The Brilliance of Charles Whittlesey: Geologist, Surveyor, Military Engineer, Civil War Strategist

By Stanley M. Totten

An essential biography of one of Ohio’s most influential—but overlooked—historical figures

The Brilliance of Charles Whittlesey offers the first full-length biography of one of the most outstanding and influential Americans of the 19th century, Charles Whittlesey (1808–1886). Whittlesey advanced numerous fields, including geology, exploration, history, archaeology, and military strategy. However, until now, much of Whittlesey’s work has been treated as a mere footnote of American history and largely neglected by historians.

Stanley M. Totten’s recovery of Whittlesey’s life and work relies on Whittlesey’s own insights and private papers, which provide a unique window into his many talents and interests as well as the hardships he endured. This exhaustive volume uncovers—perhaps most significantly—Whittlesey’s important geological discoveries. Notably, Totten describes how Whittlesey accurately determined the amount by which oceans lowered during the height of the Ice Age. His geological maps of Native American earthworks were informational and enhanced our understanding of these ancient structures, although, as Totten persuasively argues, other geologists have undeservedly been given credit for Whittlesey’s work. Totten also highlights Whittlesey’s contributions during the Civil War and his work as a preservationist of historic materials on both the national and local levels.

Drawing extensively from papers housed in the Western Reserve Historical Society, The Brilliance of Charles Whittlesey is an overdue, exhaustive biography that will undoubtedly serve as an important foundational text for future scholarship into each of these areas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781631014772

Book preview

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The Brilliance of Charles Whittlesey

The Brilliance of

Charles Whittlesey

Geologist, Surveyor, Military Engineer,

Civil War Strategist

Stanley M. Totten

The Kent State University Press

KENT, OHIO

© 2022 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-60635-436-0

Manufactured in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.

Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.

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Contents

Foreword by Joe Hannibal

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

  1 From Cradle to Saddle

  2 West Point and Life in the Army

  3 Becoming Colonel Whittlesey

  4 Geology for Beginners

  5 Earthworks

  6 Putting Geology to Work

  7 Black Gold

  8 Wild about Copper

  9 Mineral Exploration in the Wilderness

10 The Ups and Downs of Water in the Great Lakes

11 Water or Ice

12 The War Begins

13 Hellfire at Donelson and Shiloh

14 Mud-Slinging Geologists

15 The Write Stuff

16 Archaeological Frauds

17 Illness, Destitution, and Death

18 The Last Survey

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

Finally, we have a biography of Col. Charles Whittlesey, an adventurous pioneering geologist, a soldier, an engineer (both military and civil), an archaeologist, and a historian. He was brilliant, well published, and beloved by the men under his command during the Civil War. He was also a strong personality, cantankerous by many accounts, and the nemesis of another well-known major early Ohio geologist, John Strong Newberry. Whittlesey could hold a grudge.

You may have already heard of Whittlesey, as you will find his name and contributions noted on signs in parks and monuments in several states. This is true in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky, where he planned a series of Civil War forts, batteries, and rifle pits to defend the important Ohio River port and industrial city of Cincinnati and the cities of Covington and Newport across the river. One of the forts in Kentucky was subsequently named for him. You will also find his name on signs in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in northern Ohio, as he mapped archaeological features that are now in and near the park. The same is true in the Cleveland Metroparks, where there is even a street, Whittlesey Way, named for him.

The largest geographic feature named for Whittlesey is Lake Whittlesey, a glacial lake that preceded the present Lake Erie by some 14,000 years. You may have walked or driven along the streets that follow or are parallel to long stretches of Lake Whittlesey’s strandlines in Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, New York, and smaller stretches in Pennsylvania and Indiana. The highest feature named for him is Mount Whittlesey, in northern Wisconsin, a state where the colonel was one of the first to explore and map its famous iron ranges. You will also find his name among those of fellow Civil War veterans engraved in the marble tablets inside the Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ & Sailors’ monument, associated with the name of his unit, the Twentieth Regiment of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry. And it is just possible that you may have even seen his gravestone in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery on a geologically oriented walking tour that I have been fortunate to have led for many years.

