PIONEER TEACHERS OF
THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY
FIRST SCHOOL IN HAMILTON COUNTY
John Riley (also spelled Reily) a Revolutionary War soldier originally from North Carolina, taught the first school in Hamilton County (second county established in Ohio). Riley opened his school on June 21, 1790 and took as his associate, in 1791, another Revolutionary and Indian war soldier, Francis Dunlevy, a young man of such determination that despite the hard- ships of military life, he made time for study, acquired a classical education and fitted himself, in general, for what developed into highly important and distinguished service. Both Riley and Dunlevy had come to Columbia (now part of Cincinnati, Ohio, then the earliest settlement in Hamilton County) with the original group of 18 or 20 pioneers who arrived November 18, 1788 and laid out their village on the Ohio River, just below the mouth of the Little Miami. Dunlevy later became a member from Hamilton County of the first constitutional convention, was elected a member of the first Ohio Legislature in 1803 and when the state judiciary was organized, he was appointed pre- siding judge of the first circuit. It is said that Judge Dunlevy was responsible for a very candid letter to Thomas Jefferson (then president of the U. S .) which removed General Arthur St. Clair from the governorship of the North- west Territory and established General William Henry Harrison in his place. Dunlevy undoubtedly deserves that all these fine things be stated about him—but not in "Women of Ohio” unless there happened to be a lady in the case. There was. Her name, before she married her first husband, James Carpenter, of New Jersey, was MARY CRAIG, born on the voyage of her parents from Scotland to America, in 1765. Mary had brave part, at her first home, Elizabethtown, N. J . , in the Revolutionary War. She is said to have been highly skillful in “running” bullets for the Continental soldiers and equally so in nursing the wounded, comforting the dying. Mary was exactly the sort of person, when her husband suggested accompanying the first party setting out for the Symmes purchase, at the mouth of the Little Miami, to reply “Certainly, why not?” And when Carpenter succumbed to the hard labor of clearing and build- ing their pioneer home, Mary was the sort of woman that knew how to carry on. There were children, of course. Two of them. Her cabin was outside of the blockhouse but she insisted on remaining there. She had dug a small cavern beneath the puncheon floor of her home. By lifting a loose piece of the flooring, she could hide the children. She managed a sort of bed for
