Bailey Guard
Bailey Guard, son of Alexander Guard was born in New Jersey. His child life was spent amid the scattered cabins surrounding the block-house at North Bend, where painted Indians, uniformed soldiers, and adventurous hunters filled his young mind with horror, amazement, and delight. When fifteen years of age, having spent most of these years cultivating the truck patches, fishing and hunting, he went to mill with two bushels of corn. His conveyance was a canoe paddled with his own arms down the Miami to the Ohio, then up the great river to the mouth of Mill creek to where Cuminsville now stands, where a corn cracking mill was found. The trip, and waiting for his grist required two days of toil and exposure. His school days were few and irregular, in which he mastered Dilworth's spelling book and learned to read his Bible. He was a man of good natural understanding and a true Christian. Under the preaching of Rev. W. Ellinger, an eminent Methodist pioneer herald of the cross, in 1809 Bailey Guard professed religion and made a public profession by uniting with the Methodist Episcopal church at Elizabethtown. Mr. Guard died on the 5th of June, 1869, at the advanced age of eighty-two years, and left a good name as a precious inheritance to his numerous descendants.
From History of Hamilton County, Ohio, Henry & Kate Ford, L. A. Williams & Co., Publishers, 1881