Stan Totten was ideally posed to write this biography. He is a Hanover College geologist with a broad background in geology—and a specialty in glacial studies, a field in which the colonel made some of his most important contributions. Thus, he can understand and interpret Whittlesey’s geological findings. Stan has been interested in the colonel for many decades; how could he have not been when he was looking at the same and similar features that the colonel had so many years before? For many years (almost three decades), Stan has pored over the microfilms of the trove of Whittlesey materials preserved in Cleveland’s Western Reserve Historical Society. Whittlesey almost certainly surmised that someone would use this cornucopia to write a book-length biography and would have been pleased to see it (well, mostly) and surely would have at least been pleased that his enemy Newberry, had not yet had such a work written about him.

I have been lucky to help with this book in a small way as a reviewer and have seen it develop into a nicely crafted and very readable work. In the later stages of its development, I have gotten to know Stan well and can vouch for his intimate knowledge of all things Whittlesey.

Whittlesey’s life trajectory is punctuated with exciting moments, ranging from an overturned wagon on his childhood journey from Connecticut to Ohio to his horse being shot at the battle of Scary Run and a major encounter, as commander of a union brigade, with Beauregard’s Confederate troops on the second day of the Battle of Shiloh. His discoveries were multifaceted and multidisciplinary. For me, the most perspicacious of these was his remarkably accurate—and remarkably early—determination of the amount that the world ocean lowered during the height of the Ice Age. I know that archaeologists find the maps he made of Native American earthworks to be important keys to our understanding of these ancient structures. These maps were essential elements in the development of the field of archaeology. His geological maps were early delineations of rock strata in Ohio and Wisconsin. And Whittlesey devoted considerable time to preserving historic materials on both the national and local level, including his leadership of the Western Reserve Historical Society in its formative years.

Please go on to read Stan’s own words on this. Start at the beginning, or just open the book and start anywhere. You will find it a fascinating journey into the life of a major figure who is finally getting the attention he deserves.

JOE HANNIBAL

Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Preface

My mission in authoring this book is to shine a bright light on the life and legacy of Col. Charles Whittlesey, whose achievements and contributions to science and society have been remarkable. The inspiration for this biography of Charles Whittlesey was initiated in 1983 when I received a phone call from my good friend and mentor George W. White of the University of Illinois. White, a noted authority on the history of geology, was asked to prepare a manuscript on the history of glacial geology for inclusion in a special volume of the Geological Society of America. In poor health and severely vision impaired, he made it clear that I was to prepare the manuscript in his absence. He would provide his file of notes and publications, and we could discuss over the phone what I had written. White’s passion for the history of geology influenced me, and the society published the manuscript in 1985, with White listed as coauthor.

During the research phase of preparing that manuscript, I was so impressed with Charles Whittlesey’s observations and discoveries that I crowned him America’s first glacial geologist. Much of Whittlesey’s geologic fieldwork was conducted in Ohio, and coincidentally, by 1983 I had conducted 18 summers of fieldwork on the glacial geology of northeastern Ohio. Whittlesey and I had covered the same ground, separated by 150 years.

In 1992, I became serious about writing a biography of Whittlesey and was awarded a sabbatical by Hanover College for the winter term of 1993 to begin my research. My first step was to visit the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, which held a diverse collection of Whittlesey’s papers. When I opened the first file of MSS 3196, it became obvious that the field books, maps, and papers were too fragile to withstand handling, so the complete collection would be microfilmed. Since microfilming would be a major project done primarily for my benefit, at the historical society’s request I secured a grant from Hanover College to cover the expense. The Hanover College library received the 17 rolls of microfilm in February 1993, and I began a systematic review of the 15,501-frame collection.

The enormity of the Whittlesey papers and the difficulty of deciphering Whittlesey’s penmanship presented a daunting challenge. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Whittlesey was much more than a glacial geologist. A biography of the man would need to include his business interests, exploration for minerals in Ohio and the Northwest, archaeological mapping, and exploits in the Civil War. By the end of my sabbatical, I had barely scratched the surface.

When I retired in 2002 after teaching geology at Hanover College for forty years, I began writing and published three books, two on the history of Hanover College, and one about my high school coach, Roy Bates. I still intended, however, to write a biography of Whittlesey, and I visited the places he had frequented, such as the earthworks in southern Ohio, the copper mines in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Upper Michigan, and the Civil War battlefields of Fort Donelson and Shiloh. In 2017, I resolved to complete the Whittlesey manuscript. The Hanover College library was only 600 yards from my residence on campus, and my research was facilitated by the availability of bibliographic materials online.

