Ohio History Journal

KIM M. GRUENWALD

Marietta's Example of a Settlement

Pattern in the Ohio Country: A

Reinterpretation

 

 

 

As historians of the Early Republic, scholars of the Progressive era created

a long-lasting, influential school of interpretation for the decades following

the American Revolution. The Progressive school focused on the conflict be-

tween common men who favored local control and an elite which favored

strong central authority-as they deemed it, the forces of democracy versus

the forces of aristocracy. The Old Northwest provided a perfect arena for these

historians to test their hypotheses. Following in the footsteps of Frederick

Jackson Turner, they described how the forces of the common man developed

as Americans spread through the new territories in the Old Northwest. In The

Civilization of the Old Northwest: A Study of Political, Social, and

Economic Development, 1788-1812, Beverley Bond described the new region

as the laboratory where Americans first experimented with democracy. Settlers

took colonial ideas about law, government, and society with them. But once

they were in the West, they adapted to their new life in the wilderness,

dropped conventional ideas that no longer served their needs, and developed

egalitarian institutions. In Valley of Democracy: The Frontier versus the

Plantation in the Ohio, 1775-1818, John D. Barnhart followed up on Bond's

work, focusing even more narrowly on the Ohio Valley to show how the

frontier produced American democracy.¹

Marietta, Ohio, occupied a peculiar place in this historiography of the Early

Republic-a place which relegated the town's story to a peripheral role within

the Progressive school's lexicon. The town was settled in 1788 by the Ohio

Company, a group of New England Revolutionary War veterans and their as-

sociates. Historians wrote that Marietta's settlers recreated a New England vil-

lage in the wilderness. Composed chiefly of those who adhered to

Federalism, Mariettans seemed too different from the pioneer farmers inhabit-

ing the rest of the state to be considered typical. Thus, although Marietta's

 

 

Kim M. Gruenwald is Assistant Professor of History at Kent State University.

 

1. John D. Barnhart, Valley of Democracy: The Frontier versus the Plantation in the Ohio

Valley, 1775-1818 (Bloomington, Ind., 1953); Beverley W. Bond, Jr., The Civilization of the Old

Northwest: A Study of Political, Social, and Economic Development, 1788-1812 (New York,

1934).

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126                                                         OHIO HISTORY

 

status as the first permanent Anglo-American settlement in the Old Northwest

assured its place in American history, many historians moved further west to

the history of the Scioto and Miami Valleys, feeling their stories were more

representative of the history of the settlement of the Ohio country. The tradi-

tional story presented Marietta as a stronghold of Federalism in early Ohio

that faded from significance quickly as Jeffersonian Republicans wrested con-

trol of the territory from them. For most historians, Marietta's traditional

place in history remained unchanged even while the history of the Old

Northwest itself evolved.²

Recent historians have reinterpreted the story of the struggle between East

and West between 1795 and 1820. In The Frontier Republic: Ideology and

Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780-1825, Andrew Cayton stressed that while

the antifederal and Jeffersonian localists of the Miami and Scioto Valleys

eventually won out in the political struggle to define Ohio's character, they

were never precisely egalitarian as the Progressives had maintained. The

Jeffersonian Republicans resented the hold Ohio Federalists and Arthur St.

Clair attempted to keep over the settlement of the Ohio Valley, but they were

far from poor, simple farmers. The controversies of the Early Republic in the

West, he argued, had less to do with competing class interests than with is-

sues of home rule: in other words, the competition involved localism versus

nationalism.³

But despite the evolution of the historiography of the Old Northwest, one

question has remained unanswered. With such conflict dividing Ohio localists

from the metropolitan leaders of the East, how did the Ohio Valley ever be-

come part of the Union? The answer lies in the history of the town that the

Progressive historians deemed unique and outside the mainstream of the his-

tory of the Old Northwest-the history of Marietta, Ohio.

From a political standpoint, Mariettans did sink into the background of

Ohio's history, but Marietta itself survived, evolved, and grew, even if it

never rivalled the size and strength of Cincinnati, Cleveland, or Columbus

(but, of course, few Ohio towns did). But it is precisely because Marietta's

founders had at least half of their intentions grounded in old, colonial views

that a historian can discern the more successful strategies of those who ac-

 

 

2. Reginald Horsman, The Frontier in the Formative Years, 1783-1815 (New York, 1970),

36-42, 75; Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and

Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837 (New York, 1968), 48-49, 119-20; Robert

E. Chaddock, Ohio Before 1850: A Study of the Early Influence of Pennsylvania and Southern

Populations in Ohio (New York, 1908); bibliographical essay in Andrew R.L. Cayton, Frontier

Republic; Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780-1825 (Kent, Ohio, 1986), 181;

Cayton, "Marietta and the Ohio Company," in Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, &

Development in the Preindustrial Era, ed. by Robert D. Mitchell (Lexington. Ky., 1991), 187-

88; Don Harrison Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Comunity: Jacksonville, Illinois,

1825-70 (Urbana, Il1., 1983), 23-38.

3. Cayton, Frontier Republic.

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Marietta's Example of a Settlement Pattern                    127

 

companied the leaders of the Ohio Company to the confluence of the

Muskingum and Ohio Rivers. The nationally-oriented patronage system of

the Federalists failed, but that failure stands in contrast to and highlights the

successful links to the East forged by the merchants who came with Rufus

Putnam and his followers to the Ohio Valley.

The story of Marietta as a town whose past provides a window into the his-

tory of the Old Northwest must begin with the plans Rufus Putnam and the

Ohio Company had for the Ohio Valley. These plans went far beyond trans-

planting a New England town in the wilderness, and thus they attracted many

different types of settlers. Founding Marietta proved difficult, but after ban-

ishing the Native Americans who lived in the Ohio Valley, Anglo-American

settlement exploded. In establishing the community, Mariettans utilized two

different kinds of networks-one based on the patronage of the federal gov-

ernment and one based on credit relationships between local merchants and

others. When the Federalists lost control of the national government, it was

the second type which allowed Marietta to survive and grow.

