The WPA Guide to Ohio: The Buckeye State

By Federal Writers' Project

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authorsmany of whom would later become celebrated literary figureswere commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor.

For a reader interested in small town life in the early 20th century, the WPA Guide to Ohio is an excellent resource. A series of photographs by Ben Shahn for the Farm Security Administration is well complemented with 17 selective essays about the political, industrial, and cultural life in the Buckeye State. The essay on the economy provides interesting information on the labor movement in Ohio.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781595342331

Book preview

PART I

The General Background

THE State of Ohio rolls down from the mountains of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, flows into soft hills and fertile valleys, and flattens out in broad lands which reach to Indiana. The Ohio River turns a sweeping boundary in the east and south on its way from Pittsburgh to Cairo, and the southern shore of Lake Erie gives a water front to nearly three-fourths the northern limits of the State. Two hundred square miles of rivers and lakes are included in the total area of 41,040 square miles, which reach 225 miles from east to west and 210 from north to south. Ohio ranks 35th in area among the States.

The rough, hilly terrain in eastern Ohio eases down momentarily and then rolls, as the Central Plains, to the Mississippi River and beyond. The surface in the western part of the State is characterized by dunes in the north, a level plain in the center, and undulating hills farther south, becoming more disturbed in the southwest, then sinking, on the banks of the Ohio River, to a level of 400 to 500 feet. The plateau area of eastern Ohio, everywhere broken into gorges, averages 600 to 700 feet along the Ohio River.

Shallow seas once covered Ohio. Sand, gravel, and calcareous ooze were deposited on the bottoms and formed series of layers. This bedrock is composed principally of sandstone, shale, and limestone dating from the Paleozoic era (200–500 million years). The dominant rock structure is the broad Cincinnati anticline, which extends north and south through west-central Ohio. The composite thickness of the sedimentary rock layers in the Paleozoic group varies from about 3,000 feet at the crest of the Cincinnati anticline to an estimated 10,000 feet in the southeastern part of Ohio. The Paleozoic era was not exclusively a period of deposition. The seas periodically filled and receded, with intervals of exposure of land—at times so arid that salt and gypsum were formed—and of huge swamps thick with plants that later became coal.

By the end of Paleozoic times all the bedrock in the State had been completed. The land probably heaved upwards to form a plateau, later reduced by erosion to the hills and valleys so characteristic of the eastern part of the State.

In the limestone formations of the Cincinnati region, the oldest part of the State geologically, are abundant records of the marine forms that swam in the shallow seas of a half-billion years ago. The wide exposure of bedrock in this area has facilitated the study of fossils—of which fully a thousand species have been found—to such an extent that the section is one of the best in the United States for the study of invertebrate paleontology.

It is to a different locality that one must look for the vertebrate fishes of a later period and the various forms of amphibians that pointed the way from sea to land. From the shales of the Devonian age near Cleveland, the American zoologist, Bashford Dean, took sharks so perfectly fossilized that he was able to study the flesh, kidneys, and microscopic structure of their muscles. In parts of the western and central section, where rocks of the Devonian and Silurian periods remain, various salamander types, as well as true fishes, are often found fossilized in the stones. In the Devonian rocks, traces of the earliest land plants are discovered as fossilized stems and leaves.

A later chapter in the earth’s history is written into the coal strata of the eastern and southeastern section of the State, where the rocks laid down during the Pennsylvania and Permian periods are some 2,000,000 years younger than those in the Cincinnati vicinity. Fossilized leaves, fronds, and stems of the early fernlike land plants are found embedded in the shale and coal seams, indicating that life was no longer wholly marine.

Within the late Cenozoic era, two or more tongues of ice came down from the northeast over the northwestern two-thirds of the State and reached beyond the Ohio River. These glaciers plowed up loose materials and mixed them with refuse they had brought along. When the ice of the second glacier finally melted, this compound was laid on the surface in thicknesses ranging from a few feet to as many as 200 feet. Although most of the land covered by the ice sheets was left as a plain, masses of debris at the margin of the stationary ice fields formed terminal moraines, characterized by high, hilly surfaces.

The glacial tongues licked the hills and valleys level, but possibly an even greater change effected was that of the drainage pattern. The principal streams had previously flowed northward. When oncoming ice fields blocked them, and drift was deposited in the old valleys, the rivers had to cut new channels. Upon the retreat of the ice front north of the higher land which the glaciers had built up, the melted waters became the huge, deep pond that was to be the present Lake Erie. The lake overflowed southward to the stream that became the Ohio River. About 25,000 years ago, much of the water ran off, and Lake Erie was reduced to its present size.

The bones of the large fur-bearing animals that roamed Ohio’s hills some 20,000 years ago, shortly after the ice melted, have been found. Notable specimens are those of the Ohio elephant, the mammoth mastodon, a giant musk ox, and a beaver as large as a bear. The geological museum of the Ohio State University has the mounted skeleton of a mastodon and one of a sloth; the Cleveland Museum of Natural History has the skeleton of a mastodon.

One of the most famous of the many remarkable skeletons found in Ohio was that of the ground sloth, or Megalonyx (big claw), discovered by Dr. William Goforth in the Cincinnati region during the early 1800’s. To the amazement of the scientists who studied it, the skeleton of this sloth—although related to the South American tree sloth, which spends much of its life hanging upside down from trees—was much too large for any tree.

In Ohio’s southeastern hill and valley section grows the most lavish variety of the 2,500 species of plant life which the State harbors. In addition to the pitch pine, large-leaf magnolia, sourwood, arbutus, and wild honeysuckle localized in that section, there are great hardwoods, with under-growths of sassafras, dogwood, witch hazel, pawpaw, and hornbeam. Timber and woodlands cover about 4,000,000 acres, less than 15 per cent of the original hardwood forest which at one time nearly covered Ohio. Throughout the State are found oak, hickory, yellow poplar, ash, pine, maple, black walnut, white elm, beech, linden, wild black cherry, black locust, willow, and sycamore. Perhaps because the tree is not commonly found east of the Alleghenies, and also because of its distinctive appearance, the buckeye (a relative of the cultivated Asiatic horse chestnut) was first called the Ohio buckeye, and gave Ohio the name of the Buckeye State. The tree can be known by its clusters of cream-colored flowers that bloom in the spring, and later form large, thick-hulled, brown nuts.

