Excerpts from "History of Salem County, New Jersey" by Joseph H. Sickler, Western Migration...... Many reasons for the western migration....."In the fall and late summer of 1798, the city of Philadelphia was swept by an epidemic of yellow fever. Disease, death, and pestilence stalked at will through the desolate national metropolis and hundreds of citizens fled to the suburbs of the city for relief against the plague. Many accounts of fugitives coming as far south and west as this county (Salem) will be found in the records." Other events leading to the great western migration was "all the damage which the war had left hung heavily over the heads of the local citizens. Added to this, the 1790's found them unable to wrest even a meagre living from the ground. The soil had been exhausted but they did not know this. Neither did they know the fertilizing value of marl, which lay at their very door. With the foreclosure of mortgages, with famine stalking their thresholds, the farmers of Salem, harassed and worried, did exactly what so many of their comrades in other counties of the state did, they moved west.............The tide was first directed towards western NY and western PA. As the Indians fled westward, the hardier pioneers penetrated to the forests of Ohio in the very start of the winning of the west. Thus, it was that Salem, Ohio, was founded in 1803 by Zadock Street of Salem, NJ. "The ones who came from here (Salem Co) remembered the town which gave them birth to the extent that Salem, Ohio; Salem, Indiana; Salem, Iowa; and the state capital of Oregon owe their names to Fenwick's colony on the Delaware." Interesting.......Regards, Joan