Another year elapsed, and Colonel Stephen Landray of Oxen Hill, Westmoreland County, Virginia, surveyor and soldier, with horses, wagons and a few slaves, following the Indian trail, found his way into the country. He wintered with the Jersey axe-maker, after sending his wagons back to Baltimore, loaded with ginseng for the Chinese trade.
The fourth settler was a lone Yankee, Jacob Benson, who came down the trail from the lakes. With chain and compass he layout the town, with its large public green, its Main Street, its North Street, and South Street, and its Front and Water Streets, together with one hundred and sixty lots in Section number five, Township eight, Range five, United States Military District. Then, with his town plot in his pocket, he made his way on foot to the nearest land office, eighty-five miles distant, and before a Justice of the Peace, acknowledged this important instrument; whereupon Andrew Ballard, feeling that he had been crowded out of the country, got together his half-breed family and moved over into Indiana, where there was nothing but echoes to answer the crack of his rifle.
The country round about Benson was soon parcelled out in what were known as tomahawk rights. The pioneer cut his name with hatchet or hunting knife on some convenient tree, and thus marked his claim. Jacob Benson built his cabin of hewn logs on the south side of the public square and opened a store, selling guns, ammunition, cheap trinkets, and poor whisky to passing whites and Indians, at a fabulous profit to himself.
But the stage road had been a great highway long before Jacob Benson's day—a highway when the eighteenth century was younger, and Jacob Benson not at all. From time immemorial the Indians had used it in their passings to and fro between the Great Lakes on the north, and the Ohio River on the south. They were using it when the first white man set his foot upon the Western World. They were following its windings beneath the broad arches of the forest by summer and winter; when the sunlight lay in golden patches on the mossy mould of its surface; when snow and frost clung thick to bough and bush, and the sunlight glistened white and blinding among its pale shadows; and even further back than this, the trail had been there, a means of human intercourse between the North and the South. Strange earth-works and mounds rudely outlined its course, showing plainly that it had been known to the Indians predecessors. But the Mound Builder had vanished, and tall trees thrived at amplest girth on the mounds of his building. He had gone his way upon the trail, had stepped from it as silently as the sunlight faded over its length at evening to become as intangible as a myth; and the Indian had gone his way upon it too, leaving not even the print of his moccasin among the dead leaves rotting beneath the old trees.
Following the Mound Builders and the Indians, came the superior race to occupy the soil. Their first need was a road, so they felled a few trees at the trail-side, or blew out a few stumps with gunpowder, and the state established it as a post route between the lake ports and river points. Cabins sprang up along it and were occupied by the pioneers who made their living partly from their land; partly by hunting or in trading with the Indians.
As emigration increased, inns and taverns dotted the road; for it was destined to know the passing of those, who, impelled by the earth hunger, were pushing west, always west; on foot, on horseback, by wagon and by stage, to found states in the wilderness beyond. The blacksmith, gun-maker, wheelwright, cooper, and cobbler, plied their trades beside it; there was the busy hum of their ceaseless primitive industry.
It soon became a place of wonderful fascination and romance; with its own abundant life, its traders, teamsters, and drovers; its home-seekers, hunters, Indian fighters, and adventurers of every conceivable description. Up it went the first rumour of war in 1812, and back down it swept the first news of Hull's defeat. It saw the passing of General Winchester's troops north to the Lake in the dead of winter; many of them barefoot and all in tattered buckskin or ragged homespun, with their long, brown rifles held in their frosted fingers; and later it echoed to the news of Harrison's victory on the Thames, when bonfires blazed at every cross-road station, and live trees were split with gunpowder.
And now the road had seen half a century of use. It was heavy with dust in summer from the almost continual trampling of the herds of horses and cattle, or droves of white, bleating sheep; and axle-deep with mud in spring and fall between frost and thaw; or rutted deep in winter where the wheels of the lumbering coaches and slow-moving freight wagons had cut.
In Jacob Benson's day, the fine old taste for classic learning still survived; men having the time as well as the inclination for such things; and many a land owner in plotting his town site, gave it some name culled from Greek or Roman history. The Athens, Romes, Homers, and Spartas, dotted the map; but old Jacob Benson, with the egotism of rude and satisfied ignorance, when he lay out his town, and dug or burnt a few stumps from the centre of what he hoped would some day be a street, named it after himself; and so it has stood to this very day, growing steadily and with no apparent haste, but growing always.
In the course of time the cabins, built by the early settlers, of unbarked logs with outside chimneys of mud and sticks, clapboard roofs, and puncheon floors, were replaced by more pretentious dwellings of hewn logs, with shingled roof, having sawed lumber for doors, window sash, and floors. These survived as stables, loom-houses, and shops of various sorts; for they in their turn gave way to substantial and often spacious homes of frame and brick. Indeed, as early as 1815, the town boasted a brick court-house which men came from afar to see. In their reckless pride the townspeople declared that it was one of the finest public buildings in the state.