A Dusty Tires Short Story

By Dusty Tires

The man, who wore heavy leather boots and coat, and breeches made of heavy woolen cloth, stepped down from the wagon he had driven on the rough-hewn road. The roadway was heavily studded with stumps but there was a clearing in the forested country.

Looking around in all directions, he observed that the land was reasonably level, a small stream flowed nearby and there was plenty of material for building.

He looked at a map he held and then at a stump into which was carved the letter “B” and the number “4.” This, he determined, marked the correct parcel where he would build a log cabin and farm.

“Louise, we’re here,” he said, walking back to the covered wagon that held his pregnant wife. “This is where we will make our home and start our family.”

The land was part of a parcel offered by a man named Jonathan Zane advertising land for sale.

The man, named David Mitchell, rummaged in the wagon until he found another sheet of paper. This one promised his dreams would come true this spring of 1804.

All he had to do, the paper said, was to find his selected parcel, go to the land office in the nearby town of Zanesville and have it surveyed and made legal.

At least that’s what he understood what would happen – he had already paid $20 in silver coin as a down payment. The advertising broadsheet he held in his hand was illustrated at the top with a woodcut showing a farmer plowing his field in front of a log cabin. The sheet read,

THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW!!!!!

Able-Bodied Men Who do not Fear Hard Work and Seek Fresh Air are Sought to Choose their Land Plots and Help Build the New, Great State of Ohio.

Zanesville, Ohio, and the Surrounding Area has Thousands of the Most Fertile Acres in the Entire State with which to Build the Home and Farm of Your Dreams.

Village and Country Plots Available!!!

Rolling, Well-watered Hills and Valleys with Rich Soil are Just a Wagon Ride Away on Zane’s Trace.

ACT NOW AND YOU WILL NOT REGRET YOUR DECISION!

HESITATE AND OTHERS WILL REAP THE HARVEST!!

Jon. Zane, Esq., land agt. For the Hon. COL. EBENEZER ZANE

David and Louise Mitchell, who had spent the past two months traveling from Philadelphia, had listened to a land agent in Wheeling, Virginia, tout the riches of the lands that were available in the new state.

A few days later they had decided to make a down payment and start their newly wedded life in Ohio rather than in Virginia or Pennsylvania.

“These land deals are a bargain compared to land in Virginia,” David told his wife. “We need to get in on the ground floor of this bonanza.”

“What’s a bonanza?” she had asked.

“It’s what we call a good deal,” he had responded with a finger pointed to the broadsheet.

Since getting married and leaving their families’ homes near Philadelphia over the past few months, they had traveled up and down steep hills, and across numerous creeks and streams. They had seen black bears, wolves and mountain lions but fortunately no hostile Indians on the trip. Now they had finally come to the last phase of their trek westward.

The Treaty of Greenville in 1795 had ended 40 years of savage warfare between American settlers and various Indigenous tribes, who gave up about two-thirds of what became the State of Ohio. Remaining tribes were required to live north of the Greenville Line.

Only those Indians who had chosen to live as the white man resided below that border, and there were fewer and fewer of them.

After a ferry ride across the Ohio River, the Mitchells had started their Ohio journey on Zane’s Trace, a steep, rutted road that was about 20 feet wide. It had been built in 1796-97 by Col. Ebenezer Zane and improved and widened in 1800 to allow use by more settlers and farmers. Before 1796, Zane’s Trace had been a woodland path used by Native Americans and wildlife.

His parcel was just off the well-traveled Zane’s Trace, a “beaten track” that went from Wheeling to Maysville, Kentucky. Col. Ebenezer Zane, who had built the road, had also lent his name to Zanesville, a thriving town at the confluence of the Licking and Muskingum rivers.

The wagon and their two cows had been ferried across Wills Creek and the Muskingum River in the arduous journey from Wheeling over the past three weeks.

In their travels along Zane’s Trace, they had seen rough-hewn settlements, mills, taverns, and farms springing up all along the road.

The Mitchells settled on their parcel of land near a village called Moxahala, a few miles southwest of Zanesville just off the Trace. After having their land claim surveyed and registered, the Mitchells began the real work of developing their new home.

David was surprised when, on that first morning he began work on his cabin, three men and two teenage boys came by with saws, axes and adzes and offered their help.

“It’s what we do for new folks around here,” one of them said. “We help each other out.”

Their wives, sisters and daughters came as well with fried chicken, roast venison, cornbread, apple pies and cider. With all that help, land was cleared, and a one-room cabin was built and supplied in a week’s time. Stumps were burned, ground was broken, firewood was split and stacked, and Mitchell was even able to plant his first season’s plot of corn and beans.

The cabin had a dirt floor, a rough-hewn door, no windows (they would be added later when they could afford glass) and a stone fireplace on one end that provided heat and a means to cook meals.

Five months later, a baby boy joined the family. There was a new window in the cabin, and the structure was partially floored with rough wooden planks.

A year later, a second baby boy joined the family. By this time, Mitchell had added a bedroom onto the cabin for himself and his wife and had covered all the dirt floors with wood planks.

“The boys can sleep in the loft when they get bigger,” David advised his wife.

The years passed, one more boy and two girls were added to the family, and the cabin settled into a busy existence. A barn was built along with a chicken coop and many feet of split-rail fence. Another extension was built onto the back of the cabin, providing space for a separate kitchen and dining area.