 

 

I

 

By 1770 the fertile land on the banks of the Ohio were well known to

would-be American settlers, especially on the southern side of the valley.

Squatters with no legal claim moved north of the Ohio River during and after

the Revolution, and by 1785 some 300 lived along the Muskingum, 300

along the Hocking, 1500 along the Scioto, and 1500 along the Miami. The

army tried to uproot squatters in the late 1770s in an effort to keep the

Delaware Indians neutral in the Revolutionary War. In 1785, after the war,

they erected Fort Harmar at the mouth of the Muskingum to control squatting

and to secure the Ohio country for the newly formed United States.⁴

The Confederation displayed keen interest in the Ohio country for strategic

reasons, but government leaders also hoped land sales there would help offset

the young nation's debts. Members of Congress and leaders such as George

Washington believed that the Ohio squatters posed a threat to their plans to

create an orderly society capable of securing the Revolution and the new

Republic. Congressional leaders deemed the squatters too individualistic and

selfish to make good citizens. They feared the squatters would be easily sub-

verted by British or Spanish agents, making them a threat to security.

Congress decided to use force to evict settlers, burning their cabins, but found

the task an impossible one.⁵

 

 

 

4. Archer Butler Hulbert, "The Ohio Company," in The Records of the Original

Proceedings of the Ohio Company, ed. by Hulbert (Marietta, Ohio, 1917), xxi-xxiii.

5.  Cayton, Frontier Republic, 2-11.

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128                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

Because of the attempts by the army to control the banks of the Ohio, the

Ohio Valley was as well known to the military as to the squatters them-

selves, and army officers knew the lands were rapidly being settled. In

September of 1783 while stationed with Washington's army at Newburgh on

the Hudson, a group of Continental officers began to formulate plans of their

own for making use of the Ohio Valley-plans that did not include letting it

fill up with squatters. Led by Brigader General Rufus Putnam, these officers

petitioned Congress to grant the land to them in the tradition of military

bounty lands. Putnam argued in the petition and elsewhere that by allowing

his group to set up a permanent settlement on the Ohio, the new American

government would gain a buffer against the British and the Spanish, as well

as providing communication between the East and the West through the Great

Lakes. Putnam emphasized that if settlement was not carried out in an or-

derly fashion, a European power might gain control of the area. Nearly all

the petitioners, as members of the Society of Cincinnati, intended to make

their settlement a bulwark of the authority of the federal government in the

West.⁶

When their push for their bounty lands met with no success, Rufus Putnam

and some of his associates created the Ohio Company in 1786. Set up as a

joint-stock company, instead of requiring military service to obtain land, it

gave membership to those who could purchase a share of stock for $1000 in

continental securities or $10 in gold. This allowed men to turn depreciated

securities into profit-land. They limited the number of shares a person

could buy to five to insure that professional speculators could not cash in-

thus preserving the speculative advantage for themselves.⁷

The federal government agreed to sell land to the Ohio Company because

Congress believed that the Ohio Company's plans would further the national

interest and provide for a systematic settling of the West. Those who would

be labelled Federalists in a very few years regarded the interior as a place they

could mold into an asset to the new nation. They wished to settle the trans-

Appalachian region not with the squatters who grew corn, lived in cabins, and

hunted in the woods, but with farmers bent on improving the land and estab-

lishing communities. To accomplish this aim, Congress gave control of the

Ohio country to "gentlemen of the proper persuasion," who would establish

system and order on the banks of the Ohio.⁸

Neither Putnam nor his associates envisioned an egalitarian society; they

expected their ties to the national government to secure their own individual

social status. Most of the prominent members of the company had lost capi-

 

 

6. Hulben, "The Ohio Company," xxvi-xxx, xl-xlii.

7. Timothy J. Shannon, "The Ohio Company and the Meaning of Opportunity in the

American West, 1786-1795," New England Quarterly, 64 (September, 1991), 396-97, 402.

8. Cayton, Frontier Republic, 13-25.

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Marietta's Example of a Settlement Pattern                       129

 

tal during the war, and in the social chaos that followed the Revolution. In

some ways, they wanted to recreate the more orderly world they had known

before the war. Joseph Gilman of New Hampshire was one such man.

Chaotic currency conditions after the Revolution and the decline in the value

of state securities caused Gilman to lose much of his property in the late

1780s. He had been a creditor to his home state during the Revolution, pro-

viding troops with clothing and blankets, but he could not collect on many of

these debts after the war, and his economic status collapsed. Gilman intended

to make a new start in the West, away from the eyes of his neighbors who

had witnessed his ruin. Rufus Putnam himself sought an increase in status;

appointed Surveyor General of the United States, and as one of the directors of

the Ohio Company, Putnam would control the patronage system in what

would become Washington County, Ohio.⁹

But Putnam's plans also attracted men very different from Gilman.

Recently one historian has explored other facets in the Ohio Company's plans

for the region. Rufus Putnam envisioned an urbanized West fully integrated

into the Atlantic community and economy. Putnam's West would have an

interdependent relationship with Atlantic culture and society, rather than an

independent one. But the Ohio settlements would be no mere colony of the

East. Putnam planned to promote manufactures in his scheme. Churches and

schools would provide social control. The as-yet-unnamed city of Marietta

was to be the hub of western commercial and cultural exchange with the East.

Putnam and others planned the city on a grid. They knew that farmers would

provide the economic base of western society, but wanted them to support ur-

ban areas of manufactures and commerce. Putnam envisioned a complex,

economically diverse society in the West, not an agrarian paradise.¹⁰

Although he never became a stockholder, Dudley Woodbridge was one man

who found himself attracted to this vision of the Ohio Company. Born in

1747, Woodbridge moved to Norwich, Connecticut, in 1770, established

himself as a lawyer, married the daughter of a prominent iron manufacturer,

and turned to mercantile pursuits soon thereafter. In the years following the

Revolution, Connecticut merchants found their path to the West Indies

blocked by the English, and Woodbridge decided to find an alternate route to

the Atlantic world down the Mississippi through New Orleans.11

 

 

 

9. Ibid., 16, 26, 34, 49; Mrs. Charles P. Noyes, ed., A Family History in Letters and

Documents, 1667-1837 (St. Paul, Minn., 1919), 155; S.P. Hildreth, Biographical and Historical

Memoirs of the Early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1852), 302-03.

