Social problems; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
Soon after his arrival, he visited Hartford and reported to the
missionary society what he had done, and the character of his work, and
agreed to return with his family to the same field of missionary labor,
and for such compensation as the society chose to allow him, which was
but seven dollars per week. This was at that time considered a
sufficient sum to meet the current expenses of himself and family. He
exchanged his former homestead at Blandford for land in the Western
Reserve. On the 23d of February, 1802, he started on his journey to the
Western Reserve in a wagon drawn by four horses and loaded with a few
household goods, his wife and six children, and himself driving the
team. He took the route leading through the State of New York to
Buffalo, and thence followed the southerly shore of Lake Erie to
Austinburg, in the Reserve, where he and his family were received with a
hearty welcome to the home and hospitalities of his friend, Colonel
Eliphalet Austin. He accomplished the journey, a distance of six hundred
miles, in sixty days. This was travelling at a pretty rapid rate, as was
then thought. He remarked, when he had reached the hospitable home of
his friend Austin, that he and his family seemed destined to share God's
promise to his ancient Israel: "And they shall dwell safely in the
wilderness, and sleep in the woods."
He now purchased a small lot of land in Austinburg, and soon, with the
aid of a few kind settlers, erected a log cabin in which to shelter his
family. He found it difficult to procure sufficient provisions, but soon
succeeded in obtaining a sack of coarse flour in the vicinity; and
hearing of a barrel of pork for sale at Painesville, he sent a man with
a team thirty miles through the woods to purchase it, and paid twenty
silver dollars for it, and found on opening it that it contained the
"whole hog,"--feet, head, snout and ears,--and weighed but one hundred
and seventy pounds. This, with the milk from two cows that were pastured
in the woods and sometimes missed for a day or two, was all the
provision he could make for his family when it became necessary for him
to leave them and enter upon his missionary labors in other parts of the
Reserve. He visited Mentor, Chagrin, and other settlements. At Euclid he
found a family by the name of Burke, who had resided in a lone situation
in the woods for over three years, in so destitute a condition that the
wife had been obliged to spin cattle's hair and weave it into blankets
to cover her children's bed and save them from suffering in cold
weather. At Newburg he visited five families, the only residents in the
place, but discovered to his regret "no apparent piety among any of
them. They all seemed to glory in their infidelity." He continued
visiting families and preaching throughout the southeastern part of the
Reserve, and establishing churches. He called on his return at "Perkins'
Station" in Trumbull County, where an election was pending and a goodly
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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