| Notes |
- Von Hof Erbert or Hofferbert Family History
by Florence Hofferbert Brenneman
A letter of Margaret Weaver Morris, (date and recipient unknown)
“We started for our new home October 2, 1832, with a yoke of oxens, a team of horses and a cow, which we had no trouble with for she followed the oxens. We had very little trouble from my father’s home to Bellefontaine as the path or road was wide enough for our wagons, but o the mud was deep, or so we thought then. We were told there was a good road cut through the forest to a small place called Lima, northwest of Bellefontaine, but this was not so. There was a path most of the way, but only wide enough for a horse or one man to walk through. We spent many days, and yes weeks, cutting down trees and dragging them out of the way, and then the mud was hub deep. It was bitter cold before we reached Lima. And when we did reach Lima we were a little disappointed, it was nothing but swamp. There were four families and a bachelor living in Lima. We met them all, they came cutting into the forest to meet us. I guess they were as glad to see us as we were to see them. I’ll never forget them. I was so afraid they would be the last white people I would see for a long time as my husband wanted to go north till he found good land. Their names were, Mr. and Mrs. John P. Mitchell, Mr. and Mrs. Absalom Brown, Mr. and Mrs. John P. Cole, Dr. and Mrs. William Cunningham, Mr. John Brewster and a baby girl, daughter of the Brown’s. Of all that we had to go through I believe the hardest for me was to leave Lima, not because it was beautiful, but because of the people. Maybe I should write something in this letter about Lima, I have already told you about the people, so I’ll tell you about the corn mill that was there. It was a stump of a big trees center burned out and a log attached to the end of a young sapling bent over to act as a pestle. It worked alright but it took a day, from sunrise to sunset to convert a bushel of corn into samp. There was no newspaper, no inlet or outlet either by rail or earth. There was one small creek, where Indians had learned to raise hogs and drove the hogs to the creek to water each day and so the Indians called it Keshko sepe, meaning hog river and the white men called it Hog Creek. That was Lima, Ohio. We tried to find a path cut through to the north but they told us there wasn’t any, that no one but Indians were north of Lima and their paths went in from some other way. There was a family that went west of Lima that same year and settled on something that sounded like sugar creek. But my husband wasn’t going west, he was going north, so we came north. I knew we did not come straight north as some of the trees were too big for us to cut so we went around them. But the road we cut was traveled by many a settler and is still being used as a road. It was winter when we finally reached a ridge of good farming land. We staked off 160 acres of this government land on the ridge and paid $1.25 per acre for it. We built a house 16 ft. square out of poles and my husband chink and daub the house. We built a fire in one end of it, allowing the smoke to go out of the house through the cracks and crevices. The door was also the window, as it grew colder, much below zero, my husband fashioned a door of poles, and made hinges of hides. We lived this way for a year. We then built a log cabin with puncheon floor, and a square hole with paper pasted over it for a window. This was equal to the finest home in these parts.
We brought three barrels of flour with us which lasted a year, with corn meal. We had plenty of wild meat, such as deer and turkey, and we gathered wild berries. But I remember one winter, I think it was in 1834 as George was just a baby, we were without bread for four months, as the nearest place we could get grinding done was Cherokee, in Logan county, or Sidney in Shelby county. But we had plenty of pumpkins and squashes and a few potatoes. My husband worked hard clearing the ridge and as soon as we would get a spot cleared we would plant it. The country was beautiful here, but I did get lonesome for other people. My husband, Henry, was born in Kentucky, the son of Joseph and Lavina, and he knew nothing but fighting the Indians or making friends with them and clearing forest. He was a small boy when he came to Ohio with his father but he remembers it so clearly and how he worked with his father to cut a road from the Ohio River to Oldtown and then to their homestead near South Charleston, Ohio.
O, the joy I felt when one day Henry was out hunting for meat for our dinner and he was east on the ridge and he thought he saw a piece of white cloth blowing in the wind through the trees. He went very quickly to see what it could be and discovered we had neighbors. After almost four years of loneliness we had neighbors. Their name was Turner and they had taken up a homestead a few miles to the east of us. They were as glad to see us as we were to see them. A few days after this our first little girl was born and we named her Elizabeth.” [7]
- Margaret Weaver Morris
Margaret, daughter to Elizabeth Hempleman Weaver and George Weaver, was born May 11, 1812 and died September 7, 1891. She was married to Henry Morris in August, 1832. Henry Morris was born in Bracken County, Kentucky, on April 14, 1806, and died January 8, 1877.
To this union were born ten children: George, Elizabeth, Levina, Joseph, Sarah, Henry, Mary, John, Ellen and Catherine.
[3]
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1812 - 1891 (79 years)
[3, 4, 5] 
: Address
: Location
: City/Town
: County/Shire
: State/Province
: Country
: Not Set