About 60 species of mammals inhabit Ohio. With the exception of a few deer and bear, protected by State law in reservations, only the smaller animals run wild. The opossum, squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, and red fox thrive in Ohio woods and fields. Although 358 species of birds have been known in Ohio, only about 181 species nest in the State every year. Since the State is the transition area between flyways, migratory birds, such as ducks, geese, and shore birds rest in great numbers on many Ohio waters. The loon, the sea gull, and the tern, migrating through the State, follow the larger streams and reservoirs. The ring-necked pheasant, the Hungarian partridge, and the ruffed grouse are among the most important game birds. The bald eagle nests along Lake Erie and the golden eagle is a rare winter visitor. Among predatory birds are the screech owl, the hoot owl, and the Cooper’s and sharpshinned hawks. The cuckoo, kingfisher, quail, swallow, and robin are common throughout the State.

NATURAL RESOURCES AND CONSERVATION

When the first settlers came to the Ohio country they found great reaches of level wooded land and fertile limestone soil that would grow clover and hay as well as wheat and corn. The corn that they planted shot up 14 feet in the river valleys and yielded 100 bushels to the acre; vegetables grew like weeds. At Zanesville and other places, these early farmers found clay, pure and tough, which they molded and baked into stoneware. In the hilly eastern section they came upon coal, and in the north and south they found a prized commodity—salt.

Today, Ohio ranks sixth in the value of its mineral products. The State leads all others in the production of pottery, fire brick, tile, and other clay products. Half the plain white tableware shaped in the United States is made in Ohio.

Although coal, ranking first in value among Ohio’s mineral products, is not so widely distributed as clay, the plateau section of the State holds more than 12,000 square miles of soft-coal land—a supply that, with proper conservation, will last for many decades to come. In order to save valuable seams of coal near New Straitsville, the WPA granted approximately $250,000 recently for the digging of ditches and the building of barriers at points where a disastrous underground fire, raging since 1884, might be confined within bounds. The fire was started by striking miners, and to date has destroyed more than $50,000,000 worth of valuable coal.

Some of the softer grades of Ohio coal serve as the basic material for the manufacture of such diversified products as industrial coke, alcohol, dyes, building board, and mattresses.

Ohio is rich in material for modern building, road making, and other construction work. Its plentiful limestone is valuable not only for road construction, but also for the manufacture of lime, an important soil builder, and Portland cement. Berea sandstone, the best-known building stone in Ohio, is widely distributed, but it is most extensively quarried in Cuyahoga, Lorain, and Washington Counties. Silica, gravel, and gypsum, materials used in building, paving, glass manufacture, and molding, are found in many sections.

The mining of salt in the northern section has been going on since the early nineteenth century. Although production is heavy—only New York and Michigan yield more—the supply is still apparently limitless.

Oil and gas were discovered in Noble County as early as 1814 with the drilling of a salt well. Although oil was used for little else but medicine in the early days, the demand grew enormously during the closing years of the century; the new machinery of the period required vast quantities of lubricants. With the striking of a gusher near Findlay in 1885 the oil industry was launched on a spectacular career. Ohio was for a short time first among the States in the production of crude oil, but it was soon outstripped by Pennsylvania and others. About 7,000,000 barrels, however, are being pumped annually, chiefly in the northwestern section of the State. Although Ohio has natural gas in abundant quantities, nearly half of its present consumption is piped in from West Virginia and other States.

Ohioans have been spendthrift in exploiting the State’s resources. Ninety per cent of the trees have vanished, their lumber often used in the construction of houses and barns. On much of the land, timber was burned so that the farmer might have broader fields. Today great sections of the State lie impoverished. Water that formerly trickled down hills thick with humus now swirls down grassless gullies, and fields that once supported tall corn have lost their topsoil and grow only tufts of grass.

Ohioans have been trying industriously in recent years to reclaim and restore the soil. State departments of agriculture, forestry, and conservation have been teaching farmers how to protect their lands, and they have been restocking field and stream with game and fish. Denuded hillsides are being planted in trees. Soil building is carried on by many agencies, and the Federal Government has given the work added impetus and a wider scope. The Granny-Dry Creek Project, supervised by the Soil Conservation Service of the Department of Agriculture, involves an area of about 50 square miles in northcentral Ohio where Government specialists are trying to restore barren land to usefulness through crop rotation and the liberal use of alfalfa and other soil-holding and soil-building crops.

Hand in hand with soil building and reforestation go the vigorous attempts to cope with the serious flood problem. The floods of January 1937, when the water of the Ohio River and its tributaries reached record highs, sharpened public agitation for flood control. However, the Great Miami River did not flood Dayton, Hamilton, and other populous places on its banks. Five huge earthen dams built across that river and four of its tributaries after the tragic floods of 1913 proved that flood waters could be controlled.

Ohioans now look with new interest at the Nation’s model conservation laboratory, a tremendous flood-control and soil-building project in the Muskingum Valley. The work includes 14 major dams, 11 main levees, and 30,000 acres of impounded water—all designed to control 70 per cent of the run-off in the 8,000 square miles of the valley. The project has other incidental purposes. A larger number of demonstration and research projects are operating in the Muskingum Valley than in any other place in the United States. Reforestation, restocking of wildlife, and development of recreational areas are also important phases of the work. This project, in common with others in the State, aims not only to lessen the effect of flood at dangerous points, but also to decrease the rapid run-off of water on treeless, gullied slopes.

Wayne National Forest, gradually taking shape throughout 20 counties and approximately 1,464,000 acres of mistreated land in southeastern Ohio, is another far-reaching conservation project. Eroded lands are being set with trees, streams stocked with fish, and birds and animals released in protected areas; eventually the whole will be not only a forest but also a recreational and hunting preserve, and a place from which few torrents of muddy water will rush to swell a flooded river.

