City of Springdale History On-Line

Springfield's New Light schism made for a dramatic story. Fortunately, such epic controversies were rare. For the most part Springfield's residents marked the passage of time by the seasons and their chores, churchgoing and visiting, annual rites of celebration, new births and the inevitable deaths. Such is the history of the vast majority of human beings everywhere. The patterns of everyday life suggest far more about the past than the unusual occurrences or the actions of the exceptional few. The material conditions of everyday life in Springfield are also worth examining to learn what it was like to live in Springfield in the first half of the 19th century.

By the second decade of the nineteenth century clapboard houses had begun to replace log cabins in the village. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that residents began to nail the boards onto their log cabins. In the attics of the few old homes still remaining in the village today, one can still see the log peg and pin construction of the earliest buildings. Soon, as residents prospered, buildings made of brick began to appear. In 1816 James Whallon built a two-story brick home west of Springfield. In the village itself brick became the vogue in the early thirties. The new church built in 1833 and the home of Anthony Hilts, Sr., on Springfield Pike, used bricks that Hilts made on his own farm. If Hilts' home is any indication, residents preferred a two-story building with a chimney built at both ends. When the budget prohibited an entire brick structure, a facade on the side facing the street served the purpose of establishing an air of prosperity. For example, Col. John Brownson's hostelry on the northeastern corner of Main [Springfield Pike] and Apple offered its reassuring brick front to weary travelers looking for a respectable place to spend the night.

Inside the homes furnishings were sparse but well-maintained. While Springfield may have been a wealthy community, that wealth was in the form of land, buildings and furnishings rather than in cash. As a result, objects purchased with cash were valued more than those that were homemade as is evident from bequests in wills. In 1831 William Chamberlain, who platted the Chamberlain and Crane section of the village and was a prosperous farmer and tavern keeper, left his wife Anna "my eight-day clock [grandfather clock?] and looking glass." Time and time again these two items are specifically mentioned in wills. Apparently, no firm in the area manufactured them so merchants had them shipped in from the East. Even back East, at the turn of the century, the ownership of a mirror signified a degree of prosperity and could cost as much as two to five pounds.

The Chamberlain household also included two beds and sets of bedding. Although not true in the Chamberlain's case, in many Springfield households, the best bed, and its quilts, pillowcases, coverlets, etc., often exceeded the value of all the rest of the furnishings combined. Other items of worthy mention were carpets, again a measure of a prosperity because they were not manufactured locally. Rugs, on the other hand, often referred to as "rag rugs," were homemade and not nearly as grand as carpets.

Mrs. Chamberlain also received a set of Windsor chairs, usually in sets of 6 or 12,, and a half-dozen common chairs. A handsomely-made Windsor chair could be used anywhere in the house, even the parlor. Although the will does not specify, it is possible that the Springfield craftsman, John Rogers, manufactured these, who was famous for his fine Windsor chairs. The common chairs referred to probably had rush seats and slat backs. These served nicely in the kitchen where most of the visiting occurred. Stemware, tableware, and "a common set of kitchenware" rounded out the inventory.

When Epenetus Sortor Breaden, widow of one of Springfield's physicians, wrote her will in 1841 she bequeathed similar items to her daughter. This time, however, the table cloths are described as linen, the teaspoons and tablespoons are silver, and the chairs are reed-bottomed, considered quite valuable at that time. Epenetus Breaden also bequeathed a mahogany chest and "glass", or a mirror, and a new bureau worth twenty dollars.

Another example of the increasing variety and luxurious of home furnishings is found in the will of William Wooley, who kept a tavern on the Pike north of Springfield. His home contained green-painted Windsor chairs, several mirrors and a "fall-leaf", or drop-leaf, cherry table that adorned the parlor.

