Morris Schaff Locates Vanished Westerville Wetland

            You would be hard-pressed to find or even hear a bullfrog in modern Westerville.  If the time and temperature were right, you might still hear them at the Otterbein Pond, or at Inniswood Metropark.  But not routinely, not daily.  The wetlands that supported bull frogs from the end of the last Ice Age to the mid nineteenth century are gone now.  We can still read about them if you know where to look, and be willing to do a bit of sleuthing.  

Our story begins with a Civil War veteran of some repute, Morris Schaff.  Schaff (1840-1929) was a native of Kirkersville in Licking County on the old National Road (US 40).  Schaff attended Otterbein University during  the 1856-57 school year.  Changing gears, Schaff graduated from West Point in 1862, where he was trained as an ordnance officer.  It was dangerous work in wartime; he was sometimes sent to battlefields, Gettysburg and Spottsylvania among them, searching for unexploded ordnance.  Another duty was to inventory the Union Army’s growing munitions stockpile. But if dangerous, Schaff’s work brought him into contact with Union officers such as George Meade, Ambrose Burnside, and Ulysses S. Grant.

            Schaff resigned from the Army in 1869, married, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked in the munitions industry.   Later in life, he became an author of some still-respected books on the war, the Confederacy, and one on local spots, Etna and Kirkersville (1905).  As educated persons were at the time, he was a writer of letters.  That brings us back to Westerville, the bullfrogs, and the mushrats

            The Tan and Cardinal of March 2, 1926 had a page of alumni news, including an article headed, “Civil War Veteran Writes Interesting Letter to Editor.”  The letter, from Morris Schaff and written in the first person, is a discussion about whether the local creeks and streams were as high as they were in pioneer days.  I quote in part:

. . .  they are all dried up; runs in which I used to trap mushrats. . . . have all dried up sir, or have dwindled down to a mere thread.  So it is with Alum Creek. . . . She is a mere shimmering bit of moonshine of her former self.  Why dear sir, when I was a boy there was a swamp between the main road and Saum Hall wherein bull frogs abounded. . . . But the swamp and the bull frogs are all gone.

            A few words of explanation:  “Mushrat” was a common pronunciation of “muskrat” in nineteenth century America.  A “run” is another word for “creek.”  The “main road” he refers to was Main Street.  Saum Hall occupied the ground where the Courtright Memorial Library now stands.  Landmarks such as these are easily identified.  More elusive is the fate of the natural landscape.

            The 1920s were a time of nostalgia for the Civil War.  Veterans, who were so numerous and so politically powerful in the decades after the war, were beginning to die off.  The survivors, like Morris Schaff, were treasured as links to a more heroic past.  Otterbein benefitted from this state of affairs.  Morris Schaff gained a feather in his cap and notoriety; Otterbein shared in the notoriety and could use the Schaff name in publicity and fundraising. 

            But even as the veterans were “going home,” the more natural world of their youth was also vanishing.  The world was so different.  A pond in front of Saum Hall?  Saum Hall, which appears to have sat nearer to Grove Street than the Library does today, is only a memory, a memory I wish we could recover more fully.

For the archaeologist of the natural world, the letter quoted is invaluable for evidence of the past.  Morris Schaff and his letter is a roundabout link to a long vanished Westerville where the sounds of water and wildlife prevailed.  Whether this was a better world or just different is up to the reader to decide.

-Alan Borer

Morris Schaff [Wikipedia]