[111] Vanceburgh, at the mouth of Salt Lick Creek, is now the county-seat for Lewis County; but Clarksburgh, a village below, was originally so chosen.—Ed.
CHAPTER XXIII
Graham’s station—Brush Creek—A family travelling on a visit—Fine scenery—Massey’s island—Manchester—Brookes’s—Madison—Maysville—Failure of three towns, and an intended glass house.
At eight o’clock we proceeded to drop down the river. The hills on each side still continued broken, separate, and pointed, and the bottoms narrow. The appearance of the timber since we passed Little Sandy, indicated the soil to be not so rich as above that river, it being of a much smaller growth.
About eight miles from Salt Lick we passed on the left a fine settlement of several large farms and good farm houses, called Graham’s station on Kennedy’s bottom, and three miles further on the right the new town of Adamsville, with one very good house and three or four small ones, finely situated at {146} the mouth of Brush creek, which is a charming little river about thirty-five yards wide.
From hence we observed several good farm houses in fine situations, on the left, and an extensive bottom, well settled, on the right, the Ohio being about half a mile wide between.
At Sycamore creek, which is very small, on the left, two miles below Brush creek, is a good house, finely situated, with a ferry for the Ohio. Here we spoke a man of the name of May, who with his wife and child, and an aged mother, had been seven weeks descending the Mississippi and ascending the Ohio in a skiff; bound from St. Louis in upper Louisiana, to Pittsburgh, a distance of thirteen hundred miles, on a visit to two of his brothers residing there. They had just landed to cook their dinner. I mention this merely to give some idea how little the inhabitants of this country think of journies which would seem impracticable to the stationary residents of Europe.
Since passing Brush creek, I observed the river hills to be lower, their tops flatter, and the country less broken: the river too had widened to the breadth of three quarters of a mile, and Pennaway’s handsome brick house on a fine farm, separated by Donaldson’s creek from the widow Smith’s farm house, the latter decorated with a balcony and piazza, and beautifully situated, with the wooded hills rising gradually behind, formed altogether imagery worthy a good landscape painter. From hence there is also a charming view down the river, through a vista formed by Massey’s island and the high right bank on which the town of Manchester is placed.
Four miles and a half below Sycamore creek, instead of going through the vista which was open to the eye, we kept over to the left shore in the main channel, to the left of a small island, which is joined at low water by a semicircular sand bar to Massey’s {147} island, a fine harbour being formed by the bar between the islands except in inundations of the river.
Massey’s island is about two miles long, but it is very narrow. It belongs to two owners, it is very fertile and partly cultivated.