Beverly

Marietta Register, January 14, 1890

As every reader knows, Beverly was known as "Plainfield," the 2nd association of pioneers settling here from Marietta.  It consisted of 39 members.  The first outside one was at Belpre.  The settlement here was east of the river.  The old fort (Frye) stood on the bank of the river about a half mile below.  I saw a rough drawing in an old family here.  The front rested on the bank of the river and was 200 feet in length.  It was triangular and had a blockhouse at each corner and, I have often thought, with due respect to my grandfather, who was an inmate thereof through the Indian war, that it was filled with block-heads, though brave.  There was no necessity for rigging out ox teams and with women and children, leaving eastern farms and happy homes to climb over mountains of snow to settle among savages, to build mills in the Wolf Creek wilds and suffer and die and be buried on lonely knobs away up the valley of Wolf Creek, as I saw to-day.  

Here are three inscriptions on stones three miles from the river.  Two were of the 48 original settlers at Marietta:  "Peleg Springer, who endured many privations, encountered many hazards and hardships during five years Indian blockade in the first settlement at Marietta, died Sept. 28, 1828, aged 63 years."

"Maj. Haffield White served in the Continental Army," etc., born at Wenham, Mass., 1739, died Dec. 13, 1818, aged 80 years."

"Pelatiah White - " (about same inscription) died Feb'y 17, 1832, aged 63, from Rhode Island.

These burials, with Asa Convers, are near the old mill, on a bluff.  A huge cedar eight feet in circumference stands mournfully by the graves of all three.  These men were part of the "Plainfield" force detached to build the mills under the protection of the fort and commanded by Maj. Dean Tyler and which supplied food for even the Belpre settlement by prorogue and canoe.

But what of the Indian? Who sheds tears for Pontiac or Tecumseh.  What of the "six nations" which fought for their native heath.  Who mourns for Logan and Black Hawk?  No Beverly man!  The custom of these later days is to weep only over the greenest grave, and pass along into the great jostling crowd.  Nobody cares who settled London, whether Saxon or Norseman, Goth or Vandal.

The world is getting so infernal wicked that the people will once more be swept away, and the new race of people will wonder, not at the mound-builders, but at water-works, dikes, railways, telephones, &c., which some strange people had built and left to rot!

Beverly, O., Jan. 13.