CLEVELAND TO TOLEDO.
Sixty-first Day.
_Lampman House_,
BLACK RIVER, OHIO,
_July 11, 1876_.
At eight o'clock, my favorite hour for beginning a day's ride, I mounted
_Paul_ in front of the hotel at Cleveland, but before leaving the city I
stopped at Major Hessler's office to hand him the proceeds of my lecture
at Garrett's Hall, which were donated to the Soldiers' Monument Fund at
Dayton. This brought me two very kind acknowledgments: one from General
James Barnett, who forwarded the money, and the other from Rev. William
Earnshaw, custodian of the Monument Fund. These letters, written in
behalf of three thousand disabled veterans, amply satisfy me for any
sacrifice I may have made, and are among my most prized possessions.
General Barnett wrote as follows:
_Post No. 1, Department of Ohio, G. A. R._,
CLEVELAND, _July 12, 1876_.
CAPTAIN WILLARD GLAZIER,
COMRADE: Through your unsolicited generosity I have the pleasure to
acknowledge the receipt of the net proceeds of your lecture on
"Echoes from the Revolution," delivered in our city July 6, 1876,
and by your direction have forwarded the amount to Chaplain William
Earnshaw, President of the "Soldiers' Home Monument Fund," at
Dayton, to assist in erecting a monument to the memory of the
veterans who by the fortunes of war await the long roll at the
National Military Home, and may your reward be no less than the love
and gratitude of our unfortunate comrades.
By order of
GENERAL JAMES BARNETT, _Commanding_.
E. M. HESSLER, _Quartermaster_.
There are certain results following every undertaking which are looked
upon either with gratification or dissatisfaction, and which, through
side issues, very often assume the importance of those desired to be
attained. The recollection of the splendid scenes through which I have
passed, the people whom I have met, the cities I have visited, will be a
lifelong satisfaction, but the opportunity to help perpetuate the memory
of fellow-soldiers and to do others honor while they yet live, will be
the most gratifying outcome of my journey. Knowing this, the following
letter from Chaplain Earnshaw holds an important place among the papers
of my correspondents.
_National Soldiers' Home_,
DAYTON, OHIO, _July 27, 1876_.
CAPTAIN WILLARD GLAZIER,
MY DEAR COMRADE: We have received, through Major E. M. Hessler, your
generous donation to aid in erecting the Soldiers' Monument at the
Home. You have the hearty thanks of three thousand disabled veterans
now on our rolls; and a cordial invitation to visit us whenever it
is your pleasure to do so. Again, we thank you.
Very respectfully,
WILLIAM EARNSHAW,
President Historical and Monumental Society.
[Illustration: A COTTAGE IN THE WOODS.]
On leaving the city several gentlemen gave me the pleasure of their
company for some distance, among them Alexander Wilsey, who before
the war had been a scholar of mine back in Schodack, New York.
Meeting him was only one of many similar experiences, for here and there
along my route I found old acquaintances, whose faces I had never
expected to see again.
After a ride of six hours, I rode into Black River and found it quite an
enterprising village, but hardly suggesting its old position as the
principal port in the county.
Sixty-second Day.
_Huron House_,
HURON, OHIO,
_July Twelfth_.
Left the aspiring village of Black River or "Lorraine," as the
inhabitants are disposed to call it, at nine o'clock, stopping at the
Lake House, Vermillion, for dinner. The scenery is very attractive along
the Lake Shore Road between Black River and Huron, and I followed it all
day and for two or three hours after nightfall, covering a distance of
twenty miles. My sense of the beautiful was somewhat dimmed, however, by
the cloud of mosquitoes which beset my path, and which were hardly
persuaded to part company at the hotel. There were nearly seven hundred
people in Huron, and I must confess that upon entering the slumbering
village I began to be generous in the hope that my attentive little
tormentors would adopt the principle of equal distribution among the
inhabitants. But for the rapacious mosquito the course of the traveller
by night upon these highways is serene and uneventful, for, of all the
hordes of wolves, wildcats, buffaloes and panthers that made their
homes about this part of the country in the times of the Indian,
scarcely a vestige remains.