Then came a war, with threats from Indians who had been roused against American settlers one more time by the British. Mitchell joined the local militia, and the family once felt compelled to travel to Zanesville for protection, but their property was never actually threatened or damaged by the war.

During the war, they had heard of a powerful Shawnee chieftain named Tecumseh who was not only a fierce warrior but a sage leader. Tecumseh was trying to gather many tribes together against the encroachment of white settlers. When the Mitchell family learned he had been killed in battle in Canada, it was a huge relief.

The war ended, peace returned, and with it came years of increased prosperity and more people moving into the area. In time, a canal was built a few miles away that included a port in Zanesville. Mitchell and his two older sons, David Jr. and Martin, regularly made trips to Zanesville to take crops and produce to trade for foodstuffs and supplies that were floated in from New York and other eastern markets.

In those years, Mitchell was steadily expanding the cabin, adding a second and then a third bedroom for his family of three sons and two daughters. His farm was growing as well, with numerous cattle, horses, chickens, pigs and other livestock, and acres of cleared land upon which grew corn, beans, squash and onions. Trees were pushed back further each year.

The year his eldest son David Jr. turned 23, David Sr. died of pneumonia, and David Jr. took over the farm. The second-oldest son, Martin, 22, purchased land nearby and built his own cabin, taking his wife from a family who lived nearby. David Jr. built even more onto the original cabin and covered all the logs inside and out with wood plank siding.

By the time David Jr. was an old man of 58 with children and grandchildren of his own, a new war was being fought – a civil war that was devastating the entire country. In fact, David Jr.’s two sons and his oldest grandson were fighting in that war.

When none of them returned from the war alive, the family succumbed to deep despair. David Jr. died within weeks after he got the news, and his wife passed away soon after that. His remaining daughter and her family lived elsewhere, and none of the other extended family members were interested in the old cabin, which represented only sadness and loss to them now.

The property was sold to a bank, and the old homestead fell into disrepair. The bank separated the original tract into smaller lots, and gradually the lots were purchased, all but the one with the house.

About 80 years after the log cabin was originally built, the acre and a half upon which the house stood was finally purchased by an investor who remodeled the building into a boarding house. The village of Moxahala surrounded the property, and Zane’s Trace was a sturdy, hard-packed dirt road that connected the town to Zanesville.

By the turn of the 20th century, the property was abandoned again, and within a few years a local resident purchased it and converted the house into a country store with an apartment in the rear for the owner and his family. A few years later, Standard Oil gasoline pumps were added in the front.

The store became a familiar place in the community during times when there was a war, then a depression and another war. It was a solid, comforting business where people gathered for not only soda pop and candy, but for the latest news and gossip.

By the 1960s, the old gas pumps were abandoned. By the 1970s, the generation that ran the store passed away. Their children ran it for a while, but it couldn’t compete with newer and better-stocked stores in larger towns nearby. People drove past it in their cars while ivy and weeds grew around it. Finally, in the 1980s, the store closed and the rusty signs advertising soda pop and chewing tobacco were taken down.

The old cabin, concealed by clapboards and cycles of use and despair, settled into a long period of slow decay. The family continued to own the property, but nothing was done with it, and no buyers were interested. No one knew what to do with the old building. Before long it was just forgotten.

One day a code inspector for the village parked his pickup truck in front of the old building with its broken windows and dirty whitewashed wooden plank walls. Upon his inspection, he noticed that several of the planks had fallen off. He was surprised to see the logs underneath. He contacted a building inspector with the county.

“I think we may have an historic log cabin in our village. Would you like to come and check it out?” he asked. The two of them confirmed that the structure was indeed a log cabin, probably quite an old one.

The village was in the process of filing papers to have the old building demolished to improve a sewer line. The two inspectors and others did much research and attended many meetings to convince the village council to stop the planned demolition.

But the structure clearly stood in the way of progress, and something needed to be done with it. It had to be moved.

A group of volunteers, community leaders and business people agreed that the old structure was valuable. Funds were gathered to carefully remove the less historic sections of the building, leaving the original cabin the only remaining structure.

Within a few months, the cabin was moved to a village park and renovations began. Found in one of the walls was a decayed piece of paper that had mostly fallen apart. Only one line of text printed on the old paper was legible.

The spring day in 2004 that renovations were completed to the cabin was a monumental one for the community. A newspaper reporter and even a television news crew reported on the event.

The cabin finally rested in its rustic glory, looking very much like it had appeared some 200 years ago. But now it was located in a grassy, tree-shaded village park with an American flag billowing above and with daffodils and tulips planted all around.

Visitors saw that on one of the interior logs had been carved the date “1804” and the initials “DM.” They also saw old, rusty advertising signs and an antique cash register that had been saved from the cabin’s country store days.

Displayed in a glass case on a table inside the cabin was the preserved piece of fragile paper renovation workers had found. It had an inscription in frilly, old-fashioned lettering that read, “THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW!!!!”

Note: This story is a work of fiction, but Zane’s Trace did exist and still does as U.S. 40 from Wheeling to Zanesville, and U.S. 22 from Zanesville to Maysville. For more information about Zane’s Trace, see “Back In Time — Zane’s Trace,” by Rickie Longfellow, from the Federal Highway Administration website.

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