“A light wind swept
over the corn, and all nature laughed in the sunshine.”
– Anne Bronte
Lynn Wittenburg, Portsmouth Times
Staff Correspondent, wrote in a 1931 article titled “Lucasville
Known as Corn-Fed Town: “Although its size doesn't indicate it,
Lucasville is a corn-fed settlement, where Jackson, Ohio, and
Vanceburg, Kentucky, were born of salt, Lucasville sprouted on corn.
And Lucasville's diet since has been corn.”
Food, next to water, is the most
important need to support human life. Human habitation in North
America expanded as settlers found land suitable not only for hunting
and gathering but also for cultivating crops. The fertile Scioto
River Valley was ideal for cultivation of corn. Long before the white
man settled in Ohio, corn – one of the Three Sisters along with
squash, and beans – was being grown as a dietary staple.
Native American Agriculture
Corn (maize) is actually a really tall
grass: All corn known to humankind today originated some 9,000 years
in Southern Mexico from a single-stalked, grassy plant called
teosinte, meaning “grain of the gods.” The indigenous people of
Mesoamerica probably bred the first corn from these wild grasses. The
first ears of maize were only a few inches long and had only eight
rows of kernels. Early farmers later crossed high-yielding plants to
make hybrids. By systematically collecting and cultivating those
plants best suited for human consumption, they encouraged the
formation of ears or cobs on early maize.
Cob length and size of early maize grew
over the next several thousand years which gradually increased the
yields of each crop. Eventually the productivity of maize cultivation
was great enough to make it possible and worthwhile for a family to
produce food for the bulk of their diet for an entire year from a
small area. Corn was found to be easily stored and preserved during
the cold winter months. Often the corn was dried to use later. Dried
corn was made into hominy by soaking corn in water until the kernels
split open. These would be drained and fried over a fire.
Natives would also ground corn into
corn meal. They would use mortars and pestles made from either rock
or wood. Corn was placed into the hollowed out mortar and then by
pounding the corn with the pestle, this would grind it up into a
powdery form. Corn meal could then be used for cornbread, corn syrup,
or corn pudding. Often corn meal was mixed with beans to make
succotash or to thicken other foods.
(http://indians.org/articles/corn.html)
Oral traditions give us insight into
the intimate relationship between people and corn. They believed corn
was the mother to all human creation. The summer corn harvest was so
important to the indigenous peoples of North America that many tribes
held religious ceremonies to pray for a successful crop. It was and
continues to be central in the arts, culture, health and lifestyle of
many American Indians from New Mexico to Massachusetts.
Of course, Native Americans introduced
maize (corn) to early settlers and taught them how to plant and
cultivate it using fish for fertilizer. The name "corn" may
have come from early European explorers, and the word originally
meant any crop grown by the local people.
Lucasville – Native Americans
The land that would become the town of
Lucasville had been home to people for thousands of years. As
stewards of nature, the earliest inhabitants had a deep spiritual
connection to the earth. As the source of all life, the land was
treated with great respect. Survival depended upon the people's
ability to learn the knowledge and wisdom of the natural laws.
Ohio was probably first settled by
Paleo-Indian people, hunter-gatherers who lived in the area as early
as 13,000 B.C. Among these were sophisticated successive cultures of
precolonial indigenous peoples such as the Adena, Hopewell and Fort
Ancient. A large proportion (perhaps the bulk) of their foods were
still obtained by gathering wild plants, fishing, and hunting, But
even early on, the Indians supplemented their diet with seasonally
wild vegetables and harvested plant foods.
Like the Adena before them, Hopewell
communities were participants in a cultivating ecosystem. But unlike
the Adena, at many Hopewell sites there seems to be evidence of a
dramatic increase in the cultivation of native plants (sunflower,
goosefoot, pigweed, knotweed, maygrass, and marsh elder for their
edible and nutritious seeds) as well as gourds and squash and at some
sites, introduced strains of maize.
Corn, as
mentioned before was first domesticated in Mexico, but it took
millennia to find its way north. It probably arrived in the Midwest
before 200 BC, but members of the Hopewell culture, already settled
agriculturists, chose to grow it only for ceremonial purposes. Not
until centuries later did people adopt it as a food crop.
According
to archeological research by William Woods of Illinois Southern
University …
“Becoming dependent on corn, we
now know, constituted a prehistoric Faustian bargain. On average,
corn growers got more food for their labor than they could from
earlier grains like goosefoot or knotweed, and corn stored better
too. But in any given year they also faced a greater risk that the
crop would fail altogether, leaving them to starve that winter.
“There was another less obvious
trade-off in nutrition. People living primarily on corn may not get
enough protein. (No one grew beans, a complementary protein, at
Cahokia, though wild beans existed and some neighboring peoples were
beginning to cultivate them. "In all our excavations," says
William Iseminger, "we only found half of one bean, and we're
not sure of that.") Toddlers weaned on corn mush suffered high
infant mortality. Those who did grow up wore down their teeth on the
fragments of grinding stone left in their cornmeal.
“When the Hopewell culture faded
and someone invented an improved stone hoe, people did turn to corn
as a major crop and daily staple. The stage was set for what we call
Mississippian culture.”
