,” and two “Servants” resident on his acreage, plus a full-time farmer, and the labor garnered from his children. He had twelve children in all from two successive marriages, and after this father died in 1841, brought his mother, the former First Lady Anna Harrison, to live with him and help with the children.

But even with the help, John Scott barely made a go of it. He frequently wrote to his brother-in-law asking for money. Floods were a problem, living close to two major rivers. His family was prone to sickness, and the low price of agricultural products and financial panics made the family finances unenviable.

There were happy moments, however. John Scott’s children grew up as typical mid-century farm kids. Future President Benjamin and his siblings helped feed livestock, took corn to the mill, hunted and fished, and explored the farm. The Point Farm had many apple orchards, and the Harrison children freely pilfered apples. John Scott’s farmhouse faced the Ohio River, and like many farmhouses, had a large dining room which also served as the family room. “In this room it was the custom of the family to assemble, particularly on winter evenings, around a central table.” There, with old Mrs. President Harrison darning socks, the family would listen to someone reading aloud by the light of tallow candles.

Being the son of one farmer-politician, John Scott Harrison perhaps could not help but feel the call to politics. On December 6, 1851, John left for Washington to serve as a Whig congressman for Ohio. As a Congressman, he gained some notoriety as an opponent of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which allowed new states to vote on whether to allow slavery or not. The passage of this bill broke up the Whig Party, and John Scott served a second term in Congress as an “Oppositionist” (the Republican party not yet having organized) until 1857. Defeated for reelection, he returned to Point Farm.

There was some talk of a Harrison presidential candidacy, but Harrison did not press the issue. Although he never embraced the Republican Party as his son Benjamin did, John Scott followed the political news carefully. Late in life he became a public speaker of some note. He gained some local fame with speeches such as, ”The World’s Race for Wealth,” and “Pioneer Life at North Bend.” He was working on a new speech, “The Lay Element in the Church,” when he died at his desk, May 25, 1878.

John Scott Harrison is buried next to his father in the William Henry Harrison State Memorial in North Bend, partly as a security measure. Shortly after his death, his body was stolen and sold to medical students. The body was recovered, and state laws were strengthened to make penalties for body-snatching more rigorous. Just as his father is perhaps best known as the first president to die in office, John Scott also achieved posthumous notoriety as the central figure in what the newspapers of the time called “The Harrison Horror.” In death as in life, John Scott Harrison and William Henry Harrison were cut from the same cloth.

[John Scott Harrison’s papers are in the Library of Congress. Many are quoted in Harry J. Sievers, S.J., Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier Warrior (New York, 1952).]

From Waldo to Amana: Pietism and Community Building

[Wrote this for the Ohio Postal History Journal]




“…[P]rior to 1883, U.S. fourth-class offices – those with less than $1,000 annual revenue – had to furnish their own postmarking devices…”
{Richard B. Graham, United States Postal History Sampler (Sidney, Ohio, 1992), p. 24.)

My great-grandmother, Lyda Bensley Rathbun (1879-1973) was born in a Marion County village called Waldo. She had been left at an orphanage at a very young age; her mother died and her father could not or would not take care of the children. She spent a long life believing she was born somewhere in northern Ohio. It was only after she died in 1973 that I used census data to figure out that she had been born in Waldo.

Great-grandma, who I knew as a child, has nothing to do with postal history, but the story of figuring out the place from which you came does resonate. By and large, Americans are a rootless bunch. Few of us live in the same town we were born in, and making connections between point A and point B is half the fun of genealogists, essayists, and of course philatelists. Given my mysterious connection to Waldo, it is not surprising that I picked up this cover on eBay. But there’s another story connected with this cover.

The clear, manuscript date stamp, has no date beyond “Mch 4” (?), so we cannot pin the handwriting on a particular postmaster. The stamp is the issue of 1873 (Scott). The enclosure is long gone. We can assume that Waldo of the mid 1870s was one of those fourth-class offices not provided with the mechanical date stamps that were becoming common. But the address – the address was interesting.

The cover is addressed to one John Esterle, of East Amana, Homestedt [sic] Co., Iowa. There was a John Oesterle in the 1880 Census of 1880 living in Amana, Iowa. A German-born farmhand, we can be fairly sure we have the right man, especially since there were any number of Oesterles is Waldo, Ohio. But what is special about East Amana?

