OCCURRENCES of great importance at the time, but seldom, if every, mentioned in these days, are recorded here for several reasons:  First of all, to add to the general interest of this enterprise, and secondly, to preserve, as much as possible, records of events that at one time or another attracted the attention of the entire country, and defied the power of science to account for some of these wonderful manifestations.
     A quantity of other matter is added here for the convenience of the student of history, and for ready references to the subject embraced; some of these are statistical, and others are historical in their nature.  These are hoped will proved a benefit as well as a pleasure to the reader, though, in fact, forming in themselves no part of the history of Seneca county.

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL PHENOMENA.

THE GREAT EARTHQUAKE

     On the 15th day of December, 1811, the first great shock of an earthquake occurred, that shook the whole majestic valley of the Mississippi to the center, and made the Allegheny mountains tremble beneath its gigantic throes.  Its convulsions agitated even the waves of the Atlantic ocean.  The subterranean forces which produced such results must have been of inconceivable magnitude.
     The region on the west bank of the Mississippi and in the southern part of the state of Missouri seems to have been the center of the most violent shocks.  They were repeated at intervals of two or three months.  These shocks, in their terrible upheavings of the earth, equal any phenomena of the kind of which history gives any record.  The country was very thinly settled, and there were but few educated men in the whole region who could philosophically note the phenomena which were witnessed.  Fortunately, most of the houses were very frail, being built of logs.  Such structures would sway to and fro with the surgings of the earth, but they were not easily thrown down.  Vast tracts of land were precipitated into the turbid, foaming current of the Mississippi.  The graveyard at New Madrid was at one swoop torn away, and with all its mouldering dead, swept down the stream.
     Most of the houses in New Madrid were destroyed.  Large regions of forest, miles of extent, suddenly sank out of sight, while the waters rushed in forming, upon the spot, almost fathomless lakes.  Other lakes were drained, leaving only vast basins of mud, where, apparently for centuries, in the solitudes of the forest, the waves had rolled.
     The whole wilderness of territory extending from the mouth of the Ohio, three hundred miles, to the St. Francis, was so convulsed as to create lakes and islands, ravines and marshes, whose numbers never can be fully known.  Some of the effects produced were very difficult to account for.  Large trees were split through the heart of the tough wood.  The trees were inclined in every direction, and were lodged in every angle towards the earth or the horizon.  The undulations of the earth resembled the surges of the tempest-tossed ocean, the billows ever increasing in magnitude.  At the greatest elevation these earth billows would burst open,and water, sand and coal would be ejected as high as the loftiest trees.  Some of the chasms thus created were very deep.
     Wide districts were covered by a shower of small white sand, like the ground after a snow storm.  This spread of desolation rendered the region around quit4e uninhabitable for a long time.  Other immense tracts were flooded with water from a few inches to a few feet deep.  As the water subsided a coating of barren sand left behind.
     Indeed, it must have been a scene of horror in these deeps forests, and in the gloom of the darkest night, and by wading in teh water to the middle to fly from those concussions, which were occurring every few hours, with a notice equally terrible to beasts and birds and to man.  The birds themselves lost all power and disposition to fly, and retreated to the bosoms of men - their fellow sufferers - in this general convulsion.  A few persons sank in these chasms, and were providentially extricated.  A number perished who sank with their boats in the Mississippi.  A bursting of the earth just below the village of New Madrid arrested the mighty Mississippi in its course, and caused a reflux of its waters, by which, in a little time, a great number of boats were swept by the ascending current into the outh of the bayou, carried out and left upon the dry earth when the accumulating waters of the river had again cleared the current.
     The following is from "The Great West,"   There were a number of severe shocks, but the two series of concussions were particularly terrible, far more so than the rest.  The shocks were clearly distinguished into two classes - those in which the motion was horizontal, and those in which it was perpendicular.  The latter were attended with explosions, and the terrible mixture of noises that preceded and accompanied the earthquakes in a louder degree, but were by no means so desolating and destructive as the other.  The houses crumbled, the trees weaved together, the ground sunk, while ever and anon vivid flashes of lightning, gleaming through the troubled clouds of night, rendered the darkness doubly horrible.  After the severest shocks, a dense, black cloud of vapor overshadowed the land, through which no struggling sunbeam found its way to cheer the heart of man.  The sulphur-

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ated gasses that were discharged during the shocks tainted the air with their noxious effluvia, and so impregnated the water of the river for one hundred and fifty miles as to render it unfit for use.
     In the intervals of the earthquake were there was one evening, and that a brilliant and cloudless one, in which the western sky was a continued glare of repeated peals of subterranean thunder, seeming to proceed, as the flashes did, from below the horizon.  The night, which was so conspicuous for subterranean thunder, was the same period in which the fatal earthquakes at Caracas, in South America, occurred, and it is supposed that these flashes and those events were part of the same scene.

MORE TO COME....

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THE GREAT HURRICANE.