OHIO’S first people left evidence of their presence in a lasting, unmistakable, and provocative way. Known as mound builders, and generally agreed among archaeologists to have been early American Indians, they left behind innumerable earthworks in the form of forts and mounds. Many of their remarkable structures are now covered with forest or have otherwise been made unrecognizable, but several have been preserved as State parks: Fort Ancient in Warren County, the ceremonial mounds at Newark, and the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County, a huge effigy of a writhing snake swallowing an egg. More enduring than most of the effigy mounds and more familiar to Ohioans are the simple conical mounds in which the prehistoric people buried their dead. In nearly every county in Ohio, the bones, tools, and weapons of this early people have been uncovered by the plow or by the probing of the archaeologist.

The mound builder and the life he led are vividly portrayed in a series of displays at the museum of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society in Columbus. Relics found in the State have been classified by W. C. Mills into three basic cultures—the Fort Ancient, the Adena, and the Hopewell, representing primitive, intermediate, and advanced cultural levels.

The earliest of the three cultures, the Fort Ancient, was named for a prehistoric fort in Warren County. In this type there is rarely any sacred enclosure. The pottery is crude. Little copper work is found, and little mica; ornaments are confined to stone, bone, and shell. Awls of bone, and flat, long needles are usually found in the burials. An important site of this culture is the great Madisonville works near Cincinnati, from which the Peabody Museum of Harvard University obtained samples of pottery, implements, ornaments, and skeletal material. Other sites are the Baum Village and the Gartner mound village in Ross County, what was until recently Campbell Island in Butler County, and the Feurt mounds and villages in Scioto County.

In his Mound-Builders, Henry C. Shetrone, director of the State museum, re-creates a Fort Ancient village of several hundred people who lived in skin or bark tepees and chinked, wattlework huts. They wore skins, feathers, and coarsely woven cloth, and adorned themselves with necklaces, bracelets, and beaded arm bands of shell, bone, or stone. While the craftsmen fashioned weapons and tools of stone, bone, or flint, and also pipes, pottery, and stone discs, the women toiled in the gardens with their hoes of mussel shell, raising corn, beans, squash, and pumpkins. Hunters returned with their spoils—deer and bear, and perhaps birds and mussels. The women cooked these in a big community pot from which all helped themselves. Refuse and waste matter were tossed aside and covered with earth—a custom that was to cause entire villages to rise several feet above their original ground level. Bones of animals in the refuse pits show that these people were not squeamish about their food. Besides the game animals known today, they ate Indian dog, otter, skunk, wildcat, toad, screech owl, crane, and swan.

The Adena culture, characterized by great conical piles of earth often arranged in triangular groups and placed close to streams, is named for a mound that stood near Chillicothe at Adena, the estate of Thomas Worthington. As in the Fort Ancient culture which preceded it, there are no sacred enclosures in the Adena culture. However, as in the Hopewell culture which followed it, there are ornaments of copper, mica, and beads, skillfully woven fabrics, and excellent carvings on stone and bone. Extending southwest from the center of the State, in the valleys of the Scioto and the Miamis, the Adena mounds contain uncremated single or multiple burials, placed in log cists above, below, or on the original surface of the ground. Copper and mica ornaments and finely wrought ceremonial pipes have been found with the human remains. The largest Adena mound in Ohio is the one at Miamisburg which rises to a height of 68 feet.

Most advanced of the mound builder cultures is the Hopewell, named for a group of mounds near Chillicothe on land owned by Captain M.C. Hopewell. Oldest of the mound builders, the Hopewell people lived throughout southern Ohio. Unlike the other mound builders, those of the Hopewell culture cremated their dead and placed earthworks about their mounds. Beautiful pottery, exquisitely sculptured pipes, excellently woven fabrics, and ornaments of copper, mica, and pearl are found in their mounds. Awls of split bone, and small, short, round bone needles are also found.

A splendid example of the Hopewell culture is the Turner group of mounds and earthworks in Hamilton County. Concerning the bone carvings found in the Turner mounds, Charles Willoughby remarks, ‘It is probably true that in no section of America north of Mexico had decorative art reached a higher plane than in southern Ohio.’ Some idea of how mound builders dressed is given by the terra cotta figurines modeled by Hopewell artisans, who also painted effigy objects cut from mica, wrought sheets of hammered gold and ornaments of copper, and fashioned imitation bear teeth and pearl beads.

When the Turner mounds were explored, evidence of buildings and elaborate stone graves was found beneath the walls of the large circular enclosure. Beneath the mounds were intricate systems of connecting pits and tunnels, the purpose of which is unknown. Although these works are almost obliterated, material from them is on display at the Peabody Museum, and an excellent model of the entire Turner group is in the Cincinnati Art Museum. Other significant Hopewell mounds are in the Mound City, the Harness, the Seip, and the Hopewell groups of Ross County.

Among the first historic Indians in Ohio were the Erie, who occupied the southern shore of Lake Erie from western New York into northern Ohio. They continued to live in northern Ohio until 1656 when they were nearly annihilated by the invading Iroquois Confederacy, which laid claim to the Ohio lands. Except for remnants of the Erie and a scattering of war parties sent westward by the Iroquois, this area then remained a lonely, untenanted forest for a half-century.

By 1750, French and English explorers found tribes living in the forests and along the rivers of the Ohio country. Most of these had been driven into Ohio, after 1700, by hostile tribes on the north, east, and south, or had gone there to hunt, and plant corn. To the west and southwest were the powerful Miami, who dominated all the present State of Indiana and part of Illinois; on the south, the Shawnee, thrust from Tennessee by Cherokee onslaughts; in the northwest, the Ottawa; in the center and northeast, Iroquoian tribes—Tuscarora, Wyandotte, Seneca; and on the banks of the Muskingum, the Delaware, who had migrated west to escape the pressure of white settlement and subjugation by the Iroquois.

Descended from ancient Algonquian stock, the Miami had come into Indiana and Ohio from Canada and built a village known as Pickawillany, where Loramie Creek flows into the Miami River, near the present site of Piqua. Here they began to trade with the English—which angered the French, who held lands in Canada and hoped to acquire the Northwest Territory. Several French expeditions were sent to Pickawillany to remind the Miami chief, Old Britain, of the long-standing friendship between his people and the French; but the Miami continued their trade with the English.

