Chloe S (Pettibone) Brown (1785 - 1852)

Born 24 Apr 1785 in Norfolk, Litchfield County, Connecticut, United States

Ancestors

Wife of Frederick Brown — married 1808 in Colebrook, Litchfield County, Connecticut, United States

Descendants

Died 3 Feb 1852 at age 66 in Haw Patch, Lagrange County, Indiana, United States

Biography

Chloe Pettibone's husband, Frederick Brown, was a son of Captain John Brown, a captain in the Connecticut Militia who in July 1776 marched at the head of his company from Connecticut to New York in response to General George Washington's call for troops to help defend Long Island against invasion by the British fleet. There Captain John Brown contracted a virulent case of dysentery and died after only two months of service, leaving his wife, Hannah, and eleven children. Hannah Brown lived to the age of ninety-one, and all eleven children lived to adulthood and were married.

Frederick Brown and his first wife had three children: Frederick Anson, Marcus, and Catherine. The family lived first in Canton, Connecticut, but soon after the birth of their second child in 1797 they moved to the village of Colebrook, Connecticut, where their third child was born in 1799. Chloe Pettibone probably moved to Colebrook at about the same time, for the Colebrook Congregational Church records show that her parents, Elijah and Mabel (Field) Pettibone, were received into membership there in 1799; and their last six children, born between 1786 and 1797, were baptized in the Colebrook church on 24 August 1800 [BI: Colebrook Congregational Church 2:111].

Eight years later, in 1808, Chloe, aged twenty-three, married the widower Frederick Brown, aged thirty-nine and the father of three. Frederick by then was a substantial citizen of Colebrook and was the representative from Colebrook in the Connecticut Legislature in 1812 and 1814 during the War of 1812. During their first six years of marriage he and Chloe had three children, bringing the combined total of children in their home to six.

In 1816 the whole family, with the exception of Frederick’s oldest son, moved to the new town of Wadsworth, Ohio. The move, although a drastic one in many ways, was not entirely incomprehensible. Both Frederick and Chloe were brought up in families which for generations had had large numbers of children; any inheritance was always thoroughly divided, with daughters receiving usually only a relatively small sum of money. Frederick, who was only six years old when his father died and was the seventh of eleven children, lived in a town in which most of the land was occupied by long-es- tablished family farms. In the large tract of land in Ohio owned by General Elijah Wadsworth of Litchfield County, Connecticut, on the other hand, land was selling for from two to five dollars an acre, and easy credit was available.

The first trail from Cleveland to the Wadsworth tract was blazed by four men from Vermont: Oliver Durham, Daniel Dean, and two of Dean's sons, Benjamin and Daniel, Jr. They reached their destination in the Wadsworth tract in February 1814, bought their acreage, and, with the help of settlers from the nearest settlement, built a log cabin in one day. They then returned to Vermont, packed up their families, and set out again for their new life in Ohio. The round trip was completed by March 14 [Rader, in Medina Historical Society, History of Medina County OH, 340]. This pattern of an initial round trip by the men of the family followed by a second round trip of the whole family was perhaps the most favored pattern for settlement, but in some cases--usually after a relative had already established a home in an area--whole families made the trip west together on the first journey.

Several autobiographical accounts reveal the hazards of the journey and the living conditions faced upon arrival. Maxine Miller Rader, a local historian of Wadsworth, Ohio, writes: Captain George Lyman’s story of his first trip to Wadsworth in February, 1817, includes the episode of his two horses breaking through the ice on Lake Erie, over which he was travelling from Buffalo to Erie because of the muddy, impassable roads. By choking the horses until they "floated like a bladder" the animals were pulled back onto the ice, while the wagon had to be recovered by boat-hooks and drawn to shore by hand.... [Rader, 341]. Mrs. Rader then quoted from Captain Lyman’s own words to tell about the Captain's return trip from Connecticut with his family. After describing a hair-raising crossing of the dreadful Cattaraugus swamp in New York State, he described the last leg of the family's journey, during which the wagon upset three times. At one creek crossing he was mired so deeply that he was about to abandon some of his possessions when a settler arrived who helped by loading his own wagon with some of the Lyman family's baggage, helping pull out the Lymans’s wagon, and then accompanying them to their new home, "without upsetting but once more." It took four whole days to get from Cleveland to Wadsworth, a distance of some thirty-five miles, about which Captain Lyman wrote, "You cannot imagine, you can only guess, what the roads were." [Rader, 341-42; see also J47552 John and Emily C. (Lyman) Brown].

