Henry Runyan
The only pioneer outpost in this direction which seems to have been occupied as a regular station-house was Henry Runyan's, about a mile and a half north of Reading. Mr. Olden says: "Near the spring, east of the Dayton turnpike, stood the old station-house." Mr. Runyan was a Virginian, but emigrated from Kentucky, where he had lived since 1784, and had there been married to Mrs. Mary Bush, of Bourbon county. Upon two land warrants, May 9, 1790, he located the west half of section nineteen, the northernmost section of that number in the township, being fourteen miles from the Ohio, and then a long way back in the wilderness. It is believed that he did not move upon the tract within the period required by Symmes' contracts, and that he consequently forfeited a little over fifty-three acres in the northeast corner of it. He soon, however, put up his cabin and made a clearing, and in 1792, according to his son Isaac, who is still surviving at a very advanced age, he removed permanently to the place. Mr. Olden thus presents some of the recollections of Isaac Runyan:
Mr. Runyan remembers the first school-house in the neighborhood. It was built of buckeye logs, and stood in the field south of Mr. John Rick's present residence. It was a rude cabin, with the ground for a floor. The benches were made of slabs, with wooden pins for legs. A few openings were left in the sides of the cabin, which, being covered with greased paper, served for windows. There Mr. Runyan took his first lesson in Dilworth's speller and reader.
The first religious meetings were held in the woods, where the people seated themselves on logs or on the ground, as they found most convenient. The first preacher that came to the settlement was a Mr. Cobb. The men dressed in the hunting-shirt and knee-breeches, and the women wore the petticoat and short gown, all made of linsey-woolsey, or homespun cloth.
The principal sports or recreation among the men were had at the log-rollings and cabin and barn-raisings, and consisted chiefly in wrestling, jumping, pitching quoits and target-shooting. Spinning and sewing-parties, apple-bees and corn-huskings, after the country had been settled a few years, were frequent, where not only the young of both sexes, but often the old and middle-aged, were brought together, when, after completing the work which the company had been invited to perform and partaking of a bountiful supper, they all joined and spent the remainder of the evening, and often the entire night, in plays and dances that formed the social glee. The dance consisted of
"Nae cotillion brent new frae France,"
but the genuine old Virginia reel. And those who joined in the dance paid the fiddler, whose charges were fixed and well established at a h'penny bit, or six and one-fourth cents, a reel.
No trouble is known to have occurred with the savages at Runyan's station.
From: History of Hamilton Co., Ohio; Compiled by: Henry A. Ford, A.M. and Mrs. Kate B. Ford; Publisher: L. A. Williams, 1881