Turtle Island Lighthouse Keeper Gordon Wilson

There were long drawers full of old letters at the stamp show. I was pressed for time, and could not unpeel many of the letters about which I was curious. Quite a few of them were addressed to a certain R. B. Hubbard, a lumber dealer in 1850s Sandusky. I spotted a Toledo postmark, though – probably a boring legal case over lost lumber. I asked the dealer if I could open the letter, and what I saw amazed me. It was datelined Turtle Island, Maumee Bay and was from a lighthouse keeper. Suddenly, a neat piece of Northwest Ohio history was unfolding before me. I paid the dealer, and later that day opened the letter at my leisure. This is what I read:

Turtle Island Maumee Bay o Feb 21th 1853 Mr R. B. Hubbard Sir I received your letter this day Att 2 Pm which I sett down to Answer I have nott Ben Ashore Sence the 30th of November last I Received my Mail buy A man coming Here in A canoe Shod with iron Sost [so as?] to run on thin ice so he just Come to day I will take your Schooner Elmina If you Have nott gott out of Payshents [patience] waiting for an Answer Att your Proposals I wish you would write mee Again So I can make my Arrangement About my family for I want to move Them to Sandusky As soon as navigation is open I Shal Bee Att toledo As Soon Asican [sic, as I can] get there with my Boat I send this Ashore with the Saim Thatt Brought mee yours Yours Obt Servet [sic] G. S. Wilson

Spelling was not the lighthouse keeper’s long suit, but then we don’t know what the man’s background was – even educated people used spelling and punctuation erratically. We do know that on September 4, 1850, Gordon S. Wilson was appointed keeper of the Turtle Island lighthouse in Maumee Bay. Records in the National Archives show that Secretary of the Treasury Thomas Corwin (himself an Ohioan) approved the appointment of Wilson. He was taking the place of Alexander H. Cromwell, who had been keeper there since November of 1847. He took charge of the lighthouse, keeper’s house, and probably a boathouse, and was paid a salary of $400.00 by the United States Lighthouse Service.

Built in 1831 - 1837, the lighthouse station was on a very small island that sits on the Ohio-Michigan boundary. Extensively rebuilt in the years after the Civil War, the original lighthouse was 44 feet high and built of yellow brick with a black ‘lantern.’ It was a “fourth order fixed light,” using eight white fixed lamps with reflectors. The lamps burned kerosene, and on good days could be seen for six miles. Mr. Wilson also found a house for the keeper’s use. Connected to the light tower, a wooden story and a half house offered the keeper and his family a parlor, dining room, bedroom, and kitchen with stove. A half acre of land was available to the keeper, at least some of which was used as a garden.

Turtle Island itself was shrinking. There is some evidence that the island was fortified during the Indian war of 1794, although the fort’s owners are unclear (British? French? Native American?) at the time. When the federal land office sold Turtle Island in 1827, it was about 6 ½ acres in size. Ferocious storms in the late 1820’s whittled the island down to 1 ½ acres. The federal government repurchased the island in 1831 for a lighthouse. Toledo was in its infancy, but showed promise as a port, and the island was needed for a light to illuminate the shipping channel in Maumee Bay. The lighthouse, rebuilt in 1866, was abandoned in 1903, when the Toledo Harbor Light was established. All that was in the future when Gordon Wilson became lighthouse keeper.

Wilson’s life before 1850 is untraceable. He does not appear in the census records, at least under that name. Was he an immigrant? Did he ever get the job in Sandusky? We will probably never know. The letter does not actually say that much about life on Turtle Island, except that it was hard to get the mail (but not impossible), that the mail was brought over by non-post office transit, and that canoes were sometimes shod with iron. The 1911 Century Dictionary confirms this, listing “ice-canoe n. A boat with a very broad flat keel shod with iron runners, so that it can be drawn readily over the ice: intended for use on partly frozen lakes and rivers.” Other details of life for the keeper of Turtle Island light can be inferred. Not surprisingly, Wilson had a boat of his own, but could not use it year round. Wilson’s family lived on the island, although no clues remain to who or even how many were there. And if Wilson could not go ashore for November to at least February, he must have had supplies stored on the island, or perhaps relied on a wintertime contractor who brought supplies to him. The schooner Elmina that Wilson mentioned is elusive as well, but we do know that it was commandeered on April 28, 1850 to help rescues passengers from the steamer Anthony Wayne, which had exploded off Vermillion.

