Adam Hodam's cipher book discovered: my days, my weeks, my months, my years, & fly rapid, like the whirling spheres, & around the steady pole.

From the hymn "On the swiftness of Time"

Not unlike the words of the old hymn he recorded in his diary, the watercolors of Adam Hodam (or Hodom; Fig. 2) are often aswirl--with weather vanes, bells, flowers, and towering vines exhibiting the freedom and balance of a Calder mobile. (1) The bases are secured and structured on stacked lateral planes with repeating upright teeth--solid blocks of color delineate space and give foot to overtly geometrical compositions. This article examines Hodam's watercolors, taken from a recently discovered cipher book he kept in Gallia County, Ohio, in the early 1800s. Together with the diary entries and geographical record he later left behind m Spring Creek, Roane County, West Virginia, they provide a fascinating picture of the life of a simple yet complex man.

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Hodam was the grandson of Johannes Hothem (d. c. 1780), who came to America in 1770 from the German principality of Hesse Darmstadt. Hothem became Hodam, and Johannes settled in Pendleton County, Virginia (now West Virginia), and married Anne Barbara Fultz. They had one child, John (1778-1862), who, with a land warrant for his service in the Virginia Light Horse Calvary in the War of 1812, cleared a farm and settled with his wife Phebe Mouse (d. 1858) in Nicholas County, Virginia (now West Virginia). (2) In 1829 they moved with their son Adam and daughters Rebecca Mouse and Anna Barbara to nearby Hacker Valley. Adam recalled that his parents were particularly impressed that the area had an English-speaking school; as an incentive to sway his young German-trained tongue to learn English, they promised him a new coat. (3) The Hodams moved across the border to Gallia County, Ohio, in 1832, settling first in the township of Green and then, after swapping farms with one Samuel Campbell, in Walnut Township. (4)

Gallia County is located in the south-southeast portion of the state, with the Ohio River forming a natural border with West Virginia. The formation of the county originated with a land speculation scheme that preyed on French citizens wishing to flee the Revolution in 1789. The Scioto Company sold parcels of land to hundreds of Frenchmen who, after an arduous transatlantic journey, learned that the land was not owned by the Scioto Company, but by the Ohio Company of Associates. Those who stayed had to pay for the land a second time, in 1803, when Ohio became the seventeenth state, Gallia County was formally recognized. Soon, the area saw influxes of Virginians, New Englanders, Welsh, and Germans.

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