After the French discovered that the Miami were sheltering French deserters and were alleged to have killed 15 French traders, they sent an army of Indians under Charles Langlade to demolish the post. When they were attacked on June 21, 1752, the Miami were totally unprepared. Stockade gates stood open, warriors were absent on the chase, squaws hoed corn in the fields, and about a dozen English traders loafed about the town. Some of the Miami men and boys and five traders managed to close the gates, and a siege of several hours began. Finally the Miami agreed to surrender the traders on condition that they should not be harmed. The gates were opened. The attacking Indians leaped upon a wounded trader, stabbed him, tore off his scalp, cut out his heart and ate it. Three thousand pounds in money was seized, the post was burned to the ground, and Old Britain was boiled and eaten.

The Miami, though still respected, never again held their position of dominance in Ohio. The balance of power shifted southward where the Shawnee lived on lands given them when they had asked Miami protection after having been driven from the East and South. Professor Charles C. Royce, of the Smithsonian Institution, says of the tribe:

‘The Shawnees were the Bedouins . . . the Ishmaelites of the North American tribes. As wanderers they were without rival among their race, and as fomenters of discord and war between themselves and with their neighbors, their genius was marked. Their origin is not, with any measure of certainty, known.’

The Shawnee made their headquarters at Old Chillicothe, on the present site of Oldtown, Greene County. Throughout the French and Indian War they were allied with the French; and from 1774 to 1795 they formed the chief barrier to white settlement in the Northwest Territory. In A History of Ohio, by Roseboom and Weisenberger, they are characterized as a fierce group who ‘offered the most desperate and prolonged resistance of all the Ohio tribes.’

The first white man to visit the Shawnee capital, however, was received cordially by the Indians. Captain Bullitt had come down the Ohio River from Virginia to form a settlement in Kentucky. Leaving his companions at the river, he traveled through the wilderness to Old Chillicothe to obtain permission of the Indians to make the settlement. Bearing a white flag, he entered the town alone. The Indians admired his courage and were completely won over by a humorous story he told them. They feasted him on venison, smoked the pipe of peace all around, and graciously gave him permission to settle on the south shore of the Ohio River.

Quite different were the experiences of Simon Kenton when he came to the Shawnee capital on a scouting expedition in 1778. Approaching the town at night, he and his two companions came upon an enclosure in which several Indian ponies were corralled. Forgetting their mission, the three men each mounted a horse, tied the others together, and started for Kentucky. When the Indians discovered the theft they were enraged and started in hot pursuit, overtaking Kenton’s party at the banks of the Ohio River, where it had been detained by rough water. Kenton was taken captive; one of the men escaped, the other was scalped.

Kenton was returned to Old Chillicothe where an infuriated mob of Shawnee men, women, and children welcomed him with cuffs and kicks, and wild shrieks for his execution. He was first tied to the execution stake but later released and made to run the gantlet. Few men had the strength to survive the fierce cudgeling of an Indian gantlet, but Kenton—‘the blonde giant’—recovered and lived to run the gantlet seven more times before he was finally, some months later, turned over to the British at Detroit, from whom he was able to escape.

Northeast of Old Chillicothe, in what is now Marion, Crawford, and Wyandot Counties, lived the Wyandotte, most powerful tribe in the Northwest Territory after the Revolutionary War. Although they themselves were of Iroquoian stock, they had been pushed southward from eastern Canada by the Iroquois. Roseboom and Weisenberger call them ‘brave fighters who ordinarily were less cruel in their treatment of prisoners than were the other tribes.’

Two other Iroquoian tribes inhabited the present Ohio. The Tuscarora, sixth nation of the famous Six Nations Confederacy, had spread into northeastern Ohio from their homelands in New York. The Seneca occupied the upper Scioto and Sandusky Valleys and were better known as the Mingo—a name meaning treacherous. As the Mingo they lived on the Ohio River at Logstown, which had been destroyed by Lord Dunmore’s army in 1774 because they had failed to send representatives to a peace conference south of the present city of Circleville.

The Delaware and the Ottawa—both of old Algonquian stock—were the only other tribes in what is now Ohio, with the exception of a very few Cherokee in Ross County and occasional wanderers or outlaws from other tribes. The Ottawa had come from the Georgian Bay region in Canada to settle on the Maumee. The Delaware, last tribe to enter the State, lived on lands in the Muskingum Valley granted them by the Miami, to whom they were known as ‘our grandfathers.’ Coming to Ohio from the East as refugees, they lived peacefully until the Battle of Fallen Timbers, in which the Delaware was the tribe most heavily involved.

Except for marauding expeditions of young men filled with tribal pride and firewater, the Indians generally attacked the white settlements and killed their white captives only because of encroachments, cheating, or unwarranted attacks; for such reasons, for example, as the Moravian Indian massacre in 1782 and the murder of Chief Cornstalk and his son in 1777. The Ohio Indian often tried to be hospitable toward the white man.

The Indians in the Ohio area, however, were doomed from the start; they had no defense against the land-hungry whites who swarmed into their coveted corn-growing valleys. By the time the treaty was signed at the rapids of the Maumee in 1817, the Indians had been deprived of all of their lands except a few meager reservations in the northwestern part of the State. Even these were soon taken away; from the Delaware in 1829, from the Seneca in 1831, and from the Wyandotte, last of the tribes, in 1842. Except for those who intermarried with whites or lived on as eccentrics in scattered communities, the Indians were herded out of the State and into reservations in the West.

IT IS generally believed by strangers that the most interesting and significant phase of Ohio’s history lies in the part the State has played in National politics—as a ‘barometer State’ and as the home of political leaders. Ohio has produced many men of political importance, and has sent seven native sons to the presidency—Grant, Garfield, Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, Taft, and Harding. However, Ohio’s industrial life overshadows its politics, and although today, as for many years past, the tenseness and sensitiveness of political life are much publicized, Ohio’s major importance—and major interest—lies in a large and varied industrialism.

Men have always wanted the Ohio lands. Indians clung to the lovely valleys of the Miamis, the Scioto, and the Muskingum for decades, in almost suicidal desperation. The French and English battled over the Ohio-country fur trade for years; moreover, both nations came to realize that this strip of land between the Ohio River and the southernmost tip of the Great Lakes was the key to the conquest of the entire Upper Mississippi Valley. White settlers sometimes risked their scalps for a parcel of rich Ohio land that ‘needed only to be tickled with the hoe to laugh with the harvest.’

