CHAPTER I.
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Sketch of the Country and Settlement Prior to Organization
- Traversed Before the Territory of Ohio Was Named by One of It's Subsequent Settlers
- Its Inhabitant Before the State Was Organized
- Its Citizens When Fairfield County Was Created
- With Incidents of Frontier Life and Adventure.

     THE country having for its name Ohio was constituted, under General Arthur St. Clair, a territorial government in the year 1788, and he continued as Governor until the adoption of the State Constitution in 1803.
     By this proclamation the county of Fairfield was created Dec. 9th, 1800, and the district of which we now treat was included therein until the month of February, 1808, when it was, by enactment of the Legislature, organized into a separate and distinct county, honored with the name of General Henry Knox, a distinguished officer of the revolutionary army, who was subsequently Secretary of War in Gen. Washington's administration.
     The first white man known to have viewed this seciton of country was John Stilley who, when a captive among the Indians, traversed the White Woman and Owl Creek from its month in a northwesterly direciton, as early as June, 1779, nine years.

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before the name of Ohio had been given to this territory, and when the savages and wild beasts roamed at will throughout its vast extent.
     The first settlers in this district were from Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennysylvania, and its inhabitants, at every period of its history, have been chiefly from the middle States.
     From our research into early statements, we are led to believe that Andrew Craig was the first white man who located within the present county limits.  He was, at a very early day, a sort of Frontier character, fond of rough and tumble life, a stout and rugged man - bold and dare-devil in disposition - who took delight in hunting, wrestling and athletic sports, and was "hail fellow well met" with the Indians then inhabiting the country.  He was from the bleak, broken, mountainous region of Virginia, and as hardy a pine knot as ever that country produced.  He was in this country when Ohio was in its territorial condition, and when this wilderness region was declared to be in the county of Fairfield, the sole denizen in this entire district, whose history is now being written, tabernacled with a woman in a rough log hut close by the little Indian Field, about one-half mile east of where Mount Vernon city now exists, and at the point where Centre Run empties into the Ko-ko-sing.  The Andrew Craig lived when Mount Vernon was laid out in 1805 - there he was upon the organization of Knox county, its oldest inhabitant - and there he continued until 1809.  Such a harumscarum fellow could not rest easy when white men got thick around him, so he left and went to the In-

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back, about 125 miles, and brought home with him in his wagon about 900 pounds of flour, one barrel of whisky, and one barrel of salt.  How the settlement must have rejoiced at the arrival of the great staples of frontier life, salt, whisky and flour!

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