Waitstill Hastings’ excess was a success in Knox County

MOUNT VERNON — In the early days of this column, I wrote about a disaster largely caused by the sloppiness of an early Knox County native, Lansford Hastings.

Lansford had many successes in his life, including serving for a spell as the postmaster for the village of Oberlin, Ohio. One very definite failure, though, was his guidebook to travelers in the far west, which included the suggestion of a path which led over the Sierra Nevada mountains into California.

A wagon train led by the Donner party would not have left a positive Yelp review for that shortcut.

But how did Lansford come to be born in Knox County? Well, that has everything to do with his restless father, ironically named Waitstill Hastings, for it seemed the one thing Waitstill was unable to do was wait and be still.

He was born in Hatfield, Massachusetts, to a distinguished family, which included doctors and judges, that descended from one of the pilgrim passengers of the ship the Mayflower.

His peculiar name was one of those old Puritan names designed to inspire good behavior, like “Felicity,” “Hope,” or “Temperance.”

Some of those names are still popular, but “Waitstill” isn’t one of them, probably last appearing prominently in the name of the Unitarian minister Waitstill Hastings Sharp (1902-1983), the great-great-grandson of our Waitstill, who is remembered for his humanitarian activities during World War II.

The name had been held by a grandfather in the early 1700s, and our Waitstill was named after him.

After his father, the Honorable John Hastings I, passed away in 1811, Waitstill, who had already done a little adventuring in what was then the western part of the U.S. (meaning Pennsylvania and Ohio), decided to relocate to Ohio, where his skills as a trained physician would be in demand.

Waitstill and his wife Lucinda, whom he had married on one of his Pennsylvania stays, moved to Huron, on the Lake Erie shore, in 1812.

Feeling that this was a vulnerable place to be located with the War of 1812 brewing between the U.S. and England, however, the Hastings family (which by this time included six children), moved south to the growing community of Mount Vernon.

At least two more children were to come, including Lansford in 1819. In Knox County, the family felt safer from the Indian raids, which were happening from Mansfield and northwest.

In addition to serving as a prominent early physician in Mount Vernon, Waitstill very much involved himself in local business and politics.

He ran a newspaper ad in 1814 requesting that all patients pay for services he had rendered to them by Christmas time. His first run for state senate, in 1816, was unsuccessful, even though he was nominated by the local militia.

It’s likely that he lost because he was little known outside of Knox County.

But his subsequent bid to be named county coroner was successful, and thus he became the county’s certifier of mortalities.

He still had his eyes set higher, though, and ran for election as state representative in 1818.

According to an article in the Jan. 2, 1818, issue of The Western Spy & Literary Cadet, an early state newspaper out of Cincinnati, Hastings won the election, but the result was subsequently declared void because Hastings already held the elected post of coroner.

Today, politicians frequently leap from office to office, resigning from the previous post, but apparently that wasn’t allowed in the early years of this state.

Having gone from no success to too much success in politics, Hastings decided to leave Mount Vernon and return north to Erie County in 1819, where he settled down and served as a doctor for many years, as well as the postmaster for the village of Groton, just southwest of Sandusky.

The Hatfield Historical Society in Hatfield, Massachusetts, holds a remarkable document in its archive: It’s a letter that Waitstill Hastings wrote to his sister Mary Wait, who had never left the family hometown of Hatfield, in 1843.

In it, Waitstill — who was 72 years old at the time —told her the story about how one of his medical customers suddenly departed town and headed for Michigan without paying Dr. Hastings for his services.

Unlike modern doctors, physicians of the early 1800s were not well paid, so when a family skipped town, it was a desperately serious issue.

Thus, the old man climbed up on his horse and started tracking the offenders west and then north, asking questions at small towns along the way to keep on the right path. He eventually caught up with the family in Monroe, Michigan, about 100 miles away from the doctor’s home in Groton.

He demanded, and received, his fee. At least the fleeing farmer felt bad enough about the lengths that the old man had gone to in order to track him down, he also threw in an extra $10 to cover the doctor’s travel expenses.

Even this amount was barely sufficient. Hastings closes his letter by asking if he could borrow some money from his sister!

Alas, I was unable to find any surviving portrait of this colorful forefather of the Ohio frontier.

But we can at least honor him by remembering his adventures in early Knox County history.