Lake County Ohio GenWeb

Martin Wirt
1760-1815

From A Record of the Revolutionary Soldiers buried in Lake County, Ohio, New Connecticut Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution, Painesville, Ohio, 1902.

Typed and submitted by Becky Falin, 1996.

Born in Germany and emigrating to this country at the age of seven years, Martin Wirt came at a time when the custom prevailed of selling out the passengers for payment of the passage money. He landed in Philadelphia, and was sold for a term of nine years, but at the end of seven years the purchaser died and Wirt was released. This occurred about the time of the opening of the Revolutionary War, so he must have been close to fifteen when he enlisted as a teamster in the army.

The only battle he is said to have witnesses was that of Brandywine.

At the close of the war he located on the Schuylkill river at Reading. He married Catherine Homan. They moved over the Allegheny mountains to Horseshoe Bottom, Fallowfield township, on the Monongahela river, twenty-two miles above Pittsburg. Here they lived twenty-eight years, four daughters and three sons being born to them.

About 1806, two of his sons, Jacob and Samuel, went out into the "Indian Country" to look for a home.

They located some land in Hiram, Portage County, Ohio, and lived there during parts of three years. In 1808 they went back to the old home for their father.

He came into Ohio with them and purchased a farm and mill on the Chagrin river, owned by David Abbott. He was a man of quiet, unobtrusive mien, upright in all his dealings.

He died in July 1815, and was buried on a spur of the hill north of the river, in an old burying ground in Willoughby, Ohio.