Pioneering Women - Part 1

For my granddaughters

This is the story of Hannah Butler, your 7th great-grandmother, who is an ancestor on your Stark line.
 
Hannah was born on August 18, 1772 in Salisbury, Litchfield, Connecticut just before the start of the Revolutionary War. The Butler family had come from England around 1633. Hannah's father was Thomas Butler and her mother was Jane White. The following was written by Ryan Radleigh in Wadleigh-Brown-Plymale-Bixby Genealogy:
 

from town website

Hannah spent her earliest years in Salisbury, Connecticut. In about 1776-1778, Hannah and her family apparently moved to Massachusetts where they probably lived in the remote town of Adams. In 1785, the family moved permanently to Hinesburg, Vermont. It was there, in about 1786-1787 (when she was only 14 or 15) that Hannah was married to a young man named Zalmon Wheeler. [This would be your 7th great-granfather]

Soon after the marriage...the couple moved to Fairfield, Franklin County, Vermont, where their children were born. Zalmon Wheeler died in 1799, leaving Hannah a 27-year old widow with six minor children.

She remarried in about 1802 to a widower named Peter Thurston from the nearby town of Fletcher, Vermont.

At the time of their marriage, Peter had at least 3 children.  Hannah and Peter had 8 more children in the next few years. 

 

Hannah would have been a young child during the Revolutionary War. By the time her youngest child was born in 1813, the country was involved in another war with England, the War of 1812. The effects of this war would have been felt in the area of Vermont where Hannah and her family lived since major battles were fought in the Lake Champlain and Lake Erie area. It was during this turbulent time that Hannah, her husband Peter and most of her children moved to Licking County, Ohio, a trip of over 900 miles. One writer has described this trip as follows:

They fitted up long wagons, covered them with a coarse cloth manufactured by themselves, and attached two horses to each; supplied them with bedding, so they could be used for camping in nights, and with cooking utensils for baking bread and cooking game and fish, which they found in abundance on the way. These operations, together with fording streams, encounters with copperhead and rattle snakes, which were numerous, rendered the journey lively and often exciting. There were but few settlers on the route, and no hotels, making it necessary to camp out most every night during the two months it required for the journey. When they arrived at Buffalo, N.Y., the place had been burnt by the British and all the people fled.

When they arrived in Ohio they would have found few people living there. They settled in Licking County which is in central Ohio east of Columbus. The first settlers had arrived in 1800 and told stories of forests and swamps and snakes - lots of snakes. Land was cleared and churches organized. Most people were farmers.

In 1820 the family was in Newark township. Life would have gotten easier by then with towns being formed, churches built and neighbors moving in.  Peter died in 1827 and Hannah was again a widow...her youngest child was 13 years old.  She probably stayed near Licking County for the rest of her life living with different children.  The following description of Hannah comes from The Thurston Genealogies, 1892, by M. T. Runnels:

Mrs. Thurston was a woman of great energy, endurance, bright intellect, and social culture, having remarkably uniform good health, a sound and strong physical body, which, together with similar qualities in her husband, produced a wonderfully healthy, vigorous and hardy family of children. She would weave fourteen yards of cloth a day after she was sixty years of age. She joined the Methodist church in Ohio.

 Hannah would experience one more war before her death.  She would have been 88 years old when Abraham Lincoln was elected president and 93 years old when the war ended.  She died on May 23, 1866 in Knox County, Ohio at the home of her son Johnson.  She is buried in the family cemetery near Centerburg, Ohio.

You can read more about the history of Licking County in:

The history of Granville, Licking County, Ohio - see especially chapter 26 (page 226) on pioneer life. Also the source of images of houses shown above.

...History of Licking County, O.