Most of the social interaction continued to take place in the kitchen. Here the family congregated, and here neighbors sat when they dropped by to chat. Here too, of course, the women of the household prepared prodigious amounts of food. Much of it they grew in their own gardens. Even the village dwellers had small kitchen gardens. Many of the families with homes fronting Main Street also owned a back lot between the alley and Walnut Street where they cultivated sweet corn and tomatoes, cabbages and pole beans, as well as grape arbors and fruit trees.

Much of the bounty grew wild. Blackberry bushes covered the countryside. Even grown men such as the successful farmer C.A.B. Kemper who lived on a farm outside Springfield could not resist the attraction. On a business trip to Reading, he stopped his horse alongside the road and picked four to five quarts, much to his daughter Juliet's delight. It seemed sinful to waste them. In 1858 Mrs. Hughes, wife of the Presbyterian minister, canned six dozen quarts. Quite enough for two people, according to the irrepressible Juliet. Berry picking provided a marvelous opportunity to exercise the hospitality that was at the center of community life. If too many berries hung on the bushes, others came to the patch to pick them. On one occasion twelve or fifteen pickers stayed at the Kempers for supper.

Fresh game supplemented the diet of pork, salt pork and beef. Typically, Springfield's young men had a passion for hunting. In the winter of 1860 sixteen-year old Sam Hunt and his friends spent countless hours hunting squirrel, snipe, pigeon and raccoon. Sometimes they bagged more than they bargained for, as Sam Hunt described in his diary, "Gib Rush, Bill McGilliard, Tom Hatter and I went up to King's woods and cut a large elm, in search of coons but got none, but got a large swarm of bees and plenty of honey. Gib took the bees; Hatter the honey." One has to wonder if Gib found the episode quite so amusing.

No one seemed to have considered the consequences of this indiscriminate slaughter of wild animals. In a land of plenty conservation seemed unnecessary. When the settlers arrived at the turn of the century large animals such as brown bears and buffalo roamed the Springfield area. Deer had once been so plentiful and so unaware of their danger from man that they paid uninvited visits to the small, isolated cabins. Cornelius Little shot one from his doorway. Great herds of buffalo moved through the area. These massive beasts disappeared quickly. In 1812 Luke Foster who founded the Pleasant Valley stockade wrote Dr. Daniel Drake that buffalo had become so rare that Foster's horse had been frightened that morning by just the scent of one.

Passenger pigeons were so numerous at mid-century that their flights darkened the sky. "Pigeons are flying over, in immense quantities; there are millions and millions. Some flocks literally cover the heavens. Some fellows around here killed 119 of them," Sam Hunt observed. Within sixty years those numbers dwindled dramatically.

A pot of fresh game stewing on the stove was simply an invitation to have a neighbor or even a stranger stay for supper. Of all the sociable activities associated with food, Springfield children loved best tapping the sugar trees. Numerous references attest to this annual delight although the number of trees that produced syrup became fewer every year. By March the long hard winters seemed unendurable, and the rising sap heralded the approach of spring. One day in early March 1856, young Juliet Kemper, distracted from her chores, sat at her window and gazed at the grove of trees just beyond the fields. "I developed a craving for a drink of sugar sap while looking at the woods," she wrote her absent brother. "The trees have been tapped and tapped but Ma says the more tapped, the richer the water." Ma's words added to Juliet's craving but the Kempers had too much to do to go tapping that day. Families like the Kempers and the Riddles, lucky enough to have a sugar grove on their farms, became very popular indeed in sugar season. Letters that arrived in late January discreetly asked "will the trees be tapped this year" and suggested that a little visitor might be arriving in March! The old as well as the young appreciated the importance of maple syrup. When Benjamin Skillman died in 1871 he left his only son Thomas not only the homestead, the wagon and harness for two horses, but the sugar kettle as well.

Old clothes were appropriate for berry picking and sugar tapping but the young ladies of Springfield delighted in dressing up in fancy beribboned gowns to attend afternoon tea. In their grandmothers' time no such choice of wearing apparel existed. They selected a linsy woolen dress for everyday and just about every other occasion. When Catherine Long wed John Riddle, Jr., the talk of Springfield Township centered as much on her wedding gown as it did on the very fine match she had made. Her father, known as "Black Mike," purchased the first-ever bolt of calico cloth brought into the area for his eldest daughter's dress. If Catherine followed the current fashions, she wore a dress block-printed with sprays of flowers and leaves styled with long sleeves and a waistline raised to just below the bust.

