Whenever I visit the region of a famous man's youth I have the feeling
that I ought to discover there some clue to the secret of his greatness;
for I cannot help fancying that the environment must have molded him and
been an essential element in the development of his individuality and
power. It was with such expectations that I recently went to Ohio, just
as spring was verging into summer, to see the land where Mr. Howells
spent the years of which he has made so frank and appealing a record in
this volume. In the middle of the last century the State retained much
of the crude primitiveness of the frontier, and I wondered what stimulus
this could have offered in creating a genius so broad in his views and
so sensitive to impressions, and in whose expression there is such fine
imagination, humor, sympathy, and wisdom.
I began my journey in Mr. Howells's native State where he began his
life's journey eighty years ago, at Martin's Ferry. The place is two
miles up the Ohio River from Wheeling, West Virginia, on the western
bank of the stream. By the water-side are big, ugly factories belching
smoke and steam, and in their vicinity are railroad tracks, cinders, and
other litter, and dingy, ramshackle buildings, among which are numerous
forlorn little dwellings and occasional saloons. A sort of careless
prosperity is in evidence, but not much of the charm of neatness, or
concern for appearances. The rest of the town overspreads the steep
slopes that border the river, and pushes back into the nooks among the
adjacent upheaval of big hills. It is rather chaotic, but improves in
quality the farther it recedes from the smoke and din of the
manufacturing strip along the river.
The small brick Howells house stood close to the stream, where grime and
squalor most abound at present. However, the railroad was not there
then, and Martin's Ferry was a village that had in some respects real
rural attraction.
During the period of about twenty-five years which this book covers the
Howells family lived in seven different places, many of them widely
separated, but all within the confines of Ohio; and they seldom stayed
long in any town without occupying more than one residence. Naturally,
there have been marked changes in the aspect of most of the places where
they dwelt. Perhaps Jefferson has changed least. In the old days it had
six hundred inhabitants. Now it has three or four times that number, but
it is still serenely rustic, and every one knows every one else, and the
wide, tree-shadowed streets and the rich, gently rolling farm country
that environ the town are delightful.
Hamilton, with which Mr. Howells has dealt so graphically in his _A
Boy's Town_, has increased in population from two thousand to
thirty-five thousand; Dayton from eleven thousand to one hundred and
twenty-five thousand, and Columbus from eighteen thousand to nearly a
quarter of a million. Of course, such a strenuous expansion means the
obliteration of landmarks of the past. Besides, some of the places have
been largely rebuilt after being nearly wiped off the map by floods.
On the other hand, the vicinity where Mr. Howells spent his _Year in a
Log Cabin_ is even more lonely than it was then. It had a name in the
long ago--Eureka Mills. But fire, which in our country is an even more
potent destroyer than floods of what men build, has razed the mills, the
dam has crumbled, the mill-race is a dry ditch choked with weeds and
brush, and the name is well-nigh forgotten. When I was there the only
man-dwelling was a vacant house that stood close to the site of the old
log cabin. I might have thought the locality entirely deserted if it had
not been for fences and cultivated fields and two cows grazing in a
pasture. The only person whom I saw on the highway while I loitered
about was a rural mail-carrier jogging along in his cart.
Round about were low, rounded hills, fertile and well-tilled for the
most part, with here and there patches of woodland and occasional snug
groups of farm buildings. It is a land flowing with milk and honey,
wonderfully productive and prosperous, and charming in its luscious
agricultural beauty. In Mr. Howells's youth it was wilder and more
forested, but I fancy that the stream, with its wooded banks, must be
essentially the same, and that the birds flitting and singing and the
other wild creatures of fields and woods are like those of old.
Log houses, once so common in the Ohio country within the memory of its
elderly people, are now rare, and I could learn of none within less than
a dozen miles of Eureka Mills. But I found one on the outskirts of
Jefferson which was intact and serviceable, though it no longer
sheltered a family; and both Jefferson and Dayton have a log cabin
preserved as a relic of the past.
