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The Quarterly Publication of the Histori-
cal and Philosophical
Society of Ohio

Vol. I...1906...No. 1
JANUARY-MARCH

UNIV. OF
CALIFORNIA

Cincinnati, Ohio

1906

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI PRESS

CINCINNATI

TO VIMU AIMBORLIA)

v. 1-3

UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA

PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF
WILLIAM LYTLE.

My father was an emigrant from Cumberland county, Pennsylvania, near Carlisle. In the autumn of 1779 he left home with his family for Kentucky, then a part of Virginia. He did not reach the Monongahela until the winter was too far advanced to allow his descending the Ohio before spring. In company with two men who were bound with their families to the same point, he built three large arks, or, as they were afterwards called, Kentucky boats. The winter proved uncommonly severe and, by suspending the operations of the sawmills in that country, procrastinated their arrangements until the first of April following. By advertisements all the adventurers in that part of the country who were bound to Kentucky were requested to assemble on a large island in the Ohio a few miles below Pittsburgh. It was proposed to remain here until a sufficient force should have assembled to pass with safety amidst the country of savage hostility which lay between them and Kentucky.

WILLIAM LYTLE, 1770-1831.

First Prothonotary of Clermont County; Member of General Assembly at Chillicothe; Lieut. Col. of the 4th regiment, 1st brigade, 1st division Ohio militia, Commission dated August 10, 1804; Major General 7th division, Commission dated Feb. 20, 1808; Surveyor General of territory northwest of the Ohio for four years; President of the first Humane Society, organized 1819; Stockholder in the first Lancasterian Seminary, 1814; first President of the Cincinnati College to which he gave $10,000 in 1818; stockholder in the first woolen mill in Cincinnati; one of the original Directors in the Miami Exporting Co., 1803; founder of the town of Williamsburg, Point Pleasant and Fort Clinton, O.; in 1797 constructed road through the wilderness from Williamsburgh to the State Capital, Chillicothe, afterwards part of the national post road; in 1780 was engaged in a fight with the Indians on what is now the levee on Front St., before Cincinnati was settled; in 1786 served in the campaign against the Mac-o-chee Indians referred to in Journal; served in the War of 1812; died in the house on Lawrence St., March 17, 1831. This house, known as the Lytle house, erected by General Lytle in 1809, is still standing in Lytle Park, now the property of the city of Cincinnati.

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