Early on clothing represented a major investment in time or in money. Clothing was handed down, patched and re-patched until it was simply too worn to be patched again. Leftovers were used to make rag rugs. No one questioned whether a mother's dress, cut-down and remade, was of a style appropriate for her daughter. Age-specific clothing had no place in a society of scarcity. Thomas Sortor's will, written in 1833, reflected that frontier mentality. He bequeathed "all of my clothing" to his young grandson Thomas Murdoch.

In most instances the women in the house made the clothing. Helen Kemper, granddaughter of Rev. James and daughter of C.A.B., took days off from school to make her "green dress." Both girls and women worked at remaking old dresses, embroidery and hemming. All of these tasks consumed so much time that women rarely had the needle and the thimble out of their hands. Nevertheless the greater selection of luxury items available in Cincinnati always had appeal. C.A.B. Kemper's account books and his daughters' letters show their liking for city finery.

Not surprisingly, a spinning wheel and a loom were highly prized possessions. They offered single women one of the few ways to earn their support. When Levi Sayre wrote his will he specified that his "loom and tacklings" go to his wife Jane. Springfield families could outfit themselves from head to foot without ever leaving the village. In 1840 Stephen Schooley or one of a number of other merchants sold the cloth; Samuel Ledman did the tailoring. James McClean wove good, hard wearing homespun. By the end of the forties, Springfield also had shoemakers who could make both shoes and good serviceable boots.

Sometimes fancy clothes and farm living did not mix, particularly when ladies' fashion demanded voluminous skirts as it did in the 1860s. On one occasion in 1862 Juliet Kemper, dressed in her best "pink silk with the black silk jacket," joined her sister for a visit to friends in nearby Glendale. After a nice dinner complete with ice cream "which was quite a treat," the girls chose to take a shortcut home through the Greenwood pasture. The Greenwood's bull resented the trespassers; in fact, he took that pink silk dress as a challenge. The two girls dashed across the stubble fields and cleared the fence, skirts and all, just in time to escape the enraged bull!

Feeding a family was a hard, ongoing task that took the labor of members of the family, including the children. Springfield women bore the responsibility of washday, typically on Monday. The farm women washed not only the clothing and bedding for their families but also for the farm laborers and apprentices who lived with them. In fact, maintaining a minimum of material comfort was a full-time job in nineteenth-century Springfield.

While nineteenth-century Springfield had its charms, disagreeable aspects in daily life existed. Houses in the village built so close to the Pike were noisy and dusty. The architecture offered little in the way of privacy. Early in the century families rarely assigned specific functions to particular spaces. The earliest homes were usually little more than a main room and an attic for sleeping. Even after homes contained separate sleeping chambers, the best bed often kept its place of honor in the main room. Families continued to share bedrooms with children often sleeping in a trundle bed near their parents. William Wooley left his daughters beds to "include underbeds as well as upperbeds." Not until the 1830s and 1840s did the parlor begin to make its appearance in the larger homes.

Cold permeated even the best-built house. The fireplace might have been pleasant to congregate around but it did not really heat the room. The summer months brought the opposite problem of stifling heat that could only be escaped by spending every waking moment possible outdoors. The candle or oil lamp used to light the rooms did not allow much to be done after sundown. The wax drippings and the ink blots still on the paper of Helen Kemper's letters attest to her frequent complaints of her candle burning down.

All too frequently men and women performed their difficult tasks while they were physically debilitated by illness. The reality of life lived under constant threat of deadly diseases conditioned the cultural patterns of the people of Springfield.