10. Cayton, Frontier Republic, 21-31.

11. Frances Manwaring Caulkins, History of Norwich, Connecticut (Hartford, Conn., 1866),

397, 511; Richard Anson Wheeler, History of the Town of Stonington, County of New London,

Connecticut, facsimile reprint (Mystic, Conn., 1966), 693; Bruce C. Daniels, "Economic

Development in Colonial and Revolutionary Connecticut: An Overview," William and Mary

Quarterly, 3d ser., 37 (July, 1980), 438, 448.

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130                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

That many Mariettans' plans went beyond recreating a New England village

can be seen in a series of debates held on snowy Ohio evenings during the

winter of 1790. Bent on restoring their lost status, many of the leaders of the

Ohio Company in Marietta were full of the rhetoric of orderly, civilized set-

tlement. But Thomas Wallcut, who spent the winter of 1790 in Marietta,

recorded that when the local debating society was given a choice between dis-

cussing capital punishment, the harmony between farmers, mechanics, and

merchants in society, the establishment of a police force in Marietta, and the

legality of Americans utilizing the Mississippi River, they chose to debate

navigating the Mississippi. The choice of debate topics indicates that along

with the plans for the establishment of a civilized society, there were men in

Marietta who had no less interest in economic success than in the Ohio

Company's plans for American society.¹²

Marietta's settlers intended that the Ohio territory would be much more

than an Atlantic hinterland or a backcountry. They looked further west to the

Mississippi River and wanted to take advantage of the New Orleans trade.

Members of the Ohio Company intended to make money for themselves

rather than being dependent on established Boston or Philadelphia merchants.

Pennsylvania merchants would be their suppliers, but the Marietta merchants

and farmers planned to make their own profits by selling in New Orleans.

They looked beyond just giving the eastern merchants their produce for fin-

ished goods. These men intended to create and control a trade route that pene-

trated deep into the heart of the continent. Ohio Company leaders felt that

Marietta had to represent much more than the furthest line of western settle-

ment-some sort of expanding buffer and furthest reach of civilization. The

founders of the Ohio Company intended to control the most important trade

and migration route in the northern part of the continent-the Ohio River.

They would provide a portal, giving direction to the settlement of the vast

new lands available to Americans now that the French and the English had

been banished from the long desired Ohio Valley. The interior of the conti-

nent was there for the taking, and they planned to be at the forefront of that

effort.

The image of their western settlement as a portal rather than a hedge is the

key. In the earlier colonial period, the "frontier" usually meant the settle-

ments at the point of the colonists' furthest expansion into the wilderness,

making it either a buffer zone against Indian attack, a backcountry isolated

from the mainstream life of the colony, or a hinterland which traded with the

coastal communities. The Marietta settlers, on the other hand, crossed the

Appalachian Mountains and put themselves near the headwaters of a mighty

 

 

12. Thomas Wallcut Journal, entry of 27 January 1790, Thomas Wallcut Papers, 1671-1866,

microfilm edition, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts (hereafter referred

to as Wallcut Journal), reel 3.

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Marietta's Example of a Settlement Pattern                         131

 

transport system that flowed to the west, away from the old world and on to a

new continent. The Ohio Company leaders wanted their town to be a gate-

way for a nation moving west. They envisioned a mighty nation by looking

westward, down the river, not back over their shoulders to the Atlantic coast;

they faced the interior and wanted to take advantage of all the hinterland that

would connect them with the port of New Orleans. These men planned to

harness a river to claim a continent, not just carve a town out of the wilder-

ness. In addition to attracting New Englanders like Joseph Gilman seeking

the recreation of a stable society, Putnam's vision also attracted men like

Dudley Woodbridge eager to found a continental trading empire.

 

 

II

 

The first group of men who went west in 1788 to establish the town of

Marietta were surveyors, boatbuilders, and guards employed by the Ohio

Company. They came to survey town lots and get ready for settlers to arrive.

One surveyor, a young man named James Backus, sent very good reports of

the western country to family back home in Norwich, Connecticut. He wrote

that the Indians were friendly: one family had even stayed in the white set-

tlement and helped them plant corn, and that a treaty with the Ohio tribes was

only a few months away. James also reported that settlers were flocking in

by the boatload, and he asked his father to send him 10 pounds of nails and

100 pairs of shoes to be sold for a tidy profit. He sent along the names of

four Ohio Company shareholders (three of whom appeared in the Norwich

business records of his brother-in-law, Dudley Woodbridge) and urged his fam-

ily to buy their shares to sell later for a much higher price.¹³

Dudley Woodbridge wrote James in December to ask for more information

about the western country. Complaining that business was dull in Norwich,

and money growing scarcer, he asked about "the prospects of business" in the

West. He asked for a detailed report:

What is the climate, a healthy or unhealthy one, what is the danger in going, or af-

ter you are there, where can vessels go, and have the least land carriage

Philadelphia, Virginia, or where, are vessels suffered to go down and up the

Mississippi unmolested, how far can a vessel of a hundred tons get up the Ohio,

are materials for shipbuilding plenty and good . . . is the navigation down the

rivers safe and good, what is the demand for goods and what kinds will best an-

swer, with the prices of liquors etc. there, what is the price per ton for land car-

 

 

 

13. Thomas J. Summers, History of Marietta (Marietta, Ohio, 1903), 55, 77-81; Hulbert,

"Ohio Company," cxxiii; Shannon, "The Ohio Company," 407; James Backus to Elijah Backus,

9 June and 15 June 1788, in the Backus-Woodbridge Collection, microfilm edition, Ohio

Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio (hereafter referred to as Backus-Woodbridge Collection,

ME), box 1, folder 1.

