In the year of the treaty, Jonathan Dayton, head of a New Jersey land company which also included Generals Wilkinson and St. Clair and a Colonel Ludlow, acquired the so-called “seventh and eighth ranges” between the two Miami Rivers, and employed surveyors to lay out a town site. The town was to take Jonathan Dayton’s name, although he was never to lay eyes on the holding. Ludlow (in the company of the surveyor, Daniel Cooper) was the only member of the land company to make the westward trek. Newcom Tavern was one of the first structures to be erected in Dayton, and it is the oldest Dayton building now standing. Long a familiar landmark of Van Cleve Park, on Monument Avenue in downtown Dayton, the Tavern was moved to Carillon Park in the summer of 1964. Here, it is much more accessible to the public than it was in the congested business district, and it has the wooded setting that a frontier relic deserves. It was in the spring of 1796 that three groups of settlers headed north from Cincinnati. One party came by flat boat, or pirogue, which was laboriously poled up the Miami. The other two groups came overland—one by wagon, the other on foot, leading packhorses and driving cattle. [Illustration: Early household utensils include, on shelf at left, a hearth rotisserie and a foot warmer. Corn crusher stands in the corner and on shelf at right are various grinders, a dough board and a cypress knee in which salt was kept.] The latter party was led by Colonel George Newcom, a veteran of Wayne’s campaign against the redskins. Newcom immediately chose a lot on the southwest corner of Main and Water (now Monument Avenue) Streets, where the Newcom Manor apartments were later erected. He put up a one-room cabin of round logs as temporary shelter, then engaged one Robert Edgar to build a permanent house—18 by 22 feet, of square-hewn logs, with a loft above reached by a ladder. The small original shelter served as kitchen to the larger house for a while, but eventually was razed. [Illustration: Simple furnishings and venerable logs bring extraordinary warmth and charm to this first-floor bedroom. Corn husks were used as fill for the mattress; bed was used by the Newcoms, and was probably made in Dayton.] John F. Edgar, son of Robert, left a detailed account of those early days in his book, “Pioneer Life in Dayton and Vicinity,” published in 1896. Concerning construction of the log tavern, he wrote: