Delaware Bend - Its Path Through History - Part 1

 

From the 1890 Defiance County Plat Map

This informative article appeared in the Defiance Crescent-News on December 2, 1927.  Written by Ethelyn Sexton, an insructor at Defiance College in Journalism, Sexton takes the story of Delaware Bend from the time of the Native Americans who camped on the shores of the Maumee at the curve in the river until the present day.

"Bend, Once Flourishing Lumber Town, Recalls Indians, Wayne, and Pioneers

The community of Delaware Bend, ten miles west of Defiance, one mile off the Hicksville Pike, has perhaps more forcefully than any village in Northwest Ohio been marked by the merciless tread of the great, black oxen.

From an Indian settlement in the days when this section of Ohio claimed only the Redman as inhabitants, to an important logging center with all the attendant high life of those early days, then again the march of years, leaving in their wake, a deserted village with but an occasional landmark to suggest the days of prosperity  - this, in brief, is the history of Delaware Bend.

The little group of houses which comprise the place today is located on a slight bluff at the foot of which flows the Maumee River. The well-cultivated fields of wheat and corn, the orchards that line its banks, give no hint of the fact that once these fertile spaces were a wilderness, that the road from the Bend to Defiance was a poorly broken trail made by Anthony Wayne, almost impassable in winter. Nor is it easy to imagine in these days of advanced transportation, facilities that the white settlers of the spot pushed canoes up and down the Maumee with a 'setting pole' before the keel boat came into use.

First Whites Come in 1822

According to records, it was in the early twenties that the white man first came to Delaware Bend, eight families arriving within the space of a few years.  The records, as stated by George W. Hill, coming to the Bend from Washington County, Pennsylvania, in 1822 and locating in Section 27, include a reference to the old Indian orchard planted by the Delaware Indians, and the great fields of corn which they had grown.  Memories of the Hill family in the History of Defiance County, published in 1883 read:

'The old Indian orchard at Delaware Bend is probably from seventy five to one hundred years old.'

The Hill homestead comprised some 280 acres on the banks of the Maumee where the river turns, giving the community its name. It was on the site of the former Indian village which flourished before the advent of Anthony Wayne who, descending upon the Delaware, put down their corn and forcing them to abandon their dwelling homes, offered this land for sale.

Whiskey Bargaining too Effective

The recollection of Mrs. Hill, whose father, Benjamin Mulligan, was a pioneer of the Bend, tells in this early history of the arrival of the McGinnis family, who settling near her home on what is still called the Speaker farm, attempted to open negotiations with the Indians with a barrel of whiskey.

Not wisely, but too well, did his bargaining have effect, for on one occasion, when McGinnis was out of town, the Indians imbibed so freely of the new trading commodity that the Mulligans, one and all, in order to escape the drunken orgies of the Indians set out late in the evening for Defiance.

Along the swamp road by the Maumee, the horses were often knee deep in muck and water and aftertimes, wrote Mrs. Hill, 'my father was forced to go on hands and knees ahead of the teams to keep the path and thus by toilsome stages, we reached Defiance by 2 o'clock the next morning,'

Coon Skins Legal Tender

Fully as interesting are the pioneer experiences of the Snook family. William Snook, coming from Trenton, New Jersey, located at the Bend in 1824, buying land on both sides of the river at the point where today the B & O Railroad crosses the Maumee.

This was in the days when in all Northwest Ohio, coon skins were legal tender for taxes and for commodities of life, and descendants of William Snook tell of a thrilling coon hunt in the vicinity of the Bend that nearly cost the lives of adventurous young Snooks.

After killing three coons, George, John and Peter, nephews of the pioneer, succeeded in felling a large tree, which they believed to be a 'don' tree, a sort of coon rendezvous.  To their surprise and dismay, however, the chief inhabitant of the treed was a great, black bear who attacked George, wounding him.  The other boys, with their axes, succeeded in disabling the bear, which was found later by an Indian, almost dead from the wounds.

Next: Part 2