" But sad are fair Muskingum's waters, Sadly blue Mahoning raves; Tuscarawas plains are lonely, Lonely are Hockhocking's waves."

     It is to be regretted that the beautiful Indian name has been abbreviated and it is now generally known as the Hocking.  But few of our people have seen or appreciate the beautiful upper falls, which form the bottle as described in the Pioneer.  Art has not

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disturbed it, and with the dark gorge below the falls it is a beautiful and romantic spot.
     John Leith, a native of Leith, Scotland, came to America with his parents and settled in South Carolina.  He ran off to Pennsylvania and hired with an Indian trader at Fort Pitt (now Pittsburg).  They started with a stock of goods to the West and opened a trade with the Wyandots on the spot where Lancaster now stands.  This was in the year 1765.  The trader returned to Pittsburg with furs and to get a supply of goods, the Indians confiscated the goods in his store and carried off the boy.  He was a captive twenty-nine years.  He married a captive white girl, and the sister of this girl married the father of the late Thomas McNaughten of Walnut Township.  The brothers-in-law were among the early emigrants to that township.  John Leith died about the year 1835.  This story the writer received from the lips of Judge Leith, late of Wyandot County, O., but it is not mentioned, farther than that Leith was a prisoner, in any pioneer history.
     In 1793, the Indians captured three boys, Jeremiah Armstrong, John Armstrong, and a young man named Cox, also Elizabeth Armstrong, and on their way north up the Hockhocking they camped at or near where Lancaster now stands.  Jeremiah, in 1838, was a hotel keeper in Columbus, O., John died in Licking County, Elizabeth married in Canada and died there.  Lewis Wetzel was, as a scout and hunter, an early visitor to this spot.
     In the year 1751 the Ohio Company of Virginia sent out Christopher Gist, George Croghan and Andrew Morton to examine western lands as far west as the Miami town of the Indians.  They followed the old

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Indian trail leading from Fort Du Quesne to the Shawanese town of old Chillicothe on the west bank of the Scioto.
     January 17, 1751, they camped at "the great swamp," now known as Buckeye Lake, and passed on westward, crossing the head waters of the Hockhocking at a point shown on Thos. Hutchin's map, called Beavertown.  Hutchins was the engineer of Col. Bouquet's expedition against the Indians in 1764.  This map states that the Hockhocking is navigable for canoes a distance of eighty miles.  Col. James Smith, a pioneer of Kentucky, was a prisoner among the Indians in 1755 and with them camped at Buffalo Lick, the great swamp of Gist.  Here they hunted and killed deer and fine buffalo.  The Indians made with their small brass kettles a half bushel of salt.  If Smith's statement is true, and he was a respectable man, the salt lick has been lost or buried under the waters of the great reservoir.  Taylor, in his history of Ohio, says that there is but little doubt Beaver was the same town known as Tarhe and mentioned by Sanderson, and that the great Indian trail passed from Buffalo Lick to Tarhe, thence to Tobey (Royalton) and on to the Shawnee town, afterwards called by the whites Westfall.
     General Sanderson states that the Wyandots had a town named Tarhe on the present site of Lancaster, and that in 1790 it contained 500 souls.
     Pownall's map of 1773 shows Tarhe and calls it Hockhocking or French Margarets south of the Big Swamp.  The Hutchin's map gives the distance from Dresden or Wakatomica as twenty-seven miles to Buffalo Lick, and forty miles from the Lick to Shawnee.  From the Buffalo Lick, by way of Lancaster

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and Royalton, to Westfall is just forty miles.  With out doubt Gist and his companions were the first white men to visit the spot where Lancaster now stands.  This occurred in 1751.

     CAPT. JOSEPH HUNTER.  