Whittlesey’s correspondences with such notables as Ephraim Squier, Francis Parkman, and future president James A. Garfield were readily obtainable. Maps delineated by Whittlesey are in the Library of Congress and in the Ohio History Center in Columbus. Significant Whittlesey maps and sketches previously unpublished are included in this volume.

Acknowledgments

I express my sincere thanks and gratitude to the Western Reserve Historical Society for microfilming the Whittlesey Papers (MSS 3196), primarily for my benefit, and to Hanover College for financial support of the microfilming project.

I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers and to reviewer Joe Hannibal, who offered valuable advice and constructive criticism and pointed me in the right direction. Critical to my extensive literature research were the resources of the Hanover College Duggan Library. I benefitted from Patricia Lawrence and Kelly Joyce’s expertise in obtaining library holdings online.

I could not have brought the project to completion without the electronic processing and editing skills of Celeste Sutter. In addition, I owe a great debt to many other persons who have assisted with the Whittlesey project that spanned three decades, and I would be remiss if I did not mention the following: Mike Angle, Dianne Barnes, Jen Duplaga, Joyce Good, Michael Hansen, Tutti Jackson, David Johnson, Joyce Johnson, Molly Jones, Lisa Long, Sarah Moncada, Walter Morrill, Debbie Quinn, Kelsey Shaw, Ann Sindelar, and Susan Totten.

I appreciate the attention given my manuscript by the Kent State University Press, especially Erin Holman for her copyediting and Christine Brooks for preparing the figures and designing the book.

Introduction

Are you interested in Union strategy during the Civil War or in some of the largest prehistoric earthworks in the world? Did you ever meet a man who transformed a polar ice cap into a thick sheet of ice covering most of Ohio, who lowered sea level 400 feet, and drilled for coal, or someone who could see valuable deposits of iron ore buried beneath 50 feet of glacial drift? Meet Charles Whittlesey (1808–1886), a geologist and engineer whose accomplishments and actions place him among major figures of nineteenth-century America. Riding on horseback over hills and up streambeds, Whittlesey measured and mapped the rocks of Ohio. Riding up and down the line of his battalion at the battle of Shiloh, amid a hail of bullets, he urged his men to keep their heads down. Lugging a rod, chain, and transit through woods and thickets, he surveyed Ohio’s geometric earthworks and mounds shrouded in antiquity. This was just part of the life and legacy of Charles Whittlesey.

Early in his youth in northeastern Ohio, Whittlesey’s introduction to the transformation of rocks to enrich society happened early in his youth in northeastern Ohio. As a boy, he accompanied his father on horseback to an iron furnace and forge where iron ore was being converted into pig iron and ultimately into nails and plowshares. He collected plant fossils from the roof of his father’s coal mine, which supplied coal to power steamboats on the Great Lakes. Is it any wonder that Whittlesey would devote much of his life to the exploration and development of the mineral and rock resources of Ohio and the Northwest that would transform a youthful and mostly unexplored United States into one of the world’s leading industrial powers?

After a childhood spent exploring, Whittlesey’s West Point education prepared him well for the future, and his spirit allowed him to take advantage of whatever opportunity came his way. He used his military engineering training to construct a breakwater at Cleveland, open a copper mine on Isle Royale, build a tramway to transport coal from mine to canal, and maximize coal production from an underground mine. Another opportunity was just always around the corner. Among other pursuits, Whittlesey spent time as a lawyer, journalist, consultant, surveyor, cartographer, archaeologist, soldier, real estate agent, inventor, investor, soils mapper, and historian.

Charles Whittlesey lived a life of adventure, much of it outdoors in all types of weather. Inevitably he risked his life on many occasions, 15 times by his own reckoning. His first brush with death was during his family’s move from Connecticut to Ohio when he was four years old: the covered wagon he was riding in overturned and buried him underneath wooden boxes. One of his last escapes came in 1864, when he refused to reboard the steamship he was taking from Bayfield, Wisconsin, to Cleveland after a stop for food. The ship sank that day in Lake Superior, with all but one passenger lost. A life filled with facing the dangers of the Lake Superior wilderness, the hail of bullets at Shiloh, and the flames of a burning building reveals much about Whittlesey’s character. When he was not attracting volleys from Confederate sharpshooters during the Civil War, Whittlesey was planning strategy for Union offensive and defensive maneuvers. Most notable were his plans for the defense of Cincinnati and to attack the Confederacy by sending armies by steamboat up the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers.

