born in New York state, but lived in Ohio from his fifth year onward. He
was a printer and an editor, and after the war, he suddenly won national
fame as the author of the Petroleum V. Naseby letters. These were
satires of the old proslavery spirit which retarded the reconstruction
of the South and harried the freedmen by mobs and lynchings. Their humor
gave Locke a place in our literature which no history of it can ignore.
Another literary man who must be taken account of in the summing up of
American literature was S. S. Cox, who made himself known early in the
fifties when Ohio was far less heard of than now, by his lively book of
travels, “A Buckeye Abroad.” He was a journalist and a politician; he
was three times elected to Congress from Columbus, and when he went
to live in New York, he was three times sent to the House of
Representatives from that city, where he is commemorated by a statue. He
was a native of Muskingum County, and was born in 1824 at Zanesville.
The latest and most brilliant contribution of Ohio to the scholarship of
the East is Professor W. M. Sloane, now of Princeton University, but by
birth of Jefferson County. He must rank by his “Life of Napoleon” among
the American historians of the first class. He is of Scotch Calvinistic
ancestry, and the son of a Presbyterian minister.
In this list of Ohioans who have done honor to our state, Mr. James
Ford Rhodes happens to be last, though chance might well have placed him
among the first He is the author of “A History of the United States
from the Compromise of 1850,” which has a peculiar value in the field
of American history, and which has given Mr. Rhodes prominent standing,
with a constantly growing reputation. He is of the New England race of
the Western Reserve; until within a few years his home was in Cleveland,
but he now lives in Boston.
XVI. INCIDENTS AND CHARACTERISTICS.
Nearly all the Ohio stories since 1812 have been stories of business
enterprise and industrial adventure. I dare say that if these could be
fully told, we should have tales as exciting, as romantic and pathetic
as any I have set down concerning the Indian wars. But such stories are
usually forgotten in the material interest of the affairs, and it is
only when some tragedy or comedy arising from them finds chance record
that we realize how full of human interest they are. The decay of
steamboating and the rise of railroading is in itself a romance if it
could be rightly seen, and if the facts could be clearly set before us,
the story of commercial triumph by a great monopoly would not be less
fascinating than that of any war of conquest.
The greatest monopoly of ancient or modern times, the Standard Oil
Company, had its rise in Ohio, and there is no more impressive chapter
in the annals of our country than its history forms. In fact, everything
concerning the discovery of the great underground lakes of petroleum,
and subterranean spaces of natural gas, which suddenly enriched certain
sections of the state, and then with their exhaustion left them to lapse
into ruin, is picturesque and dramatic. Many tales are told of poor
farmers who struck oil on their lands, and sold them for sums greater
than they had ever dreamed of, and then went out into the world to waste
their wealth in a few years of wild riot, or sank down and led idle
and useless lives in sight of the fields they had once tilled. Similar
stories are told of the regions where natural gas has been found, and
some day, when the chronicles of Findlay, in Hancock County are fully
written we shall know all these romantic episodes in their grotesqueness
and their pathos. It had been known from the earliest settlement of the
country that the natural gas underlay the town, and fifty years ago two
small wells were sunk. But it was not until after the discovery of the
natural gas at Pittsburg that the people of Findlay began to think of
turning their treasure to account. Then, in the year 1884, the first
great well was bored, and sent into the startled air a shaft of flame
sixty feet high. Other wells were sunk, and the greatest of all, the
famous Karg well, shook its flag of fire against the sky with a roar
like that of Niagara, and made its voice heard fifteen miles away. It
was winter when it was first lighted, but it made summer for two hundred
yards around. The snow melted, the grass and wild flowers sprang up,
and the crickets came and trilled in the grateful warmth. By a sad irony
this source of future wealth became the refuge of homeless men, and
within its genial circuit many tramps slept sweetly, secure from the
winter beyond.
Findlay grew from five thousand to fifteen thousand inhabitants in a
year. The municipality wisely possessed itself of the most important
wells, and supplied the gas so cheaply and abundantly to the people that
no company could rival it. In June, 1887, it celebrated the anniversary
of the first use of the natural gas in the industrial arts, and for
three days the town was given over to rejoicing in its glory and
prosperity. The streets were arched with flame, the great wells flaunted
their banners night and day, and the gas flared from innumerable pipes
and jets through sun and rain in every part of the town.
