05/09/2024
Elizabeth Shown Mills posted a photo that reminded me of something I posted in a group last year. Thought it was worth reposting.
Most pre-1801 white settlers in Fairfield County Ohio were in fact squatters as land could only be purchased at auction in the eastern states prior to the opening of the land offices in 1801. If your ancestor was a squatter, don't think poorly of him. Credit him with his ingenuity and determination.
In the early nineteenth century, conservatives regarded squatters as contemptuous of property rights, intruders on Indian lands, and non-taxpaying freeloaders; they were "trespassers, land pirates, wrong doers."
On the other hand, in 1841, Senator Alexander Anderson of Tennessee praised squatters as the poor, the industrious, the enterprising, the great producing classes of the community.
Senator Oliver H. Smith of Indiana exhorted: "This is not the class of men from whom danger is to be apprehended. These are honest, hardworking, industrious men, who support themselves and families by the sweat of their brows; men who attend to their own business. When you see a foreigner take his family into the Western country, settle down on a piece of wild land, commence his little improvement, surrounded and aided by his wife and children, you may rest satisfied that you have nothing to fear from him; he is of the useful class of foreigners that ultimately become our best citizens." The squatter is "a warm friend, a kind neighbor, ever hospitable to strangers, and, still better, an honest man.
(from [The Register of the Kentucky Historical ](https://www.jstor.org/journal/regikenthistsoci)Society [Vol. 75, No. 3, July 1977](https://www.jstor.org/stable/i23378715) The Green River Pioneers: Squatters, Soldiers, and Speculators)
Published continuously since 1903, the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society is among the oldest historical journals in the United States and continues to...