II

The letters and diaries of nineteenth-century Springfield residents are full of comments on death and dying. When the bell tolled in the little church tower, people stopped work to pay last respects, and funerals took up virtually the entire day. This preoccupation with death was quite understandable because sickness and death were a constant part of everyday life. Springfield was luckier than villages of a similar size in that residents were serviced by a physician quite early. Dr. Jeremiah Breaden was the first, practicing medicine on Lot 8 on Main Street from at least 1817 until his death in 1836. Shortly after his death, his practice was sold to Dr. E. S. Close. Dr. Joseph W. Hageman established his practice in 1819. It is unlikely that either of these men had a medical education in the modern sense. Most doctors did not in the early nineteenth century. A doctor learned the healing trade just as other artisans learned their craft, by serving as an apprentice to an established physician.

In 1825, Dr. Hageman sold his practice to John Hunt, a young man fresh out of the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons. Hageman left Springfield for new opportunities in Mississippi where the prevalence of yellow fever and malaria in the delta region guaranteed a lucrative practice. Hunt's brother Furman, a Cincinnati land speculator, had lured the young man westward by describing Springfield as being "in a rich and thickly settled country, and in my estimation quite sickly enough." Dr. Hunt was not disappointed and served Springfield until his death forty years later.

In the "sickly season" of July and August, a Springfield doctor could earn five to fifteen dollars daily or one thousand to fifteen hundred per year. Building up a practice, however, took time. Dr. Hageman agreed to stay on in Springfield with Hunt as his partner until the latter "earned the confidence of [his] patients." Not until April 10, 1829 did Dr. Hunt purchase Hageman's offices on Lot 27 on Main Street for the sum of twelve hundred dollars.

Doctors in small communities such as Springfield depended on attracting patients from the surrounding area. John Hunt even attended pauper patients for Springfield Township. He spent far more time serving those in the countryside than he did in his office. Dr. Hunt, who had a penchant for spirited animals, became notorious for the number of spills he took off his horse. Such accidents were an occupational hazard. When Dr. Hunt visited his New Jersey family in January 1829 his neighbor Thomas van Tuyl wrote "Your accounts are about the same. The debtors know you are away and they will not be sued."

Nineteenth-century physicians took their limited knowledge into battle against a long list of killer diseases. Tuberculosis, commonly called consumption, could be particularly cruel and often struck the young. Helen Kemper's young friend Mary Wooley "took sick with the falling leaf and did not live to see the blossoms of spring; how deceiving is that disease consumption." Typhoid fever was also common, killing residents in Springfield well into the twentieth century. On the other hand inoculation had lessened the threat of smallpox. In swampy areas malaria caused many cases of the "chills and fever" that perpetually afflicted our ancestors. Infant diarrhea carried off the very young in great numbers and the elderly succumbed to annual bouts of influenza.

As medical science was in a rather primitive stage, physicians tended to lump any number of disorders under "chills and fever." Occasionally physicians asked for a second opinion. Dr. Close, for example, consulted with another doctor when his patient C.A.B. Kemper nearly died from a "bilious" fever.

Relatives sent letters replete with details of illnesses that were guaranteed to disturb the sleep of the recipients. When after a long delay newlywed Malinda Peterson Thomas finally answered the letters of her Springfield relatives in 1849, she explained that a recent illness had left her extremely weak and with a very sore mouth. Still she felt lucky compared to many of her Maysville, Kentucky neighbors. Her mother-in-law, sick for four weeks, vomited constantly. The doctor did not expect her to live. There had been ten deaths a day for the past four days. What horror the Springfield Petersons must have felt as they read Malinda's letter. The disease she described terrorized nineteenth-century Americans to the degree that newspaper editors often refused to report it for fear of creating a panic. It was cholera.

What Malinda did not know was that the cholera epidemic was also raging in Springfield. Indeed, it infected the entire area, most likely spread by an unwitting steamboat passenger from the South. Before the first of September, cholera claimed over four thousand victims. A river city like Cincinnati, or even a village on a coach line like Springfield, was particularly vulnerable to contagious diseases. Mass panic greeted any news of a cholera outbreak. R. W. McFarland wrote of the desperate exodus from Cincinnati. "When we reached Springfield about dusk, fourteen old-fashioned stages were there to carry the passengers forward."