No such festival has commemorated the introduction of the grape culture
in Ohio, though this is one of the most poetic facts of our history.
When the changes of climate along the Ohio River rendered it
unprofitable in the region of Cincinnati, where the imaginative genius
of Longworth had first invented the Catawba wine which the poetic genius
of Longfellow celebrated in graceful song, the vine found home and
welcome along the shores of Lake Erie. There thousands upon thousands
of acres now spread interminable vineyards, and the grapes of every
American variety purple in autumn to an almost unfailing harvest.
It was at first only a dream when Longworth transplanted the wild vine
from the woods, and it might well have been scoffed at as akin to
dreams of the past which never were realized. One of these was the silk
culture, which people believed was to be one of our greatest sources
of wealth sixty or seventy years ago, when they planted millions of
mulberry trees to nourish the silkworms which died rather than become
citizens of Ohio. Another was the culture of the Chinese sorghum cane,
which for many years tantalized our farmers with the hopes of native
sugar never fulfilled.
Still other kinds of dreams there have been native to our air or
naturalized to it. The Leatherwood God was by no means the only
religious impostor who has flourished among us. In 1831 Joseph Smith,
the first of the Mormon prophets and the founder of Mormon-ism, came
to Portage County, with one of his disciples, and began to preach. They
made so many converts that some shortsighted people of Hiram thought
to stop their work by tarring and feathering them. This only drove
them from the place; but the next year, they settled in Kirtland, Lake
County, where, in 1834, their followers built the first Mormon temple,
for the worship of God according to the Book of Mormon. It was this
sacred book, written on gold plates, which Smith, a native of Vermont,
pretended to find, in a hill near Palmyra, New York, where he was
leading an idle and useless life. His converts at Kirtland increased to
three thousand, but they founded a bank as well as a temple, and so got
into debt and trouble. Smith left the state to escape the sheriff, and
went to Missouri, where the great mass of the believers joined him,
seven hundred leaving Kirtland in one day. Before long the Missourians
foolishly began to persecute them, and then the Mormons settled at
Nauvoo, in Illinois, where they built their second temple, far more
magnificent than the first at Kirtland. But here again their unwise
neighbors began to molest them, and Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram
were thrown into jail. A mob attacked the jail, and the Smiths were
murdered. The Mormons then abandoned Nauvoo, and took their way through
the desert to Salt Lake, in Utah, where they laid the foundations of
a great commonwealth. They still own their first temple at Kirtland,
however, and it is said to be the hope of one sect among them yet to
return and dwell there.
Among the fanaticisms or enthusiasms which flourished among our people,
none was more striking than that which moved the Woman’s Temperance
Crusade in Hillsborough, Highland County, in 1873. Under the influence
of a fervent speaker, who told how the women of his native village in
New England had joined in beseeching the liquor sellers of the place to
give up their traffic, a hundred and fifty ladies of Hillsborough banded
together and went about to the different saloons, entreating their
owners not to sell strong drink any more. By day and by night, in wet
and in cold, through menace and insult, they kept up their effort the
whole winter long. Where the dealer was very obstinate, they knelt down
at his door, and prayed and sang till he yielded. After the crusade
ended, the liquor selling began again, but though it seemed to have done
little good, yet it is said that there has been far less drunkenness
in the region than before, and public opinion was roused to enforce the
laws against liquor selling. Among the crusaders were some of the first
ladies of the neighborhood, and good women emulated their efforts in
several other places.
I am willing to leave the reader with the impression that the people of
Ohio are that sort of idealists who have the courage of their dreams. By
this courage they have made the best of them come true, and it is well
for them in their mainly matter-of-fact and practical character that
they show themselves at times enthusiasts and even fanatics. It is not
ill for them that they should now and then have been mistaken. This has
helped to keep them modest in the midst of their prosperity, and their
eminence in saving and governing the union of these states. Such as
they are, they seem to me, historically, the first of the Americans. The
whole country on the eastward characterized them, and they, more than
the people of any other state, have perpetuated and imparted their
character to the whole country on the westward.