DAVID: Oh,
technology.
ANDREW: We
are here in Manchester, Ohio with David Allen Piatt and he's about to give a
presentation about his Ohio ancestors, and here's David.
DAVID: Like
I said -- like Andrew said, we're here in Manchester Island. Actually, this is called Twin Islands
now. The islands came into the Piatt
family's possession after the Revolutionary War. They were given -- soldiers were given a
thousand acres and then some of the commanders were given more lake region stuff,
and so that's how this part of it's that we owned land on the Ohio side. The Piatt family was (indiscernible) in
Ohio. The Piatt family was in
Kentucky. As a matter fact, most of the Piatt's
were actually in Kentucky and farmed the fields and bottoms on the Kentucky
side of the river as much as they did over here. In this -- actually geographically, there was
not as much bottom ground on the Ohio side.
We had to go up on top of the hills to get up to where the flat was, in
Ohio. So this was a lot easier in
Kentucky to farm and get to the river for shipping and putting stuff on the
flat bottom boats and stuff.
The family lived here and had a --
pretty much a huge, big square, a three-story house that sat in the middle of
what was at the time a hundred and eighty acre, one big island and stuff. It was that way for years and years. The 1913 flood, some of the others had been
in the -- on the island and stuff, hadn't been around the house and
things. But the '37 flood, which was the
one that really, you know, affected the family the most was when the water came
up in '37, it came up quickly. It was in
January. It was a muddy, mar -- a mess,
everything, and they moved things, like they always did, to the second level so
if the river came up and got in the first level --well, then the water kept
coming so they ended up moving everything to the third level.
But when they would move things to the
third level, they evacuated the family and got the family and stuff out of here. And within just a few hours, the water was
already above the second level and then, finally it went into the third level
and then finally over the house, at 70-some feet through here in this area,
which the water was from mount -- hill to hill.
When the flood went down, the '37 flood
was over, the house had washed up -- the main home had washed away. The -- there were 13 cabins that the -- some
of the slaves that had been freed were -- still lived there with the family and
stuff on the island and helped take care and cooked and things like that. They were never treated as slaves. They were just -- they were there and were
allowed to stay. And some of them -- we
had talked about the Underground Railroad.
Some of them were actually from the Underground Railroad that just came
there and stayed on the island and helped farm and things like that. Kind of like a sharecropping version of what would
we call them today.
When the water went down, the island was
about half the size it was originally and it was two islands. It -- the -- it washed through the center of
it and stuff. There had always been a
gully there but it washed it two -- and now there's two separate islands in the
Ohio River. So that's pretty much what
you find today, is the two Twin Islands.
In 1978, the Department of -- well, the
state of Ohio first came in and approached the family about turning it over to
the state of Ohio. Being in -- on the
Ohio River, it was a Corps of Engineers kind of a thing where they kept having
to make the channel and blah blah blah.
So the state wanted the island, so the island ended up coming into the
hands of the state of Ohio. And then
soon after that, the federal government turned it into a national wildlife
preserve. So this is actually our
protected federal lands now where they -- for the bird sanctuaries and stuff
like that, that live on the island and stuff.
So pretty much the islands were in our
family until 1978, from the Revolutionary War times when they were granted to
some of the family.
Now, we're going to leave here and we're
going over to the Manchester Cemetery that's in the middle of town and we're
going to look at some of the Piatt family that's buried over on this side of
the river. There's also more family on
the Kentucky side. In the Ohio, there
was no requirement for marked graves, so there's actually several homesteads
that go off of the sides that we don't have marked graves on that we know where
the -- what they call the hearthstones, where some of the original cabins and
things were actually at. The stones have
survived. So there's some different
cabins and things around this area.
But the families were large
families. They had lots of kids to
manage and farm all this property. You
know, you're talking a horse and a mule and farming thousands of acres of
bottomland --
ANDREW: And
David, you mentioned that some of your ancestors had eighteen or twenty-one
kids?
DAVID: Right. Got my -- my grandfather was one of twenty-one,
and his dad was one of eighteen. Four
wives. They lost -- had been married and
lost four wives in childbirth, which was a pretty much common thing back in that
day. And then they just married somebody
else and started having more kids with the next wife and stuff. So my grandfather was actually -- he had
twenty-one brothers and sisters. He was
only related to three of them. But the
family farm outside of Vanceburg (phonetic) going Route 8 is still there where
Rick -- Don Piatt -- not the one from Ohio -- the Don Piatt that was my
grandfather's brother, immediate brother.
The family -- his family still lives in those houses over on the
Kentucky side of the river. Actually,
right now, I know six homes all the way down through St. Paul that were
actually originally Piatt homesteads that are all still there where these kids
got married, had families and built houses right there on the farms. So they owned everything for miles down the
river and there's a lot of that stuff still there.
ANDREW: I
see. Well, thank you. I'm moving down toward the river to take a
closer look at the other shoreline.
DAVID: This
is actually the narrow part of the river.
It's much wider on the other side.
It's fairly narrow between the two islands but it opens up far more on
the Kentucky side. And then before the
dams were built in the '50s, you could actually, most of the time, take a horse
and wagon right across to the island. So
it was quite easy to -- it's not like you had to cross all this water. Many, many times during the summers, the Ohio
River would be dry. There'd be no
navigation possible on the Ohio River because they weren't (phonetic)
anything. They built dams in the '20s
that brought up -- they could control some of the water level, but the bottom
line was most of the time, over on the Kentucky side you could just ride that
wagon right across for months during the summer and --
ANDREW: I
see.
DAVID: --
and there was no water. So…
ANDREW: I
see. Well, let's go to the cemetery.
(End of recording.)
I made this video to show connections between Henry M. Cist who was Donn Piatt's lawyer in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Underground Railroad was a close community who helped with the Abolitionist Movement. It makes sense to me that the Piatt family trusted Mr. Cist with there real estate holding and other personal legal concerns. Henry M. Cist and Donn Piatt and Lewis J. Cist made trips together to the opening of the Chicamaqua Battlefield Museum in Georgia. Lewis J. Cist used this time and personal connections to acquire many Civil War soldier's autograph and personal stories to preserve. This has been documented in the auction catalog from Bang's Co. in New York City in 1886-87 . My reference copy has all the hammered auction prices for each catalog.
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