Excerpt from Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in Wood County and the Maumee Valley: A Pioneer Scrap Book The purpose of this book is to preserve to the people of Wood county and the Maumee Valley some of the historic facts and interesting incidents of its early days and to present them in an entertaining and readable form. The plan of making it scrap-book-fashion originated with my father and an outline of the work had been arranged by him and left - an unfinished task. The further preparation and compilation was then entrusted to the trained hand of Mr. F. J. Oblinger, who has, with pains-taking care, from a mass of manuscript, notes, clippings and other material, condensed the gleanings of a life time into these pages. I am also under obligations to Mr. John E. Gunckel, of Toledo, for his kindness in permitting the use of a number of cuts from his "Early History of the Maumee Valley." The publication I have undertaken, personally, as a memorial to my father, from whose pen most of the articles have come. Some are now in print for the first time, while others have appeared during his years of active newspaper work. My father's labors in this direction were purely out of love for the work. All history appealed to him, but the early struggles of Wood county pioneers was a chapter so replete with tragic interest, so tinged with romance, so filled with human endeavor and its achievement that it called forth his highest admiration. It seemed fitting, therefore, that the final effort of his life should have been a record of these events and with this thought in mind and the grateful encouragement and friendly interest extended by his old associates, both personally and as members of the Pioneer and Historical societies, I have ventured to complete the work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.