Bidwell, Ohio, was an old town as the ages of towns go in the Central
West, long before Hugh McVey, in his search for a place where he could
penetrate the wall that shut him off from humanity, went there to live
and to try to work out his problem. It is a busy manufacturing town now
and has a population of nearly a hundred thousand people; but the time
for the telling of the story of its sudden and surprising growth has not
yet come.
From the beginning Bidwell has been a prosperous place. The town lies
in the valley of a deep, rapid-flowing river that spreads out just
above the town, becomes for the time wide and shallow, and goes singing
swiftly along over stones. South of the town the river not only spreads
out, but the hills recede. A wide flat valley stretches away to the
north. In the days before the factories came the land immediately about
town was cut up into small farms devoted to fruit and berry raising,
and beyond the area of small farms lay larger tracts that were immensely
productive and that raised huge crops of wheat, corn, and cabbage.
When Hugh was a boy sleeping away his days in the grass beside his
father's fishing shack by the Mississippi River, Bidwell had already
emerged out of the hardships of pioneer days. On the farms that lay in
the wide valley to the north the timber had been cut away and the stumps
had all been rooted out of the ground by a generation of men that had
passed. The soil was easy to cultivate and had lost little of its virgin
fertility. Two railroads, the Lake Shore and Michigan Central--later
a part of the great New York Central System--and a less important
coal-carrying road, called the Wheeling and Lake Erie, ran through the
town. Twenty-five hundred people lived then in Bidwell. They were for
the most part descendants of the pioneers who had come into the country
by boat through the Great Lakes or by wagon roads over the mountains
from the States of New York and Pennsylvania.
The town stood on a sloping incline running up from the river, and the
Lake Shore and Michigan Central Railroad had its station on the river
bank at the foot of Main Street. The Wheeling Station was a mile away to
the north. It was to be reached by going over a bridge and along a piked
road that even then had begun to take on the semblance of a street. A
dozen houses had been built facing Turner's Pike and between these were
berry fields and an occasional orchard planted to cherry, peach or apple
trees. A hard path went down to the distant station beside the road,
and in the evening this path, wandering along under the branches of
the fruit trees that extended out over the farm fences, was a favorite
walking place for lovers.
The small farms lying close about the town of Bidwell raised berries
that brought top prices in the two cities, Cleveland and Pittsburgh,
reached by its two railroads, and all of the people of the town who
were not engaged in one of the trades--in shoe making, carpentry, horse
shoeing, house painting or the like--or who did not belong to the small
merchant and professional classes, worked in summer on the land. On
summer mornings, men, women and children went into the fields. In the
early spring when planting went on and all through late May, June and
early July when berries and fruit began to ripen, every one was rushed
with work and the streets of the town were deserted. Every one went to
the fields. Great hay wagons loaded with children, laughing girls, and
sedate women set out from Main Street at dawn. Beside them walked tall
boys, who pelted the girls with green apples and cherries from the trees
along the road, and men who went along behind smoking their morning
pipes and talking of the prevailing prices of the products of their
fields. In the town after they had gone a Sabbath quiet prevailed. The
merchants and clerks loitered in the shade of the awnings before the
doors of the stores, and only their wives and the wives of the two or
three rich men in town came to buy and to disturb their discussions of
horse racing, politics and religion.
In the evening when the wagons came home, Bidwell awoke. The tired berry
pickers walked home from the fields in the dust of the roads swinging
their dinner pails. The wagons creaked at their heels, piled high with
boxes of berries ready for shipment. In the stores after the evening
meal crowds gathered. Old men lit their pipes and sat gossiping along
the curbing at the edge of the sidewalks on Main Street; women with
baskets on their arms did the marketing for the next day's living;
the young men put on stiff white collars and their Sunday clothes, and
girls, who all day had been crawling over the fields between the rows
of berries or pushing their way among the tangled masses of raspberry
bushes, put on white dresses and walked up and down before the men.
Friendships begun between boys and girls in the fields ripened into
love. Couples walked along residence streets under the trees and talked
with subdued voices. They became silent and embarrassed. The bolder
ones kissed. The end of the berry picking season brought each year a new
outbreak of marriages to the town of Bidwell.
In all the towns of mid-western America it was a time of waiting. The
country having been cleared and the Indians driven away into a vast
distant place spoken of vaguely as the West, the Civil War having been
fought and won, and there being no great national problems that touched
closely their lives, the minds of men were turned in upon themselves.
