Sketches, Biographical and Incidental

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1857 Excerpt: ... BIOGEAPHICAL SKETCHES. (c)ttoag Cnrtj. OTWAY CUKBY was born March 26, 1804, on a farm which has since given place to the village of Green, field, Highland county, Ohio. His father--Col. James Curry--was a man of great bravery and patriotism. In his youth he was, with some Virginia troops, in a bloody engagement near the mouth of the Kanawha, on which occasion he was severely wounded. During the greater part of the Revolutionary war, he was an officer of the Virginia Continental Line; he was at tbe battles of Germantown and Monmouth, and was taken prisoner when the American army, under General Lincoln, surrendered to the British at Charleston, S. C. For fourteen months subsequently, he was on parole two miles distant from that city. He must have been one of the earliest pioneers of Ohio. In 1811 he removed from Highland county, and settled on Darby creek, near the village of Pleasant Valley, in the county of Union, where he held many important civil offices, the duties of which he faithfully discharged. He devoted himself chiefly to agriculture, and he was doubtless a man of strong common sense, indus trious habits, and honorable character. He died in 1834. The poet's mother was a lady of much intelligence, tender sensibilities, and every social and domestic virtue. 11 Otway was a child of the wilderness--a situation not unsuitable to awaken imagination, to cultivate taste, and to call forth the love' of nature and the spirit of poesy. The approach of the bear, the rattle of the snake, the whoop of the savage, were among the sources of his early fears. To observe the swallow build her nest in the barn, and to watch the deer bounding through the bushes, were among his early amusements; to mark when the dog-wood blossoms, and when the north winds blow, to o.