Postmarked from the past: Book contains letters from North Baltimore settlers

NORTH BALTIMORE — A new book reveals how early settlers made their mark on North Baltimore and Henry Township in Wood County. "North Baltimore and Henry Township Pioneer Days" is a series of first-person accounts originally published in the North Baltimore Weekly Beacon between 1889 and 1923. A few were published in the NBXpress and the North Baltimore News. However, the entire series of 37 letters authored by 26 pioneers had not been readily available to the general public for over 100 years, said Tom Boltz. "I didn't want them to be lost," he said. Boltz, a former North Baltimore resident, said he came across the letters while doing research for another project. Although he now lives in Virginia, Boltz is still a member of the North Baltimore Area Historical Society and Wood County chapter of the Ohio Genealogy Society. "The North Baltimore Beacon is really a great source of information, and the founder, editor, publisher of the Beacon for most of its existence was George Wilkinson," said Boltz. "He had a real sense of history and preserving local history." Boltz said that Wilkinson encouraged the old pioneers, as he referred to them, to write letters to the Beacon about what life was like in settling Henry Township and the founding of North Baltimore as well as the Van Buren area in northern Hancock County. He then published them. "He realized that the last of the pioneer residents of the township were passing away and he wanted to preserve their memories of the early days," said Boltz. The letters were published in a series of articles titled "Interesting Pioneer Sketches." While Boltz came up with the idea, he said the book is a joint effort of the North Baltimore Area Historical Society and the Wood County chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society. "As I was researching, I kept running across these letters and it occurred to me they're in the Beacon, they're on microfilm, but they really need to be consolidated," he said. "Most people are not going to be doing any extensive research in the Beacon unless they're a historian or something like that, and there's a lot of good information here." He said some were written by the pioneers themselves. Others were dictated to Beacon reporters. Boltz noted that a lot of the authors still have relatives in the area. Mary (Howard) Coleman — who is a relative of Boltz — talked about daily life of the early settlers in the Black Swamp and the threat posed by wolves and other large predators. She also related a story about her younger brother who was so anxious to get into the family's new cabin he tried to creep in a crack and got his head stuck. "Father then played the saw faster than I ever saw him afterwards to get his head out," she wrote. Boltz said he also came across words in the letters that aren't familiar today. In the same letter, Mrs. Coleman referred to mosquitos and "gallinipers." "I had to look that up," he said, explaining that it refers to a species of large mosquito indigenous to the United States east of Continental Divide. "She said it was 'an insect twice as large as the mosquito and with the bite like a bee sting.'" In another letter, Henry C. D'Rhodes wrote about Mrs. Coleman's father, John Howard, who had taken his team of oxen north to work on the canal near Maumee. On his way home, he got as far as Ross tavern, a few miles north of Bowling Green, where he decided to stop for the night. "His oxen got loose and he had to track them all the way down through the forest over a couple of days," Boltz said. "And he had to carry the ox yoke on one shoulder and a bag of cornmeal on the other shoulder. So you're going roughly from Perrysburg down through Grand Rapids all the way down to west of Van Buren. He was a strong man." Boltz said he had heard this story from family members when he was young. "Well here were other people writing about it. It was interesting that they were verifying those family stories," he said. Letters also detailed the first church in the area, schools, spelling bees and landmarks that have vanished over the years. Boltz said the project took several years to complete, and the book includes photographs of some of the letter writers. "Most of the people that are writing these were young children at the time they're writing, so these are being written in say 1910 about stories from the 1830s and '40s, so a lot of memories. They also jump around," said Boltz. "But you really do get a good feel for what was life like in Hancock County and Wood County in that era." The book sells for $15 and is available at the North Baltimore Area Historical Society, the North Baltimore Public Library and the Wood County Genealogy Society in Bowling Green. Wolf: 419-427-8419