Records show that John Cleves Symmes, whose name leads all the rest in establishment of the "Miami Purchase" second settlement in what is now Ohio, had three wives.
They were, of course, successive. Moreover, he certainly needed that many. No one woman, it is obvious after perusal of the history of this great colonization promoter, could ever have carried more than her third of a share of the attainments and disappointments of his tumultous career. Even so, their experience must at times have gotten them down. The first wife was Anna Tuthill, who died in 1776. She as well as her husband came from Long Island. She was the mother of all of his children. The second wife was Mrs. Mary (Henry) Halsey. John Cleves Symmes married Susan Livingston, his third wife, in 1804 at Vincennes, Indiana.
Symmes also had five daughters, one of them, at least, destined to share a career as eventful as her father’s and even more important, historically.
This was ANNA SYMMES, who became the wife of William Henry Harrison, later the ninth president of the United States. Of course nobody suspected that this would happen at the time of Anna’s marriage, least of all her father, who frankly “did not think much” of the young officer. Since young Harrison had already shown good mettle, this was unjust as well as short sighted. But this need not be gone into right now, Anna would probably not mind waiting, she must have been well trained to patience by her impetuous father, anyway.
For John Cleves Symmes was unquestionably an impatient man, a quick worker as well as a quick thinker. When Benjamin Stites— also a leading member of the Ohio settlement hall of fame — told Judge Symmes, then a member of the Continental Congress, living at Trenton, N. J. , of the fine forests and rich valleys he — Stites— had seen when he was in pursuit of some Indians north of the Ohio River, Symmes lost no time in perfecting plans for a big land company, to finance and direct settlement of two million acres of this virgin land.
Benjamin Stites, to whom also is due great honor as a settlement founder and developer, was a New Jersey trader. His occupation took him to the Kentucky settlements — earlier than those of Ohio —and on one of the trips, in the summer of 1786, he happened to have been near Limestone, (now Maysville) Ky. He joined in pursuit of some Indians who had stolen horses and it was this pursuit that gave him opportunity of viewing the fine expanse of country between the Little Miami and the Great Miami Rivers.
Stites hurried back to New Jersey—reached there early in 1787—told Judge Symmes what he had seen. Reports had already reached New Jersey of the petitions of the Ohio Company, which later culminated in settlement of Marietta, first in what later became the state, at the mouth of the Mus- kingum River.