If you have a boat, you can journey out to Turtle Island, and still see the skeleton of the lighthouse tower and the ruins of some vacation homes. It is a poignant sight, although rarely seen because the island is so far out in Maumee Bay. And while we cannot tell the story of Keeper Wilson, his surviving letter is poignant as well. It hints at just how lonely life on Turtle Island must have been. [In addition to the letter itself, I used the following sources: www.ohioshipwrecks.org, B. Ellen Gardner, Turtle Island Lighthouse: The Darkened Light (1997), and The National Archives. The letter is now in the collection of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library .]

Newlywed Toledoan sees Great Comet of 1843

Many of us can remember the comet Hale-Bopp, which appeared in the skies of Toledo (and much of the rest of the world) in the winter of 1996-97. The brightest comet in years, Hale-Bopp made for amazing comet-gazing. I well remember viewing the comet from the playground of Grove Patterson School in West Toledo. A friend of mine who drove between Toledo and Ann Arbor daily said that motorists on US 23 were stopping on the berm to ogle the comet. It was so much more spectacular than Comet Kohoutek in 1973 and the disappointing return of Haley’s Comet in 1986. I doubt there will be such an amazing comet show again in my lifetime.

Another comet visited the earth and Toledo in 1843. A letter from a Toledo newlywed named Carry to a relative in Connecticut includes this sentence: I almost forgot to ask you if you had seen the comet - it seems to be the most fashionable of any thing I know of. You can not go out without being asked have you seen the comet? The “Great Comet of 1843” was a comet that passed Earth on March 6, 1843. Widely observed and notable for a long “tail,” the Great Comet attracted worldwide attention. In fact, a religious movement broke out in New England that believed the comet presaged the end of the world. How a Toledo housewife viewed what would become the story of the year is summarized here.

We don’t know the full name of our Toledo comet gazer. She didn’t sign her full name, so we know her only as “Carry.” Carry was from Connecticust, and was related to the Stroud family. In October of 1842 she had married a man named William: Everyone thinks, I suppose, they have the best husband in the world and I am just sure I have the very best- so you asked my advice on the subject. I will say I never was so happy as I am now or have been since one Monday morning in Oct 1842 – and my advice to you is if you can find as good a man as I have got do you give him a chase and don’t quit chasing till you get him. Now if that is not good advice I can not give any. Carry was delighted by marriage and domestic life: … I am getting quite expert – I can mend Coats shirts & everything belonging to a gentleman’s wardrobe-…. The letter is full of chitchat about friends, taking a trip to Detroit, and so forth. Her life in Toledo, that little village on the edge of a swamp, seemed quite happy.

But there were omens. Besides the comet, there had been a dreadfully cold winter: Do you have a long cold winter or rather have you had? It has been very cold indeed here. The Cattle hogs and sheep are starving to death all around us. I do not think so much of the cold as I am so accustomed to it. Carry does not say in her letter whether she saw these natural phenomenon as harbingers of doom. But certainly some of her fellow Ohioans, and others in the United States saw the comet as a sign of the end of the world.

In the village of Low Hampton, New York, there lived a veteran of the War of 1812 named William Miller (1782-1849). Miller, like many veterans, had his faith shaken by his wartime experiences. In an effort to recapture his faith, he began to study the prophecies of Daniel. By 1822 he was convinced that Christ would return to Earth in 1844. He gathered followers, who were numerous enough to start a newspaper, and convinced other clergymen. By 1843, a new religious movement, “Millerism,” had established itself around the teachings of William Miller. After several revisions, Miller’s followers established October 22, 1844 as the date of the end of the world. Not knowing how to prepare, people stocked their cellars with food and supplies; others, preparing to go to heaven, saw no need to prepare. But when the world did not end, the days following October 22 were referred to as the “Great Disappointment.” Some of Miller’s disciples went on to found what is today known as the Seventh Day Adventist Church. But for the most part, Miller’s followers were disappointed and bewildered.

