The Bluffton news. [volume] (Bluffton, Ohio) 1875-current, 1955-04-21

completed in 1884 making outside
markets available and next year the
cranberries were selling at rs cents
a bushel. The new road ran through
Crawford County. By 1850 the price
had risen to $500 bushel and the
Crawford County farmers were doing
we'll.
After five more years the swamp
became so dry that cranberrIes no
longer grew there and the bottom OF
the business dropped out.
AS soon as the Columbus-Sandusky
road was opened berries began to be
hauled over it by the wagon load.
Much fur too was shipped and 70
wagons loaded with wheat were count
ed passing through Bucyrus In one
day. The wagons came back loaded
with merchandise and so the whole
region began to develop.
Samuel Norton was the first Craw-
ford County settler. He brought his
family there in 1919 and until then
no white family had been within many
miles. Shortly after Norton, James
Kilbourne arrived and in 1922 the two
men laid out Bucyrus with only the
two log cabins in it. In the mean
time the families had lived off hunt
ing, little gardening and the cram
berries = cooked in every kind of way
the backwoods wives could devise.
Much of the fare was hoecake
baked from home ground meal or
corn flour. No flour mill was nearer
than Fredericksburg, near Wooster
Wayne County, and at Lexington,
near Mansfield, Richland County,
and the man or boy who went to the
mill walked all the way over Indian
trails and led q horse loaded with
two or three sacks of wheat. The
Mortons and Kilbournes seldom went
to mill.
Grinding their own corn meal or
flour, both families lived much on
iohnny-cake spread with cranberry
Jam, cranberry preserves, cranberry
jelly or something else made from the
berries. Norton had a grinder made
by burning hole in log big enough
to hold half a bushel of grain and
then pounding it into meal with a
pestle. The meal was sifted through
three different sizes of home made
sieves = one for fine meal, which
made flour; another for coarse meal
out of which corn pone was baked,
and coarser meal to make mush or
porridge. Everybody became pretty
well fed up on cranberries.
! Norton went over to Marion County
and bought 40 sheep which he drove
back to the little Crawford County
town but they did not last long. Soon
all had been killed by wolves. There
was a small bounty for wolf scalps
but the walk to Columbus was toe
long to make wolf killing profitable
While the cranberry crops con-
tinued the whole community got into
the business of picking them. Some
devised homemade implements to
pick them and many worked night
and day, picking Is to 20 bushels in
"a hours. Hundreds of bushels grew
in the marsh but all were picked long
before the season was over. The
cranberry season began the latter
part of September and lasted all
winter and spring. Fewer were picked
in the winter because they were
frozen in the ice.
Other things than cranberries grew
in the big swamp - swarms of wild
bees, an abundance of bears and thou
sands of rattlesnakes. Thus it was
that while most of the settlers were
picking berries others were on guaro
to keep off the bears and watch out
for rattlesnakes.
Many of the Crawford County
fortunes began back in the cranberry
days and it was the hardship anc
privation then that laid the founda-
ton for the rich, productive farms
that cover the county now.
| Excessive sneed was the nrincinal