A history of Monroe County that doesn’t often get mentioned is “Pleasant Valley; An Early History of Monroe County and Region, 1650-1850” (1970) by Florence Lee. Some of the history she writes about was in earlier histories of the County. But she puts together many sources. She does something that the other histories don’t do; she includes footnotes and references to those earlier sources. There is also a brief index. Maybe this gets neglected because it is just the early history of Monroe County.

Florence Lee was the the Assistant County Historian from 1945 to 1955. She then served as Monroe County Historian from 1955 to 1963. After that time she and her husband moved to Tennessee. She died in 1989 and is buried in Parma Union Cemetery.

There are some photos in this history but they aren’t reproduced very well. Better are the old maps that she included.

This book is 350 pages. It is one of the largest books that I have scanned. So the completed PDF ended up being 21mb. It might take a while to view (or download) if you have a slow internet connection.