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132                                                    OHIO HISTORY

 

riage, from Philadelphia or your nearest seaport, what are the remittances that will

be made for goods, cash or produce, if produce, what kind and the price? In short, I

should be glad of a particular and minute information with regard to what does now

or may relate to the mercantile line that part especially which relates to naviga-

tion viz. building, loading, and kind of cargo.¹⁴

 

Woodbridge visited James in Marietta in May and June of 1789, at the be-

ginning of a summer during which James traveled as a surveyor for the Ohio

Company. He asked James to report on good lands to invest in, and to buy

shares from nonresident shareholders for him. Dudley planned to speculate in

land, mills, and mines, using Backus's advance local knowledge of land, soil,

and resources to his advantage. Woodbridge also discussed going into busi-

ness with such prominent Ohio Company stockholders as Samuel Parsons

and Griffin Greene.   Obviously, Marietta's prospects pleased Dudley

Woodbridge, and he decided he could make his fortune there.¹⁵

Lucy Woodbridge followed her husband to Ohio with some of their children

in late September, arriving in early November. Dudley Woodbridge as yet

owned no property. He rented a home and shop, but constantly looked for

property to buy. Apparently the move cost him most of what he had, but he

remained confident that he could make profitable business deals and alliances

in Marietta. With his business knowledge, experience as a lawyer, and his

connections within the Ohio Company through his brother-in-law,

Woodbridge must have felt that he had an excellent chance of succeeding.¹⁶

While Woodbridge was busy establishing his business, Joseph Gilman's

son, Benjamin Ives Gilman, arrived in town. He wrote his eastern fiancee

that Marietta already had the look of an old settlement: "Those people who

wish it have not only the necessaries but the luxuries of life in as great plenty

here as in N England." He also bragged of how quickly the settlers cleared the

land and planted crops.¹⁷

But a year after the arrival of the Woodbridges and the Gilmans, the out-

break of war with the Delaware Indians interrupted all the carefully-laid plans

of the Ohio Company. During the 1780s, the American army had established

numerous forts in the western country, but it lacked the troops to enforce

peace in the region. Constant warfare between the Kentuckians and the Ohio

Indians made the region a battleground much of the time. In January of 1789,

 

 

 

14. Dudley Woodbridge to James Backus, 9 December 1788, Backus-Woodbridge

Collection, ME, box 1, folder 1.

15. Dudley Woodbridge to James Backus, 14 June 1789, Backus-Woodbridge Collection,

ME, box 1, folder 1.

16. Dudley Woodbridge to Roger Griswold, 11 November 1789, typescript, Dudley

Woodbridge-Roger Griswold Correspondence, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford,

Connecticut.

17. Benjamin Ives Gilman to Hannah Robbins, 16 August 1789, in Noyes, A Family History,

163.

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Marietta's Example of a Settlement Pattern                       133

two treaties were signed at Fort Harmar, across the Muskingum from Marietta, in which the Indians, including Delaware and Wyandot leaders, agreed to peace in exchange for goods and the punishment of white aggres- sors. But many of the Ohio Indians, including the Shawnee and the Miamis further west, refused to abide by a treaty in which they had taken no part. 18 During the summer of 1790, white and Indian attacks continued unabated. Colonel Josiah Harmar convinced Governor Arthur St. Clair that the Americans would need to "'chastise'" the Indians. In September, Virginia and Pennsylvania militia gathered at Fort Washington (on the site of Cincinnati) to stage an expedition against Indian villages in northeastern Indiana. Poorly trained, supplied, and prepared, these troops suffered disastrous defeat as they marched north. Harmar's humiliation only increased the confidence of the Indians, and other Ohio tribes joined in the warfare against the American set- tlers. The federal government decided that more troops and money would help   18. Cayton, Frontier Republic, 36-38; Reginald Horsman, The Frontier in the Formative Years, 39-40.

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134                                                    OHIO HISTORY

 

settle the area. Arthur St. Clair himself, at the head of a force in the summer

of 1791 which aimed to secure the Maumee-Wabash portage, lost nearly 1000

of his 1200 troops. The federal government switched once again to peace ne-

gotiations between late 1791 and 1793, but after their early victories, the

Ohio Indians were unwilling to make any concessions.¹⁹

Marietta's settlers lived under siege in the early 1790s. During the winter of

1790-1791, Indians attacked a settlement at the Big Bottom about thirteen

miles up the Muskingum River, killing twelve. Afterward, the settlers aban-

doned the outer settlements and retreated to blockhouses and stockades in

Marietta and Belpre. By the end of 1793, less than 500 people lived on the

Ohio Company's lands.²⁰

The Indian wars ended with the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. During the

winter of 1793-1794, General Anthony Wayne established Fort Greenville

nearly one hundred miles north of Cincinnati and trained troops there. With

better troops, better preparation, and carefully secured supply lines, Wayne de-

feated the Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on 20 August 1794. One

year later the Indians ceded the Ohio lands in southern and eastern Ohio to the

settlers.²¹ Having ousted the earlier occupants, Ohio pioneers could at last

turn their full attention to settling the region.

 

III

 

The Woodbridges' Marietta neighbors included New England Revolutionary

War veterans and their contemporaries, many of whom were accompanied on

their westward journey by sons, sons-in-law, and nephews-young adults just

starting their families. William Dana, a Continental Army captain from

Massachusetts, had sunk all his capital into continental currency in 1788.

