Person:Joel Higley (6)

BIOGRAPHY: Major Joel Higley, Jr., the eldest son of Lieutenant Joel, 1st, and Eunice (Haskin) Higley, was born in Simsbury, Conn. (That division which is now Granby), July 31, 1764. He married Cynthia Phelps, May 25, 1785, and settled adjacent to the place of his birth. Here they lived eighteen years. The second Saboth in March, 1785, just before his marriage, he united with the church at North Granby on profession of his faith. The records show that he filled his place in life to good purpose. Among other town appointments, he was surveyor of highways in 1795. In military matters he held a commission as major, belonging to the Connecticut State troops. It is not known that he was in any of the wars of his time.

  In the year 1803 he emigrated with his family of seven children, accompanied by his parents and their family, to Gallia County (now Meigs County), Ohio, and settled near the present site of the town of Rutland. He was no doubt incited to take this important step through letters written by his cousin, Judge Brewster Higley, 4th, who had removed from Vermont, and here founded a home in the spring of 1799. The country at that time was one deep, dark, tangled wilderness, where mother nature lay almost undisturbed. Ohio had only just then become a state. Major Joel Higley's family of growing children grew with the growth and progress of the new State they had entered, and became real specimens of the strong, honest men and women whose sinew and brow-sweat developed this large area of farm lands with the industrial and commercial resources of this noble section of our country. He died April 26, 1823. Major Joel Higley, Jr., and his wife Cynthia Phelps, had seven children, all of whom were born in Granby, Conn.