East Amana, Iowa, was and is one of America’s longest running “intentional communities.” Here in Ohio we may be more familiar with Zoar and Gnadenhutten in Tuscarawas County, the Amana Colonies were founded by German pietists called “Inspirationists.” Founded in Germany in 1714, the Inspirationists came to America in 1843, settled near Buffalo, New York, and in 1855 relocated to Iowa. They founded six villages, of which East Amana was one. They lived, ate, and worked communally. No one was paid and all did farmwork or work in support of the residents

In 1932, as the Depression dragged on, the Amana colonies gave up the communal lifestyle, but not their religious or agricultural ways. To keep the binds of their community, the Amana people kept their church and also created the joint-stock Amana Corporation, tying themselves in a new way while preserving the sense of community.

To many Ohioans, Amana is just an appliance company, although its origins can be found in the Amana Colonies history. But is America is about connections across time and space, that cover hand postmarked Waldo, Ohio, does connect us with those hardworking farmers who started a collective farm out on the Iowa prairie.

[For more about Amana and their history, see: http://amanacolonies.com.]

A Ram Named Bumper, 1865

The name makes sense. If you ram something, you bump into it – hard. A male sheep is called a ram, and he spends part of his time butting head with other males (butting – ramming - bumping). If I was looking around for a clever name for my boy sheep, “Bumper” would be a good choice.

In May of 1865, an Otterbein University student from Green Village, Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to his brother. William B. Oyler (who apparently never graduated) wrote:

hold the bumper when pap clips his mother. You take hold of the tail and leave Ben hold tight to the horns and if he goes to ram … hold tight it makes no difference if you pull all the wool off his tail hold tight anyhow.

Oyler gave more advice regarding Bumper to another brother:

… he had one little wee lamb which he calls bumper, now I suppose this bumper is a fine old feller. I want you to be careful and don’t let him bump you whatever you do, keep him chained…

If there is a lesson to be learned from Bumper the Sheep (and some might argue that this is the difference between history and nostalgia), it is that, in the 1860s at least, Otterbein students often came from rural backgrounds. This is not surprising, since the United Brethren Church, the parent organization of Otterbein University, had a largely rural membership. Oyler’s swapping of farm gossip with his brothers illustrates this.

Yet Oyler himself was waxing nostalgic. When we go off to school, we bring a bit of our old home to our new home. Oyler writes from “O.U. Westerville, Ohio.” But his letter makes it clear that a sheep back in Pennsylvania was on his mind in what may have been a homesick student’s reverie. Yet Bumper, his wool, and his antics thus became a part of the collective memory of Otterbein University.

[The Oyler Papers are in the Otterbein University Archives, Westerville, Ohio.]

Christmas in Perrysburg, 1880

[The Champney House, 302 E. Second Street, Perrysburg, Ohio]

[From Bend of the River, December 2012]



Christmas has taken some time to emerge into the gigantic holiday it is today. A religious holiday at first (and still for many of us), it took some clever marketing in the late nineteenth century to rebrand the holiday into a commercial hurricane.

One of those marketers was A. R. Champney (1831-1908). Champney was a pharmacist in Perrysburg in the last half of the 19th century. He was also, according to advertisements preserved in the Perrysburg Journal in December of 1880, a “special agent” of Santa Claus. How did Champney, who lived a very ordinary merchant’s life beside the Maumee River 130 years ago, understand that Christmas could mean sales?

A. R. Champney had plenty of excitement as a boy. Details are sketchy, but his 1908 obituary declared:

When a boy he went on the [Great] lakes and worked his way up until he became Master and many years sailed the great inland seas, his staunch little schooner making many trips to the Perrysburg dock.

He married a Toledo girl, Frances J. Hancock, in 1859. He continued as a mariner until 1865 or 1866, when he settled in Perrysburg an “engaged in the drug business.”

The Champney Drug Store was located 114 Louisiana Avenue. Originally called Inscho & Champney, Champney bought out his partner and operated the store independently until 1900, when he sold it to his son Charles. By that time, the “Champney Block” housed the drugstore, a dentist’s office, a cigar maker, a barber shop, and a “confectionary.” In 1880, Champney installed the first telephone line in Perrysburg, connecting his home and his business. Champney lived long enough to witness the building burn down in 1904.

Like modern drugstores, A. R. Champney sold a variety of goods and services. This allowed him to attract Christmas shoppers at a time when malls were in the far distance. His 1880 Christmas advertisements show that he sold “toys and holiday goods, hobby horses, wagons, carts, sleds” and a number of other items suitable for gift-giving.

