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Moving Day

It is easy to forget how hard life was in the early years of our country’s founding. One way to remember is to read the first-hand accounts of people who were there. The following narrative was written by Lavinia Morris, my aunt’s third great-grandmother who, with her Baptist minister husband, moved their family of eight from Kentucky to Ohio, some 200 miles north. It was in the early 1800s.

“The road from Bellefontaine, Ohio to Lima, Ohio was hub deep in mud and the trees and brush had to be cut out part of the way. We landed here on the 8th of October and built a house 16 feet square out of poles. A door served for a window. We built a fire in one end of the house, without any chimney, allowing the smoke to go out through the cracks and crevices. We lived this way until my husband could build a chimney and a door, and chink and daub the house. The house was built without any floor, and we lived this way for one year. We then built a log cabin with puncheon floor, and a square hole with paper pasted over it for a window. This was equal to the finest parlor in those days. We brought three barrels of flour with us which lasted one year with corn meal. We had plenty of wild meat, such as deer and turkey, and wild fruit, such as grapes, plums and berries. I remember one instance, I think it was in the fall of 1834, we were without bread for four weeks, as the nearest place we could get grinding done was Cherokee in Logan County or Sidney in Shelby County, but we had plenty of pumpkins, squashes and potatoes.”

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of film, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives, and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website.

Tax Laws Too Squirrely?

Settling the new American frontier was a daunting task in that it presented challenges that required “out-of-the-box” thinking from the civic leaders of the day. Such as the one Ohio faced when they first entered statehood in the early 1800s.

One of the first things the state legislature did was to enact a property tax on the assessed value of land ownership. This was obviously not a popular decision, especially among the farmers who were already struggling just to tame the land and bring in their crops.  In the early days Ohio farmers were seeing great losses of livestock due to wolves and other wild animals. In addition, squirrels were getting into barns and raiding their stockpiles of animal feed.

So the legislature came up with a solution to not only ease the tax burden but address the farmers’ dilemma. They amended their tax laws to include a requirement for any male of military age to kill 100 squirrels a year and deliver the pelts to the town clerks. By doing so, they would receive a tax credit for that year.

It was an effective solution… in fact, too effective. Hunters would bring in far more than 100 pelts to receive credits that could be applied to future taxes. In less than ten years Ohio faced dwindling revenue and voted to end the squirrel bounty program.

I came across this nugget of history while reading town records mentioning William Houston, one of my daughter-in-law’s great-granduncles, alongside his annual squirrel tally.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of film, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website.