News of the outbreak spread quickly. Cootie Evans of Rising Sun, Indiana had intended to visit Springfield, but as she wrote the family of Dr. J. R. Hunt, "the cholera is raging so bad we were advised to stay at home." The disease virtually wiped out the family of Lucretia and Nelson Naylor. Four of their children died in the weeks between July 10 and August 21, 1849. Two years later the disease returned taking the lives two more children and their father as well. A line of tiny gravestones in St. Mary's cemetery bears silent witness to one family's tragedy.

Although prevailing opinion of the day thought cholera attacked primarily the poor and the dirty, "King Cholera" did not discriminate according to sex or social class or profession. None was immune. In 1851, while Dr. Hunt tended to his Springfield patients, the disease struck his own family. In a letter written by his wife a year earlier to her daughter Anna, a student at Cooper Academy in Dayton, Ohio, Mrs. Hunt warned her to be careful on an upcoming canal boat trip. She wrote, "...be careful how you indulge your appetite on the boat for cholera is in the neighborhood. Drink only tea as the water is impure."

In June 1851, Anna returned home to Springfield to attend the funeral of her thirteen-year-old brother Oliver who had died from the disease. Upon her arrival she discovered that her twelve-year-old sister had also succumbed. The cholera epidemic continued to cut a swath through the family, including Mrs. Hunt, who was so ill her husband did not expect her to survive. She recovered but Anna was not so lucky. She died on June 23, just hours after she began showing the symptoms of the disease.

For all his professional learning, cholera left Dr. Hunt defenseless. No medical intervention could save the victim and often only the strength of the patient mattered. The very young and the very old were especially at risk. The rapid onset of the symptoms contributed to the terror with which individuals viewed this disease. In extreme cases it struck its victims dead on the street. The symptoms were like no other except perhaps for cases of arsenic poisoning. Vomiting and diarrhea prostrated the patient while violent chills racked the body. Death was caused by dehydration. The face took on the mask of death, drawn and withered and dark blue in color. Patients recovered from cholera but the rapidity of its onset and the agonies it produced made it the most dreaded of nineteenth century diseases. Because there was no cure, a doctors treatment was sometimes experimental, contributing to the loss of fluids and causing death. First the doctor would bleed the afflicted, and then administer massive doses of mercury, usually in the form of calomel. A major side effect was caused by the mercury, which ate away at the gums and the lining of the mouth. Almost certainly, Malinda Peterson's sore mouth resulted not from the cholera but from the medical treatment. If the patient still survived, the physician could always resort to laudanum or sometimes all three of the preferred treatments simultaneously.

Apparently Springfield remained relatively free of cholera after 1851. In the years that followed, newly established public health boards in the nation's larger cities instituted sanitation and quarantine policies designed to prevent the spread of a disease that physicians could not cure. The days of the great cholera epidemics had finally ended.

III

Funeral rites reminded Springfield residents of their isolation, vulnerability and need for each other. But the village's isolation and hence the almost forced intimacy of its residents sometimes led to conflict. Holidays and village rites, predictable and organized rituals, tended to defuse communal tensions. Springfield placed greatest importance on the Fourth of July which outranked even Christmas as the most-favored holiday. The village planned festivities to entertain those of every age. Stories handed down through the generations told of carrying guns at all times, even to church, of Wayne's march and the Indian threats. The Springfield Township Pioneer Association could usually be relied upon to provide a speaker.

Springfield also shared the nineteenth-century passion for politics and many a local favorite son or a representative of the local party could be depended upon for a stump speech. It was an age and a village that prized oratory and the longer the speech the better. Samuel F. Hunt, who would later win fame for his speech-making, perfected his technique in Springfield.

