Who is Simon Henry?

Hi Everyone… This article was in The Spirit of Bainbridge this past weekend…. (11-10-08) Simon Henry was quite the man in Bainbridge back in the early days!!!

Download to read Simon Henry -Spirit of Bainbridge article PDF Scott Henry

This interesting account of Simon and Rhoda’s move to Bainbridge is from the Captain Henry of Geauga book by Frederick Henry

Nearly a quarter of the people of the town of Washington (Massachusetts) emigrated westward in the decade 1811-1820, and Simon Henry, anxious to provide for the settlement of his sons, procured from Simon Perkins of Warren, in exchange for the Massachusetts farm, a much larger tract in Bainbridge, Geauga County, Ohio.  To Ohio, therefore, with his wife and eight children (two of the older ones, Orrin and John, having been sent ahead the year before) her removed in the autumn of 1817, a year described in Villard’s John Brown (at page nine) as one not only of extreme scarcity of money “but of the greatest distress for want of provisions known during the Nineteenth Century.”

His terse diary of their forty-five days’ journey into the heart of the wilderness begins: “We started from home Sept. 18th on Thursday in the afternoon and staid at Wm. Noble’s”.  The next night, at New Lebanon, they put up at Pierce’s tavern, where the charge  “$1.57” seems well worth recording.  With a daily progress of about fifteen miles, their only long stops enroute were a three days’ visit at Smyrna with Rhoda’s brothers John and Elam Parsons, and four days at Madison, near their journey’s end, to await word from their sons at the new location before proceeding farther on the main road west or venturing from it into any doubtful byway.  Finally on November 1 the last entry read, “Saturday night home.”  From the Berkshire Hills to the Western Reserve they had come nearly six hundred miles, but their pilgrimage began and ended at “home.”  The advent of the Henrys is thus recounts in the Pioneer and General History of Geauga County (page 137).

November 10, 2008 Linda Simon Henry -Spirit of Bainbridge article PDF