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THE JERKS

     Having thus alluded to remarkable physical phenomena, we ought not pass in silence a mental phenomenon, totally inexplicable upon any known principles of intellectual philosophy, and yet thoroughly attested by competent witnesses.
     The Rev. Joseph Badger was the first missionary on the western reserve.  He graduated at Yale college about the year 1785, and was the highly esteemed pastor of the Congregational church in Blanford, Massachusetts, for fourteen years.  He was a man of enterprising spirit as well as fervent piety, and became deeply interested in the religious welfare of the Indians in northern Ohio.  Aided by a missionary society, he visited the country, and was so well satisfied that a field of usefulness was opened before him there, that he returned for his family and took up his residence among the Wyandots of Upper Sandusky, extending his labors to the tribes on the Maumee.
     His work amongst the Indians and the scattered inhabitants of the reserve, was very arduous, but interesting and valuable.  He was appointed by Governor Meigs, chaplain in the northern army as war broke out with England.  He was in Fort Meigs during the memorable seige of 1813, and was afterwards attached to General Harrison's command.  Mr. Badger had a high reputation for sound judgment, energy of character and superior intellectual endowments.  He died in 1846, at the ae of eighty-nine.
     Quite a powerful revival of religion commenced under his preaching in the towns of Austinburgh, Morgan and Harpersfield, where, at that time (1803), he was alternately preaching.  The revival was attended by a strange bodily agitation called the jerks.  We find in "The Historical Collections of Ohio"* a very graphic account of this strange occurrence.
     It was familiarly called jerks, and the first recorded instance of its occurrence was at a sacrament in East Tennessee, when several hundred of both sexes were seized with this strange and involuntary condition.  The subject was instantaneously seized with spasms or convulsions in every muscle, nerve and tendon.  His head was thrown backward and forward and from side to side with inconceivable rapidity.  So swift was the motion that the features could no more be discerned than the spokes of a wheel can be seen when revolving with the greatest velocity.  No man could voluntarily accomplish the movement.  Great ears were often awakened lest the neck should be dislocated.

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 * Sharon Wick's note:   Historical Collections of Ohio in Two Volumes, An Encyclopedia of the State.  Vol. I - page 279

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     The whole body was often similarly affected, and the individual was driven, notwithstanding all his efforts to prevent it, in the church over pews and bences, and in the open air over stones and the trunks of fallen trees, so that his escape from bruised  and mangled limbs seemed almost miraculous.  It was of no avail to attempt to hold or restrain one thus affected.  The paroxysm continued until it gradually exhausted itself.  Moreover, all  were impressed with the conviction that there was something supernatural in these convulsions and that it was opposing the spirit of God to attempt, by violence to resist them.
    The spasmodic convulsions commenced with a simple jerking of the fore-arm, from the elbow to the hand, violent, and as ungoverned by the will as what is called the shaking palsy would be.  The jerks were very sudden, following each other at short intervals.  Gradually and resistlessly they extended through the arms to the muscles of the neck, the legs and all other parts of the body.  The convulsions of the neck were the more frightful to behold.  The bosom heaved, the features were greatly distorted and so violent were the spasms that it seemed impossible but that the neck must be broken.  When the hair was long, as was frequently the case with these backwoodsmen, it was often thrown backward and forward with such velocity that it would actually snap like a whip-lash.  We are not informed whether the victim suffered pain under these circumstances or not.
     An eye-witness gives the following graphic description of the inexplicable phenomena: "Nothing in nature could better represent this strange and unaccountable operation than for me to goad another alternately on one side with a piece of red hot iron.  The exercise commonly began in the head, which would fly backward and forward and from side to side with a quick jolt, which the person would naturally labor to suppress, but in vain; and the more any one labored to stay himself and be sober, the more he staggered and the more his twitches increased.  He must necessarily go as he was inclined, whether with a violent dash on the ground and bounce from place to place like a foot-ball, or hop around with head, limbs and trunk twitching and jolting in every direction, as if they must inevitably fly asunder.  And how such could escape without injury, was no small wonder amongst spectators.
     "By these strange operations the human frame was commonly so transformed and disfigured as to lose every trace of its natural appearance.  Sometimes the head would be twitched right and left to a half round, with such velocity that no feature could be discovered, but the face appeared as much behind as before; and in the quick, progressive jerk, it would seem as if the person was transmuted into some other species of creature.
     "Head-dresses were of little account among the female jerkers.  Even handkerchiefs, bound tight round the head, would be flirted off almost with the first twitch, and the hair put into the utmost confusion.  This was a very great inconvenience, to redress which, the generality were shorn, though contrary to their confessions of faith.  Such as were seized with jerks, were wrested at once, not only from their own government, but that of every one else, so that it was dangerous to attempt confining them or touching them in any manner, to whatever danger they were exposed.  Yet few were hurt, except it were such as rebelled against the operation through

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wilful and deliberate enmity, and refused to comply with the injunctions which it came to enforce.
     "All who witnessed this unaccountable movement, agree in the declaration that the convulsions were not only involuntary, but resistless.  Stout, burly, wicked men, would come to the meetings to scorn and to revile.  Suddenly the paroxysms would seize them, and they would be whirled about and tossed in every direction, through cursing at every jerk.  Travelers passing by, and who, from curiosity, looked in upon the religious meetings, would be thus seized.  Thee facts are apparently as well authenticated as any facts can be from human testimony.  There is no philosophy which can explain them.  The faithful historian can only give them record, and leave them there." - [Abbott's Ohio, 683.

THE MORMONS.

MORMONISM.

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SALUTATORY.

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THE OLD STATE HOUSE

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EXTRACT FROM THE ADDRESS OF GOVERNOR CHASE.

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ermine for the shroud; there Hitchcock, clear in judgment and inflexible in integrity; and there - but I must break off the enumeration.  Time would fail me were I to attempt to name even half of those whose elevation of character, purity of purpose, sagacity in council and vigor in action distinguished that period.  Happy shall we be if we prove ourselves worthy successors of such men."
     Those who remember the clear and oft admired tones of the old capitol bell, will not regret the insertion of the following appropriate dirge, taken from one of the Columbus papers, as an appendix to this book:

[For the Elevator]

DIRGE OF THE STATE HOUSE BELL.

By J. M. D.

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COLUMBUS, February 10, 1862.