Did Champney use Christmas decorations to draw in more customers? This was before the days of recorded Christmas carols, robotic Santas, and credit cards. But with a little imagination we can see and smell A. R. Champney’s dusty store, smelling of chalky medicines, Christmas candy, and displaying such wonders as rocking horses and sleds that no doubt were used on the frozen Maumee in front of the Fort Meigs precipice. Don’t be afraid of old Mr. Champney, mothers would whisper to children grown bug-eyed at the sight of the toys; he is a special agent of Santa Claus.

[Material in this essay came, in part, from Perrysburg Revisited by Ardath Danford (Perrysburg, 1992). The quote from Mr. Champney’s obituary came from the Perrysburg Journal of March 25, 1908.]

Letter From a Stamp Engraver

[This first appeared in the Ohio Postal History Journal.]

I collect stamps on a very limited budget. At stamp shows, I face the dilemma of dealers who steer me toward their expensive (and most profitable) stock, even as I try to make myself invisible and head for the “bargain basement” lots. “See our 1869 Pictorials,” they call, even while I look for their three-for-five dollar “miscellaneous” offerings. Yet I persevere, hoping to find treasures the dealer missed. I found one recently; not valuable, but one that I enjoyed finding and also tested my knowledge of postal history.

The cover I spotted was a folded letter. [Figure 1] The stamp, a common as dirt Scott #11, was missing part of its right side. The cancel was also not terribly unusual, a CDS from “New-York” without a year date. The addressee was “Hon D. Morgan”, “Acting Commissioner” of Columbus, Ohio.

Hmm. Not exactly Ohio postal history, as there were no postal markings from Ohio beyond the address. But, since I live near enough to Columbus to hear the noise of I-270, I thought I’d take a quick look at the (mostly) intact letter sheet. It was a bill, but the letterhead of the bill made my heart skip a beat.[Figure 2]

The bill was from an engraver. Not just a printer, but an engraver, the artisan who engraved a negative image on steel or wood and used it to print fancy illustrated letterheads, certificates, and, yes, stamps. And I immediately knew the company sending the bill from my childhood stamp album. The bill was from the New York firm of Rawdon, Wright, Hatch, and Edson. The engravers of U.S. Scott #1 & #2.

Rawdon, Wright, Hatch, and Edson (hereafter referred to as RWHE) had printed some canal stock certificates for a Mr. Bull in Columbus, the state capital. The bill was for $169.50 and mentions a “seal,” perhaps of the type that seals documents. The details may never be found out. The Bull family was prominent settlers of the Clintonville area of Columbus, and one of their number, James G. Bull, was mayor of Columbus in the 1860s and 70s. The State of Ohio did sell canal stock in a “canal fund” in the nineteenth century.

But my concern here is more about RWHE and their work as engravers. I was a bit surprised the company has never had a book length study. The best information on RWHE that I could find in a less than exhaustive study was on Arago, the Snithsonian National Postal Museum [http://arago.si.edu/]. Their website is worth quoting:

In 1845, the New York engraving firm Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson began printing postmaster provisionals, early stamps issued locally by the New York postmaster. That experience made them the logical choice for printing the first nationwide U.S. stamps, the 5-cent and 10-cent stamps of 1847.

The firm’s partners included three engravers, Freeman Rawdon, Neziah Wright, and George Hatch, but it was Tracy Edson, a former engraver turned business manager, who led the way. In 1858, Edson arranged the merger of Rawdon, Wright with six other firms to form American Bank Note. He became president of that company in 1860.

So is this the story. It may not be postal history, depending on your point of view. But I got a kick out of adding a piece of Rawdon, Wright, Hatch, and Edson work to my collection.

[Sources: http://clintonvillehistory.com/tag/bull-family/
http://arago.si.edu/index.asp?con=4&cmd=2&eid=238&slide=10 ]

Henry Philipps, Toledo Seedsman

It is one of those topsy-turvy reckonings. A sure sign of winter is the arrival in the mail of seed catalogs. Whether you farm hundreds of acres, garden intensively, or have a potted plant on your windowsill, you can spend many an idle winter hour gazing at the garden plants in the seed catalogs. They are clever advertisements, but are also a way to kick-start spring dreams of what one might plant.