During a geological career that spanned nearly half a century, Whittlesey’s passion for history touched every aspect of the past, extending from his boyhood back to the beginning of the universe. He was more interested in preserving history than writing about it. His efforts encompassed such diverse activity as mapping the prehistoric earthworks of Ohio, to excavating ancient copper mines in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan, to partnering with Ohio congressman and future US president James A. Garfield to publish papers relating to the early exploration of North America.

An introduction to Whittlesey’s involvement in the growth and development of nineteenth-century America would not be complete without mention of his many contributions to the science of glacial geology. Whittlesey deserves credit for his early discoveries that a large ice sheet covered the northern part of North America and was responsible for many topographical features, such as the Great Lakes, moraines, and kettle holes. His observations included recognition of the raised terraces and beach ridges formed by the ancestors of the Great Lakes and the understanding that glacial meltwaters formed river terraces.

When failing health slowed Whittlesey down, he used his last years to reflect about religion and science, the origin of life and evolution, and laws of the universe. Near the end of his life, he spent his happiest days outdoors, behind his barn sitting on a stool basking in the sun and lying on a cot in a tent next to his 1832 army uniform and sword.

Chapter 1

From Cradle to Saddle

In the early 1860s, Cincinnati, a key Northern city situated along the Ohio River, was under threat from active Confederate forces in nearby Kentucky. Early in the Civil War, Charles Whittlesey, a geologist, military engineer, and West Point graduate, designed and began construction of defenses to protect the city. After seeing combat in the now famous Civil War battles of Fort Donelson and Shiloh, he would help to complete the defenses, which included a series of forts in Ohio and across the river in Kentucky. One of the forts in Kentucky was named for him. Whittlesey was also a strategic thinker and an early advocate of Union advances into Tennessee along the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. This was a plan others embraced as well, and it proved a successful move for the Union.

Before the war, Whittlesey had extensive experience creating maps as a member of the first Ohio Geological Survey and as part of mineral exploration work in Wisconsin. He was well adapted to the rigors of this work. As a geologist, he was attuned to the nature of landforms and topography, the inclination of underlying bedrock and sediment, and the erosive power of rivers. He was an excellent surveyor and cartographer, having produced maps of Native American earthworks in Ohio, geologic and other types of maps of Ohio, and maps of Wisconsin ore deposits.

Whittlesey’s life story related to exploration and dealings in coal, work with copper and other minerals, and documentation of the works of the Indigenous peoples whom he called the Moundbuilders. He would play a part in the great debate about what are now known as glacial deposits, and he would make a remarkably accurate estimate of the change in sea level during maximum glaciation. A love of reading and writing as a youth led to a lifelong interest in preserving history. He would play a major role in publishing early North American historical documents, and he would author numerous historical articles. Today, he is known mainly to geologists and archaeologists and to a lesser extent, historians.

In 1808, Southington, Connecticut, was a small town nestled in a valley in the center of the state and bordered on the east and west by low mountains ablaze in the fall colors of autumn. Asaph and Vesta Whittlesey, a young couple eagerly awaiting the birth of their first child, resided in a cottage there. About midnight on October 4, Vesta gave birth to a son, and they named him Charles, following a generations-long Whittlesey tradition.¹ The Whittlesey lineage can be traced to a medieval England market town of the same name, located northeast of Cambridge in Cambridgeshire. The most notable Whittlesey mentioned in very early historical records is William Whittlesey, LLD. William, educated at Oxford, served as bishop of Worcester, England. In 1368, he became the archbishop of Canterbury, England, and upon his death on January 5, 1374, he was interred in Canterbury Cathedral in England.

The first Whittlesey to immigrate to America was John Whittlesey, who settled in Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1650. John married Ruth Dudley, the granddaughter of Governor Thomas Dudley of Massachusetts. As late as 1848, all the Whittleseys residing in America could trace their heritage to the union of John and Ruth Whittlesey.

