1841. But he had lived long enough to hold his little grandson, Benjamin Harrison, who was to become twenty-third president of the United States, on his knee.
After his death the William Henry Harrison home also burned to the ground and this is why the widow thereafter lived at the John Scott Harrison home. She had been regarded as “sickly” but she lived to the advanced age of 89 years, dying in 1864.
There is movement to restore the John Scott Harrison home and also to restore Ft. Finney, which had been built by order of the Continental Congress several years before the Columbia, Cincinnati and North Bend settlements were made, in order to repel if possible the fierce Shawnee Indians who had so retarded such settlement. Ft. Finney was on the same plot as the Harrison home. All trace of this fort is gone —but it was there, on January 31, 1786, that George Rogers Clark and two other Commissioners appointed by Congress concluded a peace treaty with the Shawnees and it was this treaty which encouraged Symmes and the other leaders in promoting settlement.
It is true that Symmes was sure there would be an adequate establishment of soldiery at North Bend. Nobody was more disgusted when, as matters turned out, Ft. Washington was established in “Losantiville” by the arrival on August 16, 1789 , of 140 soldiers, under Major John Doughty, from Ft. Harmar on the Muskingum. They began Ft. Washington by constructing four block houses. They were along the line of what is now Third Street, then called Hill Street, and they were between Broadway and Lawrence. The block houses formed the beginning of Ft. Washington, a fortification of hewn logs extending 180 feet in length and two stories in height. In the following November, 1789, Gen. Harmar marched in at the head of 300 men and took possession. Today, if you will walk a short distance over Third Street, eastwardly from Broadway, you will come to a memorial erected there and flanked by four cannon. It marks Ft. Washington and is within the boundaries of that historic barracks.
It seems that a very handsome young officer, Ensign Luce, had arrived at North Bend in March, 1789, with 18 soldiers, in answer to Symmes’ frantic appeals to General Harmar for protection of the Miami Purchase colonies. Ensign Luce built a small block house, pending, so Symmes thought, the arrival of the military in sufficient numbers to build a real fort.
So much is history.
Let us leave the records and dally, for a moment, with romance. There is an oft repeated story to the effect that the dashing young Ensign Luce was madly in love with the wife of one of the North Bend settlers. Friend husband became alarmed—but not to the point of rashness. He thought matters warranted removal of his home and helpmate to the safely distant—at that time—community of Losantiville. But — according to the story—our young Ensign was not thus to be foiled. He managed, it was rumored, to
