SETH PEASE (1764-1819)
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Seth Pease, born in 1764, one of Joseph Pease’s eleven children, played an important role as surveyor of the Western Reserve lands in Ohio and participated in important expeditions which helped open up these lands for settlement. Field notes, journals, and correspondence made by Pease provide today’s historians with details of these journeys which took place in 1796 and 1797. With Moses Cleveland, also of Connecticut, and one of the eight original purchasers of part of The Western Reserve, he laid out the city of Cleveland, Ohio, named in honor of the latter. Seth Pease was graduated from Yale College where he had excelled in math, thus preparing him for his career as a surveyor. In 1785 he taught an evening school in Suffield, and with his brother, Royal, ran a sawmill here between 1785 and 1798. Following his Western Reserve trips, he conducted a fur business with Israel Spencer in 1801, handling mink, otter, marten, muskrat, and red and grey fox skins. Their accounts show they bought and sold furs, extending their trade as far as Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and into New York state. During Jefferson’s first term as President, Pease served as the first Assistant U.S. Postmaster General under another Suffield native, Gideon Granger, Jr. Taken ill suddenly in Philadelphia in August, 1819, he died there at the age of fifty-five. |
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