When that depreciated, he was forced to move to Amherst, New Hampshire,

where his brother lived. He rented a farm there, and earned extra cash as a car-

penter and deputy sheriff. In 1789, he decided to move to the banks of the

Ohio with the Ohio Company and become the owner of his own land once

again. Joseph Barker, a newlywed at age 24 in 1789, had worked as an ap-

prentice with his architect father and later as a carpenter. But when he married

William Dana's eldest child, Elizabeth, they followed Captain Dana to the

Ohio Valley. Barker settled on a donation tract, and his descendants remained

in Marietta first as prosperous farmers, and later as merchants well beyond the

Civil War.²²

 

 

19. Cayton, Frontier Republic, 39; Horsman, The Frontier in the Formative Years, 40, 44,

20. Horsman, The Frontier in the Formative Years, 40-42.

21. Ibid., 47-49; Cayton, Frontier Republic, 39, 47-49.

22. Hildreth, Early Pioneer Settlers, 337-39; Rodney T. Hood, "Genealogy and Biography of

Joseph Barker," in Joseph Barker: Recollections of the First Settlement of Ohio, ed. by George

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Marietta's Example of a Settlement Pattern                      135

 

But many young men who came west with their fathers and fathers-in-law

wanted something more after the Revolution. They were in their twenties

rather than in their forties or fifties like Dudley Woodbridge, Rufus Putnam,

and the Ohio Company leaders. Benjamin Ives Gilman was born in 1765, and

his primary interests lie in being in the center of things. When Joseph's fi-

nancial difficulties forced him to move west, his son went with him.

Benjamin returned to the East briefly in 1790 to marry Hannah Robins, and

then set about establishing a mercantile business in Marietta. Benjamin Ives

Gilman sought an active role in the government of the Northwest Territory,

and he became one of Marietta's most active land speculators in the early

1800s. In addition to his political ambitions and land speculation activities,

Gilman also hoped to build a fleet of ocean-going vessels in order to connect

the Ohio Valley to the Atlantic trade world. He wanted to participate actively

in the growth of the new nation. For Benjamin, the move west was not to

re-establish traditional family security, but rather to start a whole new life for

himself. He wrote a relative in Congress, Nicholas Gilman, often, seeking

territorial appointments for himself.²³

Like Benjamin Gilman, Dudley Woodbridge was a Federalist, and like

Joseph Gilman, he accepted appointments from Putnam in the territory's

government. The two families even allied for a time-Dudley Woodbridge,

Jr., married Benjamin Ives Gilman's eldest daughter (she died in childbirth a

short year later). But Woodbridge did not rely primarily upon political and

status-oriented social connections, and his son even less so. Dudley

Woodbridge established a different sort of connection between his community

and the larger world, one of credit and capital. His economic network grew

slowly, however, and Woodbridge encountered many difficulties in cstablish-

ing it.

Despite the ambitions of Ohio Company leaders, Marietta grew slowly in

the early 1790s. Dudley Woodbridge's business early in the decade consisted

mostly of local barter. He received mostly whiskey as payment for goods,

and in turn sold the liquor to men working in town, many in the employ of

the Ohio Company. The townsmen paid Woodbridge in work-carting rails,

plowing a garden, doctoring a cow, killing a calf, bringing in stock, or draw-

ing millstones.  Some paid with venison, which, like the whiskey,

Woodbridge sold in Marietta to others who raised no stock or did not hunt for

meat. The Woodbridge store provided the community with a thriving busi-

ness and a center for social interaction among the stream of customers coming

 

 

Jordan Blazier (Marietta, Ohio, 1958), iii.

23. Hildreth, Early Pioneer Settlers, 306-10; Benjamin Ives Gilman to Hon. Nicholas Gilman,

27 February 1790 and 27 December 1795, Benjamin Ives Gilman to Hannah Gilman, 25 April

1795, in Noyes, ed., A Family History, 170-71, 206-11; Lee Soltow, "Inequality Amidst

Abundance: Land Ownership in Early Nineteenth Century Ohio," Ohio History, 88 (Spring,

1979), see table two, "Top Twelve ... Property Owners in 1810," 137.

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136                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

through daily. Besides the goods Woodbridge received from local hunters and

farmers, he also sold cloth, thread, tobacco, powder, wine, coffee and just

about anything else people needed to make themselves more comfortable in

the woods.²⁴

Dudley Woodbridge's business remained healthy during the war with the

Delawares thanks to the opportunities it furnished: he supplied goods to the

army and members of the local militia in exchange for their pay vouchers, and

sold goods to the army directly as well. In 1794 Woodbridge noted that "[m]y

principle remittance is by militia order."²⁵ Most of the fighting was centered

to the west of Marietta, and goods came through Pennsylvania and down the

Ohio unimpeded.

Throughout the first decade, Woodbridge overcame a series of obstacles to

his mercantile plans. A shipment which arrived a month late in the spring of

1793 cost him an estimated $200 in sales. The limited market during the

Indian wars meant that competition between merchants was keen, and who-

ever received his goods first made what money was to be had. The main army

sometimes moved through, heading west, days before a big shipment ar-

rived-those sales were lost, although the local militia was a constant buyer

during the summer. Another time Woodbridge wrote that goods he had or-

dered in January "did not arrive seasonably to answer a particular purpose for

which I designed them," indicating that, once again, he took a loss.²⁶

Reliable shipping presented a problem as well. Woodbridge believed that

his shipments were so late because the middleman in Pittsburgh did not get

them out on time. Once he complained that his Pittsburgh correspondent had

carelessly stored his goods in a damp cellar, and when they finally arrived, the

dry goods were wet, the tea was musty, and many goods had sustained other

damage. In October of that same year, he lamented that none of his commu-

nications to Philadelphia were received. Woodbridge speculated that due to

the yellow fever epidemic in the city, his messengers refused to enter and

simply "scattered" his letters. No matter how good his markets were,

Woodbridge was at the mercy of forces beyond his control-middlemen in

Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, sickness in the cities, wagoners taking his goods

across Pennsylvania, and ship captains on the Ohio River.²⁷ In addition to

Woodbridge's personal troubles, local society seemed to be under the same

siege by outside forces. After one particularly lengthy period without sup-

 

 

24. Account Book, April to September 1790, Backus-Woodbridge Collection, Ohio Historical

Society, Columbus, Ohio (hereafter referred to as Backus-Woodbridge Collection), box 17,

folder 2, Ibid., account with Henry Rockwell; Wallcut Journal.

25. Letterbook, Dudley Woodbridge to Webster and Co., 21 April 1794, Backus-

Woodbridge Collection, box 18.

26. Letterbook, Dudley Woodbridge to Webster and Co., 9 April 1793, 5 May 1793, 28 June

1793, 26 October 1793, 26 May 1794, Backus-Woodbridge Collection, box 18.

