Excerpt from Sketches of South Charleston, Ohio: Reminiscences of Early Scenes, Anecdotes and Facts About Early Residents

During the winter of 1813, my grandfather, Jacob Reeder, came from the East through the wilds of the then new State of Ohio, prospecting for a place to locate for a home for himself and family. In some way he struck a blazed road through the woods a few miles East of where our town of South Charleston now is. This road was just north of the creek in the North End of town and the only road of any kind in this part of the country. He followed it until he came to a large sulphur spring in the field now owned by Thomas Mattinson and only a few rods northeast of our present Detroit, Toledo 81 Ironton Railroad bridge. There he found an abundance of pure water for his family and his livestock. He then came back on the south side of the creek where the ground was higher and built a log cabin, opposite the John M. Murray mound, just west of town where several of the old pioneers were buried in later years. He built the first log cabin in this part of the country and he was the first white man to settle here after the Indians left. He came back from the East over this blazed road very early in the spring of 1814 with his wife and four children in a wagon and when he got opposite his new log cabin he found he could not cross the creek. For it was frozen over and the ice not thick enough to bear his team of oxen or horses and the wagon. It was very cold for his family to stay in the wagon and he must get across. So he got there as an olcl pioneer always could. He got a pole and broke the ice in large blocks back of where he wanted to cross and shoved it under the solid ice in the driveway; the water not being very deep he forced the blocks of ice down on the gravel in the bottom of the creek and drove over to his cabin on a solid ice bridge. That is the way the first white man got to locate in South Charleston, Ohio.

At that time my father, John Reeder. Was a boy nine years of age. Who told me while they lived in this cabin he got four or five plants of peppermint and planted it there along the creek. That was nearly one hundred years ago. And there is now an abundance of that mint still growing near where the cabin used to stand. By that I could easily locate the site of the old home. \iy grandfather several years later bought a fine farm three miles east of toun on the north and south side of u hat is nowthe London Pike. He raised a large family and lived there until his death in 1848.

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