With settlement of the Far West, Ohio lands became even more coveted, for they lay along the important east-west highways and railroad lines which poured Eastern pioneers into the Western plains. Since the coming of the Age of Steel, Ohio’s location has had fuller meaning than ever before, because iron ore comes cheaply down the lakes from Minnesota ranges, while coal comes immediately to hand from Pennsylvania and West Virginia fields; iron ore and coal mean steel, the production of which has lifted Ohio to a top place among the manufacturing States.

Into this area extended the Virginia-Pennsylvania frontier with its Scotch-Irish squatters and their characteristic indifference to legal restrictions. Then came the New England Puritans into the valley of the Muskingum, the Western Reserve, and, by twos and threes, into practically all other parts of Ohio.

After these came all the Middle-State representatives: English Quakers, Dutch religionists of various creeds—Lutherans, Reformed, Dunkards, and United Brethren—and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who settled the Miami Valley. Then there were the Pennsylvanians, Marylanders, Virginians, and Kentuckians, who flowed into the Virginia Military District. From the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky came large numbers of English, Scotch-Irish, and French Huguenot descent who were dissatisfied with the institution of slavery. Some came direct from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and France.

These elements commingled, each affecting the other. And when in 1803, having the requisite population, Ohio became a State, it could be said, as of no other State at that time, that it was typically American. Throughout the nineteenth century Ohio continued to draw people from various sections of the Nation and from a variety of European countries. Ohio is still as typically American as any State in the Union; it is neither North nor South, neither East nor West; it lies where they all meet and has characteristics and habits of all of them.

It is possible that the French explorer LaSalle, seeking adventure for himself and trading advantages for his countrymen, who already held a claim to Canada, penetrated the region between Lake Erie and the Ohio River as early as 1669. Whether or not he did matters little, for his explorations were regarded as negligible by his king, Louis XIV, who, like Charles II of England, was content to think of the lands west of the Alleghenies as uncharted wilderness whose worth was problematical. Neither realized the strategic importance of the strip between the lake and the river, nor foresaw that it would become the crossroads of later French and English colonial rivalry.

However, in 1673 the French did establish nominal claims to the Ohio River and the territory north to Lake Erie, as is evidenced by maps drawn that year in Paris, which also showed Canada and the country up and down the Mississippi River. A decade later the English, hoping to add the western fur trade to their other profitable ventures, struck a more realistic blow for possession by persuading the Iroquois who occupied the region to agree to fight for the British flag. This mustering of allies was one of the preliminaries of the first war in the series of four between Great Britain and France for possession of the new colonial empire. The first of these wars lasted from 1689 to 1697. With deference to their sovereign, the English colonists on the New York-New England frontier called the American phase of the struggle King William’s War. The scattered French and English trappers in the wilderness west of the Alleghenies were so few that the area was not mentioned in the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), by which France acknowledged defeat.

Shortly after the French had signed the treaty they established a settlement on the Gulf Coast in 1699 and another on the Detroit River in 1701, thus definitely including the Ohio Valley in their scheme of colonial aspirations. Although winning the second of the colonial wars (Queen Anne’s War, 1701–13), England permitted France to retain possession of the Mississippi Valley and the lands around the Great Lakes.

About this time various tribes of Indians, no longer afraid of the Iroquois, filtered into the area. The newcomers had hardly taken possession of the land before English traders arrived. Operating unscrupulously for the enrichment of England and the American Colonies, these men brought the potential wealth of the Ohio lands more closely to the attention of France and England. The traders, though few in number, exerted a powerful influence over the destiny of the Ohio country. They enriched themselves and their employers and made the country a coveted territory. They stirred up trouble among the Indians. They spurred the interest of both the English and French over their respective claims; and they helped bring on a controversy among the colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia over the extent of their grants in the Ohio country.

The third colonial war (1744–8) made little impression upon America. Its most important result, so far as the history of Ohio is concerned, was the creation of a working alliance between the English and the Indians. After the third English victory was acknowledged by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the French worked hard to regain the friendship of the Indians. By now competition was sharp between the traders representing the two nations, and the outbreak of another war was imminent.

The French realized that to grasp the Ohio Valley was to hold open the door to their lands along the Mississippi. Accordingly, Celeron de Bienville journeyed about the Ohio country in 1749, burying lead markers, shaking a warning finger under the noses of the contemptuous English traders, and trying to convince the Indians of the strength of his king, Louis XV. In none of these purposes was Celeron successful. The formality of the interment of the lead markers has gone down in history as an empty gesture; the English traders continued to do business as usual; and Louis XV was less respected by the tribesmen than was the shrewd Pennsylvania Irishman, George Croghan, who followed in Celeron’s footsteps.

Shortly afterward the English sought to gain a tangible advantage over the French by setting up a trading post at Wills Creek (Cumberland), Maryland. With the sanction of England, a group of Virginians continued their plans to colonize some half-million acres of wilderness by means of the Ohio Land Company, organized in 1748. This entire plan accounted for the explorations of Christopher Gist in the Ohio country in 1750, and likewise was responsible for a sharp disagreement between Virginians and Pennsylvanians.

The French seized this time of friction between the Virginians and Pennsylvanians as opportune for strengthening their position in the Ohio Valley. They regained their former prestige among the Indians by a show of force superior to that of the English, and began to construct forts up and down the Ohio River. Robert Dinwiddie, Governor of Virginia, quickly took up this challenge to the success of the Ohio Land Company. In 1753 he dispatched young George Washington to admonish the French, but they were not impressed. Two years later, with the help of a band of Indian allies, the French almost exterminated an English and Colonial punitive expedition under Braddock.

This triumph, and others, while drawing a majority of the Indians to the side of France, eventually caused her to lose the war, for the British, aroused by the growing strength of the French west of the Alleghenies, transformed the frontier skirmishes into a major European imbroglio (the Seven Years’ War, 1756–63). After hammering down all the French strongholds from Louisburg in Nova Scotia to Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh), they took Canada and all the French territory east of the Mississippi by the Treaty of 1763.

