Jesse Hunt
Jesse Hunt lived in Lawrenceburgh, Indiana, and brought up a family of sons and daughters - useful and respected citizens. The survivors have left the neighborhood, and the aged father and mother are buffed near Lawrenceburgh. Thomas and Jacob Hunt always lived at the old homestead, and accumulated a large estate. They were members and liberal supporters of the Presbyterian church. Thomas Hunt served the church faithfully in the office of a ruling elder for over twenty years. The Presbyterian meeting-house and parsonage in Elizabethtown are monuments of their liberality and Christian lives. Edward Hunt, still surviving at the age of eighty-one years, was educated for mercantile business in the city of Cincinnati, and has been in active business, farming and merchandising, until laid aside by the infirmities of age. He has been actively engaged in the Sabbath-school work, and in laboring for the advancement of religion in the township for over fifty years. In 1830 he married Miss Ann Hughes, eldest daughter of Ezekiel Hughes, esq., and their children - Thomas, Jacob, and Mary, who married Joseph Cilley, esq. - are living in the neighborhood, highly esteemed and useful citizens. George W. Haire, esq., of Elizabethtown, is a son of Susan Hunt. He has been in public life, as a magistrate, a county surveyor and engineer, and for many years superintendent of Sunday-schools, and an elder in the Presbyterian church. Another son, Rev. I. P. Haire, graduated at Miami university, Oxford, Ohio, and Union Theological seminary, New York, and is now settled in Janesville, Wisconsin. L. H. Bonham, esq., son of Charlotte Hunt and John Bonham, also graduated at the Miami university, was principal of a well known and useful female seminary at St. Louis, Missouri, for many years, and now devotes his time to cultivating a model farm near Oxford, raising fine stock, and with his facile pen is giving the agricultural world the benefit of his experience in cultivating the soil.
Another son, Rev. John Bonham, graduated at Miami university and Lane Theological seminary, is now the faithful pastor of a Baptist church in Kansas. William Rees, an estimable citizen Of Elizabethtown, and an elder in the Presbyterian church, is a son of May, the eldest daughter of Edward and Charlotte Hunt. [Some further notice of Mr. Haire is given below.]
Of the squatters who became purchasers of land and remained permanent settlers, John Bonham and his family deserve special remembrance. He was a native of Somerset county, New Jersey, and in early life left in 1792 to seek his fortune in the new country towards the setting sun. He spent two years at Red Stone, Old Fort, Pennsylvania, and thence came down the Monongahela and the Ohio in a fiat-boat to North Bend, in 1794. He and his family were religious and members of the Baptist church. In all the years of their pioneer life they were careful to maintain their Christian life and family religion, as the lives of their children fully testified. Their sons --John and Aaron were men of real worth and standing in society, and, after serving God and their generation, have passed away. A daughter, Mrs. Rhoda Noble, now in her eighty-seventh year, is living, closing a long, happy and useful life at the residence of Amelius Francis, esq., her son-in-law, at Harrison, Ohio.
From History of Hamilton County, Ohio, Henry & Kate Ford, L. A. Williams & Co., Publishers, 1881