While the governor and some of the judges lived at Marietta, and they had enacted laws at meetings there, those laws had been invalidated. There was then no officially designated capital of the territory, the judges meeting and promulgating laws wherever might be convenient. In 1790, St. Clair had removed to Cincinnati in preparation for his campaign against the Indians, which proved so disastrous in 1791.
OX TEAM AND COVERED WAGON PARTY
Drawn by Earl Laweck, Roger City, Michigan
Chapter V
GROWTH OF SETTLEMENTS
The arrival of Governor Arthur St. Clair and the territorial judges encouraged immigration by assuring settlers of the institution of law and order. When the Reverend Daniel Breck delivered a sermon in the present state of Ohio, on Sunday, July 20, 1788, he addressed an audience of 300 people from Marietta and the settlement of Isaac Williams on the Virginia side of the river. After Manasseh Cutler returned home from his visit in 1788, General Samuel Holden Parsons wrote to him on December 11 that “we have had an addition of about one hundred within two weeks.... Between forty and fifty houses are so far done as to receive families.”
By the end of the year, 1788, the settlement contained 132 men and 15 families, making a total of nearly 200. James Backus wrote to his parents that their stock consisted of “one hundred and fifty horses, sixty cows, and seven yoke of oxen.”
In August of 1787 Judge John Cleves Symmes, an influential man and member of Congress from Trenton, New Jersey, petitioned Congress for a grant of land between the two Miami Rivers at the mouth of the Little Miami River, which became known to history as “The Symmes purchase.” In November of 1788 Benjamin Stites and about 20 others settled Columbia and in late December of the same year Matthias Denman, Colonel Robert Patterson and Israel Ludlow with a party of 26 men established Losantiville about five miles west of Columbia in the Symmes tract and in the very center of present Cincinnati. These two communities became Cincinnati in 1790 at the request of St. Clair. North Bend was the third of the Symmes settlements and was settled in February, 1789.