Most of the children preferred the parades, the fireworks and the shooting of the big cannon. In later years, Helen Kemper Blinn remembered a Fourth when tragedy struck. The village men could not load the big cannon so a passerby, a stranger, stopped to volunteer his assistance. The cannon exploded and the stranger died instantly. It was the kind of unexpected tragedy in the midst of celebration that left an indelible imprint. Mrs. Blinn remembered it vividly in her old age. Most celebrations were happier if not as exciting. Letters indicate that Springfield was overrun with out-of-town visitors in response to the numerous invitations issued by the sociable village youth.

Other important events included the Singing School recital. Springfield enjoyed the periodic services of a traveling singing master named John Dent. As an instructor in the 1840s, Dent became something of a legend for his "perfect pitch." In any event, while in Springfield Dent would organize a recital for the girls. The girls busied themselves with rehearsals and sewing recital gowns. When Saturday night arrived, sleighs and farm wagons lined the sides of the Pike. People from the village and from farms all around gathered on the second floor of a large room located above the post office. Sitting in the "nicely furnished" room with "astral" lights that hang from the ceiling, Springfield society enjoyed the performance of its young ladies until the "late" hour of nine p.m.!

In the winter the Sewing Society sponsored its annual oyster supper. Springfield, like most of midwestern America, had a passion for oysters. Many people who came from the East fondly remembered oysters and missed them terribly when they moved to Ohio. Regularly scheduled stage coach runs over the Alleghenies made them an occasional, if expensive, treat. Packed in buckets filled with ice and covered with layers of straw and burlap, the oysters remained fresh until arrival at Springfield. How the old-timers, many of whom grew up near the Jersey shore, must have appreciated this tasty reminder of the sea. The ladies from the Sewing Society sold oysters on the half-shell and wash-boilers filled with creamy oyster stew. Any leftovers were sold to the children for ten cents apiece.

Winter brought other pleasures. Deep, heavy snows, perfect for sleigh riding, fell regularly in Springfield in the mid-nineteenth century. Practically every family had a sleigh in the shed and horse in the barn ready to pull with the first good snowfall. Young people enjoyed taking their sleighs out to Hilts pond for enjoyable ice-skating parties.

Revivals and camp meetings were also repetitive village rites that refreshed Springfield and tended to bring people closer together. When the church held a revival, weeping penitents filled the long "mercy seat" in front of the pulpit. Camp meetings offered even more entertaining fare. In the 1840s revivalists often chose Kemper Landing on the Miami and Erie Canal for its convenience as a baptismal. Country girls dressed in their best crinoline frocks and fanciest bonnets packed picnic lunches and positioned themselves prettily under the big trees near the landing. The young men made dashing figures in their Sunday best complete with boots and tall hats. Perhaps some of them underestimated the practiced skills of the revivalists until they found themselves rising from the water, "wetter than wash day" but feeling gloriously purified and saved.

Agricultural fairs created strong village pride. None was better than the Hamilton County Agricultural Fair, the oldest of its kind west of the Allegheny mountains. Springfield farmers regularly served on the Board of Directors of the Hamilton County Agricultural Society and judges at the fair. In 1844 John M. Cochran acted as a judge of farm implements. One of the items, which was shipped from New Orleans for the competition, did not arrive in time. Thus Cochran missed his opportunity to judge Cyrus McCormick's "Virginia Reaper." Nevertheless, the Hamilton County Agricultural Association printed an account of the machine in an appendix to its report on the fair. Perhaps Anthony Hilts, Jr., read the appendix, or perhaps he made a trip to see the machine when it did arrive. In any event, a few years later Anthony Hilts designed and built his own reaping machine in the blacksmith shop behind his Springfield home.

In the meantime, he and most of his neighbors concentrated on the more mundane categories which included, among other things, fruits and pickles, farm products and buggies. In 1848 Edmund R. Glenn, who a few years later would make his fortune when he sold a parcel of his farm to the Glendale Association, won a prize with one of his cows which produced milk that yielded forty-two lb. ten oz. of butter in just 21 days! Glenn must have been an accomplished farmer because he also won ten dollars for the best hay crop. A.A Sortor's production of thirty-one bushels and forty pounds of wheat on one acre of ground garnered him top honors. Even the State Board of Agriculture deemed this harvest a "premium" crop.