Many Millerites had seen The Great Comet of 1843 as a heavenly sign that the end was coming. There were several omens to be seen in the America of that time: meteor showers in 1833, a financial panic in 1837, the death of President William Henry Harrison on 1841. “Carry” herself mentions an ominously hard winter. People in the nineteenth century were predisposed to look for “signs” in a mostly inscrutable world. Carry in Toledo reported the comet as a source of conversation; many others looked more warily to the skies.

Charley Heuermann and his Chickens

If you drive southeast of Bowling Green about two miles, you will run into two landmarks: US Route 6, a major two lane artery that runs all the way to Massachusetts, and Cuckle Creek, a tiny waterway that meanders northward and finally empties into the north branch of the Portage River. Cuckle Creek is very narrow, little bigger than a ditch, draining the open farmland of a portion of eastern Wood County. US 6 is a heavily traveled motorway; trucks use it to avoid paying tolls on the Ohio Turnpike. If you track Cuckle Creek to where it comes nearest to US 6, in Center Township’s Section 34, you won’t hear water; you will hear trucks downshifting. Go to the same point one hundred years ago, and you might not have heard the creek either; you would have heard chickens cackling. Cuckle Creek and US 6 parallel each other on land that was once owned by a farmer named Herman Heuermann, whose brother Charles (aka Charley) ran a chicken breeding operation. Herman owned the land, 113 acres in Section 34, and another 43 acres further down the creek. Charley lived on the larger farm.

His story is simple, but tracking him (and his chickens) is a bit more complex. Charles (1868-1929) was born in Hanover, Germany, “and spent his childhood in his fatherland with his thrifty parents,” Frederick and Caroline Heuermann. The whole family moved to Ohio and settles in Wood County around 1882. Charles died in 1929 at the age of 61. “His death came very suddenly, while he was doing chores. He was stricken and dropped dead without suffering any pain.” Heuermann, who was an active member of the Cloverdale Lutheran Church, does not appear ever to have married. He was, “admired for his straightforward manner and honesty in dealing with everyone.”

I thought at first that Heuermann, who dropped the extra “n’ from his name at some point, left no further record of himself. But thanks to a battered envelope and a classified ad in the June 1905, issue of Successful Poultry Journal, we know he was a breeder and keeper of chickens. In the only surviving writing of his, in a classified ad, he wrote: I am breeding Thompson’s Ringlet strain of Barred Rocks, and the quality is the best. If you want to start right or improve your flock you cannot do better than to try some of my eggs. $2 per setting. The envelope had a return address advertising “Charley Heuermann, Breeder of Prize Winning Barred Plymouth Rocks.” Mailed in 1903, it showed a large picture of the characteristic black and white poultry breed.

The Plymouth Rock breed of chicken is native to America, having first been called by that name in 1869. They were a popular breed on farms, tough and long lived. The “barred” nomenclature describes the white-and-black feathers of the original variety that Charley Heuermann kept. There are now many other varieties, including the White, which is a popular breed for broilers. “Thompson’s Ringlet” was a variety of the barred Plymouth Rock. Developed by E. B. Thompson (1862-1928) of Amenia, New York, in the early twentieth century, they were bestsellers in the poultry world. It is reported that Thompson once refused an offer of $1000 at a poultry show at Madison Square Garden for a Ringlet rooster. That may be chicken folklore, but it showed how eagerly poultry breeders, like Charley Heuermann, sought the breed.

Farm raised chickens have dwindled in Wood County, supplanted by massive ”factory farm” chicken-and-egg outfits in other areas. Yet every year, a brave show of poultry can be seen at the Wood County Fair, where hobbyists, 4-H projects, and backyard producers display. Charley Heuermann would no doubt approve.

[Information was taken from the Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune of May 28, 1929, and Successful Poultry Journal, June 1905.]

