The corpse was lying in the cabin

Benjamin Blair came out from Defiance County, Ohio, by way of southern Michigan, some time around August of 1828.

He picked his land that autumn, a mile west of where Lima would be, and put up a small log cabin on it. In November or December he brought his wife Elizabeth and their four children out to live in it. The 1882 history calls that the first white settlement in the county, and says the township justly enjoys the distinction of having been its site.

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They were not quite alone.

North of them, on the far side of Crooked Creek, two families were already living in a cabin with one room.

Both families, though small, were occupying one small room, the only room of the dwelling. To render the situation more trying at the time the Blairs appeared, a small child of the Thurston family died, and its corpse was lying in the cabin when the Blairs first occupied their new home. This was, unquestionably, the first death in the township.

Nathan Fowler's family and Jason Thurston's, in one room, with a dead child in it, and a fourth family arriving down the road.

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Here is everything the record holds about that child.

It was small. It was of the Thurston family. It died.

No name. No age beyond small, and Ford's infant. No sex, no date, no cause, no burial, no grave, and no parent named. Thurston is the surname of a family, and neither book gives the child a mother or a father of its own.

It exists in this county's history for one purpose, and the sentence says so outright: to render the situation more trying at the time the Blairs appeared.

The first person known to have died in this county is a device in somebody else's arrival.

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The two books also disagree about what the death was first of.

The 1882 volume says the first death in the township, unquestionably. The 1920 volume says this:

evidently this infant was the first white child to die within the county

Ford has widened the ground from a township to a county and narrowed the category from a death to a white child's death, which is a bigger claim on the same evidence, and then hedged it with evidently. Both sentences rest on that one paragraph and neither book cites anything else.

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And there are four accounts of who arrived first, not two.

Battey's Lima chapter and Ford's fourth chapter tell the story above: Blair first, a mile west, the Thurstons and Fowlers already in place.

Ford's Lima chapter will not commit.

It is not fully known which really made the first act toward a settlement.

And Ford's chronology, in the same volume, tells it differently again. It gives the first settlement of the county as one-half mile west of Lima rather than a mile. It credits the cabin not to Blair but to Nathan Fowler, on the banks of Crooked Creek, near where a water tank stood in Ford's own day. And it files Jason Thurston, William Thrall and Jonathan Gardner under 1829 rather than 1828.

So Ford contradicts himself twice inside one volume, on who founded the county and on how far from Lima it happened, and neither he nor his index ever mentions it.

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Blair himself did four things this county recorded, and then he died.

He settled. He entered land in Section 13, and his son Francis entered next to it. He let a man sell whisky out of his cabin. And in May of 1832 the commissioners made him assessor for Lima Township at the same session that created the township.

The whisky is his daughter's testimony, given to the county history fifty years later. During part of 1829, she said, her father permitted Ica Rice to sell whisky to the Potawatomi in his cabin. The Lima chapter has that trade growing into an extensive barter over the two years after.

So the first white house in this county was also, for a while, its first bar.

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Then in 1832 he died of cholera, and this is the whole of what the record says about it.

In 1832, Mr. Blair died of cholera.

Seven words, and they are not in a biography of Benjamin Blair. There is no biography of Benjamin Blair. The 1882 county history carries four hundred and five of them and he is not among them.

That sentence sits inside the sketch of a man named Newton Enoe, who married Blair's daughter Elizabeth. Everything the record holds about Blair's family is there because a man married into it and paid to be written up.

And the cholera that killed the county's first settler is recorded nowhere else in either volume. No outbreak, no season, no other name, no count. The word appears five times in these books and every other one is somewhere else and somebody else.

He was here four years. He was the first white settler in this county, its first township assessor, and the first person in it to die of a disease no source records arriving or leaving. His death is a clause in his son-in-law's paragraph.

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There is a rival claim to being first, and it is not really about dates.

The Tamarack trading post in Johnson Township opened in 1832 or 1833, four or five years after Blair, so the sequence is not in doubt. What is in doubt is what kind of thing counts. Blair was a family in a cabin on land he had chosen. The Tamarack was a business, sent out by a firm at Fort Wayne.

The 1882 history gives the Tamarack claim a hearing and reports it as currently believed in the township. The 1920 history heads its account Another "First Settlement" Theory, and the quotation marks are Ford's.

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Neither book ever says what a settlement is.

The phrase first permanent settler appears twenty-four times across these volumes and is never once measured against a stated test. Clearspring's first permanent settler came in 1829, located in Elkhart County, and did not live here until 1831.

They plainly had a rule in their heads. Eden's chapter says Orvin Kent was at the Haw Patch in 1833 and bought land, was back in 1835, and did not settle permanently until 1847. Clearspring's says Schermerhorn was in the township and bought land in the northeast, but did not settle until 1839. Being present and owning ground is not settling. Neither book ever says what is.

The closest either comes to asking is Ford's one sentence about the first act toward a settlement, and that is a doubt about which of five men rather than about what the word means. He had already answered it three chapters earlier without hedging, and answered it a third way in his chronology.