From the close of the war until the elimination of hostile Indians in the 1790’s, the Ohio country continued to be a battleground. Pontiac, an Ottawa chieftain with a genius for military organization, made an unsuccessful attempt in 1763 to unite the Indian tribes and slay the whites west of the Alleghenies. The English, to save the fur trade, came to his aid that same year by setting aside the territory exclusively for the Indians. Since the settlers were not kept back, England sought to turn the Ohio country into an inviolable part of Canada by the Quebec Act of 1774. This measure, resented intensely by the American settlers, was part of the background responsible, in the following year, for the shooting by Massachusetts farmers of British red-coats on the retreat from Concord.

The settlers felt that it was the right of any man to go out among the Indians and, at the risk of his scalp, gain a fortune or a livelihood in any manner possible. From Charleston to Boston, the foundations of a rich man’s aristocracy were being laid by means of the profits from Ohio furs. Between the years 1778–83, George Rogers Clark assured the safety of these foundations and appeased the pangs of the land-hungry by winning the Northwest Territory for the Thirteen Colonies. Even before Clark’s work was finished, those colonies which held no claims to the section of the territory now known as Ohio began squabbling with those in possession. The result was that all the claimant colonies except Connecticut and Virginia gave up their rights within a few years. Connecticut retained a small strip in the northeast (the Western Reserve) until 1800, while Virginia held back a parcel between the Little Miami and Scioto Rivers (the Virginia Military District) with which to pay off its war veterans.

The Land Ordinance of 1785 gave the United States possession of the land in the Ohio country, and Congress at once set about to dispose of land parcels to the highest bidder. The revenue therefrom, it was hoped, would provide funds for the new Nation and enable it to carry on its work in the hard times brought by the war. When the United States Treasury board failed in its effort to sell an appreciable amount of the surveyed land in the Seven Ranges section, the work was turned over to the aggressive second Ohio Company. By means of the skillful salesmanship of the New England preacher-scholar-lobbyist, Manasseh Cutler, the Ohio Company and its affiliate, the Scioto Company, established the first permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory at Marietta in 1788.

The section of the territory between the Ohio River and Lake Erie now began its quick rise to statehood. For guidance it looked to the Ordinance of 1787, which provided for the encouragement of education, freedom of speech, press, and assembly, the prohibition of slavery, and admission to the Union as soon as the population warranted. Cincinnati was founded in 1789 by a group of New Jersey people whom John Cleve Symmes brought to his purchase between the two Miamis. Chillicothe, founded in 1796 by Tidewater Virginians, soon became the fountainhead of Old Dominion culture west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The victims of British and Tory raids in Connecticut during the Revolution moved into the Western Reserve; Pennsylvanians came into the Seven Ranges of later east-central Ohio.

The Indians were appalled by the hordes of whites surging across the border, felling timber, slaughtering game, and burning villages and crops. General Arthur St. Clair, first governor of the unorganized Northwest Territory, made an attempt to defeat the confederated tribes, but his expedition of 1791, like that of General Harmar during the previous year, failed. Neither was well enough schooled in methods of frontier warfare to conduct a successful campaign against the united Indian forces. Finally in 1794, ‘Mad Anthony’ Wayne broke the power of the confederation at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. A year later the Treaty of Greenville brought Indian warfare to a formal close in what is now Ohio. Once the fears of Indian attacks had been set at rest and the Northwest Territory formally surrendered to the United States by England, the land filled up rapidly.

In 1799, the liberal-minded Republicans erected a governmental structure for the territory, though not without considerable opposition from the conservative Federalists who believed that the people were not yet ready for this step toward statehood. The feeling between the two groups ran strong, and it was over an ill-tempered legislature that Governor St. Clair, a Federalist, presided at the first meeting in Cincinnati in 1799. The 22 lawmakers, 15 of them from the territory later included in the State of Ohio, elected William Henry Harrison, a Republican, to the Congress in Washington.

Once in Congress, Harrison aided the move toward statehood and strengthened his party in the Northwest Territory by helping to secure the passage of a more democratic land law. Passed in 1800, the measure reduced by half the minimum acreage a settler could buy, allowed four years’ credit on land payments, and set up convenient land offices at Steubenville, Marietta, Chillicothe, and Cincinnati. The territory of Ohio became the whole of the Northwest Territory, Indiana having been cut off earlier in 1800.

Not to be outdone by the Republicans, the Federalists persuaded President Adams to reappoint St. Clair as governor. To forestall creation of a State, they introduced a bill to cut Ohio into sections so that each would be too sparsely settled for statehood. It was then that Thomas Worthington, a wealthy liberal from Chillicothe, armed himself with petitions and written expressions of public disapproval of the Federalist plan, led a group from Ohio to Washington, and succeeded in defeating the St. Clair forces. The victorious Republicans met in convention in 1802 to adopt a constitution. Strangely out of line with frontier ideals of the rights of the common man, the document provided that all State officials (except the governor) should be appointed by the legislature, which thereby became the all-powerful instrument of State government. Edward Tiffin, a Republican from Chillicothe, in 1803 was elected first Governor of the State, an office that carried pitifully few responsibilities.

From the temporary seat of government in Chillicothe, Ohio’s first chief executive surveyed a domain about which any man of vision could be optimistic. The population, which had been 42,000 in 1800, was growing rapidly. A college—Ohio University—had already been established (1802). Increasing numbers of wagons filled to creaking fullness were transporting goods overland to eastern markets; 1,030 miles of crooked wagon trails had been cut by the time the State was organized in 1803. On the river small boats carrying freight and passengers made round trips from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati in about four weeks. Flatboats bringing settlers and goods were arriving constantly at one or another of the river towns. On both sides of the stream the rich lands were already producing enough to make Cincinnati the distribution point of the Ohio Valley.

Politically Ohio was fairly evenly divided between Federalists and Republicans. Chillicothe was the stronghold of the Republicans, while Marietta, which had been settled largely by New Englanders, was the center of Federalist activities. Cincinnati, fastest-growing river port, shared its loyalties. However, as a result of a great inrush of liberal-minded pioneers during the formative years, Ohio politics soon afterward took on a liberal tinge; until 1830 the liberal-minded Republicans kept their men in the governor’s chair.

