Freyburg

Freyburg, OH has a big German catholic cemetery. I was looking for an excuse to post the photos I took of it on my August 29 starter ride, but haven’t found any good connections to the settlement-era stories, other than to note that this place was part of the Wapakoneta Reservation before 1832.

This is looking south of the town. The 1905 county history tells about a John Lenox who supposedly lived about a mile down this road.

John Lenox, one of the early pioneer of Pusheta township, was born in Fairfield county, Ohio, October 18, 1809. When he was two years old his father moved to Shelby county, Ohio, and settled near Sidney. The family suffered all the privations and dangers peculiar to that turbulent time. Six thousand Indians were encamped around the Indian agency at Piqua from 1812 to 1814. It was not until after the battle of the Thames that any pioneer north of Dayton could consider himself safe from marauding Indians.

February 14, 1833, Mr. Lenox, having accumulated one hundred dollars, attended the public land sale at Wapakoneta. Having made a memorandum of a number of desirable tracts of land, he bid on each one in succession, as it was presented by Van Horn, the auctioneer, and was over-bid in each instance, until the last tract on his list was reached. He bid one hundred dollars for the east half of the southeast quarter of section twenty-three. and was again overbid; at that moment his father-in-law, Ebenezer Stevens, tapped him on the shoulder and told him to bid higher, that he would be responsible for the additional cost. After a few more bids Mr. Lenox was declared the purchaser. It would be difficult to convince any person of the present day that the purchase was not the best one that he could have made. He afterward became the owner of two hundred acres of land. Immediately after the purchase of his land he moved into an Indian cabin, that was so small that it became necessary when he had company to move the chairs and table out of the building to make room for beds on the floor.

The road shown ahove will take one to that 80-acre parcel. But there is a problem. The 1880 atlas doesn’t show that southeast quarter of section 23 as belonging to anyone named Lenox. And that 80 acres is just south of the old reservation. The land that Lenox was bidding on was a part of land that Shawnee people had been pressured into ceding to the United States just the year before. The south part of section 23 lies outside that.

I then checked the GLO database. It shows John Lenox as having purchased 80 acres all right, but it was in section 8, not section 23. And it was the west half of the southwest quarter, not the east half of the southeast quarter. And the 1880 atlas does show Lenox as owning 200 acres there.

I’m guessing a typo. Maybe the writer or printer made a mistake in reading a handwritten information. But how someone could get 23 out of an 8 is not so clear, even in a case of bad handwriting.

Whatever the case, sometime I’ll need to make a visit to section 8 to see if there are any clues as to what made is so valuable a property for a farm.