Old Fashioned Settler's Honeymoon

Lately I've been on a kick researching about the white settlement of our county.  It's absolutely fascinating stuff! My favorite portions are the real life experiences shared by members of the "old pioneer societies".  Many of these are recollections of the mid 1830 -1850 era, written in the late 1800's by the old-timers of that day.

  I'm going to share a few tid bits with you here and my comments.

Jesse Hart, of Brookfield, thus relates his experience: “I was born in the township of Springfield, Portage (now Summit) county, Ohio, April 27, 1814, and lived there with my father until I was twenty-three years of age. I then married Rachel Richards, July 16, 1837, and about the tenth day of the next October we started for Michigan with two yokes of oxen and one wagon. We got along well until we got to what was called the ‘Black Swamp,’ then all the roads I ever saw or traveled over, that road through that swamp was the worst. Suffice it to say I worked hard for eight days to get thirty-two miles.

We arrived at Joseph Bosworth’s on the sixty day of November following; he lived then in what is now the town of Walton. He had moved two or three weeks before, and had built a shanty right in the woods. My land was four miles northeast of there in what is now the town of Brookfield. As Mr. Bosworth was the nearest one to my land, I made arrangements to stay with him until I could build a shanty and cut a road to it, and I got him to help me.

We got the body of the shanty up, three-fourths of the roof on, and the door cut out, but had neither door nor floor; then we moved in. It was here in this partly built shanty that, on the 12th day of November, 1837, my wife and I first began keeping house.

It was four miles to the nearest neighbor, with no road but a crooked track I had cut through the woods, and the whole county an almost unbroken wilderness. The screech of the owl and the howl of the wolf was our music by night, and the Indians our callers by day. The first night we made our bed on some split pieces of basswood in one corner of the shanty, built a fire in another, hung up a blanket for a door and some on the walls around the bed, and it seemed quite like home, and we had a good night’s rest. I soon made a pole bedstead, hewed out and put down a puncheon floor, built a stone back and stick chimney in one corner, made a clay hearth, and the shanty was finished, without a nail, except what were in the door. We lived in that shanty nearly two years—yes, the happiest two years of my life were spent in that shanty. There was something grand and romantic about it, which I very much enjoyed. The grand old forest yielded up for our support of its wild fruits, its honey, and its venison. It was in this shanty that our first child was born, cradled and rocked in a sap trough.”



Wow -- can you imagine spending your honeymoon traipsing over a swampy road for a month to utter wilderness, building your first home with little save an ax and then sleeping on a pile of wood with no door, to keep out the wild animals? And, then birthing your first baby in such a place (likely without the aid of anyone but your husband) and rocking your baby in a hollowed out log? Yet...

Despite all of the hardships and toil, those were the best years of this man's life.

It really makes you think doesn't it?