Man with Horses: Wood County, Ohio, 1890s

His name might have been Frank Henry; that is one of the names written on the cover of the faded notebook. But that might also have been a customer’s name. Merchants in small farming towns used to hand out small calendars or notebooks free. This notebook is filled with advertisements for “Dr. Pierce’s Standard Medicines” of Buffalo, New York. There was a space on the back for the local merchant’s name, and this particular notebook advertised “D. L. Aldrich, Dealer in Drugs and Medicines” in Weston, Ohio (Wood County). Not really a diary, the book’s owner made miscellaneous notes of his work scattered through entries dated roughly 1890 to 1893. The notes are difficult to read and miscellaneous in character. Can we learn anything from them?

On March 15, 1891, he did work for D. G. Bishop, plowing and hauling manure. He also hauled seven loads of wood from the “Brewer barn.” He also hauled a load of “gords” (?) to Bowling Green. That August he spent a day threshing oats and wheat, and in October of 1892, he was paid $2.00 for husking corn “with team [of horses].” In other entries, he shelled and hauled loads of corn. The list of chores was endless. He sawed wood for a man named Silas Powell. He “dressed” (skinned, bled, and/or gutted) a hog that weighed 130 pounds. He hauled oil; this was at the tail end of Wood County’s oil boom. Oil wells ran freely for several years, but wagons were still used to get oil from well to refiner. Many of the logbooks entries mention horses. In addition to those already mentioned, he “plowed with one horse;” “labor with team;” spent a day on “horse labor.” He hauled a “sack of potatoes,” moved “20 baskets of ear corn,” and spent long summer weeks doing horse powered work on threshing the wheat harvest.

If his name was Frank Henry, he might have been the Frank Henry who worked as a farmhand near Perrysburg in 1880. The 1890 Census results were destroyed in 1922 in a fire, so without a certain name to hang our research one, we cannot be confident. With somewhat more confidence we may guess he was a “teamster.” Not, mind you, a member of the truck drivers union of modern times, but in the nineteenth century use of the word: a man who owned or worked with a team of horses. Is it history if we do not know his name, his home, his background, or his politics? But we do know this: he worked hard hauling things with one or more horses, lived in Wood County, and, at some point, visited the drugstore of Dwight Aldrich in Weston, and picked up a free notebook. And from that notebook, we can understand his world of hard work with horses.

From Wood County, Ohio, to Sierra Leone – Two Christmases, 1893 and 1894

[The man and women on the right are Zella Bates and John King, posing with fellow Otterbein students, about 1893.]

Zella Bates was a country girl from Wood County. She grew up on a farm in the wilds of eastern Wood County, between Risingsun and Wayne, which she knew by its original name of Freeport. Her family, including her mother, father, and brother Sardis, were devout members of the United Brethren Church, which operated a small college in Westerville, near Columbus.

To this college, then and now called Otterbein University, Zella went in the fall of 1892 as a freshman. In addition to studying Latin, German, and geometry, she met a fellow student named John R. King. A native of Pennsylvania, King was already a licensed minister when he met Miss Bates. Along about October, Mr. King proposed after a courtship mainly involving walks, reading to each other, and attending the newfangled football games. Miss Bates accepted, and they married the following June.

In her diary, she recounts such country events as quilting bees, taffy pulls, harvests, and a couple of Christmases. One was a down home, Wood County Christmas; uneventful, quiet, and full of visits and friends.

1893:

16th Sat. Sardy & I leave W. on the morning train We go to Columbus, then take the H. V. [Hocking Valley rail]road at Fostoria I take the O.C. [Ohio Central] for our folks are not expecting us in Bradner papa meets me then goes for Sardy & the trunks. We are glad to be home again.

17. Sunday. papa & I walk to S. school & preaching at the M.E. [Methodist Episcopal church]

22nd Friday. Mama, Sardy, & I go to Fostoria to-day to do some shopping

23rd Saturday. The M. E’s have a Christmas tree. The weather is quite warm for this time of year.

24th Attend Sunday school & & preaching at the M.E.

25th Christmas Day Monday We are all at home to day suppose we will be separated [sic] by a great distance next Christmas. This is a warm & pleasant day.

