LEGEND OF SANDUSKY
by EDWARD PINKOWSKI
CHAIRMAN, SADOWSKI MEMORIAL COMMITTEEFor Dee Lewis Graber, a Texas electrical engineer, the naming of Sandusky, Ohio, is wrapped up in a family legend. Ever since he can remember, and for seven generations before him, his kith and kin have connected the name of the city on Lake Erie to their Polish ancestor, Anthony Sadowski, who traded with the Indians in that section in the first quarter of the 1700s. They don't buy any other version of the place name.
According to family tradition, the first Sadowski in America was murdered by Indians at his trading post on the shores of Lake Erie, where he traded blankets, guns, powder, knives, and trinkets from England and rum from Jamaica for animal skins. The Indians killed him by mistake. Some white traders had taken advantage of a few Indians in northern Ohio, and, seeking revenge, the victims attacked the next fur trader who entered their domain, not recognizing at the time that other Indians had friendly relations with him. They regretted that they killed him and in order to atone for it named a body of water in his honor, and two settlements on its banks took the same name. As the places grew, the more modern names, Lake Sandusky, Upper and Lower Sandusky, were gradually adopted.
So, at least, the fourth generation told the story, years later, to their children and passed on souvenirs of the past, and the succeeding generations, later still, added tasty morsels of information. The trouble with repeating traditions from one generation to the next is that little pieces of history slip through the cracks. Someone usually has a tendency is to skip a generation or two, thereby pushing one or two facts into the background and eventually discarding them altogether.
So well did some of the generations alter the tradition that most of them didn't know until 1966 that the namesake of Sandusky, Ohio, died April 22, 1736, on his farm at Douglassville, first known as Manatawny, where he settled in 1712, about fifty miles up the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia. He was buried in the nearby graveyard of St. Gabriel's Episcopal Church.
The publication of my pamphlet, Anthony Sadowski: Polish Pioneer, the dedication of a historical roadside marker Sept. 18, 1966, and the unveiling of a memorial on his grave April 20, 1969, the tercentennial anniversary of his birth in Poland, opened new avenues of research for descendants of the first Sadowski, and as a result of their efforts, filling partly a gap in my account of 26 years ago, more is known about the Polish pioneer who roamed deep into Indian country in the 1700s to trade English goods for animal skins.
NEW DISCOVERY
In the manuscript department of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the researchers led by the late Mrs. Sue E. (Gooch) Watkins, a Sadowski descendant, were rewarded with a tasty chunk of Sadowski's life in the pages of James Logan's Account Book, 1712-1720. Prior to their discovery few records of Sadowski's activities as an Indian trader were unearthed. He had an account with Captain John Bowne, a merchant at Matawan, New Jersey, before he moved to Pennsylvania, but it was vague, no details. Logan, however, listed the number, type, weight, and price of animal skins Sadowski hauled to his warehouses in Philadelphia and what goods, including rum and molasses, he bought at his store on Second Street, not far from the warehouses along the Delaware River. Not all of these accounts are fully explored in Mrs. Watkins' work, The Sandusky Story, which can be rented for $3 from the Mormons in Salt Lake City and seen at any of their family research branches, but certainly we all benefit from the fact that she tied her Polish heritage to an important figure much overlooked in colonial history. As a matter of fact, in his account book, Logan called Sadowski "the Polander of Manatawny."
The Scotch-Irishman and the Pole had a lot in common. Before he came to Pennsylvania as William Penn's secretary in 1699, Logan, the son of a Latin instructor, taught school in Bristol, England, as Sadowski apparently had in Edinburgh, Scotland. Both men had a scholarly aptitude for languages and mathematics. Logan learned Greek and Latin from his father and a little bit of Hebrew. Later he learned French and Italian, more Hebrew, and some Spanish, without the help of schoolmasters. It is said that Sadowski could speak seven languages. French was probably the key to their relationship and Sadowski was destined to become the kind of trader Logan needed to deal directly with the Indians in areas where Frenchmen had a stranglehold on the fur trade.
FUR TRADE
As secretary of the Pennsylvania Provincial Council from 1701 to 1717, Logan saw the advantages of winning the friendship of Indians and bargaining for the rights to their hunting grounds, then turning them over to white settlers. In addition to his official duties, he invested in land and engaged in the fur trade. He piled peltry on his sloop to satisfy a large demand for furs in England and brought back strouds, blankets, poplin, beads, and gun powder from London, laces, shoebuckles, saddles, saws, nails, and other hardware from Bristol, rum, sugar, and molasses from Barbadoes, and cod from Newfoundland. By 1715 Logan had a long list of Indian traders from Pennsylvania and Ohio dealing with him and he envisioned the time when his fur trade, already a monopoly in Pennsylvania, would spread to the portages, trading posts, and forts from Montreal to the Mississippi.
Call it a start if you will, but at least his account book establishes a timetable for one of the achievements in Sadowski's career as a fur trader. Much more can be culled from Logan's book. Family tradition marks the place in Ohio where he traded strouds and rum for animal skins. Thus, in two swings of the bat, the account book and the legend have batted down the claim that Sandusky is an Indian word. The knockout was probably made by a French cartographer, Gilliame de l'Isle, who, in 1718, listed the place name for the first time on a map titled "Louisiane."
Graber, who picked up the family genealogy where Mrs. Watkins left off, studied the Frenchman's map in a book, The Cartography of North America 1500-1800, by Pier Luigi Portinaro and Franco Knirsch. "I noticed that the little bay area on the south edge of Lake Erie was hand-labeled 'Lac Sandofke,' he wrote. "The hand lettering is small and fuzzy enough that the letter 'o' could be 'ou' or a 'u.' The apparent 'f' is most likely the old way of script-writing an 's' (as in the 'purfuit of happiness' phrase in the Declaration of Independence). The nasal sound of the Polish 'd' in Sadowski often caused an 'n' to appear in front of the letter in Anglicized pronounciations."
It stands to reason that, unless someone turns up evidence that the Indians were using the name before the first Sadowski entered Ohio, the only thing Indian about it is that Indians applied the name in memory of a Polish fur trader the same as an Indian chief assumed the name of Logan. The spelling is not Sadowski's fault.
From: "Meet Antoni Sadowski," Polish American World, April 3, 1992