Beribboned livestock marched around the show ring. In 1846 Joseph Cooper's short-horned cow "White Queen" impressed the judges. But perhaps the keenest interest for the Springfield men were the horses. Numerous categories offered opportunities for everyone and in 1839 the premium list included ten dollars in plate each for the best thoroughbred, the best roadster stallion and the best general purpose stallion. The owners of the fastest trotting stallion and the best "jack," however, took home prizes worth only five dollars.

Dr. Hunt, whose neighbors considered his personal choice of "frisky fillies" somewhat foolish, often judged the horses as did young Alexander Neave, a Springfield farmer whose reputation as a keen appraiser of horseflesh made him a popular judge at both the Hamilton County and the Butler County fairs. Springfield's own prize-winning horses cut a "major swath" at the fair. Belladonna, Robert Hilts' fine Morgan horse, frequently took top honors. Morgan horses were trotting horses from Vermont that became extremely popular in southwestern Ohio when they were introduced into the state in 1848. Morgans were very large, and were dark bay or chestnut colored with flowing wavy manes and tails. Belladonna was an awesome representative of the breed.

Charlie Leggett brought the greatest number of prizes back to Springfield. This blunt-spoken Englishman had huge stables and an abiding love for horse racing. Indeed, in the 1880s, Charlie Leggett's was a professional rider.

Over time, the agricultural aspects of the fair diminished and its entertainment and social aspects increased in importance. The fairgrounds, located in Carthage, featured a two-tiered amphitheater with a show ring in the middle. A balcony ran behind the seats. Hucksters set up their booths and stalls underneath as Springfield residents enjoyed swapping stories with people from neighboring villages that they might only see once a year. Children delighted in slipping in without paying the ten cents charged for a grandstand seat. Once inside they teased the three-legged calves, gawked at the fat lady and tried to slip into the tents where shows were held "of special attraction" for adults only.

For special occasions, nearby Cincinnati offered theater, music halls and fancy parades. But the big city could be an intimidating experience, for human and horse alike, offering a stark contrast to Springfield's quiet and sparkling clean air. Helen Kemper described riding her three-year old pony, Timmy, who had never been to the city, "He was very much afraid of the smoke and din of the foundry and a heavy cloud coming over made it very dark."

Most of all, Springfield enjoyed a good party. Any occasion was sufficient to issue the invitations. Early in the century the young people thought nothing of walking three or four miles barefoot to a country dance. The parties might be at William Van Dyke's saddler's shop or a more formal affair at someone's home. When Samuel Hunt's sister Alethia married, the reception, complete with dancing, lasted until dawn. A wedding often meant an entire week of parties as Malinda Peterson complained when her experiences as a bridesmaid to her good friend Eliza Riddle left her exhausted. On numerous occasions the Hunt offspring mention the parties at which they "tripped the light fantastic" until dawn. Sleighing parties in the winter, and picnics and midnight horseback rides in the summer were regular events.

Springfield's rituals reinforced community pride and fostered the spirit of neighborliness. The compassion and kindness shown to others in time of need did not go unnoticed. In 1856 the Kemper's son Charlie became very ill away from home while attending Wabash College. His sister Helen wrote "if you were the President's son your illness would not have aroused greater interest. It makes me think more of Springfield than ever before." When people left they yearned to return to the closeness and friendliness of the village. "I will come to Springfield in the fall for a visit of ten or twelve years," wrote a young friend of Sam Hunt's. When William Hilts, brother of R.D. and Anthony Hilts, Jr., moved his family to Bloomington, Indiana, he wrote a letter to his friend C.A.B. Kemper full of nostalgia for the social and family gatherings at "old" Springfield.