Any place that has been Mr. Howells's home has reason to be proud of the
fact, for he has long been recognized as the foremost of living American
authors, and it seems safe to conclude that much of his work will have a
permanent place in our literature. Yet I got the impression that, as a
rule, the people in those Ohio communities with which he has been
associated are unaware of his existence. Others, however, not only are
familiar with his reputation, but regard him with enthusiasm and
affection. At Columbus Rev. Washington Gladden, the most notable of all
Ohio preachers, has made _Years of My Youth_ the subject of a Sunday
evening discourse; and it is particularly gratifying to find that _A
Boy's Town_ is a favorite book in Hamilton, and that the Boy Scouts
there call themselves the Boy's Town Brigade.
Hamilton, Dayton, and Columbus, in which places Mr. Howells spent so
much of his youth, are all important centers of trade and manufacture
where crowds and noisy traffic are ever present in the business
sections, and where a maze of residence streets spread out into the
country round about. At Hamilton, the only building I could discover
associated with Mr. Howells was the Baptist church where he attended
Sunday-school. But it is now a paint-shop, and the paint-man has adorned
the entire front with a scenic sample of his art, which makes the
structure more suggestive of a theater than a church. The Great Miami
River flows through the town as of old, and the tall buildings, towers,
and spires in the heart of the place are strikingly picturesque seen
from some points of vantage along the banks of the stream. But the most
charming feature of the past is the canal in which the boys used to swim
and fish, and which, doubtless, still serves for the same purposes. It
is no longer a thoroughfare for traffic, though the tow-path is used in
part by trams and pedestrians.
Dayton had its canal, too, but this, like the one at Hamilton, has been
abandoned, except as the mills make use of it.
At Columbus is what was the new State House in Mr. Howells's youth, the
Medical College in which he roomed, and a sprinkling of quiet old
residences that were there in his time. The college, which originally
was a castle-like structure with an upthrust of towers and turrets, has
had its sky-line somewhat straightened by the addition of an extra
story; but this has only marred, without destroying, its characteristic
quaintness.
Jefferson was the home of Mr. Howells's father for the most of his later
life, and of his older brother, Joseph, whom the people there like to
recall for his many fine qualities of head and heart, and as the printer
and editor of the "best weekly paper" ever published in Ashtabula
County.
This brother is referred to again and again in the chapters that follow.
His grave in the Jefferson cemetery has been marked with the
"imposing-stone" that he used in his office. Here is the inscription
written by the novelist and carved on the broad surface of the stone:
TO THE MEMORY OF
JOSEPH ALEXANDER HOWELLS
BORN AT ST. CLAIRSVILLE, OHIO, 1832
DIED AT AUBURNDALE, FLORIDA, 1912
AMERICAN CONSUL AT TURK'S ISLAND
FROM 1905 TO 1912
PRINTER AND THEN EDITOR,
HE IMPOSED IN PAGES ON THIS STONE,
WHICH HE DESIRED SHOULD MARK,
HIS FINAL RESTING PLACE,
THE TYPES OF THE ASHTABULA SENTINEL
FROM 1851 TO 1905
STONE, UPON WHICH WITH HANDS OF BOY AND MAN
HE FRAMED THE HISTORY OF HIS TIME UNTIL
WEEK AFTER WEEK THE VARYING RECORD RAN
TO ITS HALF-CENTURIED TALE OF WELL AND ILL.
REMEMBER, NOW, HOW TRUE THROUGH ALL THOSE DAYS
HE WAS, FRIEND, BROTHER, HUSBAND, FATHER, SON,
FILL THE WHOLE LIMIT OF YOUR SPACE WITH PRAISE,
THERE NEEDS NO ROOM FOR BLAME, BLAME THERE WAS NONE
W. D. HOWELLS
One of the oddest things of which I heard on my trip was that Mr.
Howells is credited with being born in more than one place. A wealthy
man has bought the property where the novelist dwelt in the family
wanderings long after leaving Martin's Ferry. The owner and others in
the region are convinced that their locality is Mr. Howells's first
home. He was even considering erecting a birth-place for the
distinguished author from some ruinous buildings on the premises. But I
suppose the fact that a person is becoming legendary in his native
region attests the genuineness and permanency of his fame.
What vital influence, if any, the Ohio country of Mr. Howells's youth
had on his genius I am uncertain. The small cities and rustic villages,
and the farmlands with their stump-dotted fields that were still being
wrested from the wilderness of the abounding woods, all left their
impress, no doubt, but I incline to the belief that his admirable
quality and large place in the literature of our day might be the same,
even if the environment had been radically different.