Levi Farnsworth

[dcgiesel at comcast.net]

Hello.  I am new to Farnsworth history and want to introduce myself.  My name is David Giesel, and I am from the Ashland, Ohio area.  I reside now in Chattanooga, TN.  Levi Farnsworth was my great, great, great grandfather, who was born around 1803 in New York and died in Sullivan, Ohio around 1875.  (I'm doing the dates from memory, so they're not exact.)  He is buried, along with many of his family, just outside Sullivan going East on US224 in a small cemetery on the North side of the road.  He was married to Bellona Hewitt, also of New York, and had several children.  One of his daughters married Ezra Freyman, son of Joel Freyman (1805-1900).  They had a son, William, who married Carrie Hart (d. 1958), my great grandmother whom I knew.  They had several children, one of whom was Harry Freyman, my grandfather.  His daughter, Ruby, is my mother.  My mother is still alive, but many of the other Freyman's are buried in the main cemetery as you come in to Sullivan from the south on S
R 58.  Joel Freyman, and many of his immediate family, are buried in the old German Reformed Church cemetery northeast of Homer.  

Levi Farnsworth was a Baptist minister, who apparently preached against slavery.  I recently came across a link on Google to a book held by the Oberlin College Library.  The book is about the trial and acquittal of several men from the Sullivan-Oberlin-Wellington area, who had hidden a runaway slave and were indicted.  The actual copy of the book held by Oberlin's library had been presented to Levi Farnsworth by his congregation.  The first page has a handwritten note to him, and so does the last page.  He is not mentioned in the book so far as I can tell.  I don't know how they came into possession of the book, but Levi also had another daughter, Lydia, who married Whitney Chamberlain.  They had a daughter, Cora (1860-1956), whom I also knew.  She had graduated from Oberlin College and left them part of her estate, so she could well have donated the book.  

Cora Chamberlain never married and when she died, she left her house in Sullivan to one of my aunts, who lived there with her husband for 46 years.  After my aunt and her husband died, my cousin, Larry Keillor of Ashland, was settling the estate and came across two old picture albums from the attic of that house.  There he found many pictures, mostly of the Chamberlains, but among them are pictures of Levi Farnsworth, Bellona Hewitt, Ezra Freyman and Cora and her sister when they were young girls.  

This is all I know of Levi Farnsworth.  Any other information will be greatly appreciated.

David Giesel
dcgiesel at comcast.net