Writing About Pioneer Ohio From Rosella Rice's Sketches

Rosella Rice did not write history. She wrote magazine sketches for Arthur's Home Magazine, framed by a walk to a heap of hearthstones or a conversation at the breakfast table, and some of them are plainly invented. Yet anyone trying to write about Green Township, Perrysville or the Ohio frontier of the 1810s and 1820s ends up reading her, because she put down what the county histories left out: what a cabin held, how a schoolmaster was paid, what a bride packed. This piece is a route through the archive for a student with an assignment or a local historian with a chapter to draft. It covers which sketches answer which questions, how far her remembered detail can be trusted, and how to turn what you find into a source list and a readable narrative.

Start with the talk, then the series

The original site advised reading her 1879 address to the Ashland County Association before anything else, and the advice still holds. In A Pioneer Talk she states her purpose outright, pleading for some writer to hold the mirror up to the manners and customs of early times, and she explains what she thought the real story was: the women at the loom and the little wheel, and the overwork they handed down. Read it first because it tells you what she was looking at. Her sketches are not neutral inventories. They are arguments about whose lives mattered, made by a woman who grew up listening to the first settlers and then spent decades writing it down.

After that, the three frontier series in order. Fifty Years Ago, or The Cabins of the West ran through 1875 and is the broadest: twelve numbers, some melodrama, some straight recollection. Old Hearth Stones followed in 1876 with four numbers, and Fading Footprints in 1879 with five. The two articles on schools came in 1887, the year before she died. The series pages on this site list every installment with a sentence or two on what it contains, which saves a great deal of skimming.

Which sketches for which question

For cabins, the fullest pieces are the ones where her father Alexander does the talking. Coming to Ohio (Cabins No. 6) describes the family's forty-nine-day trip from Willsborough, New York, in 1810, and the January of 1811 when eighteen people shared John Davis's one-room cabin with no window, no chair and no candle. Father's Stories (No. 7) adds the hominy block burned out of a stump and salt packed on horseback from Zanesville. Rich in Dogs (No. 9) is nominally a courtship, but it contains the fullest description on the site of how a one-room cabin was arranged and dressed for company. Log Cabin Life of Long Ago, printed in 1891 after her death, reads like a manual for candles, flax and dyes.

For schools, read First Day of School (Cabins No. 3), which describes a log schoolhouse "because one is a duplicate of all the others in the far West," then the two 1887 articles under Our Schools, School-Houses and Schoolmasters, which set out the subscription system in detail, and Log School, Blockhouse and Indian Village (No. 11), where her father dates the raising of a schoolhouse to 1816. The Yankee Schoolmaster and The New Schoolmaster are stories, but they record the school meetings, the examining questions and the ten dollars a month.

For Johnny Appleseed, her 1876 sketch of John Chapman is the reason most people arrive here. She knew him as a child: the sky-blue Quaker coat he took in exchange for trees, which the Rice children wore in their theatricals, the pasteboard hat, the sewn-up sack of seeds she fell over one morning at the head of the stairs, his habit of sleeping on the floor by the kitchen fire. For the Indian troubles of 1812, Visiting the Site of the Copus Massacre in Old Hearth Stones is the most historical thing she wrote, and the note under it on this site checks her outline against the record.

How her detail works as evidence

Rice's strength is the small physical fact. Nobody invents that custard was eaten with a knife and fork because there were no teaspoons, or that a teacher's agreement specified wheat at fifty cents a bushel delivered to two named mills. Details of that kind, which she had no reason to improve, are the parts to lean on. The same goes for the speech she transcribes, the full names called at roll, and the prices and wages that recur across different pieces: ten dollars a month for a master, four dollars a year to school a child, fifty cents postage on a letter.

Her weakness is chronology and names. "Fifty years ago" is a magazine title, not a date, and she uses fifty, fifty-five and sixty years loosely within the same series. The notes on each story page here flag what can be checked. The Berryhill school, for instance, is given a build date of 1816, a frame replacement in 1835 and a graveyard, but the editors of this archive could not find it under that name in their sources and advise treating the name as hers. The Appleseed sketch has Chapman born in Boston in 1775 and dying in 1847; the record says Massachusetts, 1774, and March 18, 1845. Several of the courting couples could not be traced at all. And a story she tells twice, like the Methodist who swore at the roots while plowing new ground, which appears in both Rich in Dogs and A Pioneer Talk, is probably a neighborhood tale rather than one man's memory.

The practical rule: use her for texture and for the structure of daily life, confirm anything with a date or a surname against Baughman's History of Ashland County or the genealogical record, and say in your text which is which. A phrase such as "Rice recalled that" costs nothing and keeps you honest.

Building the source list

Every story page on this site names its magazine and year, and the bibliography Peggy Mershon compiled gives volume and page numbers for nearly everything: Cabins of the West in volume 43 for 1875, Old Hearth Stones and the Appleseed sketch in volume 44, Fading Footprints in volume 47, the school articles in volume 56. Cite the magazine, not this website, as the primary source, with the volume and page where you have them. If a teacher or editor wants each entry explained, the standard form for an annotated bibliography is a citation followed by a short note on what the piece contains and how far you trusted it, which is the judgment this archive's story notes already model.

Beyond Rice herself, the sources the original site relied on are the ones to add: A. J. Baughman's 1909 county history, which printed the 1879 address; Mary Jane Armstrong Henney's book Rosella Rice (1827-1888), published by the Ashland County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society; and the Rice family papers held by the Butler-Clear Fork Valley Historical Society in Butler. Note that Log Cabin Life appeared three years after her death and may have been assembled from notes, so cite it with that caveat. And remember that these transcriptions keep the scanning errors of the original site; if a spelling matters, compare against the magazine page.

Shaping a narrative piece

Rice is also a model for how to write the thing. She almost never opens with a date. She opens with a question to her father about why she once called fennel Johnny-weed, or with a dish of grits pushed across the breakfast table, or with a walk to the site of a vanished schoolhouse where only fragments of slate pencil and broken delf remain on the spot. The frame is small and particular, and the history comes out of it in a voice. A student writing about pioneer Ohio can borrow the device without borrowing her sentimentality: pick one object, one site or one remembered conversation and let the explanation grow from it. The sequence that a guide to narrative essay structure lays out, a concrete opening scene, a turn, reflection at the end, is the sequence she was using in 1875.

Two cautions. First, keep her voice and yours distinct. Quote her when the wording matters, paraphrase when it does not, and never let her dialect slide into your own sentences. Second, resist the urge to settle every question. Rice herself paid for the Vermont schoolmaster's stone, inscribed only The Stranger's Grave; a good local history piece can say what is known, what she claimed and what remains open, and be the better for it. The full contents page is the place to go back to when a draft needs one more example, and the archive's own account of how these texts were restored explains what was changed and what was not, which is worth a line in any methods note.