Time changes things. What was once regarded as heroic when it happened can look very different to a culture that has kept changing for more than two centuries.

  • North Lawn Cemetery is on Ohio 13 in Utica, just 100 feet from the Knox County line.

  • Captain Hughes was a veteran of Lord Dunsmore’s War, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the frontier Indian wars.

  • Captain Elias Hughes is buried in North Lawn Cemetery in Utica.

  • This is the approximate site of where Elias Hughes purportedly shot and killed two Native Americans in 1800 for allegedly stealing horses. This is near this dog kennel on the Overholt farm on Swan Road near Fredericktown.

  • Although Hughes’ 1844 stone is deteriorating with time and acid rain, a granite ground stone has been installed to preserve his information for the future.

Take the case of Captain Elias Hughes, the first settler of Licking County. His body rests today in the cemetery in Utica. His stone is vined with purslane.

When he passed away, Hughes was known as a massive hero of local history, and was known nationally as the last survivor of the Battle of Point Pleasant, a precursor to the Revolutionary War. He was a veteran of that conflict, too.

Perhaps most of all, though, Hughes was remembered as an Indian fighter. Today, his contempt of native lives is disturbing. But it was typical of the early American frontier period when settlers were aggressively rooting out Native Americans and putting them on reservations or forcing them to flee west.

While it doesn’t excuse his actions, Hughes did have personal reasons for his attitude. The conflicts between whites and natives was a war, and there were ruthless actions on both sides. According to Connelley and MacLean’s The Border Settlers of Northwestern Virginia 1768 to 1795, Hughes lost his father, brother, and fiancee in a surprise Indian raid in the 1780s.

In and out of military service throughout his life, the one continuous thread was that Hughes fought Indians all that time.

In 1797, Hughes settled near the Licking County/Knox County border, one of the very first white settlers tacking up permanent residence in these parts. As others came to the area, they all got to know Hughes, who was a major figure on the Ohio frontier.

A. Banning Norton’s 1862 history of Knox County recounts an interesting story, quite illustrative of the tone of those times.

Norton tells a story told to him by Richard Roberts, an early settler of Knox County. According to Norton, Roberts packed a large load of corn down to the grist mill in Newark on one occasion in the spring of 1800. Roberts did this because at that time, the only mill near him in Knox County — one that used to stand along Ohio 661 south of Mount Vernon — was too small to handle the job.

While at Newark, Roberts bumped into the famous Captain Hughes, who cheerfully announced that he was still busy fighting Indians.

Hughes told him that one recent morning in April of that year, he and his neighbor Jack Ratliff had discovered that the pen between their cabins, where they both kept their horses, was empty. Joined by another man named Bland, they began tracking the trail of the horse thieves northward, into Knox County.

They tracked all that day and slept in the woods along Owl Creek (the then-used translation of the Kokosing River) south of Fredericktown.

The men surprised two American Indians around dawn the following morning in the bottom lands of Mile Run, close to where it empties into the Kokosing. One of the Indians tried to apologize in broken English and swore that he’d never steal again. Hughes and company weren’t interested and shot them both dead with their rifles.

They buried them on the spot, took back their horses and also claimed the rest of the loot the natives had gathered on their excursion, and headed back to their cabins near Utica.

In 1835, William Mefford was clearing land on his farm along the Mile Run with the intention of building a house. As he began digging a foundation, he was surprised to dig up the bones of two Native Americans, which Norton implies had not entirely decayed, perhaps due to the clay soil of the bottom land.

Mefford had his helper George Conkie gather the bones and reburied them while Mefford went ahead with building the house on the chosen location.

Norton identifies the house as being “the old Peck place on Mile Run bottom, where Mrs. Acre now lives.” Census records and maps of the period do not feature a “Mrs. Acre,” though they do show a “Mrs. Robert A. Kerr” living along Mile Run.

If that is the house to which Norton was referring, it once stood along what is today a dead end known as Swan Road. The original house is gone, but comparing old and new maps, once could conjecture that it stood on or near the current outbuildings of the Overholt farm.

During the War of 1812, the British were able to provoke some of the remaining Indian tribes to fight against the Americans, but many refused, seeing that the fight was a futile one.

Captain Hughes came out of retirement to again serve in that war, finally retiring for good (other than local militia activity) in 1815. Hughes and his wife had a total of 16 children, three of whom served in the War of 1812 with him.

Hughes passed away at the age of 97 in 1844 and was buried with full military honors in North Lawn Cemetery, just over the Knox County line in Utica, on the west side of Ohio 13. It is not known where the bones of the Indians he shot were reburied.