Dr. Brice Blair
Dr. Brice Blair is the son of Brice and Agnes Blair, and is the youngest of a family of fourteen children. He and his wife were both born in Bedford County, Pennsylvania,--he, Jan. 22, 1813; she, Jan. 14, 1814. They have twelve children,--John, Edmund, Nancy Ann, Martin VanBuren, Mary Lucinda, Nathan Perdew, Sarah Jane, Brice, William Francis, Elizabeth, Clarissa, and James Hamilton. Mrs. Blair was Rebecca Perdew, daughter of John and Mary Perdew. Dr. Blair's father died when Brice was an infant; but his mother, who was a very industrious woman, with the assistance of the older children, managed the farm of two hundred acres in a mountainous district, and kept the family together until her death, which occurred when Brice was seventeen years old. He then lived with a brother two years, when he received his share of his mother's estate ($200), with which he bought one hundred acres of wild land in Muskingum County, Ohio. He was then nineteen, and the girl he loved, Rebecca Perdew, was eighteen. After some deliberation they were married, and in the fall of 1831, removed to their new home in the woods, where they built a cabin of poles, 12 feet by 16 feet, in which they lived the first year. For more than twenty years they cheerfully toiled, enduring all the hardships incident to pioneer life, when, having well improved their hundred acres and added seventy acres more, in 1854 they sold out and came to Allen County, where they bought three hundred acres; over one hundred acres of which were cleared. Dr. Blair said that on his farm of one hundred and seventy acres in Muskingum County, his "boys hadn't room," so he brought all his family to Allen County and started afresh. He thus relates how he was induced to study medicine: "In clearing out the wild lands along the Tuscarawas bottoms, we were subjected to frequent attacks of bilious intermittent fever. One fall my wife and I both lay sick four weeks, and as the doctor had to ride ten miles to see us we had a pretty good bill to pay. But I put about as much more with it and bought a number of medical books and went to studying physic. At first it was hard work, but by perseverance I finally attained at least an honorable degree of skill in the healing art." By the influence of a pious mother he was early in life impressed with the great truths of the Christian religion, and in 1840 he joined the Methodist Church. His wife joined soon after. The Doctor says: "I have always tried to live peaceably with all men. I never would go to law, and never was sued at law but once."
From 1875 Historical Atlas of Allen County, Ohio, by H. H. Hardesty & Co. Publishers, Chicago.