Many children came and settled the land with their parents. John Woodbridge was born in Connecticut in 1785 and came to Marietta with his parents, Lucy and Dudley Woodbridge, and four of his six siblings in 1789.(1)  When General Moses Cleaveland reached the eastern border of the Western Reserve on July 4, 1796, his group of 52 included 2 women and several children.(2)  While the increase in population was due in part to migration, many of Ohio's early inhabitants were children born in the territory in the first few decades of settlement. By 1850, only 1.3 percent of the population was over 70 years of age, 58 percent was between 40 and 10 years of age and 30 percent was under 10 years of age.(3)

Men's presence as settlers is recorded in numerous public documents and, although their presence is not as well documented, women also came in considerable numbers. Three months after the arrival of the original 48 (male) settlers in Marietta, 10 women were living there with their families, among whom could have been Elizabeth Putnam, the daughter of General Rufus Putnam, who came before 1790.(4)  Claridon Township in Geauga County reported a ratio of 125 men to 100 women in 1820.(5)  The minimum marrying age was 17 for men and 14 for women, providing the latter obtained parental consent.(6)  Large families were frequent and childbearing dangerous even though such obstetric practices as the first successful cesarean operation to be reported to the American medical press was achieved by John Lambert Richmond of Newton, Ohio, in 1827.(7)  These factors combined with hard work made the average settler's life expectancy short: 36 for women and 34 for men.(8)

Infant mortality was high with as many as 25 percent dying before age 1 and 25 percent of the remaining population dying before age 20.(9)  However, Ohio physician Daniel Drake reported that dangerous infections of the throat and lungs that afflicted children were not generally any different than on the East Coast.(10)  The same illnesses affected children such as cholera, croup, measles, whooping-cough, influenza, smallpox, scarlet fever, dysentery and typhoid pneumonia. Although Drake considered tuberculosis to be less frequent in Ohio, the "remitting and intermitting ague" (malaria) was a dreaded ill of both adults and children living near waterways.(11)

School was neither mandatory nor available to many. Not until 1821 did the first Ohio school law authorize, but did not require, the organizing of public support for schools.(12)  Many poor children did not attend and, until the 1840s, it was illegal for African American and mixed-race children to attend public schools.(13)  Most students of common, or elementary, schools did not progress beyond this point until private secondary schools emerged, the first of which was chartered in Elyria in 1830.(14)  Heman Ely, the son of Justin and Ruth White Ely of West Springfield, Massachusetts, was true to his New England roots and, upon laying out Elyria, assigned lots for a school-house and a church and, subsequently, provided land for the building of a high school.(15)

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(1) Adrienne Elizabeth Saint-Pierre, "Clothing and Clothing Textiles in Ohio, Circa 1788 to 1835: A Study Based on Manuscript and Artifact Evidence" (Master's thesis, Wright State University, 1988), 31.
(2) Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720-1830 (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 197.
(3) Carl Frederich Wittke, ed., The History of the State of Ohio (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1942), vol. III, The Passing of the Frontier, 1825-1850, by Francis P. Weisenburger, 55.
(4) Hurt, 253. On Elizabeth "Betsey" Putnam, see Linda Hall, "Washington County History, History," Scioto.org, http://www.scioto.org/Washington/History/campus-martius.html (accessed August 28, 2003).
(5) Hurt, 253.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Weisenburger, 209.
(8) Hurt, 253.
(9) Ibid, 272.
(10) Carl Frederich Wittke, ed., The History of the State of Ohio (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1942), vol. II, The Frontier State, 1803-1825, by William Thomas Utter, 339.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Weisenburger, 165; George Knepper, Ohio and Its People (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989), 185.
(13) Andrew R. L. Cayton, Ohio: The History of a People (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), , 61; Hurt, 386.
(14) Knepper, 186-187.
(15) Ely, 75; Windsor Elementary School, "History of Elyria (1819-1830)," Windsor Elementary School (Elyria, Ohio), http://www.elyriaschools.k12.oh.us/windsor/news/1816-1818.html (accessed August 28, 2003).