Pioneer Days in Grand Prairie Township
06-01-2002
The 2002 edition of the Marion County Township Heritage Project focuses on Big Island, Salt Rock, and Grand Prairie Townships. An exhibition, "Harvesting the Prairie: Big Island, Salt Rock, and Grand Prairie Townships," will open at the MCHS Museum in June.
The following narrative was written in 1936 by Effie B. Robinson, descendant of early Grand Prairie Township settlers.
Pioneer days seem very near to me, for my childhood days were spent in the home of my grand-parents, who handed down to their grandchildren many stories and side-lights on life in the early days of the Republic. My great-grand parents, Samuel and Katherine Bretz, in company with two children (one of whom was my grandfather, Andrew Bretz), two brothers of great-grandfather's, and the parents (John and Barbara Bibler) of great grandmother, came from Fairfield County in 1828, expecting to locate in Seneca County. Stopping with relatives in [present-day] Wyandot County, great-great grandfather Bibler was much impressed with the country in Marion County, especially Grand Prairie Township and he said, "This is where we will stay - here on the plains."
The other two Bretz brothers went on to Seneca County, where they located on poor land, and had forests of beech wood to clear, while grandfather Samuel Bretz in Grand Prairie Township had mostly underbrush to clear, and found the soil very fertile. As a child I felt the name Brush Ridge was far from high-sounding - in fact quite homespun. "Grandpa," I said, "why did they call this place Brush Ridge?" "If you had seen it when I first did, you wouldn't ask - it was covered with thick underbrush - we children had a little path through it to school. Hence the name Brush; the name Ridge came from the fact that it is located on the water shed - the water in our barnyard flowing both to the Scioto and the Great Lakes."
. . . One cold rainy evening, a young Indian stood outside my great-grand-parents' house. Some one finally went out and asked him to come in. They fed him and he dried himself by the open fire; when bedtime came he was offered a bed, but refused, and wrapped himself in his blanket and lay on the floor with his head to the fire. In the morning when the family got up he was gone.
One of the sad things about pioneer life was that when a family migrated, friends and relatives who stayed behind were often never seen again; even if the distance was not great, the visits were very rare. When my grandfather was a little boy, his father went back to Fairfield County to see his parents and took him along. His grandmother was overjoyed to see him, and hugged him, and kissed him, and laughed and then cried, and said "Oh, little Andrew, little Andrew." This same grandmother, when grandfather Samuel (her son) left the Lutheran Church and joined the Baptist Church, walked the floor and wrung her hands.
We have heard of the hardihood of the pioneers, but my grandfather said that a great many children died; those who survived were the very strongest, and they developed great endurance.
Life was not soft for these people, and sometimes the religious mind looked on this world as a wilderness through which we travel to a better country. On the death of a lovely young grand-daughter, Grandmother Barbara Bibler praised God that a soul had gone to rest.
But Grandmother Catherine Bretz, although a devout Christian, was not so "other-worldly." In her old age she said, "My husband has gone, and I know death and perhaps suffering are not far away, and I ask myself, "If I could have my choice whether to go now or stay a little longer, I always think I would like to stay a little longer."
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