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Twenty-five years before the first white settlers arrived, a Russian nobleman rode through the land of forest, hills, rivers and swamps that was to become Richland County.

His real name was Baron Gustavus H. de Rosenthal, but at that point in his life he was going by the name of John Rose. He appeared in America “during the gloomy winter of Valley Forge” (1777-1778) as Gustavus H. Henderson , vainly seeking an officer’s commission in the Continental Army. His grandson later reported that the baron had been forced to leave his native land after killing a man in a duel.

He first served as a surgeon’s mate in Pennsylvania but attracted the patronage of Gen. William Irvine and rose to the rank of lieutenant, then captain, then major. At some point he became John Rose and an aide-de-camp to the general, who was commanding the Western Department at Pittsburgh when he sent Rose in 1782 to accompany Col. William Crawford on his march to the Sandusky Plains.

So the major was not alone in his trek across the Ohio Country.  Some 500 soldiers were assembled in at what is now Mingo Junction, Jefferson County, Ohio, charged with quelling hostile Indians who had aligned with the British. Some of those soldiers would die, and Crawford was captured by the Indians and burned at the stake.

But Maj. John Rose survived to write a report of the campaign to Gen. Irvine. His daily journal, a copy of which was eventually donated by his family to the Pennsylvania Archives, was published in 1894 in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. It contains the earliest known reference to Helltown, the Munsee Delaware village on the banks of the Clear Fork, the site now at the western tip of Pleasant Hill Lake in Worthington Township.

Here is his account of June 1, 1782, eight days after the expedition began:

“Immediately after crossing this middle Fork (of White Woman’s Creek or the Walhonding River), the road takes Westerly and is very broken, hilly, & full of disagreeable thickets. After passing a small Bottom, we ascended a ridge full of fallen timber several miles long running between N.W. and due north. The distance from the middle to the third fork (Clear Fork) of White woman’s creek, which is thought the main branch is here about 5 miles. After crossing it, you crawl upon an uneven road beset with thickets along the slating side of a hill for near 1 Mile, which ends in a beautiful Bottom & continues 1½  miles to Hell Town, which on account of the pleasantness of its situation rather deserves the name of the Elysian fields. Hell Town lies upon the Banks of this third fork of White Woman’s Creek, which we recrossed at the Town, entered a beautiful Bottom, where we halted to form & consult – the discovering of a large Indian trail to our Right occasioned the sending out of reconnoitering parties. These detected 2 Indians who were fired at 3 times but they made their escape. This unexpected alarm moved us to form in Line of Battle… everybody facing outwards.

“Immediately after Col. Crawford called here a Council of all his field officers & Captains. He was moved to this step, he said by the murmuring of the party communicated to him and by finding the evening before that upon a particular enquiry some Men were reduced to 5 lbs. of Flour & that the generality did not exceed 10 days provisions. He represented that as we had been discovered since the 28^th May, the enemy would have sufficient time to collect all their forces to Sandusky. …

“If they did relinquish that design of proceeding to Sandusky, these frequent & larger Indian trails to the North did certainly indicate to his opinion an Indian Settlement. They would follow them & could not fail of meeting with success. Mr. Zaines our pilot who was called upon, confirmed that he knew there had been half ways to Sandusky about 30 Miles from this place a Town called D^TH Town (sic). That it lay about 10 Miles to the North east from the common Road to Sandusky. That they could not take off from the Road on the Beach ridge, opposite that place, to get to it; but that they ought to quit the beaten path here, & follow the Trail to our Right –

“But the opinion of the council was against receding from the first proposed plan, and determined to go to Sandusky. Accordingly we took up our Line of march, crossed a run, marched 9 miles through a variable country along a path quite blind, & only recognizable by the Blazes in the trees. We encamped this night on the midle fork (Rocky Fork) of White-woman’s Creek .”

It sounds as if the Clear Fork was Crawford’s Rubicon of sorts since on its banks he made the decision to continue the route of his expedition to Sandusky and his fate.