The race of the red man is becoming slowly exterminated, and his friends
of the forest seem to be disappearing with him, while the white man and
the mosquito fill their places. I am sure no one of average reason,
especially our logicians of New Jersey, would deny that this is another
proof of the survival of the fittest.
Although it was dark before I came into Huron, I could get a very good
idea of its character, and had formed some notion of the place which was
to shelter me. In 1848 it was spoken of as having been "formerly the
greatest business place in the county," and this reputation, although it
has not made it a Sandusky or a Cleveland, has left it a spark of the
old energy.
Sixty-third Day.
_West House_,
SANDUSKY, OHIO,
_July Thirteenth_.
I was fortunate in having a comparatively short distance to travel
between Huron and this city. It is only nine miles, and I did not start
until two o'clock, allowing myself a two hour's easy gallop with the
lake on my right all the way.
Along this shore more than a century ago, General Bradstreet, with three
thousand men, sailed to the relief of Fort Junandat, while Pontiac, the
great Ottawa warrior, was besieging Detroit. Reaching Fort Sandusky he
burned the Indian villages there and destroyed the cornfields; passed on
up to Detroit to scatter the threatening savages, and returning went
into the Wyandot country through Sandusky Bay. To have attempted to ride
alone on horseback in those days would have been a foolhardy, if not a
fatal undertaking. Now the screech of an engine-whistle announced the
approach of a train on the Lake Shore Road, the great wheels thundered
by, and _Paul_, alert and trembling, was ready to dash away. How
different it would have been in those old pioneer times! The horseman
would have been the one to tremble then, his hand reach for his rifle,
his eyes strained towards the thicket from whence the expected yell of
the savage was to come.
Among the first proprietors of this section were the Eries. These were
followed by the resistless Iroquois, and after them the Wyandots and
Ottawas, who seem to have left the strongest impress upon the hills and
valleys of Ohio. One of these tribes, the Wyandots, called the bay near
which they built their wigwams Sae-san-don-ske, meaning "Lake of the Cold
Water," and from this the present name of the city comes. In the early
days it was called Ogontz, after a big chief of that name who lived
there before the year 1812. All about were rich hunting-grounds, which
accounts for its having been chosen by the Indians in times of peace;
and even now Sandusky is held to be one of the greatest fish-markets in
America.
The place was bound to be attractive to the white man, and any one might
have safely prophesied that a city would rise here. The ground slopes
gradually down to the lake, the bay forms an ideal harbor, and looking
off upon the boats and water, the eye rests upon a scene picturesque and
striking.
My attention was called to Johnson's Island, which was used for the
confinement of Confederate officers during the late war. I learned that
they were allowed the luxury of an occasional bath in the lake, under
guard, of course, and in squads of a hundred men--a luxury which the
boys in Libby and Charleston and Columbia would have thought "too good
to be true."
Under the city are the limestone quarries, which furnish an
inexhaustible supply of building-material and which give an added
distinction to this bright little city of the lakes.
On the evening of my arrival I spoke in Union Hall and was introduced by
Captain Culver, who referred to my military record and the object of my
lectures. Captain Culver is a comrade in the G. A. R. and was a
fellow-prisoner at Libby and other prisons. He did much towards making
my stay at Sandusky most agreeable.
Sixty-fourth Day.
_Fountain House_,
CASTALIA, OHIO,
_July Fourteenth_.
My Sandusky friend, Captain Culver, called at the West House for me soon
after breakfast, and we spent the forenoon strolling about the city. I
was shown the newly completed Court House, of which Sanduskians are very
proud; met several of the officials and found much to admire. Left at
five o'clock in the afternoon and by six had reached Castalia, five
miles distant, which I soon found had something to boast of back of its
classic name. As a stranger I was of course immediately told of the
wonders of the "waters," which I learned form quite an attraction in
summer and keep the little place in a flutter of excitement.
