"The Sanders of Saundersville," by Harland Brent Sanders.
ISBN 978-1-60264-822-7 (softcover). $14.95. 252 pages.
Take a look at a detailed Ohio map and in western Gallia
County, you'll find a little dot labeled "Saundersville."
There it lies on the border between Gallia and Lawrence
Counties, just west of Mercerville. But take a drive to
Saundersville, and you will see nothing - nothing but
rolling hills covered by waist high grass and a lonely tree
or shrub here or there. This flourishing little village
populated with families of Sanders and Saunders was wiped
clean from the landscape but not from the map. The
destruction was so complete that, today, it looks like a
village was never there. The landscape is now so bizarre
that it resembles nothing in the surrounding area of
southern Ohio. Native grassland prairies exist in the
lands of Iowa and Nebraska, but not in Ohio. So what
happened to that little village in southern Ohio called
Saundersville? Saundersville was a tiny village founded
by three brothers, William Jesse, and Jacob Sanders, in
or about 1835. The brothers moved their families from
Virginia, taking a grueling journey across the Alleghany
Mountains using horse drawn wagons. Many descendants of
the Sanders brothers lived and farmed there in
Saundersville until the 1970s, when the land was bought
out and stripped of all of its familiar existence. This
is the story of what happened in between those two events
- the creation and destruction of Saundersville, and who
lived there and what they did there. This book is based
on documented historical facts about the history of
Saundersville and the people who lived there. The sources
of information presented here is wide and varied. Some
of it is by word of mouth, from parents, grandparents,
cousins, and friends. Some came from courthouse land
records, from the various censuses, from pictures, from
historical maps, from books and web sites, and from
personal journals and from written notes handed down from
my grandfathers. Where gaps in the records exist, I drew
from other authors who wrote historical, factual accounts
about people or relatives in similar situations in the
near vicinity. In this way, this story of Saundersville
can be told in a complete and historically accurate
manner. So who was the Sanders of Saundersville, and why
wasn't he the Saunders of Saundersville?
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