By 1810 the population of the State had increased to 230, 760. Land could be bought at $2 an acre with five years to pay. Log cabins were being clapboarded over; log schools were already being replaced by the one-room red brick schoolhouses that were to be a familiar part of the Ohio scene for a hundred years. There were a few pieces of good architecture going up. The Tupper-Ward house in Marietta, built by ship carpenters in 1803, was a splendid example of the Georgian. In the Western Reserve the New England immigrants were reproducing in Ohio the village squares characteristic of Connecticut, and around them putting up well-designed houses similar to those they had left behind in the East. In the Virginia Military District Southern immigrants were building red brick homes with galleries reminiscent of the South. The square courthouse with truncated hipped roof and center bell cupola, a style peculiar to Ohio’s early public buildings, was being built in the county seat towns as rapidly as the various counties were created. Church congregations in even the small communities had built simple churches where the circuit rider came to preach on the Sabbath.

The church was a social center, and it was often here that the pioneer first learned of his new neighbors, discussed the crops and the weather, and heard the latest gossip and the news. Revivals were popular, and they too were attended as often for social as for religious reasons. Settlers given to more rollicking entertainment found it in the taverns at night, dancing the money musk and the fisher’s hornpipe, and stamping their feet to ‘Skip to My Lou’ and ‘Possum Up a Gum Stump.’ At other times the pioneer mixed work with fun in cabin- or barn-raisings which were always times of dancing, song, and merriment. All in all, however, the life of the Ohio pioneer was a lonely one, full of hard work and little recreation.

In 1811, just before the outbreak of the War of 1812, two important events occurred, both of them to have important effects on Ohio pioneer economy. First came the demise of the First Bank of the United States, which was the signal for the uncontrolled issue of wildcat bank notes; secondly, the Orleans, first steamboat on western waters, traveled down the Ohio, bewildering the river settlers and foreshadowing a new era of commerce, an era of particular meaning to Ohio, bounded on the south by the river and on the north by the lake. The use of steam as a source of power also heralded the end of the water mills.

One of the incidental effects of the War of 1812, but one important to Ohio, was that it made presidential timber of William Henry Harrison, a Virginia-born Ohioan who drew the National spotlight to Ohio a few decades later. Of more immediate importance was the extravagant Government spending. For the first time large sums of money circulated on the frontier. Ohio contributed more than its quota of men to help win the war (25,000), and gave $350,000 to the war fund.

In the period that followed, Ohio experienced its first boom days. Steamboating on the Ohio became a serious business; 76 steamers were launched on the Ohio-Mississippi waterway between 1815 and 1819. Immense quantities of pork, whisky, cheese, flour, and other products of the State went down the river to New Orleans and up the river to Pittsburgh. Ohio’s population swelled from 250,000 to 500,000 in 10 years, an increase caused chiefly by the ‘Ohio fever’ (as it was called in Connecticut), which depopulated whole villages in the East and sent emigrants by the tens of thousands into Ohio.

The boom brought about road and bridge building, but not enough to satisfy the demand of the interior farmers who were producing more farm goods than they could dispose of. While these farmers were still grumbling about lack of transportation, rumors drifted into Ohio about the Erie Canal which was being dug in New York. An Ohio system of canals was immediately conceived and proposed, and Governor Ethan Allen Brown, a Republican from Hamilton County, assumed the leadership in the canal campaign.

While enthusiasm for the canals was running high, the boom era came abruptly to an end in the crash of 1818, bringing Ohio its first stern lesson of depression; hard times lasted into the 1820’s—until the government ‘spent its way out’ by building canals, roads, and bridges. Most spectacular of these public improvements were, of course, the canals. Through the financial genius of Alfred Kelley of Columbus, money for the first canals was raised. Brown’s dream of a system of State-owned canals began to take on the aspect of exciting reality when on July 4, 1825, Dewitt Clinton, chief sponsor of the Erie Canal, came over from Albany, New York, to Licking Summit, a point near Newark, to turn the first spadeful of dirt and thus inaugurate the construction of canals in the State. To provide funds for canals, roads, bridges, and other public works a tax law was passed in 1825 which gathered in so much revenue that in 1831 the State auditor exulted, ‘The receipts from taxation annually exceed our calculations.’

Passed at the same time as the 1825 tax law was a bill furthering a more democratic system of education by providing that one-half mill out of every tax dollar should be set aside for school purposes. School education at the time was largely limited to the mastery of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Pioneer life was concerned with problems of a physical world, and there was little attention given to cultural subjects. While Mrs. Frances Trollope’s remarks on the culture of Cincinnatians (whom she observed very closely from 1829–31) are probably too harsh, they give a picture of the people that has its share of truth. The crudeness of the people she met—‘the incessant remorseless spitting Americans’—was to her at times almost unbearable. She was disgusted by the smell of onions and whisky in the theater, and the ‘thumping of feet instead of clapping.’ Cincinnati was a town of butchers and brewers, river roustabouts, farmers, and new immigrants.

To Mrs. Trollope it seemed that those Cincinnatians who weren’t crude were prudish. She complained of this prudishness that made ‘the larger proportion of females deem it an offense against religion to witness the representation of a play.’

‘And Shakespeare, sir?’ she asked of a Cincinnati gentleman and scholar.

‘Shakespeare, Madam, is obscene, and, thank God, we are sufficiently advanced to have found it out! If we must have the abomination of stage plays, let them at least be marked by the refinement of the age in which we live.’

In the late 1820’s the first cleavage between labor and capital appeared in Ohio’s industry. For the pioneer there had been no classes and no workers’ problems. But the need of some sort of protective organization among employees appeared with the widespread unemployment in the early 1820’s, and in 1828 the first real labor union was organized by the printers in Cincinnati. In 1831 one of the first labor papers in the United States, the Working Man’s Shield, was published, also at Cincinnati.

There were further evidences of restlessness among the laboring class in the early 1830’s. Walk-outs occurred in Cincinnati, and there was grumbling in Columbus over the contract-labor system at Ohio penitentiary. In 1836 the first Ohio strike was recorded when the Cincinnati Harnessmakers’ Union struck for more money and a 10-hour day. Ohio avoided the real pinch of the 1837 panic by passing in that year its famous Loan Law, by which the credit of the State could be loaned to railroad companies, and which authorized the State under certain conditions to subscribe to the stock of canal, bridge, and turnpike corporations. This brought considerable activity until it was repealed in 1840. The 1830’s saw a wave of building construction in the Greek Revival style, much of it architecturally pleasing. Before the decade closed, ground was broken for a new statehouse in Columbus (1839), which when finished 22 years later closed the era of the Greek Revival in Ohio.