Marshall Burton came in 1836 and laid out this prairie town at the head
of Coal Creek. Finding the source of the stream in a cool, clear spring,
now known to be two hundred feet in diameter and sixty feet deep, named
the place "Castalia," from the famed Greek fountain at the foot of
Parnassus. The waters of this spring are so pure that objects are
plainly seen through the sixty liquid feet, and they say that when the
sun reaches meridian, these objects reflect the colors of the rainbow,
which might suggest to Castalians that the ancient sun-god, Apollo,
favored the western namesake of his Delphian fount. I met no poets here,
but possibly inspiration is not one of the powers guaranteed. Indeed if
it should treat devotees of the Divine Art, as it does everything else
that is plunged into it, we should have petrified poets.
These petrifying qualities of the water, caused by the combined action
of lime, soda, magnesia and iron have made the mill-wheels which turn in
Coal Creek incapable of decay.
At a little distance from the town is a cave of quite large dimensions,
which was discovered accidentally through a dog running into the opening
in pursuit of a rabbit. This cave I believe makes up the complement of
natural attractions about the village. The chief attraction, the social
life of the people, cannot be guessed at by the rapid glance of the
traveller. But even a short sojourn here is apt to be remembered long
and pleasantly. Ohioans are notably hospitable.
Sixty-fifth Day.
_Ball House,_
FREMONT, OHIO,
_July Fifteenth._
I was awakened at twelve P. M. the previous night at Castalia by two
villainous imps, who seemed determined to make an impression. Their
evident object was "more rum," which to the credit of the landlord was
not furnished them. Exasperated by this temperance measure, they
attempted to enter the house, and finding the doors locked began a
bombardment with fists and feet. This novel performance was kept up
until the object of their wrath and his shot-gun appeared. Owing to this
my ride of nineteen miles to Fremont was not as refreshing as it might
have been.
As I approached the town I thought of President Hayes, who is so closely
identified with it. Here he began the practice of law, and won such
popularity, not only among his townsmen, but throughout the State, that
in 1864, after a succession of honors, his friends were pushing him for
Congress. In answer to a letter written from Cincinnati, suggesting that
his presence there would secure his election, he said, "An officer fit
for duty, who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer for
Congress, ought to be scalped. You may feel perfectly sure that I shall
do no such thing," and in a letter to his wife, written after he had
heard of Lincoln's assassination, he expressed another sentiment quite
as strong when he said: "Lincoln's success in his great office, his hold
upon the confidence and affection of his countrymen, we shall all _say_
are only second to Washington's. We shall probably _feel_ and _think_
that they are not second even to his."
Fremont of course is justly proud of the name and fame of Rutherford B.
Hayes. Two years before he returned to his home, after refusing Grant's
offer of an Assistant Secretaryship, but the people of Ohio were not
satisfied with this. Their feelings were probably voiced by the words of
a personal friend of Hayes, who said: "With your energies, talents,
education, and address, you are green--verdant as grass--to stay in a
country village." Soon afterwards, at the urgent and repeated requests
of the people, he gave up his quiet life and once more entered the
political arena, with results which the election of 1876 shows.
There were apparently many who were dissatisfied with the Nation's
choice, but in Ohio, and especially where he was known personally, he
was much beloved and admired. His uncle, Sardis Birchard, who died some
years ago, leaving his property and fortune to his namesake, has given a
park and a fine library to Fremont.
The town is on the Sandusky River, at the head of navigation, and has
quite a brisk trade for a place claiming only a little over five
thousand inhabitants.
Sixty-sixth Day.
_Elmore House,_
ELMORE, OHIO,
_July Sixteenth._
My accommodations at the Ball House, Fremont, were quite in contrast
with those placed at my disposal at Castalia. I heard no stories of
"mineral springs" or wonderful freaks of Nature, but shall remember
Fremont as the delightful little city where I had two nights' sleep in
one.
I began my day's journey at eight o'clock with Elmore as the evening
objective. Halted a few moments at a hotel known in that locality as the
Four-Mile House. Took dinner at Hessville, where I remained until four
o'clock in the afternoon and then rode on to Elmore.
[Illustration: COUNTRY STORE AND POST OFFICE.]