It is interesting to note that the existence and name of Indian village of Helltown seemed to be well known to the Pennsylvania soldiers, or at least their officers, in 1782. Rosenthal’s comments that the idyllic location better suited the name of Elysian fields indicates he may have taken the name literally rather than a German adaption of “clear stream town,” probably thanks to Moravian missionaries.  That the Indian village continued to be called Helltown, with all its connotations, but the stream came to be called Clear Fork probably reflects white prejudice.

White settlers in the Clear Fork Valley had time between 1809 and 1812 to hear stories about Helltown from their Indian neighbors, and these stories were written down in 1880 and 1908 county histories. It was told that the Indians there abandoned the village after hearing about the March 1782 massacre by American militiamen of the Christian Indians at the Moravian village Gnadenhutten in Tuscarawas County.  It was written that at least some of those Indians then founded Greentown in a more defensible place about four miles to the northeast on the Rocky Fork. Other pioneer stories indicate, however, that the Helltown site continued to be used as a hunting camp up until the Greentown Indians were removed in 1812.

So, did Rosenthal and the Pennsylvania militiamen find a temporarily or permanently abandoned village on June 1, 1782? Unfortunately, the terrain is described but not evidence of human habitation, but if there was no evidence, how was the exact location noted? Dr James P. Henderson, who settled in nearby Newville in the 1830s, wrote, “As to how many huts and wigwams stood originally in this 'Old Plum Orchard,' as it was sometimes called, tradition is silent. When first seen by the writer, there were but three cabins standing, old and dilapidated, without chimney, floor, door, window, or roof, and one of the corners broken down. Depressions in the neighboring grounds, however, were supposed to have been the sites of other buildings.”

It was a pretty narrow window of time between March and June to move a couple hundred people from one village and establish another,  so  it’s possible but  unlikely that Greentown existed when some 500 soldiers and their horses went trudging  very closely by on their way up the Black Fork  toward the Sandusky plains.

Baron Rosenthal’s journal continues his description of this journey, the attack of the Delaware Indians, the killing of Crawford and others and then the successful retreat of most of the troops back along much the same route to Mingo Junction on the Ohio River by June 13 – a Thursday, not a Friday.

He wrote that 40 to 50 men had been killed or disappeared in the wilderness and 28 wounded and left in retreat. In other papers donated to the Pennsylvania Archives by his family, he commented extensively on how the expedition could have been better handled, including that the body of troops, horses and supplies was too large and their route too predictable not to have set up an alarm among all Indian villages along the way. Perhaps this was an additional reason why they found Helltown empty except for a couple of scouts.

In the spring of 1784, Maj. John Rose or Baron Gustavus H. de Rosenthal returned to Russian, forgiven by his family and presumably by authorities. Although he wrote of his intent to visit the United States again and his mentor, Gen. Irvine, he never returned. But he also sent for the badge and ribbon of the Society of Cincinnatus, whose members were former officers in the Revolutionary War. It seems Czar Alexander wanted him to wear it.

The Baron died in Russia in 1830, the same year Dr. Henderson arrived in Newville and a time when the Richland County was being well populated with settlers from the east. One of them, Henderson said, was Col. Solomon Gladden, who confirmed that Crawford and his party passed through Helltown. He had heard it from “Capt. Nunn, his uncle, who was an officer in the expedition.”  A Capt. Munn is noted in the baron’s journal, and a James Munn is listed in the Pennsylvania Archves as a captain the militia during this period

Almost all the Indians, however, were long gone in 1830, transported westward.  Henderson, who avidly collected native artifacts, wrote in the 1870s: "In and about Helltown many Indian relies, ancient and more modern, have been found, such as arrow and spear heads, pipes of stone, pottery and copper, a stone drinking cup, copper lancets, leaden bullets, a scalping-knife, fragments of gun-barrels and brass mountings of gun-stocks, etc. Many of the graves have been opened, as they were superficial and easily dug into, but, so far as informed, nothing but bones more or less decayed were found and exhumed.

“It may be added, that the site of Helltown, with its graves, has for years been part and parcel of a cultivated field, and when last seen, early last summer, the ripening wheat was waving over the former habitations of the departed and the dead."

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SOURCES:

“Journal of a Volunteer Expedition to Sandusky,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. XVIII, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1894, pp 128-157, 293-328

“History of Richland County, Ohio,” Graham, 1880

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Wednesday, July 01, 2009