Captain Hunter is recognized by General Sanderson as the first settler of Fairfield County.  Sanderson was here himself in 1799, and had the opportunity to learn the truth.  His cabin was built on ground west of the Hockhocking now within the corporate limits of Lancaster.  Here is what the General says:
     "In April, 1798, Captain Joseph Hunter, a bold and enterprising man, with his family, emigrated from Kentucky and settled on Zane's trace, upon the edge of the prairie west of the crossings, and about one hundred and fifty yards northwest of the present turnpike road.
     "Captain Hunter cleaned off the underbrush, felled the forest trees, and erected a cabin, at a time when he had not a neighbor nearer than the Muskingum and Scioto Rivers.  This was the commencement of the first settlement in the upper Hockhocking valley; and Captain Hunter is regarded as the founder of the flourishing county of Fairfield."
     Captain Hunter died in the year 1826; his widow survived him more than thirty-six years, dying Dec. 19, 1861.  Captain Joseph Hunter was the father of Hocking H. Hunter, the first child born in the present limits of Lancaster.  He had a numerous family of children, but they have all passed to the great beyond except a daughter, Mrs. John C. Cassel, one of the oldest residents of Lancaster, now in her eighty-seventh year.

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JAMES CONVERSE

     The second settler in the Hocking valley closely identified with Lancaster was James Converse, the first merchant.  He came from New England to Marietta, O.  His ancestors had lived in New England for more than one hundred years and are favorably mentioned in the local histories.  Two members of the family graduated at Harvard.  From Marietta, in 1799, he came to the "crossings of the Hockhocking" by boat (keel boat) to the mouth of Rush Creek, bringing with him a stock of goods.  He opened his store in a cabin near that of Joseph Hunter.  Here he sold goods until Lancaster was laid out, when he purchased a lot on Main Street, built a home and opened the first store.  He was the fore man of the first Grand Jury of the county in 1803, and his name is on the records as a taxpayer in 1806.  In 1811 he loaded flatboats at Chillicothe, O., for the New Orleans market.  They arrived safely at New Madrid, to be swallowed up by the great earthquake of that year, and as he never returned, it is supposed he went down with his boats.
     Judge Horace P. Biddle, in 1838 a law student of H. H. Hunter, is a nephew of Converse.  The Judge resides at Logansport, Ind.  He had a brother who lived in Hocking County with his sister, Mrs. Biddle; Royal Converse; he died in 1827.  Another brother, Simon Converse, was a Lancaster merchant previous to 1807.  Royal Converse was in the year 1819 engaged in the Clerk's office at Logan, Ohio.

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GENERAL GEORGE SANDERSON

     General George Sanderson came with his father's family to Fairfield County in the year 1800.  They came here from Kentucky, as the Hunters and Matlacks did.  It is certain, however, that the General was born in Pennsylvania.  He was the mail-carrier over Zane's trace from Zanesville to Chillicothe in 1799; this was before his father arrived, but was the statement of Sanderson himself.  In April 1801 he became a resident of Lancaster.  Later on he went to Chillicothe and entered a printing office, where he became an expert printer.  He returned to Lancaster in 1810 and soon thereafter established a weekly paper which he called the Independent Press; this he continued until he enlisted for the War of 1812.  He was an active young man and patriotic, and undertook to raise a company; in this he was successful, and was immediately elected captain.  With this company he marched to the Northwest and joined the army of General Hull, at Detroit. Here, with all of his men, he was surrendered and paroled.  He was much disgusted with Hull's conduct, and rather than hand over his sword to the British, he broke it on a stump.  He returned to Lancaster, raised another company, and joined the army of General Harrison.  He knew that, if captured, his fate would be certain death, on account of his parole, but he had the good fortune to serve during the war without being captured.  In the year 1816 he was elected Sheriff of Fairfield County, and served four years.  In 1820 he was elected a justice of the peace, and served as such thirty years. In 1821-22-23 he was a member of the Ohio Legislature.  In 1826, he established the Lancaster Gazette

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and, with Mr. Oswold, published it seven years, Reese and Borland being his successors.  He was a Major General of the 7th Division Ohio Militia in 1828, and held the position many years.  Whether continuous or not, he was a Major-General in 1846.  He appeared on dress parade in citizen's clothes with a long queue and presented a very striking appearance.  General Sanderson was of tall and commanding figure and always attracted attention.  He died in the year 1872, aged eighty-two years.