The soul and its destiny was spoken of openly on the streets. Robert
Ingersoll came to Bidwell to speak in Terry's Hall, and after he had
gone the question of the divinity of Christ for months occupied the
minds of the citizens. The ministers preached sermons on the subject
and in the evening it was talked about in the stores. Every one had
something to say. Even Charley Mook, who dug ditches, who stuttered so
that not a half dozen people in town could understand him, expressed his
opinion.
In all the great Mississippi Valley each town came to have a character
of its own, and the people who lived in the towns were to each other
like members of a great family. The individual idiosyncrasies of each
member of the great family stood forth. A kind of invisible roof beneath
which every one lived spread itself over each town. Beneath the roof
boys and girls were born, grew up, quarreled, fought, and formed
friendships with their fellows, were introduced into the mysteries of
love, married, and became the fathers and mothers of children, grew old,
sickened, and died.
Within the invisible circle and under the great roof every one knew his
neighbor and was known to him. Strangers did not come and go swiftly and
mysteriously and there was no constant and confusing roar of machinery
and of new projects afoot. For the moment mankind seemed about to take
time to try to understand itself.
In Bidwell there was a man named Peter White who was a tailor and worked
hard at his trade, but who once or twice a year got drunk and beat his
wife. He was arrested each time and had to pay a fine, but there was a
general understanding of the impulse that led to the beating. Most of
the women knowing the wife sympathized with Peter. “She is a noisy thing
and her jaw is never still,” the wife of Henry Teeters, the grocer, said
to her husband. “If he gets drunk it's only to forget he's married to
her. Then he goes home to sleep it off and she begins jawing at him. He
stands it as long as he can. It takes a fist to shut up that woman. If
he strikes her it's the only thing he can do.”
Allie Mulberry the half-wit was one of the highlights of life in the
town. He lived with his mother in a tumble-down house at the edge of
town on Medina Road. Beside being a half-wit he had something the matter
with his legs. They were trembling and weak and he could only move
them with great difficulty. On summer afternoons when the streets were
deserted, he hobbled along Main Street with his lower jaw hanging down.
Allie carried a large club, partly for the support of his weak legs and
partly to scare off dogs and mischievous boys. He liked to sit in the
shade with his back against a building and whittle, and he liked to be
near people and have his talent as a whittler appreciated. He made fans
out of pieces of pine, long chains of wooden beads, and he once achieved
a singular mechanical triumph that won him wide renown. He made a ship
that would float in a beer bottle half filled with water and laid on
its side. The ship had sails and three tiny wooden sailors who stood
at attention with their hands to their caps in salute. After it was
constructed and put into the bottle it was too large to be taken out
through the neck. How Allie got it in no one ever knew. The clerks and
merchants who crowded about to watch him at work discussed the matter
for days. It became a never-ending wonder among them. In the evening
they spoke of the matter to the berry pickers who came into the stores,
and in the eyes of the people of Bidwell Allie Mulberry became a hero.
The bottle, half-filled with water and securely corked, was laid on a
cushion in the window of Hunter's Jewelry Store. As it floated about on
its own little ocean crowds gathered to look at it. Over the bottle
was a sign with the words--“Carved by Allie Mulberry of
Bidwell”--prominently displayed. Below these words a query had been
printed. “How Did He Get It Into The Bottle?” was the question asked.
The bottle stayed in the window for months and merchants took the
traveling men who visited them, to see it. Then they escorted their
guests to where Allie, with his back against the wall of a building and
his club beside him, was at work on some new creation of the whittler's
art. The travelers were impressed and told the tale abroad. Allie's fame
spread to other towns. “He has a good brain,” the citizen of Bidwell
said, shaking his head. “He don't appear to know very much, but look
what he does! He must be carrying all sorts of notions around inside of
his head.”
