Lucasville, the Scioto River Valley ... and Corn

“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)