REV. JAMES QUINN

     James Quinn was born in Washington County, Pennsylvania, in the year 1775, and was licensed to preach by Bishop Francis Asburyof the Methodist Episcopal Church in the year 1799, the year that he made his missionary trip to the Hockhocking valley.  May 1, 1803, he was married to Patience Teal, daughter of Edward Teal near Baltimore, Md.  Soon thereafter he moved with his family and father-in-law to Ohio.  He entered upon his work upon the Hockhocking Circuit, which included the valleys of the Muskingum, Hockhocking and Scioto Rivers and the adjacent territories.  He died in the year 1847, his wife Patience had preceded him to the other shore February 1, 1820.  In the year 1799 the Rev. James Quinn of the M. E. Church came up the Hockhocking on horseback; he preached to three families at the great Falls.  In the neighborhood of the crossings of the Hockhocking he spent one week, visiting and preaching in the cabins of the settlers.  This was in the month of December of that year.  It may therefore be stated with absolute certainty that he was the first preacher to enter the wilderness of Fairfield

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County and preach to the settlers.  He afterwards became a well known Methodist preacher of pioneer times.  His voice was heard in every neighborhood of Fairfield County and of the Hockhocking valley for more than thirty years.  He preached the first sermon in the first house of worship erected in Lancaster, a frame building, erected by the Methodist Society in the year 1816.
     He had often before this time preached in the Court House at Lancaster.  The mention of the name of Jimmy Quinn revives more recollections of pioneer Methodist times than that of any other man.  The body of Rev. James Quinn was buried at Auburn Cemetery, Highland County, Ohio.

COLONEL EBENEZER ZANE.

     Colonel Ebenezer Zane, the founder of Lancaster, and his three brothers, Jonathan, John and Noah, were frontiersmen, hunters, scouts and prospectors long before Marietta was settled in 1789.  Jonathan was the guide to an expedition against the Indians to a point where Dresden now stands on the Muskingum, from Wheeling, Va., in the year 1774.  As early as 1785 General Parsons from Massachusetts, afterwards one of the judges of the territory north of the Ohio, while on an inspection tour in the interests of the then proposed Ohio Company, made a trip up the Muskingum River.  At Salt Creek, ten miles below the mouth of Licking, he met and conversed with a brother of Colonel Zane about the Ohio country.  Zane was there making salt.  Prior to the year 1796, Colonel Zane had surveyed and blazed a road from Pittsburg to Wheeling for the Government. Congress having been informed by Gov-

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ernor St. Clair that there were no roads in the Territory, decided, in May 1796, to give the President power to contract with Ebenezer Zane to open a road and arrange for ferrys from Wheeling to Limestone, Ky., Zane to receive as compensation one section of land at the crossing of the Muskingum, one at the "Standing Rock" near the crossings of the Hockhocking, and one opposite Chillicothe.  This contract was made and the work commenced either in the year 1796, or early in the year 1797.  Colonel Zane intrusted the work to his brother Jonathan and his son-in-law, John Mclntire.  At first, this trace was a mere bridle path through the woods; later it, was improved so that wagons could pass over, and the marshy places made passable by corduroy bridges (poles laid side by side and covered with earth).  With such improvements as the farmers made from time to time it was the only road to Zanesville for forty years.  Jonathan Zane and John Mclntire laid out Zanesville and sold the lots. John and Noah Zane laid out Lancaster and commenced the sale of lots in November 1800.  They had a power of attorney and made the deeds. It is not known that Ebenezer Zane was ever in Lancaster.  John and Noah Zane purchased lots and also became owners of some outlots north of the Zane section. This road has always been known as Zane's trace. Over this route the mail was carried once a week each way from Chillicothe to Zanesville, and General Sanderson, a small boy then, was the post-boy.  He braved the dangers of the wilderness, crossed swollen streams, and endured hardships unknown at this day, passing not more than a half dozen cabins on the entire route.