Jane Orange, widow of a lawyer, and with the single exception of Thomas
Butterworth, a farmer who owned over a thousand acres of land and lived
with his daughter on a farm a mile south of town, the richest person
in town, was known to every one in Bidwell, but was not liked. She was
called stingy and it was said that she and her husband had cheated every
one with whom they had dealings in order to get their start in life. The
town ached for the privilege of doing what they called “bringing them
down a peg.” Jane's husband had once been the Bidwell town attorney and
later had charge of the settlement of an estate belonging to Ed Lucas, a
farmer who died leaving two hundred acres of land and two daughters. The
farmer's daughters, every one said, “came out at the small end of the
horn,” and John Orange began to grow rich. It was said he was worth
fifty thousand dollars. All during the latter part of his life the
lawyer went to the city of Cleveland on business every week, and when he
was at home and even in the hottest weather he went about dressed in
a long black coat. When she went to the stores to buy supplies for
her house Jane Orange was watched closely by the merchants. She was
suspected of carrying away small articles that could be slipped into
the pockets of her dress. One afternoon in Toddmore's grocery, when she
thought no one was looking, she took a half dozen eggs out of a basket
and looking quickly around to be sure she was unobserved, put them into
her dress pocket. Harry Toddmore, the grocer's son who had seen the
theft, said nothing, but went unobserved out at the back door. He got
three or four clerks from other stores and they waited for Jane Orange
at a corner. When she came along they hurried out and Harry Toddmore
fell against her. Throwing out his hand he struck the pocket containing
the eggs a quick, sharp blow. Jane Orange turned and hurried away toward
home, but as she half ran through Main Street clerks and merchants came
out of the stores, and from the assembled crowd a voice called attention
to the fact that the contents of the stolen eggs having run down the
inside of her dress and over her stockings began to make a stream on the
sidewalk. A pack of town dogs excited by the shouts of the crowd ran at
her heels, barking and sniffing at the yellow stream that dripped from
her shoes.
An old man with a long white beard came to Bidwell to live. He had been
a carpet-bag Governor of a southern state in the reconstruction days
after the Civil War and had made money. He bought a house on Turner's
Pike close beside the river and spent his days puttering about in a
small garden. In the evening he came across the bridge into Main Street
and went to loaf in Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked with great
frankness and candor of his life in the South during the terrible time
when the country was trying to emerge from the black gloom of defeat,
and brought to the Bidwell men a new point of view on their old enemies,
the “Rebs.”
The old man--the name by which he had introduced himself in Bidwell was
that of Judge Horace Hanby--believed in the manliness and honesty of
purpose of the men he had for a time governed and who had fought a
long grim war with the North, with the New Englanders and sons of New
Englanders from the West and Northwest. “They're all right,” he said
with a grin. “I cheated them and made some money, but I liked them. Once
a crowd of them came to my house and threatened to kill me and I told
them that I did not blame them very much, so they let me alone.” The
judge, an ex-politician from the city of New York who had been involved
in some affair that made it uncomfortable for him to return to live
in that city, grew prophetic and philosophic after he came to live in
Bidwell. In spite of the doubt every one felt concerning his past, he
was something of a scholar and a reader of books, and won respect by his
apparent wisdom. “Well, there's going to be a new war here,” he said.
“It won't be like the Civil War, just shooting off guns and killing
peoples' bodies. At first it's going to be a war between individuals
to see to what class a man must belong; then it is going to be a long,
silent war between classes, between those who have and those who can't
get. It'll be the worst war of all.”
The talk of Judge Hanby, carried along and elaborated almost every
evening before a silent, attentive group in the drug store, began to
have an influence on the minds of Bidwell young men. At his suggestion
several of the town boys, Cliff Bacon, Albert Small, Ed Prawl, and two
or three others, began to save money for the purpose of going east to
college. Also at his suggestion Tom Butterworth the rich farmer sent
his daughter away to school. The old man made many prophecies concerning
what would happen in America. “I tell you, the country isn't going to
stay as it is,” he said earnestly. “In eastern towns the change has
already come. Factories are being built and every one is going to work
in the factories. It takes an old man like me to see how that changes
their lives. Some of the men stand at one bench and do one thing not
only for hours but for days and years. There are signs hung up saying
they mustn't talk. Some of them make more money than they did before the
factories came, but I tell you it's like being in prison. What would
you say if I told you all America, all you fellows who talk so big about
freedom, are going to be put in a prison, eh?
“And there's something else. In New York there are already a dozen
men who are worth a million dollars. Yes, sir, I tell you it's true, a
million dollars. What do you think of that, eh?”