So later, two culture groups claimed
Ohio as their ancestral homeland – the Dhegihan Sioux (consisting
of the Osage, Omaha, Kaw, Ponka, and Kwapa nations from the modern
day states of Missouri, Arkansas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma) and
the Choctaw and Chickasaw Muskogean peoples. Many Siouan peoples
claim direct connection or descent from the Hopewell. They joined
forces with Algonquians who were also displaced—mainly the Illinois
Confederacy—to dislodge the natives on the west side of the
Mississippi, who were most likely connected to the Caddo peoples and
the Mississippian Culture.
(Louis F. Burns. A
History of the Osage People. 1989.)
For good reason, the Native Americans were unwilling to part with the
land of Ohio. The Great Spirit had given them the beautiful valley of
the Scioto for their home. It was, indeed, a natural paradise. The
History of the Lower Scioto Valley, Ohio (1884) gives this
historical account of the region:
“It was a migratory field for the
restless buffalo; the elk and the bear roamed its wooded hills; the
deer and wild turkey made it their home; the valleys and the upland
were filled with small game; fish sported in the cool and pellucid
waters of its rivers and creeks, and in shadowy nooks, near bubbling
springs and crystal fountains, the aborigines built their wigwams. It
was a paradise for the hunter, and the Indians liad roamed lord of
all ...
“In 1795 the valley of the Scioto,
with its wealth of forest and stream, with its high and rolling
upland, bold bluffs and nestling valleys, became the property of the
palefaces, and that which stood for centuries in its wild and rugged
grandeur was, ere long, to assume a prominent place in the future of
our State.
“The pioneers of Ohio, especially
those who settled in the valley of the Ohio and its tributary
streams, like the Scioto, Hocking and Muskingum, came generally from
the older States which were upon the border, like Pennsylvania,
Virginia and Kentucky, but not a few found their way from the
Atlantic States, and from those composing New England.”
Lucasville and the White Man
Even in a place with such abundance of
wildlife, European settlers continued to rely on agriculture as the
primary means of feeding their family as they moved into the Ohio
country during the mid-to-late 1700s. And, so it was that a white
pioneer, Hezekiah Merritt (born in 1765 in Washington County,
Pennsylvania and died in Pike County, Ohio, on January 1, 1859),
found his way to the land that would become Lucasville, Ohio. There,
in the rich Scioto River valley, he planted and raised three corn
crops in the summer of 1796. It was maize that helped sustain a new
group of immigrants to the land.
A little later people “came in pretty
thickly” according to accounts, and Merritt moved to become the
first settler of nearby Camp Creek Township. He made his living there
as a millwright as well as a farmer, and he built a grist-mill at the
head water of the Scioto River. The mill was described as “a crude
structure that answered the purpose.” It “gave advantage as the
settlers brought (You most likely guessed it already) ... their corn
to be ground.”
History records that John and Sarah
Beasley would purchase that 100 acres of land on the waters of Camp
Creek from Merritt on June 10, 1805. And, later in 1810, Hezekiah
willed to John Merritt, his son, everything including “land and
farming utensils - 8 head horses, 10 head cattle, and 100 head hogs.”
So, you know the corn in the bottom lands had everything to do with
the success of farming the new settlements in the valley.
Then came John Lucas and his family.
The rest is well-known history as a report in The Portsmouth Times
on April 16, 1887 attests ...
“Lucasville was laid out in June,
1819, by Captain John Lucas, and the record of the survey received
and recorded August 7, 1819. Captain Lucas was a brave man and a good
hotel keeper, and a brother of Governor Robert Lucas. He died in
1825. The Lucasville of today is a different affair from the
Lucasville of the days of the Lucases. It is now a breezy, cheery,
businesslike, whitewashed little city, full of modern houses, modern
people and modern ideas, and marching along in the the procession of
progress.”
That
article in the Times
in 1931 didn't miss a beat …
“Today
the town is in the heart of one of the richest corn belts in the
world. Seven-eighths of Valley Township is rich corn land while the
proportion of rough hill lands and wastelands is less than any
township in the county.”
The next time you are driving out of
Portsmouth on Rt. 23 open your eyes to the bottoms of the Scioto.
Soak in the natural beauty that remains an integral part of our daily
existence. Think about the industrious Americans – natives and
immigrants – those human being who plied the fields, who planted
the crops, who fed their families and livestock on the bounty
provided by the soil. Then, lastly, think about those humble grains
of corn, seeds that gave life to faithful stewards in this beautiful
valley of opportunity.
It is the Scioto bounty. It has been
for thousands of years. Even as it was recorded in April of 1887 ...
“Lucasville does not sit upon her
seven hills, like Rome – as a matter of fact she does not sit upon
a hill at all, but upon a broad and pleasant plateau, overlooking the
Scioto Valley and having at ther feet the 'finest country that the
sun ever shone upon,' and it must be conceded that during his long
and eventful career the sun has shed his rays upon some might fine
country. The Scioto River formerly washed her western border, but for
some unaccountable reason that highly unreliable stream gathered up
her skirts and moved haughtily over to the other side of the valley,
making an inland hamlet of our picturesque village. True, she has a
questionable reminder of her long lost river privileges in the shape
of a savory 'old bed,' tree-grown and miasmatic, the home of the
pollywog and the trysting place of the amorous mud-turtle.”
We don't own this land. Even though the
proprietors of the valley in 2018 may profit, not even they can claim
rightful title to the soil, the streams, and the hills. The land is a
very real part of our being. Even more than our environment, the land
is a significant part of our self. Therefore, we are the land. What
we plant in it sustains us.
“Humankind has not
woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we
do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together.
All
things connect.”
– Chief Seattle,
Duwamish (1780-1866)
