(September 26, continued)

I didn’t have any trouble finding the historic marker that Jeff had told me about.

Jeff had told me the marker used to be different. Once upon a time a marker had said the blockhouse was a mile east. This one says a mile north. This marker was placed in 1955, so that’s not just a recent change.

I think I know where the “mile east” came from, though. The 1880 county history says this on page 458:

During the war of 1812, the utmost alarm and uneasiness prevailed in the scattered settlements by reason of which the Government ordered a company of soldiers into the vicinity for protection. Immediately an their arrival they proceeded to the erection of a “blockhouse.” Its location was upon a high point of land, about one mile east of the present village of Logansville. The structure was composed of two buildings, some twenty feet square, connected at the second story and well provided with port-holes. It was of little importance, however, as the troops were withdrawn soon after its completion.

Henry Howe’s 1882 “Historical Collections of Ohio” (page 104) also says it was a mile east, and connects it to the name Vance:

…Vance’s, built by ex-Governor Vance, then captain of a rifle company, stood on a high bluff on the margin of a prairie, about a mile east of Logansville…

But the historical marker now says a mile north, and that was all I knew on September 26, so I rode to the north to take a look. This was on the road I had come on in August 2005, but I wasn’t looking for fort locations that time, so had had no idea. The map fragment above, from the 1875 county atlas, shows my route in a reddish color. (The base map is courtesy of Historic Map Works. If you click on it, you’ll go to the original from which I took a screen shot.) I went as far as what was the north edge of Pleasant Township, though I didn’t notice at the time that it was a township boundary. I was just watching my bicycle odometer, and the place where I stopped to take photos was about a mile from Logansville.

This is looking back to the south, towards Logansville. This location was the right distance away, and it was on high ground — a good place for a fort.

This is the view to the north-northwest. There was a good view in this direction, too. The Great Miami River is among the trees below, in the background.

So it seems like a good site for a blockhouse. And one of the very earliest settlers in the townshipo seems to have had a farmstead up here on the high ground, which also makes it a likely spot. But I wish I knew what information sources were used for the information on the historical marker.

In looking for more information about Joseph Vance, starting with his Wikipedia article, I learned about his father, Joseph C. Vance. There had been a Vance blockhouse named for him, too. It was in Washington County, Pennsylvania, about a mile north of a place on Cross Creek (at Avella) that I hope to make a destination for a Whiskey Rebellion tour I want to do sometime. That Vance blockhouse had been built during the Revolutionary War.

There is a legend, reported in one of the later editions of Joseph Doddridge’s book, “Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania from 1763 to 1783,” that Joseph C. Vance had once claimed that the plan for the infamous Gnadenhutten massacre had been hatched by the men who were forted up at his blockhouse. A footnote to a later edition lists Vance as one of the militiamen who went to Gnadenhutten to massacre the Indians. However, it’s hard to tell whether he was one of those who took part in the killing, or one of the 16 or 18 who voted against the massacre and then stood aside. Doddridge told that as a child he had known David Williamson, the leader of that expedition, but that “the names of the murderers shall not stain the pages of history, from my pen at least.” Here is the web page of a genealogist who seems to have looked into the matter. According to him we still don’t know which people were the murderers and which militiamen made at least some slight objection. We don’t know the exact role of Joseph C. Vance, father of the future governor of Ohio and commander of the blockhouse at this location in 1812. But Doddridge made this point (on page 200):

Should it be asked what sort of people composed the band of murderers of these unfortunate people, I answer. They were not miscreants or vagabonds; many of them were men of the first standing in the country.