26th …. Get a letter and Christmas present from John to-day. He is coming Sat.

29th …. Pa & Sardy go to a lecture in Freeport in the evening.

30th This morning John comes on the 8.30 train Sardy meets him. We spend a pleasant day.

31st Papa, Estelle, John & I go to Sunday. school. … dinner in the evening Sardy takes John & I to Bradner to take the evening train for Columbus. We call on Effie & Fred until train time and almost miss the train. We get in Columbus at 10.30 o’clock…


But what a difference a year makes. The newly married Mr. & Mrs. King, who had several friends in the active United Brethren foreign missions, decided to give up Wood County for the wilds of West Africa. Zella hints at this in her entry for December 25. In November of 1894 they sailed for Europe on the SS Britannic, which took them to Europe. A smaller steamboat ushered them into what must have been a nearly unimaginable world of Africa. They arrived in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone, just in time to experience Christmas, West African style.

1894:

Monday, December 24 . . . Mr. King is bitten by a Centipede in the evening. I am very much frightened but they tell us it is not dangerous. Early this evening we hear firecrackers and see torpedoes flying and are told that is to celebrate… this is Christmas time. A number of children and young people come up to our window with a jumping Jack and sing and carry on. They are serenading I suppose.

Tue 25th Christmas Day. We sleep until late this morning as we were tired and up late. We have cocoa rather late, have a number of callers both yesterday and to-day…. This is a strange Christmas. The day is warm and it seems like a fourth of July. In the afternoon a crowd …. are going around pounding on drums and singing & dancing, They come in front of our window and make a noise for a while. … it seems dreadful to see them carrying on so…. We spend a very pleasant day…..We enjoy the fruits ever so much. We have had breadfruit, oranges, bananas….all of which I like I also like cocoa which takes the place of potato. I make a silk tie for John to-day.


The Kings lived and worked in Africa for fifteen years, before returning to Ohio. John King died in 1938, Zella in 1954. They were benefactors to Otterbein, while retaining income from Wood County farmland they inherited. Their lives were full of extraordinary contrasts, and among their memories were surely those remarkably different Christmases of 1893 and 1894.


[Zella Bates King’s two volume diary is in the Otterbein University Archives. Thanks to University Archivist Stephen Grinch for providing access. I have modernized spelling and punctuation and removed some redundancies.]

How They Paid the Doctor in New Riegel, ca 1860

(Probably the oldest surviving phograph of New Riegel shows the Nuns' Covent in about 1857, contemporary to Doctor Hermann)


We all groan inwardly when faced with medical bills and the complications of insurance. Some procedures are covered; some are not. Some are paid in full, some in varying percentages. And if you are covered by more than one insurer, the paperwork becomes mountainous. Don’t get me wrong, the only thing trickier than insurance is no insurance, so perhaps we should be happy with our lot.

In 1857, my great great grandfather, Johann Baptist Ilgert, fractured a bone. He lived near the hamlet of New Riegel in Seneca County, Ohio. The people in and around New Riegel were mostly German-speaking immigrants and mostly farmers. Luckily, New Riegel had its own doctor, who was able to treat the fracture. Grandfather Ilgert paid Dr. Franz Hermann two dollars, who carefully recorded it in his account book (although, curiously, he failed to record which bone was fractured!). Dr. Hermann accepted cash, but as we shall see, took his payment in many forms.

In rural communities, long before insurance or Medicare, doctors were often paid with either farm produce or labor. Dr. Hermann’s account books and ledgers are preserved in the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library in Fremont (a copy is in the Center for Archival Collections, Bowling Green State University) and show what the doctor traded his medical expertise for in the 1850s and 60s.

Franz Hermann was born in 1821 in Kaiserslauten, Germany. He left Germany for the United States in 1850, allegedly to escape prosecution for being involved in a “student revolt.” Settling in New Riegel in 1857, he saw patients there until 1866 when he relocated to Bluffton in Allen County. He married Christina Hemley in 1855 and the couple had at least five children. Dr. Hermann died in 1882 and is buried in Pandora in Putnam County, his wife’s hometown.