Asaph Whittlesey, Charles’s father, was born in New Preston, Connecticut, to a large family, seven boys and one girl. As a youth, Asaph was known for his intelligence and energetic spirit and had plans to follow his father in farming. When he was 18 or 19, however, while working on the family farm, a tree that he had cut lodged against another tree and then came crashing down, pinning Asaph to the ground. His spine was injured so badly that at first he was thought dead. He survived, but his back was permanently bent so that he could not walk erectly. Fortunately, his strength and endurance returned, allowing him to lead a normal life.²

Asaph’s misfortune resulted in a change of vocational plans; he became a country merchant in partnership with his brother, Charles, in Southington, Connecticut. One of Charles’s customers was schoolteacher Vesta Hart, daughter of Samuel and Rebecca Hart, who had grown up near the mountain range west of Southington. Vesta was known for her cheerful and outgoing manner and her great communication skills. When she was not engaged in conversation, she was writing letters and compositions. This was her way of compensating for a weak physical constitution, caused mainly by scrofula, a tuberculosis of the glands.

Asaph and Vesta fell in love and married. Their first child, Charles, was born about a year later, and on February 21, 1811, a second son, Samuel, joined the happy family. When Charles turned four, he was sent to the little red schoolhouse about a half-mile west of the meeting house in Southington. Charles’s fondest memory of his first year in school was making mud dams in a gulley in front of the schoolhouse, then breaching the uppermost dam and watching with glee while the torrent of water swept away all the other dams. He also remembered another, not so pleasant, incident, of his first school year: on his way to school, he watched a man shooting a small bird perched in a juniper bush. Lead shot tore the bird into fragments before it was flattened against a rock.

A bit earlier, in 1806, Asaph’s younger brother, Elisha Whittlesey (1783–1863), a lawyer, had pulled up his Connecticut stakes for a new life in the Connecticut Western Reserve, in northeastern Ohio. Letters from Elisha to Charles described a new and exciting life where the land was cheap and the soil was fertile for farming. To Asaph, it sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime. He would have to go to Ohio to check it out for himself.³

The Connecticut Western Reserve evolved out of controversy regarding Connecticut’s colonial charter of 1630, granted by the English Crown. The charter gave Connecticut possession of a strip of land beginning at the Atlantic Ocean extending westward, with no limit or western boundary. Subsequent grants to the Duke of York (New York) and to William Penn (Pennsylvania) overlapped the original Connecticut land grant, necessitating arbitration. Connecticut yielded to the claims of New York and Pennsylvania but retained its hold on lands west of Pennsylvania. Following the War of Independence, in the national interest of future expansion, Congress called for the states to relinquish to the Republic their claims to western lands beyond their boundaries. In 1786, Congress accepted Connecticut’s rights to western land under its 1630 charter and allowed Connecticut to reserve about 3 million acres. This tract of land, within the territory of Ohio, extended for 120 miles west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania line, and extended south from Lake Erie to the Twenty-first parallel. Connecticut kept about 500,000 (the Firelands, so named because the land had been cleared by fire) and sold the remaining 2.5 million acres to a group of private land speculators, the Connecticut Land Company. The land company began surveying and selling land it called New Connecticut. New Connecticut was incorporated into the Northwest Territory in 1800 and in 1803 became part of the new state of Ohio. From that time onward, the parcel formerly known as New Connecticut was called the Western Reserve.⁴

Connecticut Western Reserve, northeastern Ohio (Prepared by Dave Roth)

A system of land surveys was devised for the purpose of recording deeds of land sales, and boundary lines were established in 1797. Counties and townships were given names. Each township was laid out into 25 sections, each a mile square. In November 1806, Tallmadge Township was resurveyed into 16 large lots, each one and a quarter miles square, or 1,000 acres. Roads were plotted along each line of the large lots and from the four corners of the township to the public square, a circular tract at the center consisting of 7½ acres. Talmadge was the only township in the reserve that had eight surveyed roads leading to the township center from all four corners and four midpoints. Each large lot was subdivided into six smaller lots of 166 2/3 acres each. Lots at the town center were further subdivided for businesses.⁵

