Beecher, Lyman & Sarah Wheeler

Lyman Beecher: Early Settler, Shoemaker, War of 1812 Veteran

Birth: December 18, 1791, West Haven, New Haven County, Connecticut
Death: September 11, 1857, Vienna, Trumbull County, Ohio
Burial: Vienna Township Cemetery, Vienna, Trumbull County, Ohio
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Military Service: unknown

Sarah ("Sally") A. Wheeler Beecher: Early Settler

Birth: November 8, 1794, Southbury, New Haven County, Connecticut
Death: July 4, 1851, Vienna, Trumbull County, Ohio
Burial: Vienna Township Cemetery, Vienna, Trumbull County, Ohio
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Lyman Beecher and Sarah A. Wheeler were married on January 10, 1813, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Family Biography*

From "Genealogy of a Branch of the Beecher Family," compiled by Reuben Beecher Hughes (1898), and genealogy compiled by Harold Robinson (1976-1978):

BEECHER FAMILY FOUNDED IN VIENNA, OHIO, 1816.

A branch of the Beecher family of Connecticut was founded on the Western Reserve in Vienna, Ohio, by Lyman Beecher and his wife Sally A. Wheeler when they emigrated, with two small sons, from Southbury, Connecticut, in 1816.

This was known as, "the year of no summer" in New England for it was abnormally cold and they suffered killing frosts in each of the twelve months of that year. The crops that survived were very poor and food was very scarce.

Lyman Beecher was a veteran of the War of 1812. He may have seen service in the Ohio country. He was twenty-five and his wife Sally was twenty-two when they set out for Ohio. They had been married three years. They settled in the south-western corner of the township of Vienna, near a place called "Methodist Corners", so named since the first Methodist church in Vienna was located there on what is now known as the corner of Prindle-Booth road and the Smith-Stewart road. Some family tradition has it that Lyman and Sally traded their yoke of oxen and the covered wagon, which had brought them from Connecticut, for the land on which they settled. I hasten to add, Lyman was a shoemaker by trade - not a farmer as was his brother Ransom, but if there was any one talent that was passed on from generation to generation, the Beecher History indicates that it was music.

They are buried in Vienna township cemetery, Lot 56, old part. Weathered white marble slabs mark their graves. Lyman was a veteran of the War of 1812. They were the parents of 3 sons first and then 7 daughters - spoken of by family and friends as the 'Seven Beecher Sisters'.

Descendants

Daughter Mary Elvira Beecher (born June 18, 1820, Vienna), was married to Ira. E. Lincoln, in Nauvoo, Illinois. They were married by Heber C. Kimball, an early leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). See: Susan Ward Easton, comp., Marriages in the Nauvoo Region, 1838-1845 (n.p: n.d.), page 7.