There were two doctors in New Riegel in the early 1860s. In the 1860 census, they lived practically next door to each other, separated by one empty house. The other doctor, Jacob Boep, had been born in France and was slightly older than Hermann. It may be that New Riegel’s mostly German-speaking citizens preferred Dr. Hermann. Dr. Hermann’s net worth, as shown in the Census of 1860, was slightly higher than Dr Boep’s, too.

But in looking over Hermann’s list of patients, their medical needs, and how they paid, one wonders if he had any cash money at all. Take the case of Peter Theis. Theis, a 47 year old farmer from Luxembourg, paid his bill with one load of pumpkins and sixteen pounds of pork! John Stuhl, a 58 year old farmer born in Belgium, only needed “advice” from Hermann, and his bill was less, accordingly. He paid with three dozen eggs and two bushels of barley.

There were telltale signs of changing medical practices. Peter Hubertssprung underwent “cupping” from the doctor. Cupping was a treatment involving pressing a heated cup to the skin; as the cup cooled, it was believed to “draw out” the disease. Although cupping has long since been discredited, the farmer paid with a ham, four chickens, and a bushel each of corn and potatoes. There is a clear distinction between doctors and dentists in our day, but Dr. Hermann was willing to work on teeth as well. A certain N. Plews paid fifty cents for “drawing 2 teeth.” For another patient, he received forty five cents for drawing one tooth, but only a nickel for the second.

Not all the patients paid with farm produce. Karl Hauser paid with a half-day of wood chopping. Barbara Hiesbun paid by doing laundry. In 1860, John Pieri (sp?) paid him with a 'bookstand" valued at two dollars and "wool....45 cents." Conrad Sacher gave the doctor both “hay” and “work.” Baptist Heitzman was credited fifty cents for "3/4 day work w/o board.” A Mr. Hasenbihler apparently traded his son’s work; he was credited fifty cents for "one day chopping wood (by boy)." When one considers that “work” at that time was hard, slow, and mostly done with the hands, these payments were not casual.

We don’t know how Dr. Hermann valued the produce and the labor he received. From one patient he received a "load" of corn fodder, which he valued at one dollar. How big a load was it and what did he do with the fodder? The doctor may have had cows; horses cannot eat corn fodder. But he also may have resold the fodder. Like much of history, the evidence does not answer all our questions.

The Sign of the Prophet - a brief review

In a search for fiction in which William Henry Harrison was a character, I came across a book published in 1901. The Sign of the Prophet: A Tale of Tecumseh and Tippecanoe was written by James Ball Naylor and published by the venerable (and now deceased) Saalfield Publishing Company of Akron, Ohio. I read it, and in a curious way, liked it, but with several caeats.

First the bad news:

Most of the characters are stock images of Indians and frontiersmen, straight from "Sioux Central Casting."

The plot depends on more than a few surprises, namely a long lost father, a long-lost fiancee, and a long lost true-love.

Secondary characters include a talkative, skirt-chasing (in a 1901 way) scout.

All the Indians say "Ugh" as their favorite comment.

True love prevails.


Now for the pluses.

The book does follow the story of the War of 1812 pretty closely. General (later President) W. H. Harrison, Tecumseh, Tenskatawa (the Shawnee prophet), Henry Procter, and even minor characters like Harrison's scout William Oliver and Indian leader Winameg are historical persons. And the settings are real enough. The battlegrounds of Tippecanoe, Fort Meigs, and Fort Miamis are all described fairly accurately.

Despites its many weaknesses, The Sign of the Prophet is pretty good at atmosphere. The reader gets a good feel for the life of the Woodlands of the Old Northwest. Smoky Indian camps are well described, and the frontiersmen, while a bit stilted, are fairly enjoyably portrayed.

The story, without touching on its authenticity, did hold my attention. I grew up about ten miles from Fort Meigs, and the charm of that place and its history, hooked my interest. Maybe that's why I enjoyed this old potboiler. In any event, it's worth a couple evenings reading - if you can find it!