The first pioneers relocating to the reserve arrived in 1796, and by 1799, about two hundred settlers had made their way to Ohio. Elisha Whittlesey, Asaph’s younger brother, settled in Canfield, Columbiana County, in 1805 and set up a law practice. Elisha had been comfortably settled there for seven years when Asaph went to Ohio to see the land his brother described in his letters. Asaph reached Elisha’s home in June 1812 and explored a large area of northeastern Ohio to locate a suitable place to settle his family. In a July 6, 1812, letter to his wife he wrote that he had decided to settle in Tallmadge, a township in what would become eastern Summit County, about 35 miles west of Canfield. Most of the township was wilderness, and the roads existed only on paper. Several families had already settled in the township, mostly in the northern part, and the settlers Asaph met were from Connecticut.⁶

Asaph Whittlesey was attracted to Tallmadge on several accounts; he was most particularly drawn to people he met who had strong religious convictions, like himself, and who had hired a preacher for regular church services. Asaph chose two center lots of 8 acres each and two adjoining lots of 30 acres each. He intended one of these for a friend, a Dr. Ames. Asaph found the water to be good and, the land, covered by a mature forest, appeared fertile for farming. With the nearest store 20 miles away, he believed the location eventually would be a good place for a business. In a follow-up letter to his wife, dated July 28, he wrote that he and Elisha, had been busy for two weeks clearing the two center lots. He envisioned sowing wheat on one 8-acre lot the following year, and he arranged for a craftsman to construct a log cabin on the other. He expressed concern to his wife that dwelling in a log cabin might make her ill, but he had no choice. Sawed lumber was unavailable, and all 40 houses in the township were of log construction. Asaph cleared his land for another month. He and his brother boarded at Deacon Kilborn’s, where, he wrote, they live very comfortably, have good health, and work like horses.⁷

Tallmadge Township (Prepared by Dave Roth)

Asaph wrote one more letter to his wife, dated August 10, 1812. He described the condition of the roads as bad but envisioned a day when they would be as good as any in the country. The roads were laid out perfectly straight, and the land was excellent for them. He assured his wife that the land was perfectly safe from Native Americans: There has not been an Indian seen within 150 miles of here in six months. Asaph concluded with the regretful news that Ames had decided not to move to Tallmadge.⁸

Asaph Whittlesey returned to his family in Southington in early September 1812. One imagines that Charles was glad to be reunited with his father and was most happy to have him home to share his fourth birthday, on October 4. Vesta and Asaph spent the winter months of 1812–13 preparing for the family’s move to Ohio in a large covered wagon pulled by four horses. Asaph fashioned several wooden boxes in which their worldly possessions were safely stored during their long move to Ohio, which would take more than a month.

On or about June 1, 1813, the Whittlesey family—Asaph and Vesta, sons Charles and Samuel, and nurse Sophia—boarded the heavily loaded wagon and embarked for Ohio. Asaph took the longer southern route, which passed through Philadelphia, before heading west to Pittsburgh. The wagon team made good progress and reached Pittsburgh about a month after leaving Connecticut. Charles remembered: I didn’t know how far Ohio was from Southington, and nothing would have prepared me for the arduous journey which seemed to take a lifetime. Horses, when they are pulling a heavy load, tend to walk slowly and rest often.⁹

From Pittsburgh, the wagon road to Ohio followed the north bank of the Ohio River for some distance. About 12 miles west of Pittsburgh, at a place called The Narrows, the team got off the road, and the wagon overturned close to the water. It came to rest with its uppermost wheels lodged against a tree, which prevented the wagon and its cargo from being washed away by the river. Asaph was thrown free and was unharmed in his tumble; the four occupants inside the wagon were not as fortunate. All were trapped beneath boxes, and Asaph, still dazed from his fall, could hear their cries becoming more and more faint. He had nobody to turn to for help; his only chance to save his family from suffocation was to dislodge the boxes that were smothering them. Using what was later described as unbelievable superhuman effort, he lifted and tugged on the boxes until all four were released.¹⁰

Charles was the least injured, with only a few bruises. Vesta was badly bruised all over and could not walk. Samuel showed no sign of life; he was pulled out of the wreckage motionless and not appearing to breathe. About 15–20 minutes had elapsed since the calamity, and he was presumed dead. Though barely able to move herself, Vesta pried open Samuel’s mouth and breathed into his nostrils. Samuel began breathing and soon was revived, little the worse for wear.