27. Ibid.

• 12
 

Marietta's Example of a Settlement Pattern                       137

 

plies, Woodbridge wrote that "our women have not a shoe to their feet nor

any tea to drink."²⁸

A merchant named Charles Greene provided Woodbridge's main competi-

tion in the early 1790s. When trade was slack in the summer of 1793,

Woodbridge wrote that trade would have been even worse if Greene had failed

to take his goods further down the river. At another time, Woodbridge re-

ferred to Greene getting shipments on time and scooping sales while

Woodbridge's sat in a warehouse in Pittsburgh. In one letter Woodbridge

complained that Greene sold linen cheaper than he could, and speculated that

rapid price fluctuations allowed Greene to buy at a lower price.²⁹

Perhaps Woodbridge's most important contribution to his community in-

volved helping other sorts of businessmen become established. General mer-

chants created a diversified economy by helping artisans make a start in the

cash-starved economy of Marietta. The Woodbridges had tin brought in, and

the whitesmith paid his account with cups, providing the Woodbridges with

goods to sell. Coopers paid with barrels, blacksmiths paid with nails and

horseshoeing services, tailors paid with coats and trousers, tanners paid with

leather.³⁰

Dudley Woodbridge's dreams of building a trading empire seemed to float

within his grasp at last in the fall of 1797 when a man named Harman

Blennerhassett arrived in Marietta. Like Rufus Putnam's use of political pa-

tronage, Woodbridge sought to exploit outside contacts, but in a different

way. A businessman from Pittsburgh named Edward T. Turner sent

Blennerhassett to Woodbridge with a letter of introduction stating that

Blennerhassett was a gentleman from Europe who wanted to become a resi-

dent of the West. A second letter, presumably a sealed one Blennerhassett

couldn't read, stated, ".. . he is a man whom I know to be worth 25,000

L(pds). Could you persuade him to set down among you I think it would be

a great acquisition as monied men will give a celebrity to the settlement and

enhance its value."³¹

Blennerhassett was in fact the youngest son of a noted Irish family, who

through the death of his elder brothers had inherited a large estate. He traveled

throughout Europe for a time, before returning to marry a niece, Margaret

Agnew, thirteen years younger than he. His family was upset over the mar-

riage as well as his support of the French Revolution, so the thirty-two year

 

 

 

28. Letterbook, Dudley Woodbridge to Webster and Co., 25 September 1794, Backus-

Woodbridge Collection, box 18.

29. Summers, History of Marietta, 245; Letterbook, Dudley Woodbridge to Webster and Co.,

21 April 1794, 14 July 1794, Backus-Woodbridge Collection, box 18.

30. Ledger, 1799-1809, Backus-Woodbridge Collection, box 23, folder 3; ledger, November

1799-December 1800, Backus-Woodbridge Collection, box 27, folder 1.

31. Edward Turner to Dudley Woodbridge, 31 July and 2 August 1797, Backus-Woodbridge

Collection, ME, box 3, folder 1.

• 13
 

138                                                     OHIO HISTORY

 

old Blennerhassett sold the family estates for $160,000 and sailed for New

York in 1796.32

Blennerhassett's money and reputation were all Woodbridge needed to set

himself up as the preeminent merchant in Marietta. Through Blennerhassett,

Woodbridge ordered goods directly from London, enhancing his local status by

the quality of goods he obtained. In an agreement made on 15 June 1799,

Woodbridge and Blennerhassett became equal partners, sharing the profits

from the goods from London. Blennerhassett supplied the credit to buy the

goods, while Woodbridge stored and disposed of them, and kept the books and

accounts.³³

Mariettans made quick use of the peace that arrived on the Muskingum after

1794. Dudley Woodbridge began to handle much more produce as farmers

began planting and harvesting in earnest, and more settlers arrived all the

time. Woodbridge took in bulk produce: corn, rye, oats, and wheat. He also

took in processed foods such as meat, cheese, and butter. Marietta's farmers

began to turn a profit; after 1800, more and more customers were paying for

goods with cash.³⁴

These farmers made up the majority of Marietta township's population and

the population of Marietta's hinterland along the Ohio and Muskingum

Rivers, and Wolf and Duck Creeks. Many of these families provided

Washington County with stable, persistent kinship networks that figured

prominently in the Civil War rolls seven decades later. Without their ambi-

tions and persistence, all of the Woodbridges' plans would have come to

naught.

The Ohio Company sold 817 shares, but less than a third were purchased

by settlers who went to Ohio; those intent on speculation bought the rest.³⁵

Most settlers purchased allotments from local stockholders or agents who rep-

resented nonresident proprietors, or they took over vacant donation tracts.

Two of the most successful and persistent New England-born farmers in the

first half of the nineteenth century gained their start on donation tracts, al-

though both had family in the area to provide help if needed-Joseph Barker

and Benjamin Dana.

Settlers had abandoned the outlying settlements during the Indian Wars

from 1791 to 1794, but shortly thereafter, young men who received donation

tracts for their military service-men like William Dana's son-in-law, Joseph

 

 

32. Raymond E. Fitch, "Introduction: 'The Fascination of This Serpent,'" in Breaking With

Burr: Harman Blennerhassett's Journal, 1807, ed. by Fitch (Athens, Ohio, 1988), xi.

33. Dudley Woodbridge, Jr. to Mordecai Lewis, 1 February 1799 and Partnership

Agreement, in the Woodbridge Mercantile Company Records, microfilm edition, Regional

History Collection, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia.

34. Ledger, April 1799-September 1800, Backus-Woodbridge Collection, box 23, folder 1.

35. Shaw Livermore, Early American Land Companies: Their Influence on Corporate

Development (New York, 1939), 134-46.

