PAINE, SETH (died 1815) was a land surveyor who surveyed what is now BRECKSVILLE and the first permanent white settler in the Township.
Paine came to the Western Reserve in 1811 as an assistant to Alfred Wolcott, a surveyor from Boston employed by John Breck, the person for whom Brecksville was named. Paine and Wolcott surveyed Brecksville Township and returned to Northampton with their report. Paine liked the area so well that he returned in June 1811 from Williamsburgh, Massachusetts with his wife, and children, Oliver, Spencer, Almira and Lorina, and a young unmarried man named Melzer Clark. Paine settled in the southwest corner of Brecksville Township on lot 64 at what became known as Carter's Corners. Soon afterwards Clark and Almira Paine were married, this being the first marriage in Brecksville.
As land agent for John Breck, Paine had power of attorney to grant title to land sold. Paine's compensation for services rendered was to choose 200 acres anywhere in the township, with the exception that it should not be bottom land and should not include a mill site. Paine chose the southwest part. He left his family at a settlement in Newburgh, near the corner of Walker and Broadway in Cleveland, during the winter of 1810-1811, while he proceeded to Brecksville to build a log house. Paine died in 1815, four years after his arrival.