|
Source:
Mennonites of Butler County, Ohio
by Rev. W. H. Grubb
Pastor of the
Apostolic Mennonite Church
Trenton, Ohio
--
Published by the Author
1916
Publ. 1916
SETTLEMENTS:
Pg. 11-12
The Butler county settlement was the
third of the Amish branch of the Mennonite Church in Ohio. The
first was located on the Sugar Creek, in Tuscarawas county, in 1808,
when a preacher, John Miller, came from Somerset
county, Pennsylvania. The second being in Wayne county as
early as 1817, when a Jacob Yoder moved there from
Mifflin county, Pennsylvania.
The pioneer of the Butler county settlement was
Christian Augspurger. He had been the manager of a
farm near Strassburg, then a province of France, owned by Charles
Schulmeister, a spy under Napoleon the First. He came
to America in 1817 and settled in Pennsylvania, and a little later,
in company with others, went farther west as far as the Miami
Valley. Here he decided to make his future home, but being a
friend of society and in a strange country without friends, he
became discouraged, and in 1818, with his family, returned to
France.
Finding, upon his return, that his farm had been leased
to another man for a number of years, he decided to return to
America and make his permanent home and fortune there. In the
spring of 1819, he again left with his family and a colony of
thirty-six families for America. Of these, six families came
to Butler county, in August of the same year. They were as
follows: Christian Augspurger, his brother Joseph,
their second cousin, Jacob Augspurger, Christian
Sommer, John Miller and John Gunden.
These were all members of the Amish branch of the Church.
Christian Augspurger purchased a farm in
Milford township near Collinsville. In 1829 he also purchased
a two hundred and fifty acre farm in Madison township, and moved
there April 1, 1830. He at one time owned nineteen hundred and
seventy-five acres of land in Bulter county. The amount
of land owned by the Augspurgers and their descendants in
Butler, Warren and Preble counties at one time was three thousand
six hundred and sixty-three acres.
Other families soon followed them from the old country,
so that in 1825 there were nine Amish families in Milford township.
In 1828-30-31, others came, and in 1832 a ship load of Hessian
Mennonites, about one hundred persons in all, came to Butler county,
which by this time had become a center for future settlements in the
West. As early as 1831, some of the unmarried young men and
women, with other families who had come from Alsace-Lorrain, drifted
to the rich lands of Illinois, where in 1833 they established the
first Amish Church west of Ohio. In 1840 others went to Iowa, and in
1847 several families, under the leadership of Rev. Joseph
Goldsmith, went to Lee county, where they organized the first
Amish congregation in that state. In the fifties other
families went to Missouri. After this few or no families came
to Butler county as their permanent home. Those who did come
from the old country stayed only long enough to earn money to get a
start in the states west of Ohio. In recent years a number of
families have gone to California, Canada and Texas. |
<
CLICK HERE to RETURN to TABLE of CONTENTS > |
