By Heidi Durig Heiby

The church bell clanged and muskets thundered. My eldest sister picked me up and rushed outside our farmhouse. Her gasping breaths dampened my cheek as she ran toward the town square. My other sister and our mother… caught up to us when we slowed. We met my father and older brothers near the Congregational Church. Huddled into small groups, normally sedate people shouted their confusion… The selectmen appeared, stood on the top of the stairs, and called for silence. One of them read the Declaration of Independence.[1]

This is an excerpt from the opening paragraph of the first of four books of historical fiction by Trana Mathews about storied Ohio country pioneer, Dr. Increase Mathews. The author is the great-great-great granddaughter of Dr. Mathews and based her novels on extensive historical research and his diaries. Here, a three-and-a-half-year-old Increase Mathews illustrates his very first memory. The place was his birthplace, New Braintree, Massachusetts, sixty miles from Boston, and the date was early July 1776. After the announcement of the signing of the Declaration and battles to come with the British, Increase’s father, 2 uncles, his 14-year-old brother, and a brother-in-law, as well as many of the townsmen, enlisted to serve in the war to establish the independence of the American colonies, leaving his mother and siblings and many families in a similar situation. The last sentences of that first chapter read, “The men picked up their muskets and packs, then left us behind. Their departure changed our lives.”[2] It was a time of hardship, sacrifice, and loss that was formative for young Increase, also instilling in him a love of his fledgling country and a duty to it, his family, and his countrymen. He would later follow his maternal uncle, General Rufus Putnam, into the Northwest Territory, more specifically the Ohio country that was not yet a state, to plot and settle a little town on the Muskingum River across from Zanesville they called Springfield. It was later re-named “Putnam” after his famous uncle in 1814, and then incorporated into the city of Zanesville in 1847.

Increase spent the early years of his childhood helping his mother and remaining siblings on the family farm and with their lumber mill in Massachusetts until his father and brother returned from war. Naturally bright, enterprising, and hard-working, “Ink,” as those closest to him referred to him, wanted more than to be a millwright like his father. At age 16 he took a college class and began to apprentice a local doctor, Dr. Field. Although he did finish his studies and work as a doctor in New Braintree briefly, his uncle Rufus Putnam, who had become a Brigadier General in the Continental Army and an appointee of George Washington, convinced him to travel west to the Ohio country in 1798, at age 24, to see the vast land and opportunity available there. General Putnam was one of the settlers of Marietta, Ohio, the first European-American permanent United States settlement in the Northwest Territory, and a proponent of land grants for veterans; he was also the first Surveyor General of the United States.[3] After a trip to visit his Uncle Rufus and two of his siblings who had already moved there, Increase was convinced. He returned home to Massachusetts, married Abigail “Nabby” Willis in 1799, saved up enough money to buy land, and returned to the Ohio country with Nabby and their infant daughter to start a new life in the fall of 1800. The journey from New Braintree would have been an arduous one and took two months by Conestoga wagon.

After wintering in Marietta, Increase moved his family, and he and his brother, John, a surveyor, built the first general store on a small parcel of land near pioneer John McIntire’s cabin in Zanesville in the spring of 1801; it also served as the first drugstore. Increase practiced medicine as well, the first physician in the area, and his practice extended as far as Coshocton and Lancaster. That year, the government was offering tracts of land in Springfield, later Putnam, for sale in Marietta. Increase, after having traveled and camped with his neighbor, John McIntire, on the way there, outbid him for the tract with the backing of Uncle Rufus Putnam and cousin Levi Whipple. Increase and his brother, John, began plotting what is now Putnam immediately after the purchase. Nabby died after the birth of their second daughter in the spring of 1802, and Increase remarried the following year. He and his second wife, Betsey, had 8 children together for a total of 10.[4] The sandstone house Increase built for his growing family in Putnam in 1805 is now considered the oldest building still standing in Muskingum County. The Increase Mathews House remains a history museum and local history education center.

Home of Dt. Increase Mathews at 304 Woodlawn Ave. The Mathews home originally consisted of the first floor, and basement.

Increase eventually stopped practicing medicine when other doctors moved into the area so that he could focus on his family, farming, and other endeavors. He did, however, inoculate his family against smallpox during an outbreak in 1809, in a time when most people did not understand or trust such a practice, and his family remained untouched; he had learned about inoculation from Dr. Field in Massachusetts. Dr. Increase was one of 5 original members of the first church organized in the county, a Congregational Church, and one of a committee in Putnam that organized and had the historic Putnam Presbyterian Church built and dedicated in 1835.[5] He also built the first grist mill and was the first to have full-blooded Merino sheep shipped to Ohio from Spain via Washington D.C. Zanesville and Putnam became thriving river towns, each in their own right, Ohio having become a state in 1802. When Zanesville and Putnam were both vying to become the state capitol, Dr. Matthews was instrumental in the building of the Stone Academy building as a potential statehouse in 1809. Zanesville won out and was the capitol of Ohio from 1810-1812. The Stone Academy became a school, public building, and important center of abolitionist activity in the 1830s and was eventually converted to a private residence. The Stone Academy also remains a local history center and museum.

Dr. Increase Mathews lived his entire life in his house in Putnam with his family. His granddaughter eventually added two stories to the original house. In his article, “The Pioneer Physicians of the Muskingum County,” in the Ohio Archeology and Historical Quarterly, Edmund Cone Brush, in 1891, said of Increase Mathews: “He was a cultivated gentleman of the old school, a man whose energy and character were felt in his day and are still exemplified in his descendants. He was an accomplished performer on the violincello, an entertaining and instructive conversationalist. His life was characterized by its simplicity and purity. He died June 6, 1856, full of years and with the high esteem of all his fellow townsmen, in the eighty-fourth year of his age, and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, which was part of his original purchase from the government in 1801.”[6]

[1] Mathews, Trana. The Mathews Family: Mathews Family Sag, Book 1. 2020, 1.

[2] Ibid., 3.

[3] Neu, Irene D. “Rufus Putnam Biography.” Last updated October 23, 2023. https://library.marietta.edu/oca/PutnamRufus.

[4] Everhart, J.F., and J.J. Graham. The History of Muskingum County Ohio. Dalcassian Publishing Company, 1882, 72-73.

[5] Schneider, Norris F. The Doctor Increase Mathews House. 1975, 8-10.

[6] Brush, Edmund Cone. “The Pioneer Physicians of the Muskingum Valley.” Ohio Archeology and Historical Quarterly Volume 3, edited by Albert A. Graham. 1891, 252-254.

Brush, Edmund Cone. “The Pioneer Physicians of the Muskingum Valley.” Ohio Archeology and Historical Quarterly, Volume 3, edited by Albert A. Graham. 1891.
Everhart, J.F., and J.J. Graham. The History of Muskingum County Ohio. Dalcassian Publishing Company, 1882.
Mathews, Trana. The Mathews Family: Mathews Family Sag, Book 1. 2020.
Neu, Irene D. “Rufus Putnam Biography.” Last updated October 23, 2023. https://library.marietta.edu/oca/PutnamRufus.
Schneider, Norris F. The Doctor Increase Mathews House. 1975.