Ezekiel Hughes
Ezekiel Hughes was born August 22, 1767, on a farm called Cromcarnedd Uchaf, Llanbryormair, North Wales, on which his ancestors had lived for over two hundred years. He emigrated to this country in 1795. He sailed from Bristol on the ship "Maria," and landed in Philadelphia after a perilous and tedious voyage of thirteen weeks. His cousin, Edward Bebb the father of the late William Bebb, Ex-governor of Ohio, accompanied him. They left Philadelphia in 1796, traveled on foot to Red Stone, Old Fort, Pennsylvania, on the Monongahela river, thence by flat-boat to Fort Washington, where Cincinnati now stands. In a journal which he kept, several interesting facts are preserved: "After three days and nights floating on the Ohio, we reached Marietta at the mouth of the Muskingum river, and called on General Rufus Rutnam, the present register, seemingly a worthy character. He gave us plats of the land. We spent three days exploring the purchase, but were not satisfied, so we left on a flat-boat bound for Limestone (Maysville Kentucky). The passage down the Ohio is safe - plenty of hills and narrow bottoms. The heavier the cargo, the faster the boat will float. The Ohio receives many tributaries but does not increase much in width. We reached Cincinnati and applied to Judge Symmes, who is the register and chief proprietor of this purchase, for plats. We spent three weeks traversing the five lower ranges and saw most of the land unsold. I bought one hundred acres, northeast corner of section thirty-four, second fractional township, and first range for two dollars and a quarter an acre. [this was in Colerain township, nearly opposite New Baltimore]. My object in buying this, was to wait till the land west of the Miami would be surveyed and ready for sale, and that I might examine the land and make a good selection." He writes in 1797 "that boats go by here almost every day with provisions for the army at Greenville. The boatmen say that the Miami is navigable one hundred miles. Their crafts are long sharp keel-boats with a board fixed on each side to walk on, having long poles with iron sockets. They stand at the bow, fix these poles in the bottom of the river and push. By the middle of May, 1798, our corn and potatoes are planted in the clearing, and now we are clearing for a turnip patch. When we first came here, six months ago, we had two neighbors within three miles on one side and six miles on the other. Now a person from New Jersey has built a cabin within a hundred yards of ours. He is a very devout and religious man, and a minister of the gospel has already visited us and held a meeting" [the first public religious service ever held in Colerain township]. Mr. Hughes, and his cousin, Edward Bebb, lived on this tract of land for four years, when Mr. Bebb bought land in Dry fork, Butler county, where his son William, afterward governor of Ohio, was, in 1802, the first white child born in Morgan township, and Mr. Hughes commenced life on his well chosen and valuable tract of land, on which a squatter, Stephen Goble, had made some improvement, for which Mr. Hughes paid the adventurous pioneer a fair compensation.
In 1803 Mr. Hughes returned to Wales and married Miss Margaret Bebb, and in 1804, with his chosen companion, a lady of great worth, every way a helpmate for an adventurous pioneer in the wilds of the new commonwealth of Ohio, returned to make a home on the valuable tract of land he had already purchased. In 1806 Mr. Hughes suffered a great bereavement in the death of his excellent wife. Her remains were interred in the first grave opened in what is now the Berea cemetery. In 1808 Mr. Hughes married Miss Mary, the daughter of Thomas and Mary Ann Ewing, of Northumberland county, Pennsylvania, who had settled on an adjoining section in 1805.
There lie before me two commissions appointing Mr. Hughes to discharge important public duties, signed by Governor Edward Tiffin, the first governor of the State of Ohio - one appointing him a justice of the peace (the first in the township), signed October 7, 1804; the other appoints him as one of the three commissioners to lay out a road from Hamilton, in the county of Butler, to the mouth of the Great Miami river, and this was signed January 28, 1806. In 1808 Mr. Hughes was appointed, with two others, to select a school section in place of the sixteenth section in this township, which was sold before Congress passed the law appropriating the sixteenth section in each township for school purposes. This commission selected an unoccupied section in the adjoining township of Crosby. Tile choice indicated good judgment and an honest purpose to benefit the generations to follow. Mr. Hughes, with his foresight and desire to, under the Government, grant a great advantage to the cause of popular education in the township, opposed for many years the sale of it, until in 1846 it was sold for twenty-five thousand dollars and the proceeds invested according to law in Ohio six per cent. bonds, so that now the schools of the township realize an income of fifteen hundred dollars per annum.
In early times Mr. Hughes leased several portions of his land, and thus promoted the settlement of the township. He was a generous and upright proprietor, and always treated his tenants with kindness and liberality. Descended from a godly ancestry, in mature life he became an avowed disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, and united with the Congregational church at Paddy's Run, Butler county, in 1803, and with his wife in 1830, when the Presbyterian church of Elizabethtown and Berea was organized, he united with this society and remained a faithful member until his death, in 1849, in the eighty-second year of his age.
From History of Hamilton County, Ohio, Henry & Kate Ford, L. A. Williams & Co., Publishers, 1881