• 14
 

Marietta's Example of a Settlement Pattern                       139

Barker-cleared land and planted crops along the Muskingum and along Wolf Creek. Barker's contemporary Benjamin Dana kept a journal during 1794 that gives a picture of life in these outlying settlements. Benjamin Dana traveled to Ohio in the spring of 1794 with his cousin, Israel Putnam III. Young Israel's father, a stockholder in the Ohio Company, had removed there only a short time before. Benjamin Dana obtained land by agreeing to improve a donation tract, and he managed to farm it as a single man by providing labor to area farmers who in turn lent him labor, oxen, and equipment. In May, Dana plowed and planted corn for Timothy Gooddale one day, and another farmer the next. He planted corn for a man named Davis, and then helped Gooddale build a fence. The next week he plowed and planted his

• 15
 

140                                                OHIO HISTORY

 

own land with corn; then he helped a farmer named Pierce. Davis helped him

with his land the following day; then Dana spent time planting corn for a

man named Loring, and then for Gooddale again. One day Dana helped

Captain Miles raise a barn, after which he attended a ball there. Other social

events combined with work included shooting and exploring trips with other

men on Sundays. He used Miles' oxen one day and Putnam's hoes another.

Dana worked on the Curtis farm, and Curtis worked on Dana's the next week.

Dana delivered his corn by boat to Cincinnati, and traveled back to New York

in January in 1795, returning to Belpre once again in the summer of 1795.36

Once the land had been secured, Marietta grew quickly. The bonds estab-

lished in Marietta in order to make the community work represented a mixture

of old and new strategies. Farmers established their traditional local kinship

and neighborhood networks. But while Federalists like Rufus Putnam and

Joseph Gilman's son, Benjamin, counted on the patronage system of the fed-

eral government to establish their local status and power, merchants like

Dudley Woodbridge and his son, Dudley, Jr., were establishing connections,

based on credit, between Marietta and the outside world. When in a decade's

time the Federalists lost control of the national government, it was these

commercial connections that ensured Marietta's survival.

 

 

IV

 

Despite the spectacular success of white settlement in southeastern Ohio af-

ter the Indian Wars, Rufus Putnam's world came under siege in 1800 with the

election of Thomas Jefferson, and then collapsed altogether in 1803 with

Ohio's statehood. Putnam controlled the patronage system in Washington

County and Marietta from 1790 to 1803. With the power of a federal ap-

pointment as Surveyor General and ajudgeship behind him, Putnam served as

the town's principal leader. He appointed some officers, and his recommenda-

tions to Governor St. Clair and Congress carried weight for territorial posts.

In 1798, Dudley Woodbridge's brother-in-law, Matthew Backus, brought

himself forward as a candidate for a territorial judgeship. Putnam denounced

Backus as a candidate for lack of social standing and trying to circumvent the

patronage network. Putnam's power and status came from outside the town

of Marietta.³⁷

But change had swept through Ohio despite Putnam's denial of it.

Virginians and others settled along the Miami and Scioto River Valleys in the

1790s, many of whom would later become Jeffersonian Republicans. These

men had no ties to the federal government, and they wanted to establish local

 

 

36. Benjamin Dana Journal, typescript, Connecticut State Library, Hartford, Connecticut.

37. Cayton, Frontier Republic, 49-50.

• 16
 

Marietta's Example of a Settlement Pattern                    141

 

control within Ohio. They sought to replace the patronage system with local

competition for offices. After the election of Jefferson as president, they

called for frequent elections and an Ohio state government based on a strong

legislature and a weak executive.³⁸

The Virginians wanted statehood as soon as possible; the Mariettans did

not. In 1801, the electors of the town met and resolved to oppose statehood

on the grounds that Ohio's society had not developed a stable order yet, and

needed to remain under the paternalistic eye of St. Clair and the federal

Congress. But the more numerous Jeffersonian Republicans carried the day,

and Ohio became a state in 1803.³⁹

The Revolution of 1800 shook Marietta's political structure to its very

foundations. Some men who had owed their offices to Putnam-Return J.

Meigs, Jr., Griffin Greene, and Joseph Buell-began opposing the old general

in 1801. They sided with the Virginians in state politics, and when the

Virginians emerged as the winners, these men received appointments in the

new state government. Rufus Putnam retired from active politics when he

was replaced as Surveyor General of the United States in September of

1803.40

The Federalists in Marietta continued to try to keep the town in the fore-

front of the development of Ohio and the United States despite losing the

statehood battle, because they still envisioned Marietta as the connecting-

point between East and West. In 1804 Congress was expected to make a pro-

posal to use two percent of the money from land sales in Ohio to build a road

from Washington to the Ohio River to connect interior navigable rivers with

the Atlantic coast. Dudley Woodbridge, his brother-in-law Matthew Backus,

Paul Fearing, David Putnam, Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Ives Gilman, Joseph

Barker, and Return Meigs all served on a committee for the town of Marietta

to petition the federal government to use their city as the terminus. They

wrote that the route to Marietta would be easier to reach than any place above

it on the river; that a good road already connected them to Chillicothe, the

main seat of government; that Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and Louisiana

would all be accessible to the road by way of the Ohio; that Marietta was sit-

uated in a safe place for winter travel, above the falls of the Ohio; and that the

town could be connected with Lake Erie up the Muskingum and Cuyahoga

Rivers. But it was not to be. The road bypassed Marietta, and later genera-

tions lived and died, happily enough, in a town that thrived but never grew to

be the regional power that Cincinnati became.⁴¹

Despite his disappointment, Rufus Putnam stayed in Marietta until he died.

 

 

38. Ibid., 52-77.

39. Ibid., 73-77.

40. Ibid., 78-79.

41. A Circular Sent to Congress, 1804, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio.

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142                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

Another family better serves as an example of the failure of the Federalists

and a foil for the success of the Woodbridges-the Gilmans. Joseph Gilman

lived very much in the colonial world he had been raised in when he moved to

Marietta in 1789. Gilman was pleased when St. Clair appointed him as a ter-

ritorial judge on the basis of his "character," without reference to talent.⁴²

But Gilman remained more interested in his farm than in the bench until the

end of his days. Like any good colonial-era leader, he served as a judge when

asked, but his personal ambitions did not lead him to seek a political posi-

tion.