Frederick Brown, W. H. Wright, Benjamin Agard, and Joseph Loomis with his two sons Orrin and Sherman are named by Rader as settlers of Wadsworth who arrived in 1816, one year earlier than the Lyman family. The 1816 pioneers not only had suffered the same sort of travel conditions as the Lymans; they also had to survive cold wintry weather which lasted throughout most of the year--the famous "year without a summer." With crops planted late and for the most part unable to ripen, only the hunting prowess of some of the men saved the lives of the settlers in that grim and gloomy year. In 1875 Sherman Blocker, son of David Blocker, one of the outstanding hunters of the Wadsworth settlement, wrote a description of the hunters and their skills:

These men were celebrated rangers of the wilderness, lithe, hardy, and resolute. Dressed in buckskin breeches, with linsey or linen overshirts that reached nearly down to the knees, with buckskin moccasins snugly fitted to the foot and ankle; with a leather belt buckled about the waist in which was a sheath for a tomahawk and a stout hunting knife; with shot-pouch and powder horn; with a flint and punk to start a fire anywhere; with a good rifle and a couple of well-trained hunting dogs and about a loaf of bread or "Johnny Cake" and a little salt, these men would sally out into the boundless forest and dense thickets and swamps, day after day....lf they were belated in the chase and night overtook them in the woods, they would roll a couple of logs together and build a fire and roast a chunk of bear, venison, or turkey...with leaves for their bed and the sky for a covering, they would lie down and sleep wherever night overtook them [Rader, 342-43].

As in reminiscences written a century earlier in Connecticut by ancestors of these same families, memoirs of the Wadsworth pioneers included many vivid accounts of battles with bears, wolves, and snakes. As for the domestic scene, a typical house in Wadsworth in 1817 was described thus: Our house had no chamber floor, no chimney, nor was it chinked. I remember being out in the dark the first night and the light of the fire inside made me think of a tin lantern. We did not live very well for the first two years....[But] before winter our house was chinked and daubed; we had a good puncheon floor overhead, a stick chimney from the floor up. planed doors and glass windows (the glass brought from Connecticut) [Rader, 342].

Such, at least in part, was the world into which Frederick and Chloe (Pettibone) Brown and five of their six children arrived in 1816. Their house was the first one built on the site of the town of Wadsworth proper [Rader, 343], and they began immediately to become active citizens. Frederick was instrumental in organizing the town, and he became one of its first trustees. When Medina County was organized in April 1818, Frederick Brown was named Senior Associate Judge, which office he held for fourteen years, 1818-1832. In 1827-29 he served also as the second postmaster of Wadsworth [Baskin & Battey, 444]. Frederick and Chloe were both charter members of the Con- gregational Church in Wadsworth.

Chloe meanwhile served her neighbors as a natural-born nurse and was famous for being on call whenever sickness hit. She may have learned some of her skills from an Indian squaw who was the wife of the earliest inhabitant of the area, a roving trapper and trader named Canadian John Holmes, who sometimes lived in a rough hut on the present Holmes Creek and whose squaw was renowned for her healing herbs. At any rate Chloe was said to have never lost a patient until her son died in 1852 of the disease which probably caused her own death ten days later. In addition to her nursing, Chloe and her friends operated a library for the Wadsworth community, the books for which were brought to Wadsworth from Simsbury, Connecticut, by Frederick Brown after he had journeyed back to that town to visit his elderly mother and relatives [Schapiro, Wadsworth Heritage, 50]. An interesting side note about this family is that Frederick Brown’s older brother, Owen Brown, an outspoken abolitionist and "underground railway" agent who moved from Connecticut to Hudson, Ohio, in 1805, was the father of John Brown (1800-1859), the famous Free-Soil crusader who was considered by opposing sides to be either a martyr or a traitor for his raid on the U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.

In 1842, Frederick and Chloe Brown moved to Circleville, Ohio, to live with Frederick’s son, Dr. Marcus Brown. After Frederick’s death in 1848, Chloe moved to Haw Patch, Indiana, to live with her son Dr. John Brown; while there she continued to serve as a nurse when called upon. She died there in 1852 and was buried in Eden Cemetery, LaGrange County, Indiana [Johnsen, Pettibone- Butler-Brown Family Records, Ventura CA].

Chloe Pettibone and her husband Frederick Brown had seven children, two of whom died at birth, or soon thereafter, in the difficult first years of their residence in Wadsworth, Ohio. All of the surviving children of Frederick and Chloe taught school at some time in their lives.

Sources

• Tom Bredehoft, Pettibone Registry, page 267, see K. Pontius.^[1]

1. ↑ Entered by Tom Bredehoft, Jan 2, 2013