Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

There are twenty-one townships in Clinton County. I’ve learned two things as a historian: 1- Some of them have more fascinating histories than others, and 2- You do not want to see the hate mail you get if you forget one of them when you list them all.

One of the more interesting ones, to me, is Keating Township. And, yeah, I am aware that there are two Keating Townships: East and West. This has always seemed pointless to me, what with about a population of about a dozen between them, but I understand how it happened. Keating, originally, was formed as one township in 1844, along with Grove township bordering it. Around 1860, Cameron County was struck off from Clinton, and this left the counties with two Grove Townships, in different counties, bordering one another. This was deemed too confusing, so the commissioners changed Grove to East Keating.

The townships were largely settled by escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad, who correctly figured that they were in a remote enough area where nobody would find them. George and Rachel Schmoke were some of these, and they had twenty-eight children, according to one census. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that both George and Rachel looked pretty exhausted a lot.

During the 1847 flood, in Keating, a log cabin belonging to Robert Lusk was swept down river. Ordinarily, this would be simply a matter of rebuilding, but in one of the logs, he’d been concealing a fortune in gold. Lusk had been saving for a rainy day, but the rainy day pretty much washed away all his gold. He chased the logs downstream, discovering as he went that they all looked pretty much the same.

(Yes. I wrote the preceding paragraph for no other reason than to justify that title.)

Both Keating Townships were named after John Keating, who’d been born in Ireland in 1760, but taken to France by his parents when he was five years old. He grew up to be an Irish officer in the army of King Louis XIV (pronounced KSI-vvvv) and was captured by the enemy army. He was sentenced to the guillotine, but escaped to Jamaica and then to Philadelphia, where he worked as an agent for the Ceres Company, a French mining company that owned 200,000 acres of land in Clinton, Potter, and Cameron Counties.

This is how his name came to be associated with the area, and given to the township. (Both of them.) Keating Summit and Keating Township in Potter County were also named after him, and Eulalia Township in Potter County was named after his daughter.

The wealthiest person from Keating Township was John Rohn, who married three times and was active in local businesses. He disappeared in April of 1899, last seen climbing a fence at the edge of his property, and then never seen again. He may be with Robert Lusk’s gold, for all I know.

One of Rohn’s wives (the second one) was a daughter of Seth Nelson, a panther hunter who just about deserves his own column. Nelson moved into an abandoned house after removing a couple of live panthers, founded the village of Nelsonville, and that pretty much set the tone for his exploits. During his lifetime, he claimed to be immortal, to have cast aside his rifle and taken on bears and panthers with his bare hands, to have been hit in the head with meteors but unhurt, and to have lost his sight but regained it through sheer willpower. Ironically, he never claimed to be the biggest tall-tale guy in the county. Probably that was assumed. Also, as he is currently buried in the Nelsonville Cemetery, the talk of him being immortal was probably somewhat inaccurate.

That’s a bit of an overview about both East and West Keating Townships. I hope you enjoyed it, and maybe learned something, but it’s time for me to quit writing now. I’m going to go look for Seth Nelson, John Rohn, and Lusk’s gold.