But Joseph's son was more involved than his father in the Ohio

Company's hopes for Marietta. Benjamin Ives Gilman had ambitious plans

for Marietta, but his attitudes changed after 1808 when Jefferson's embargo

destroyed his ship-building enterprise. That same year, his daughter Jane,

Dudley Woodbridge, Jr.'s wife, died in childbirth, and shortly thereafter

Benjamin's father died as well. Although a decade earlier he had written that

Marietta had the look of an old settlement, he began to complain that

Marietta had all the problems of a "new settlement," including poor schools.

He began to see Marietta as a failed experiment, and his discontent grew as

his fortunes declined. He removed to Philadelphia in 1812. Perhaps Gilman

felt that the national government had abandoned him (the navy had refused to

buy his surplus ships in 1808); it had clearly abandoned Marietta. He went

into the mercantile business in Philadelphia, and lived there until he died in

the 1830s, having given up his plans to be part of the building of the new na-

tion.⁴³

Benjamin looked forward in terms of the economy, wanting to build an

ocean-going ship enterprise to help claim the West for America, but he

looked backward in terms of his social ambitions. Benjamin Gilman was

comfortable in the world created by Rufus Putnam's patronage network, but

when that world collapsed after Ohio became a state, he left Ohio forever.

Benjamin Gilman and others like him saw themselves as pursuing the na-

tional interest-not as poor relatives, but as leaders. With the ties between

the early Marietta leaders and the Federalist government, they could make

some claim to being central to the planning of what the new nation would be,

rather than just an appendage to the older states. They planned to be central to

the purpose of the expansion of the new United States, but in the end decided

that they had not achieved all they hoped for.

Marietta failed to become all that Woodbridge hoped for, too, but he stayed

 

 

 

42. Joseph Gilman to Hon. Nicholas Gilman, 23 February 1790, in Noyes, ed., A Family

History, 168.

43. Benjamin Ives Gilman to Hon. Nicholas Gilman, 6 January 1808 and 6 December 1809;

Gilman to Benjamin Clark Gilman, 11 March 1811, in Noyes, ed., A Family History, 277-79,

296-98, 302-03.

• 18
 

Marietta's Example of a Settlement Pattern                         143

 

anyway. Based on credit and capital, his links to the world outside Marietta

were quite different in character from Gilman's or Putnam's. Dudley

Woodbridge, Jr., thirteen years Benjamin Gilman's junior, would improve on

his father's business practices and function perfectly in a society that judged

men differently than Gilman's had. Dudley's brother Jack wrote from

Chillicothe, looking for a boy to work in the bank in the spring of 1813, and

Dudley replied that he knew of some with good enough character, but none

with good enough arithmetic skills. Dudley wrote, "In this quarter every

young man who can add up a sum in addition gets employed as a clerk."⁴⁴

The economic connections based on credit and markets proved to be much

more flexible and adaptable than the political links of the Federalists had

been. Dudley Woodbridge, Jr., built upon his father's foundations. He

formed partnerships with merchants in surrounding towns, supplied many

merchants as far away as Zanesville well into the 1820s, utilized local capital

through banks, and sold and distributed Pittsburgh nails and glass as well as

Kentucky tobacco, Tennessee cotton, and Louisiana sugar after the War of

1812. Through his business connections, Dudley Woodbridge, Jr., helped

make Marietta the hub for life in southeastern Ohio, even if the Mariettans

did fail to make their town the hub of the West.⁴⁵    In 1807 William

Woodbridge, Dudley's younger brother, reported to his Uncle James Backus

that "our little place continues to increase in wealth and population Thanks be

to the unremitting activity of our commercial people."⁴⁶

Farmers turned to the merchants rather than to the political elite to further

their economic interests. They sought to do all they could to promote easy

movement between their homes and Marietta, in a conscious attempt to ce-

ment their ties to Marietta merchants. In February 1806, the citizens of

Marietta organized a lottery for the purpose of constructing a bridge over the

Little Muskingum River. Most of the subscribers made their pledges in corn,

whiskey, and labor, usually under five dollars. Not surprisingly, most of

those with cash to pledge were the city dwellers-merchants and professionals

like the Greenes, Gilmans, Mixers, Woodbridges, and Putnams. The farmers

allied themselves with the merchants' interests.⁴⁷ When depression hit the

region following the Panic of 1819, farmers did not content themselves with

subsistence agriculture but strived to establish new cash crops such as tobacco

in southeastern Ohio.⁴⁸

 

 

44. Letterbook, Dudley Woodbridge, Jr. to John Woodbridge, 15 April 1813, Woodbridge

Mercantile Records, ME.

45. Kim M. Gruenwald, "Settling the Old Northwest: Changing Family and Commercial

Strategies in the Early Republic" (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, Boulder, 1994), 185-278.

46. William Woodbridge to James Backus, 21 June 1807, Backus-Woodbridge Collection,

ME, box 2, folder 1.

47. Muskingum Bridge, Case Western Reserve Library, Cleveland, Ohio.

48. Robert Leslie Jones, History of Agriculture in Ohio to 1880 (Kent, Ohio, 1983), 143-54,

• 19
 

144                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

The experiences of Marietta's farmers and merchants have much to tell us

about the settling of the Old Northwest and the Ohio Valley. Benjamin Dana

and farmers like him established new family nuclei, but merchants forged

chains of credit relationships that bound their region and their nation together.

Utilizing lines of credit, Dudley Woodbridge, Jr., built regional ties from St.

Louis to Pittsburgh and ties between regions from the Ohio Valley to

Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. These ties ensured that Ohio would

remain firmly connected to the financial and commercial centers of the East

long before the era of canals and railroads. Merchants moved west to extend a

network of trade and in so doing helped insure that the United States would be

more than a collection of local kinship and neighborhood networks growing

up in isolated places. When merchants helped settle a place like Marietta dur-

ing the early national period, that place became part of an economic network

rather than a backcountry or a buffer against attack. Alliance with like-

minded farmers was crucial, but it was because of the eastern links of the

merchants that the new United States could set out to claim a continental em-

pire and still survive as a nation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

219-20, 244-47, 251-55, 275.

• 20