Judge Hanby grew excited and, inspired by the absorbed attention of his
audience, talked of the sweep of events. In England, he explained, the
cities were constantly growing larger, and already almost every one
either worked in a factory or owned stock in a factory. “In New England
it is getting the same way fast,” he explained. “The same thing'll
happen here. Farming'll be done with tools. Almost everything now done
by hand'll be done by machinery. Some'll grow rich and some poor. The
thing is to get educated, yes, sir, that's the thing, to get ready for
what's coming. It's the only way. The younger generation has got to be
sharper and shrewder.”
The words of the old man, who had been in many places and had seen men
and cities, were repeated in the streets of Bidwell. The blacksmith and
the wheelwright repeated his words when they stopped to exchange news of
their affairs before the post-office. Ben Peeler, the carpenter, who
had been saving money to buy a house and a small farm to which he
could retire when he became too old to climb about on the framework of
buildings, used the money instead to send his son to Cleveland to a new
technical school. Steve Hunter, the son of Abraham Hunter the Bidwell
jeweler, declared that he was going to get up with the times, and when
he went into a factory, would go into the office, not into the shop. He
went to Buffalo, New York, to attend a business college.
The air of Bidwell began to stir with talk of new times. The evil
things said of the new life coming were soon forgotten. The youth and
optimistic spirit of the country led it to take hold of the hand of the
giant, industrialism, and lead him laughing into the land. The cry,
“get on in the world,” that ran all over America at that period and that
still echoes in the pages of American newspapers and magazines, rang in
the streets of Bidwell.
In the harness shop belonging to Joseph Wainsworth it one day struck a
new note. The harness maker was a tradesman of the old school and was
vastly independent. He had learned his trade after five years' service
as apprentice, and had spent an additional five years in going from
place to place as a journeyman workman, and felt that he knew his
business. Also he owned his shop and his home and had twelve hundred
dollars in the bank. At noon one day when he was alone in the shop, Tom
Butterworth came in and told him he had ordered four sets of farm work
harness from a factory in Philadelphia. “I came in to ask if you'll
repair them if they get out of order,” he said.
Joe Wainsworth began to fumble with the tools on his bench. Then he
turned to look the farmer in the eye and to do what he later spoke of to
his cronies as “laying down the law.” “When the cheap things begin to
go to pieces take them somewhere else to have them repaired,” he said
sharply. He grew furiously angry. “Take the damn things to Philadelphia
where you got 'em,” he shouted at the back of the farmer who had turned
to go out of the shop.
Joe Wainsworth was upset and thought about the incident all the
afternoon. When farmer-customers came in and stood about to talk of
their affairs he had nothing to say. He was a talkative man and his
apprentice, Will Sellinger, son of the Bidwell house painter, was
puzzled by his silence.
When the boy and the man were alone in the shop, it was Joe Wainsworth's
custom to talk of his days as a journeyman workman when he had gone from
place to place working at his trade. If a trace were being stitched or a
bridle fashioned, he told how the thing was done at a shop where he had
worked in the city of Boston and in another shop at Providence, Rhode
Island. Getting a piece of paper he made drawings illustrating the
cuts of leather that were made in the other places and the methods
of stitching. He claimed to have worked out his own method for doing
things, and that his method was better than anything he had seen in all
his travels. To the men who came into the shop to loaf during winter
afternoons he presented a smiling front and talked of their affairs, of
the price of cabbage in Cleveland or the effect of a cold snap on the
winter wheat, but alone with the boy, he talked only of harness making.
“I don't say anything about it. What's the good bragging? Just the same,
I could learn something to all the harness makers I've ever seen, and
I've seen the best of them,” he declared emphatically.
During the afternoon, after he had heard of the four factory-made work
harnesses brought into what he had always thought of as a trade that
belonged to him by the rights of a first-class workman, Joe remained
silent for two or three hours. He thought of the words of old Judge
Hanby and the constant talk of the new times now coming. Turning
suddenly to his apprentice, who was puzzled by his long silence and who
knew nothing of the incident that had disturbed his employer, he broke
forth into words. He was defiant and expressed his defiance. “Well,
then, let 'em go to Philadelphia, let 'em go any damn place
they please,” he growled, and then, as though his own words had
re-established his self-respect, he straightened his shoulders and
glared at the puzzled and alarmed boy. “I know my trade and do not have
to bow down to any man,” he declared. He expressed the old tradesman's
faith in his craft and the rights it gave the craftsman. “Learn your
trade. Don't listen to talk,” he said earnestly. “The man who knows his
trade is a man. He can tell every one to go to the devil.”