The 1830’s saw the rise and fall of one of the most interesting religious groups in the history of the State. There have been Shakers, Mennonites, and Dunkards in Ohio, but none ever gripped the fancy of the people as did Joseph Smith and the Mormons. Smith arrived in Kirtland in 1831 with only a handful of followers. He scoured the countryside for converts, and soon several thousand men and women had turned to Mormonism. It was the hope of Smith to make Kirtland a great Mormon city, but he became involved in financial trouble after failure of his Kirtland bank in 1837. Threatened with arrest if he stayed, he hastily left Ohio in 1838, many of his converts later following him to Missouri. Smith’s sojourn in Ohio was a tempestuous one, but his church had its first growth here.

In 1840 Ohio sent its first President to the White House—William Henry Harrison, a Virginia-born Ohio resident with a colorless but unclouded political record. Ohio rang with the campaign song, ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.’ (Tippecanoe was the nickname given Harrison after his famous victory at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811; Tyler was Harrison’s running mate.) The log cabin and hard cider became the symbols for the rough-and-ready idealism of the pioneers who had elected him.

The year of the election saw the repeal of the Loan Law. Activity in road building and canal digging tapered off to almost nothing, and for most of the 1840’s business was in the doldrums. But slack times did not stop immigration into Ohio; conditions were worse in Europe and in the East. In addition to those who came from New England—settling mostly in the Western Reserve—there were large numbers from Ireland and Germany and other European countries, whence they fled either from economic pressure or religious persecution. Ohio by the mid-century had little German towns, Swiss villages, Finnish settlements along the lake, and many other nationality groups who found something to their taste in Ohio with its wide variety of activities. The influx of Irish and Germans altered somewhat the religious pattern of the State. Until the mid-century northern Ohio had been principally Congregationalist and Presbyterian, and southern Ohio predominantly Methodist and Baptist. But the Roman Catholic church was established as one of the important faiths with the immigration of the Irish, as was the Lutheran church with the coming of the Germans.

Few railroad tracks had been laid or were being laid in the State during the early 1840’s, but the practicability of the steam wagon had been shown to Ohioans in 1836, and before the 1840–50 decade ended a great railroad-building boom was getting under way. The canal carried 26 times as much freight in 1850 as the railroads, yet ten years later twice as much freight was being hauled on the railroads as on the canals. The change had come swiftly; in the 1850’s the canals were considered ‘old-fashioned.’ In fact, all ways of transportation except the railroad suddenly became out of date. Stage lines disappeared overnight. The famous Ohio Stage Company failed in 1857. This company, which had maintained a virtual monopoly over the stage business between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi, sold its coaches to a Western stage company just before the Civil War. So far as Ohio was concerned, picturesque stagecoach days were over, although stage lines continued for many years on routes not served by railroads.

With the railroads opening up the plains of northern Ohio to development, Cincinnati’s pre-eminence was threatened. The effects were not immediately felt, however, and in the 1850’s steamboating on the Ohio was still a business of fabulous freight tonnage and passenger traffic. Cincinnati ‘Porkopolis,’ with a population of 150,000, was the biggest meat-packing center in the United States.

Hardly had the tracks of the first Ohio railroads been put down when a new mechanical wonder appeared—the magnetic telegraph. In 1847 the legislature passed an act permitting telegraph companies to erect lines along roads and streets ‘so long as they did not incommode the public.’ By the end of the year Columbus had telegraph service and its first daily newspaper.

Coincident with the spectacular progress in transportation and communication, the legislature was making important changes in government. Internal improvements were shifted from the State to local subdivisions by an act of 1846 in which counties were authorized to hold a referendum whenever the county commissioners wanted to subscribe for stock in railroad, turnpike, bridge, or similar corporations. A State Bank of Ohio was established with 17 branch banks, and 9 so-called independent banks were chartered, giving strength to the money institutions which had been weak since the panic of 1837. In 1846 the legislature introduced the general property tax in modern form. A new State constitution, drawn up in 1850, included two particularly important provisions—one, the popular election of State officials, the other, the ‘general incorporation act’ which relieved the legislative body from work that till then had taken up a large share of its time. In 1852 the legislature passed the first law in the United States for the regulation of working hours of women and children; the act, however, was loosely drawn and of little value.

While Cincinnati and other southern Ohio towns had strong commercial ties with the South, the sentiment in southern Ohio as well as in the Yankee Western Reserve was generally against slavery. An abolitionist society had been organized in Ohio as early as 1815, and in 1821 Benjamin Lundy was publishing the antislavery Genius of Universal Emancipation at Mount Pleasant.

An early center of abolitionist agitation was the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, a training school for Presbyterian ministers. Citizens of the town—while generally sympathetic with the Negro—resented the school’s tactics of ‘fomenting trouble.’ Feeling eventually became so strong between citizens and students that the Reverend Lyman Beecher, head of the seminary and a moderate antislavery man, ordered an end to abolitionist work and discussion. Thereupon a number of students with some of the faculty, including Professor Theodore Weld, quit the seminary in 1833 in protest. Going to Oberlin in the strongly abolitionist Western Reserve they founded Oberlin College, the first co-racial and coeducational college in America. Other students, disciples of Weld, traveled through the northwest, preaching abolition and rousing the people against slavery.

Meanwhile Cincinnati’s antislavery sentiment became stronger and stronger in spite of the city’s economic bonds with the South. It was the big Underground Railroad center along the Mason-Dixon line, and the home of its ‘president,’ Levi Coffin. The State as a whole was so hostile to ‘slave-snatchers’ and so friendly to the fugitive Negro that Ohio was almost as much a synonym for freedom as was Canada. The State became a powerful factor in the National Struggle. Joshua R. Giddings led the abolitionist bloc in the House of Representatives during the 20 years he served there, while Senator Salmon P. Chase of Cincinnati fought in the upper house. Another radical Republican was Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War and