Inspired by the upcoming dedication of Madison Township’s restored log cabin (May 13, 3 p.m. at the Madison Township Community Park off West Alexandria Rd.), I admitted to myself that I had a hankering to head west. Specifically, I went looking for the place “our” cabin was born. The mechanics of moving and reconstructing the cabin have been recounted elsewhere; I was curious – ok, maybe just plain nosy – about the people who lived there.
I turned off a one-lane country road onto a gravel track and gunned my little Toyota up the hillside. The melting fingers of retreating glaciers thousands of years ago clawed gullies and valleys into this landscape, and the car leveled out in a high, grassy field between two tributaries of Browns Run Creek.
The air was sweet with the scent of the previous night’s rain. The intermittent sun coaxed swirls of mist off the earth. Despite the absence of motorized sounds, it was noisy. My boots swished through the wet, knee-high grass. Tree frogs creaked in the woods. Tufted titmice shouted “weedy-weedy” from locust trees frothy with blossoms, and somewhere overhead a redtailed hawk wheeled, shrieking - sounds the original settlers would have recognized.
A huge, battered oak stood near the gravel drive. Was it a relative of the white oak that had been sacrificed to form a floor joist for our cabin? Tree-ring dating techniques on that particular log indicated the tree sprouted in the year 1600. In the autumn of 1833, when it was cut down, Andrew Jackson was president, Ohio had been a state for 30 years, Middletown had been settled , and Madison was a township in its own right, having split off from Lemon Township in 1810.
The property was purchased from the U.S. government by Daniel Johnson in 1815; it was sold to Jacob Francis in 1823. He and his wife Lydia had 8 children before Lydia died on Christmas Day, 1833. Was her death caused by complications from the birth of her son, Charles, on December 2, the work of helping to build the house, or both? With 8 motherless children needing attention, Jacob wasted no time in marrying Maria Brighton Young in July 1834. The first of eight more children may have already been on the way; son Lewis was born in March of 1835. Jacob lived to the phenomenal age of 97, surviving the cholera epidemics of the mid-1800’s and the Civil War. He still lies in Madison Township, in the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery off Germantown Rd.
When we cut down a tree with chainsaws and split the wood with a gas-powered log splitter, it’s nonetheless an all-day affair. I thought about the trees cleared from this knob, using only the horsepower that comes with four legs and a tail – and probably most of the sixteen children. In 1856 the cabin was given a second story; perhaps an extra bedroom seemed like a good idea.
The property remained in the Francis family for at least 102 years, changed hands several more times and by 1929 belonged the Blantons. Along the way the cabin had morphed into a clapboard sided farmhouse – fortunately for us, since the siding protected the hand-hewn beams hidden away underneath. In 2008, after the death of Raymond Blanton, the family dismantled the house and donated the cabin to the Madison Township Historical Society at the suggestion of neighboring farmer Ed Simpkins. Some of the many hands which worked to reconstruct the home belong to descendents of the original settlers of the township. What could be more fitting?
I stood in the field for a while and thought of all the living that had been done in that place – births, deaths, loves and losses, the endless wheel of the farm year, gardening and haymaking and splitting and stacking firewood for winter. Coincidentally, my mother’s family had lived less than a mile away in the late 1920’s. Remembering her stories – about threshing teams, twin mule colts and the music of beagles tracking hapless rabbits along the creekbed – helped flesh out the scene. I could almost hear the voices of the past in the soft morning air.
That evening – as is our habit - I plopped down on the couch with my husband and the dogs. The Sci Fi channel was on and I grinned to myself. You don’t need a fancy gizmo to experience time travel. Sometimes you just need to head down a country road.