In a little while, other persons happened on the scene and offered their assistance. Vesta was wrapped in a blanket and carried to a house more than half a mile from the accident. It was four or five days before she recovered from her injuries sufficiently to withstand riding in a bumpy wagon. Asaph also needed those few days to make repairs to the wagon and to reload the precious cargo.

The remainder of the journey was uneventful. The travelers reached Canfield about the first of July, to spend time with Elisha and his family. After a short visit, they resumed their travels and entered Tallmadge Township by way of Stowe Corners. It had been raining for many days and the wagon trail was a sea of mud. Facing reality that the wagon team could go no further, and with darkness approaching, the Whittleseys reached the cabin of Edmond Strong, about a mile north of the center of Tallmadge. Charles later remembered that the Strongs displayed that enlarged hospitality, known only among the Pioneers of a new settlement. There is hospitality everywhere, but in its fullest and noblest development, it is nowhere to be found as it exists in the cabin in the woods.¹¹

Yet, the hazardous journey was not quite at an end. The Whittleseys were still a mile away from the log cabin Asaph had arranged to have erected, and no road existed to get them there. The surveyed north-south road leading to the town center had not been constructed yet, and the only route from the Strong cabin to the Whittlesey cabin was a crooked footpath through the mature forest, seemingly impassable to the four-wheeled wagon and its team. Asaph traded his four horses for a team of oxen that were more surefooted on wet ground, pulling the heavy wagon while avoiding trees and downed limbs and logs. Hours later, the Whittleseys reached their new home, wet, fatigued, and overwhelmed with relief. No one was more relieved than Vesta, who sat down on a box and cried.¹² They were home at last!

One adventure had just ended, and a new one was about to begin: transforming a primitive log cabin completely enclosed by tall trees into a self-sustaining homestead and farm. Asaph was soon at work transforming a one-room log cabin into a home. A partition was added to separate sleeping quarters from living space. A chimney and fireplace had already been constructed, complete with jambs and mantle of cut stone; the hearth provided heat and all the essentials for cooking meat and baking bread.

For the previous year, men had been hard at work clearing land around the square in Tallmadge and surrounding the property Asaph had purchased. However, the Whittlesey land had not been cleared, because the men Asaph had hired the previous year joined a militia to protect northern Ohio, in the event of an invasion by the British. It was left to Asaph to begin clearing land and building fences to confine the livestock he had purchased for his new farmstead. Once he had done so, the family planted wheat and apple trees.

Tallmadge Township teemed with wildlife that threatened to destroy the new plantings and livestock. Unlike many frontiersmen, Asaph was not a hunter, and he did not depend on wildlife for food. For defense, he kept an old shotgun that required two persons to operate. When a flock of wild turkeys came too close to the Whittlesey cabin in search of grain, Asaph determined to destroy the lot. He loaded his gun and called for Vesta to light the powder with a hot coal from the fireplace. The loud discharge scattered the turkeys, all of which hastily departed with no apparent harm. Herds of deer grazed on the grass that had been planted for the livestock. Bears, however, were the greatest threat to livestock, and for that reason Asaph hunted them extensively. One day when he was working in one of his fields, a bear ran off with one of his hogs not far from where he was working.

During his first month in Tallmadge, Charles developed an appreciation for the natural world and all that abounded in it. He took advantage of every opportunity to investigate what was living or growing around his new home. The southwest quarter of the square lot had been cleared and burned the previous year, and the following summer a luxuriant growth of fireweed had transformed it. The weed grew as tall as a a man and concealed the remaining stumps and logs. When fall arrived, its ripened seed, which resembled that of a thistle, was borne by the wind in every direction. On a breezy, sunny day these white floating objects glistened in the sun like moving insects.¹³

Fall weather arrived in Tallmadge about a month after the Whittlesey’s first meal in their cabin. Charles turned five, and it was time to enroll in the local school for the winter months. Lessons took place in a log house in Alpha Wright’s orchard; a short time later, school moved to George Kilburn’s cabin, near Camp Brook, which teemed with minnows. Catching minnies was a favorite pastime of the boys, and on occasion one unlucky soul would slip into the water and soak his clothes. Such an offense was met with a switch to the