Toledo once had its own, home-grown (pardon the pun) seed company. The Henry Philipps Seed and Implement Company was located at 115-117 St. Clair Street. Their seed catalogs advertised seeds for “growers, importers, wholesale and retail…garden, field, and flower seeds.” Catalogs featured big, appealing engravings of vegetables, implying that customers could grow similar crops in their backyards. “We guarantee that all our Seeds are of good, germinating quality,” although, as every gardener knows, seeds sometimes fail to grow, “owing to causes we cannot control and beyond our responsibility.”

Henry Philipps was a pioneer in both the seed industry and Toledo itself. Philipps (1829-1896) was born in Brunswick, Germany. He sailed for New York in 1849, and after a 42 day voyage, landed in America. He immediately took the train to Buffalo, and then a steamboat across Lake Erie to Toledo. After doing some farming and working as a clerk, he established a seed business in February of 1852 .

Philipps, at various times, sold seed, farming implements, and other kinds of products need by the farmer. During the 1870s and 80s, he had a separate hardware store on Summit Street. He formally incorporated in 1888, and became involved in several other enterprises. Philipps built houses and organized what was known as the Columbia Heights Addition. He helped develop business blocks on St. Clair, Summit Street, and on Superior, and was involved in the Adams Street streetcar line. All the while raising a family of thirteen children!

Clearly, Henry Philipps was a “mover and shaker” in early Toledo. Philipps died in 1896, but his company went on for several more years, issuing annual catalogs with advertisements for fertilizer, insecticides, mouse and mole traps, shotguns, and windmills. One catalog listed a dangerous sounding product called “Great Western Powder.” The powder was, in fact, gunpowder, advertised for use on stumps: “For blasting stumps and boulders there is no other explosive so effectual and safe to handle.” One would hope so.

At the house Philipps built in his Columbia Heights addition in 1866, he had gardens, orchards, and a trout stream. He won a prize at the Ohio State Fair in 1868 for “best agricultural boiler.” Whether he was an agriculturalist or a “middleman” in the agricultural products industry is hard to say. But in the farming world of the 19th and 20th centuries, one could hardly do without Henry Philipps and his dream-inducing seed catalogs.

A Tale of Two Chefs

A Tale of Two Chefs

by Alan Borer


If asked for the name of a “chef,” most children (and many adults) would immediately mention “Chef Boyardee” and his line of canned pasta products. There really was a chef behind the smiling, mustachioed man on the can label. His proper name was Ettore Boiardi (1897-1985). Boiardi came to the United States from Italy in 1915, went into the food business, and eventually became a household name. By the end of his life, he had become an Ohioan, ending his days in the Cleveland suburb of Parma. His brand, and his likeness are now owned by the international conglomerate ConAgra.

Toledo once had an answer for the Chef Boyardee brand in the form of another smiling chef, the “Chef” brand of canned foods made and distributed by the Berdan Company. Calling themselves “The Largest Distributers [sic] of Canned Goods in the United States,” the brand had numerous offerings. In their heyday, they sold almost every kind of fruit and vegetable imaginable, plus macaroni, baked beans, olive oil, coffee and tea, lobster, salmon, and, like Boiardi, spaghetti.

Like Chef Boyardee, the Berdan Chef’s image appeared in many advertisements and giveaways. For example, Chef brought out a book of nursery rhymes titled, “Granny Goose Jingles,” with nine pages of nursery rhymes and a tenth rhyme of Chef products, including these lines:

What is it you want, is it grown on trees?
Is it kissed by the sun and the gentle breeze?....
The Chef will bring them to your table—
You’ll find them all ’neath his smiling label.

In 1912, a 64 page Chef Cook Book was published. It was filled with recipes that could use some of the “Chef’s” offerings. Chef also offered canning supplies, such as sealable jars and sealing rubber.

The Chef’s picture appeared in newspaper advertisements over the years. The Chef brand had its own fleet of delivery trucks. Many of the Chef products were kept in the now crumbling Berdan Building at 601 Washington Street in the Warehouse District.

As noted above, Chef Foods was a brand name belonging to the Berdan & Company wholesale groceries firm. The history of that company is full of Toledo patriarchs. Founded in the very early year of 1838 by Valentine Ketcham, the nascent food concern numbered among its directors John Berdan, the first mayor of Toledo, and James and Joseph Secor. The company lasted well over a century, until it was bought out in 1938.

The Chef, always portrayed by the same picture of a bearded, smiling chef holding a spoon, did good work for the Berdan wholesalers. He, along with Chef Boyardee, did stellar service selling food for their creators.