Pioneer Mennonite Communities / 63

end) of the church were arranged lengthwise facing the pulpit. These seats had backs. The benches running across the rear of the building had no backs. All the seats were made of poplar lumber. There was no platform; but a high` pulpit desk, probably twelve feet long, extended across the church in front of the preacher's bench. These were the usual furnishings and arrangement of the frontier Mennonite churches."

Moving westward still further, Mennonites located also in Wood County. Here families by the name of Wisler, Tyson, Pletcher, Kisser, Legron, Bachman, Boyer, and Brandt settled." Some of these families came from eastern Pennsylvania, others from the more recent settlements in Ohio. Purchases of land took place as early as 1835. Henry Pletcher, son of Jacob and Elizabeth Pletcher, served the Wood County Mennonite congregation as minister. Henry Tyson served as deacon. No resident bishop is known to have been in charge of the church, though Bishop Jacob Nold of Columbiana County, Ohio, was one of a number of bishops who served communion.

The Wood County Mennonite community was a regular stopping place for Mennonites moving westward and for those going "back east" to visit their relatives or to return to their former communities. According to John Umble: When John Thut, later bishop of Zion congregation near Bluffton, Ohio, moved

his family west in three-horse wagons from Holmes County to Allen County, he stopped at all the intervening Mennonite communities, Ashland, Seneca, and Wood. When Mumaws, moving from Elkhart County, Indiana, back to Wayne County, Ohio, stopped at these settlements, they drove through in a spring wagon."

The church building in Wood County was erected from hewn logs. The deed which conveyed the church building to the trustees (Christian Risser, David Tyson, and Henry Echilbarger) dates in March of 1856 and specifies that the Mennonite Church should own the property "so long as the house shall be used as a house of public worship" and that it should "be open to any denomination to preach funeral sermons but not to be opened to other denominations for common preaching except by permission of the trustees."'" There is reason to believe that the building was erected before it was transferred to the trustees. There was a custom in the early days for a church member, often the minister, to build a church house on his land for the local congregation and at a later date deed it to the congregation.