John Cleves Symmes and the Symmes Purchase in Ohio

Let's return to the North Bend Community website, that we were looking at yesterday.
http://www.northbendohio.org/TheVillageofNorthBendHistory.html


In 1786, Major Benjamin Stites of New Jersey was in Kentucky, when he followed some Indians across the Ohio River hoping to reclaim his horses that had been stolen. Although he did not get his horses back, he got a chance to explore the land between the two Miami rivers. The Little Miami on the East and the Great Miami on the West. It was and still is a great countryside. Just the right amount of hills without being mountainous but enough level land to farm and enough woods to have plenty of wood for building and fuel.

When he returned to New Jersey, he reported his love of this particular land to Judge John Cleves Symmes, a Congressman from the Trenton area. In 1787, Symmes and 23 other New Jerseyans petitioned to get a land grant over which they would be Proprietors, like those of the Ohio Purchase. ( And Proprietors like the rulers of the English Proprietors of East and West Jersey).

What caught my attention was that the three other Proprietors listed on this page were:

General Johnathan Dayton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Dayton

General Johnathan Dayton - He was one of the NJ Delegates to the Continental Congress (the youngest member at age 26. and a Delegate to the Constitutional Convention - Later the 4th Speaker of the House of Representatives. (Interesting tidbit. He was both a classmate of Burr and Hamilton and a contributor to the Burr Conspiracy. - a great future topic!)
The city of Dayton is part of Symmes purchase and was named after Johnathan Dayton.



Elias Boudinot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Boudinot

 Elias Boudinot - He was not only a NJ Delegate to the Continental Congress, but the President of that Congress from November 1782 - November 1783.
He was a very religiously tolerant man and opposed slavery. He founded the American Bible Society in 1816.
(He appears as a person of importance in the article I did about women losing the vote they had in early NJ. "Petticoat Electors" -  www.gardenstatelegacy.com/ -) *** This is not the Elias Boudinot who was involved in the Cherokee Removal.

Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Witherspoon

Rev. Dr  John Witherspoon -  The President of the College of New Jersey (later called Princeton) from 1768-1794. He was the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence.

Three more of the Proprietors - Matthias Denman, Colonel Robert Patterson, and John Filson

A lengthy and intersting account of Symmes Purchase and the survey problems and land distribution is in "History of Coshocton County, Ohio: its past and present, 1740-1881,
 By Albert Adams Graham, Graham, A.A., & Co., Newark, Ohio, on page 93-94 - You can find it on Google Books.

So what I found so interesting is that all the Land Speculators were New Jersey men. Many of them active politicians of the time. A question to ponder, Were they taking advantage of their political positions to enrich themselves? Makes you think that perhaps politics never changes that much.

Also, It seems that the survey was not exactly accurate and Symmes may have knowingly or unknowingly sold land that was not his and even sold the same land more then one time. Interesting isn't it.

My Family and Symmes Township, Hamilton County, Ohio will have to wait for another day. :-)