By Emily Rinaman, Technical Services Manager
If you or your children grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, a favorite memory many of us can still recall is playing the computer game, The Oregon Trail. I remember pining for bad weather leading to recess indoors so I could try (and fail) over and over to virtually arrive in Oregon. Try as I might, it seemed I always ended up with a fatal snake bite. This game, created during the big bang era of video games, was intended to teach middle-aged children the harsh realities of American pioneers traveling west in the mid-1800s.
While this may be the most popular image many of us have for a pioneer, the first settlers in Ohio were pioneers in their own right. They may have fought tamer snakes and other wild animals, smaller mountainous regions than the Rockies, and The Great Black Swamp rather than the desert climate of the West, but they trialed just the same and in very similar wagons to what was used just a couple decades later for travel into the most western states. In the early 1800s, before the Erie Canal opened making travel to Ohio much easier, Ohio was the “wild west”. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1880s that Ohio and its neighbors started to be referred to as the Midwest.
In 1820, this entire area was deemed “Congress Lands” the early pioneers set out by the hundreds. These pioneers moving into Ohio had most recently traveled through the eastern states of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia. In fact, the Conestoga wagon which we all conjure up in our minds when the Oregon Trail is mentioned was manufactured in the Conestoga River region of Pennsylvania (Lancaster County) by Mennonite German-Americans.
“Photograph Boy with Horse and Wagon,” has been digitized onto the Seneca County Digital Library. It’s description reads, “A sepia toned photograph showing a young boy sitting in a wagon with a horse and a dog. The writing on the back reads Columbus, Ohio.”
While Tiffin and its southern parts were somewhat passable, the farther north in the county you got, the worse the travel was by wagon. Before the swamp was drained, wagons would simply sink. Some pioneers created makeshift trails as they went, using axes to chop down narrow pathways for their wagons. Later, they used the National Road from Cumberland, MD to Columbus. If Seneca County was their final destination, they branched off in Zanesville to head north.
In most cases, they used already existing trails created by the inhabiting Native Americans before they were involuntarily forced to pre-determined areas out west (Oklahoma and others). These trails included the Black Swamp Trail, Fort Miami Trail, Great Trail, Huron Trail, Maumee Trail, Owl River Trail, Pickawillany Trails, Sandusky Plains Trail, Tennessee River/Great Lakes Trail, and Hull’s Trace, which later became SR 53.
Several former Seneca County residents who traveled here as children, later recalled their experiences in various publications digitized in the Seneca County Digital Library. Martha Gibson, who wrote Reminiscences of Early Days in Tiffin in 1896, described how her family used a Pennsylvania wagon for their arduous journey to her sister’s house in Tiffin. The family had to be very selective in what pieces of furniture to take with them, selling the rest (this was commonly how settlers paid for their new tracts of land in Ohio). Her older siblings and mother joined the other villages who walked alongside the wagons and mule teams pulling them. “As I was just between seven and eight years of age, I was privileged to ride in the front part of the wagon a great part of the way,” she boasts. It took the party two weeks to travel from their place of origin.
Another girl just slightly older than Gibson, Lydia (Raymond) Germond, explains in Omar: A Community of Memories, that her family of ten set out from New York in November 1822, arriving in Seneca County five weeks later. Her youngest sibling was only five weeks old and her mother carried him on a pillow while she drove the wagon. The most prized possessions they carried in their wagon were a loom, spinning wheel, sack of flour for making bread, and a churn for cow’s milk, which got naturally churned into butter with the “jolt of the wagon.”
The L. Diehl Wagon and Carriage Manufacturing is one of the Tiffin buildings featured in Art Work of Sandusky and Seneca Counties, which has been digitized on the Seneca County Digital Library.
Conestoga wagons, among others, were also used to ship cargo between newly developed pioneer communities. With canvas covers to protect the cargo from adverse weather and curved wooden floors made of oak and poplar wood to nestle the cargo from bumpy terrain, and iron casts to hold all the parts together, these wagons could hold up to five tons of supplies.
Conestoga wagons were used mainly until the 1850s when railroads started to take over.
After the Civil War, wagons were more often used to travel much shorter distances, as wagon makers had made a name for themselves in so many rural communities. By the 1870s Tiffin had at least ten wagon makers, including (but certainly not limited to) Ferdinand Bauer and the L. Diehl Wagon and Carriage Manufacturing pictured here, along with two wagon materials suppliers.
The largest wagon manufacturer was Tiffin Wagon Works (formerly Tiffin Agricultural Works), which had been founded in 1858. This reflected a wider golden era of wagon-making through the 1880s. It was a profitable business through the early 20th century. Omar Prick, a sales manager at Tiffin Wagon Works, was able to afford to build a new house at 37 Clay Street (across from the Seneca County Museum).
The surname “Wagner,” a popular surname in Ohio and the Midwest, not only represents wagon makers, but also many individuals who drove services wagons for a living. The surname “Cartwright” also pertains to wagon-making. In Tiffin, the local ice man, George Smith, used a two-horse ice wagon to make his deliveries. A line crew for the first electric company in Tiffin also used a horsedrawn wagon to make their rounds as late as 1917.
Works cited:
Barnes, Myron. Between the Eighties, Tiffin, Ohio 1880-1980. Seneca County Digital Library. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p15005coll27/id/65422
Bellrigle & Talcot. Tiffin City Directory 1873-74. Seneca County Digital Library. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p15005coll27/id/29413
Case Western Reserve University. “Wagon and Carriage Industry.” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. https://case.edu/ech/articles/w/wagon-and-carriage-industry
Gibson, Martha M. Reminiscenes of Early Days of Tiffin. 1896. Seneca County Digital Library. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p15005coll27/id/12997
Gundlach, George. Ramblin Comments on Tiffin 1891-1926. Seneca County Digital Library. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p15005coll27/id/22212
History of Seneca County from the Close of the Revolutionary War to July 1880. Seneca County Digital Library. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p15005coll27/id/17928
History Channel. “Conestoga Wagon.” Aug. 21, 2018. https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/conestoga-wagon
“Historic Trails, Roads and Migration Routes.” July 1, 2013. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~tqpeiffer/Documents/Ancestral%20Migration%20Archives/Migration%20Webpage%20Folder/Routes%20to%20North%20Central%20Lakes%20Plains.htm#_List_of_routes
Lepard, Larry A. Omar: A Community of Memories. Seneca County Digital Library. 1992. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p15005coll27/id/41429
National Museum of American History. Covered Wagons and the American Frontier. Oct. 23, 2012. https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2012/10/conestoga-wagons-and-the-american-frontier.html
R.C. Bellrigle & Co. Tiffin Fremont and Fostoria City Directory 1874-5. Seneca County Digital Library. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p15005coll27/id/27790
Scipio-Republic Historical Society. History of Republic Ohio. Seneca County Digital Library. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p15005coll27/id/33668
Tiffin Street Cars and Public Utilities. Seneca County Digital Library. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p15005coll27/id/22390
Tiffin Historic Trust. Pamphlet-Sidewalks Streets and Alleys-Historic Fort Ball. Seneca County Digital Library. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p15005coll27/id/51855
Third Annual Heritage Festival 1817-1981. Seneca County Digital Library. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p15005coll27/id/27513