Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

In this country inherited fortunes, or ancestral honors, have little effect on a man's reputation; but inherited disposition and early surroundings have much effect on his character.

My father's ancestors were from New England. His father, Phineas Butler, came from Saybrook, Connecticut, where the Congregational Churches framed the Saybrook platform. His mother's people, the Pardees, came from Norfork, Connecticut. The Pardees were said to have been descendants of the French Huguenots. Ebenezer Pardee emigrated to Marcellus, now known as Skaneateles, Onondaga Co., New York. There he died in 1811, leaving his wife Ann Pardee, (known for many years as grandmother Pardee) a widow, with nine sons and two daughters. The eldest daughter, Sarah Pardee, was there married in 1813, to Phineas Butler; and there my father, who was the second of seven children, was born, March 9, 1816.

In the autumn of 1818, Phineas Butler, of whom I shall hereafter speak as grandfather Butler, went to Wadsworth, Medina Co., Ohio. There a settlement had been begun three years before in the heavy timber, and there were only a few small clearings here and there in the woods.

My grandmother came on with her brother the following spring. She had three small children, but they made the journey in a sled, in bad weather, cutting their own roads, and camping in the woods at night. Grandmother Pardee came on later. She was a woman of great energy, and brought up her sons so well that they all became leading men in the communities in which they lived. Grandmother Butler was also a capable, fearless woman, and so calm and firm that it was said no vexation was ever known to ruffle her temper.

Their cabins were built of logs, with hewed puncheon floors and doors; and on the roof, in the place of nailed shingles, were split shakes, fastened on with poles and wooden pins. But grandfather had brought a few nails (made by a blacksmith) from New York, and used them in his house. When a neighbor died they hewed out puncheons to make a coffin, and finding only eighteen nails in the neighborhood, grandfather, by torchlight, pulled fourteen more out of his house to finish the coffin.

Their lives were full of hardship and privation. Grandfather was a famous hunter, and his well aimed rifle sometimes furnished game that kept the neighborhood from starvation. He was dependent on bartering furs at some distant trading post, for his supplies of salt, needles, ammunition and other necessary articles that could not be made at home.

Often, after a hard day's work, he hunted half of the night to obtain coonskins and other furs. Father said that one night grandfather and Orin Loomis were out hunting coons with the dogs, having taken their axes to chop down coon trees, but no guns, when they found a bear, on a small island, in the middle of a swamp. But I find his bear story so well told in the "Wadsworth Memorial" that I will quote from that:

"In the fall of 1823, as Butler and Loomis were returning after midnight from one of their hunts, and had arrived within a mile or two of home it was noticed that the dogs were missing....