Reprinted from a Dec 10, 2006 column in the Morgantown Dominion Post
When I was about ten years old (around 1950) my great grandfather told me an interesting story that I remember to this day. Four or five times a year my family would drive from Johnstown, Pennsylvania to Markleysburg (near Huntington, PA) to visit "Grandpa Brumbaugh." Grandpa really wasn’t my "grandpa." He was my great grandfather and even at a young ten years, I knew that he was a neat guy. Big bushy gray eyebrows and outdoor stories that would capture your fancy at any age.
I remember him telling us that he took an all-day buggy ride just to see the footprint of a whitetailed deer. Boy have things changed. But the story I remember most was told as we hiked along an old trail in a state park near his home. Those hikes with Grandpa Brumbaugh were great adventures that my brothers and I looked forward to on our trips to his home. As we tired and sat on a log, a few gray squirrels scampered up and down some nearby oak trees. Grandpa Brumbaugh then told us about a buggy ride he’d taken with his young wife, in this same area, years before.
He told us about seeing hundreds, many hundreds of gray squirrels, moving through the woods. He called it a squirrel migration and said that they were so abundant that he had to get out of the buggy and hold the horse. Squirrels were so abundant that they literally climbed over the buggy and the migration lasted for over an hour.
I hadn’t thought about that story for many years until last week when my good friend and retired engineering professor, Bob Jenkins, send me an email about squirrels and squirrel hunters. Bob is interested in family history and in working on that, he came upon some interesting items.
It seems that in the early to mid 19th century, large squirrel hunts were held during these squirrel migrations. Farmers and others for miles around would grab up their muzzleloaders and gather together to shoot squirrels to help them get through the winters and to protect their crops. .
In 1962, during the Civil War, Governor Tod from Ohio, called together these "squirrel hunters" to rally and defend Cincinatti against another "gray horde", the Confederates. Apparently these "minute men" came by the thousands to defend the city. They were called "squirrel hunters" and became famous in that time for their actions. So, squirrel migrations led to much squirrel hunting, and the term "squirrel hunters" then was applied to the squirrel hunters who rallied to protect Cincinatti. Interesting history.
At Bob Jenkins suggestion I went to my Metacrawler search engine and typed in "squirrel migration" and found some neat stuff. It seems that before we timbered most of the eastern United States, there were huge squirrel migrations. They always occurred in September, and here is the probable reason for these migrations.
Gray squirrels do not cache their food. Instead they gather acorns and buy them in small holes in the ground. Then they lay low in very cold winter, only coming out on warmer days to dig up their acorns. But, if you had a bumper crop of acorns in one year, then reproduction the next spring would be high and squirrel numbers also high. Then if the acorns the next fall were in low supply, the squirrels would migrate fairly long distances, looking for food. There is no way to prove this, but that is what probably happened.
In 1807, Lewis, of Lewis and Clark, recorded huge numbers of squirrels swimming the Ohio River in September. In 1842, an estimated one-half billion squirrels migrated through Wisconsin for four weeks. There were other migrations reported, but after the timbering in the late 19th and early 20th century, such occurrences dwindled. However, in September of 1968, there was a migration on a smaller scale from Maine to North Carolina. A scientific paper published on this migration noted that squirrels were seen dead on highways and found swimming rivers and lakes. Many thousands drowned, and many more were hit by cars.
One person counted 48 dead squirrels on a 32-mile stretch of road near Asheville, NC. A Conservation Officer counted 50 dead squirrels on 5 miles of road on September 18, 1968.
http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=635
I was delighted to get this email from Bob Jenkins on squirrel migrations and squirrel hunters. It created some interesting history, but also brought back wonderful memories of my great grandfather, "Grandpa Brumbaugh."
