The Earliest Days

By Caleb Jackson The Oceana Echo Community Columnist

The principle source of information for anyone interested in the history of our cozy little county is a book from 1890 called “Oceana County Pioneers and Business Men of To-Day,” by Louis M. Hartwick and William H. Tuller. This book details everything from the formation of our townships and villages to brief biographies of the earliest settlers, and it even covers a fair bit of unique or humorous events that have occurred in days gone by. Chapter four of that book explores the years between 1831 and 1855, meaning it covers the formation of the first settlement: Claybanks. I figured today we would talk about this, as it may prove interesting to anyone who has long roots in Oceana.

The land of Claybanks was scouted by two men, John D. Hanson and Dr. Phillips. Hanson was a sailor working for the lumber baron Charles Mears down on White Lake, and it was his familiarity with the waterways that led to his discovery of the area. Ultimately, they chose to settle here for four reasons:

First, it was on the beach, where all travel was; second, there existed an Indian trail from the head of White Lake into what is now J.D.S. Hanson’s farm; then the land was a heavy clay loam and remarkably fertile, and there were old Indian clearings altogether of 200 or 300 acres in extent, in patches from half an acre to two or three acres.

(Hartwick and Tuller, 1890, p. 26)

Aside from the benefits provided by the locale, establishing a settlement with a sailor and doctor must make for a promising enterprise. By the end of 1849, there were six families plus other single men living in Claybanks. These settlers evidently came in two groups. The first group arrived in April of 1849 and included, “C.B. Clements and wife, Asa C. Haggerty and wife, Alex. Pelett and wife.” Hartwick and Tuller go on to explain that everybody from this group was either dead or gone by the year 1890, except for the wife of C.B. Clements, who remarried and went by the name of Olive Byrne. The second wave of settlers came over several months, with “Dr. Phillips and wife, and his father and mother, in June; A.W. Langworthy, in July; Richard E. Cater, in August; James O’Hanlon, in September; and Alex. S. Anderson, in November or December.” These groups of people make up what the authors describe as the “nucleus” of the first settlement of Oceana County.

From there, they talk about some of the struggles of the early frontier, such as smallpox. Evidently, Dr. Philips got it from a Frenchman (“Probably Alex Pelett,” Hartwick and Tuller say, as he used to be employed as a nurse in a smallpox hospital in Detroit), and it spread through the whole community, “but thanks to vigorous constitutions and the doctor’s care, they all recovered, although some will bear the marks to grave…”

One of the principal occupations at that time was cutting shingle bolts, or, as they often phrase it, “the getting out of shingle bolts.” They mention two names in regards to this work, Mr. Graham and Lorenzo D. Eaton. Graham was apparently the first settler to die in our county, back in 1850, and Lorenzo Eaton and his family were faced with starvation and other hardships while he was employed with “getting out the shingle bolts.” Incidentally, Eaton claimed to have built the first log house in Oceana, though our good authors refute that. He built his house in 1850, and it would eventually become J. Gibbs’ farm on Blackberry Ridge, today near Cherry Point. “But before this,” wrote Hartwick and Tuller, “in 1849, Dr. Phillips built a frame house and his father another, used as a store at the mouth of Whisky Creek…The honor of erecting the first log house may be assigned to A.W. Langworthy, on lot 3, Section 17, and torn down in 1880; and the first frame to Dr. Phillips.”

Well, that is it for now. I hope you enjoyed this little collection of firsts for Oceana: the first settlers, the first deaths, the first log houses. I imagine there may be a good number of people descended from these settlers still living around here. If any of the names mentioned in this article sparked a curiosity pertaining to your own family tree, well, then I have done my job.