While my father was in the army, mother would weave cloth, etc., for the other soldiers wives, while they work and tend her garden in turn, etc., I remember as young as I was, seeing the old grey-headed men come round to see that all was well, for every able bodied man had gone to the front to prevent the Indians coming into our neighborhood. When my father returned, it was about day light. He had lost a thumb in the last battle and it was very painful. That fall he lost his second crop of corn by early freeze and the next fall, 1815 he lost his third crop. I remember the latter. The whole country was a stench in our nostrils and we could taste it in our mouths. My father was a Methodist and his Circuit Rider advised him to go to "Indiana territory". On his recommendation he started in the fall of 1815, in company with Baldwin Clark and family. They purchased a flat boat at Weaver twelve miles below Pittsburg, on the Ohio and when all was ready we were all marched down to the river. My father and others united in singing and prayer committing themselves and their families to their kind Heavenly Father's care while on the river, and journeying to their new homes. On our way down the river we stopped at several places. At Cincinnati, we stopped over the Sabbath. There was no wharf there then. Under the high bank was a steam saw-mill and when running the steam would escape. It looked to me twenty five feet high and would whistle like one of the old fashioned hunter's horn. There George Short took passage with his "kit" of tools. He was a wheelwright and all our old farmers will testify to his good spinning wheels. He settled up on Walnut street out of town and ever after it was called "Georgetown".

There was no landing then made at Madison. The original sycamore, cottonwood and willow trees were standing under and on the high bank; these grew out into the river, especially the cottonwoods. Col. John Paul had cut the trees from the front of his house, now belonging to the heirs of Mr. Abram Todd. Our first citizens erected houses on the second or high river bank and when Walnut, Main, Mulberry and West streets were graded, it left the houses above the street and nearly worthless, for instance, Robert Craig's and Alois Bachman.