Ohio

“ George Rogers Clark, descending the river with his handful of heroic Virginians to win for the United States the great Northwest, and for himself the laurels of fame; the Marietta pilgrims, beating Revolutionary swords into Ohio plowshares; and all that succeeding tide of immigrants from our own Atlantic coast and every corner of Europe, pouring down the great valley to plant powerful commonwealths beyond the mountains. A richly-varied panorama of life passes before us as we contemplate the glowing story of the Ohio. ”

“ It would be difficult to decide at what season of the year, the Ohio has the most interesting and beautiful appearance—in the spring, when its high floods sweep along with irresistible power, and the red-bud and other early blossoms enliven its banks—or in autumn, when it passes quietly along, showing its broad and clean sand bars, and its pebbly bottom, through waters transparent as air—and when the withering leaves of the forest are painted in golden and scarlet colors along its shores. ”

“ ON THE ROAD TO BAINBRIDGE Whoever wishes to spend a few hours of unalloyed delight amid the most charming and picturesque scenery of Ohio, should visit Highland county. Here both Nature and history have done everything to make this a journey never to be forgotten. The round browed hills lift themselves in "bold bastions" and parapets of green that seem to beckon to you to come up higher. Sometimes you see a wide plain with its far flashing stream and homes here and there, or clusters of wooded heights with now and then a single pointed summit rising above and behind the rest. ”

“ Throughout its whole course the Ohio is fringed with wooded bluffs; now towering in sublime majesty hundreds of feet from the bed of the rolling stream, and anon sweeping inland for miles, and rearing up those eminences so singularly beautiful, appropriately termed "Ohio hills," while their broad alluvial plains in the interval betray, by their enormous vegetation, a fertility exhaustless and unrivalled. ”

“ Whoever has travelled in Ohio has seen one of the most exuberantly fertile regions of the great American continent; there indeed does the earth bring forth abundantly, not only corn and fruits, but it is rich in some of the most useful minerals, iron and coal.
There are no mountains in Ohio, but much high table land, rising to about a thousand feet above the level of the sea, and even these hills are covered with a fertile soil to their summits. The whole country is watered by navigable rivers of great beauty, which bear on their gentle currents the products of this highly-cultivated region. ”

“ Is it imagination only, or can it possibly be fact, that presents such a change as surprises and astonishes us when we turn our eyes to what Ohio now is? Is it reality or a dream that in so short a period as even thirty-five years there has sprung up on the same surface an independent State, with a million of people? ”

“ Upon the opposite shore the Kenawha enters the Ohio, after coming from the iron mountain in North Carolina, through Kentucky three hundred miles. It has dug for itself a deep bed in the limestone rocks, and upon its banks is the most rugged and picturesque scenery in Kentucky. Coal, and salt springs abound along its shores. The rapids of the Ohio came in sight after this, and looked cool and pretty, as the water curled and foamed over the ledges of rocks and pebbles. ”

“ It is the law of us all, Jacqueline, the law of the Three Kingdoms: the battle is to the strong and the race to the swift. The Old Thirteen are stable; let them rest! Together they make a great country, and they will be greater yet But here is the Ohio—la belle Rivière, the Frenchmen call it. And beyond and below the Ohio, through all the gigantic valley of a river so great that it seems a fable, south to New Orleans, and westward to the undiscovered lies the country that is to be! ”

“ I pray you, dear friend, whose voice will reach and be heard, try to point out to the younger and later workers of the grand, old State the broad stubble swath of the scythe and the deep blazing of the sturdy axe of this glorious pioneer of theirs—the grandest of them all—whose sleeping dust is an honor to Ohio. ”

“ Jack took the belt eagerly. To go to the lodge of Tecumseh to bring back a kinswoman to whom had descended great estates and against whom foes—he at once decided that they were foes—were plotting—What boy of twenty-one would not jump at the chance.
And to go to Ohio—the very name was a challenge. The Ohio of 1812 was not the Ohio of today, not the smiling, level country, set with towns, crisscrossed with railways, plastered with rich farms where the harvest leaps to the tickling of the hoe. It was far away, black with the vast shadow of perpetual forests, beneath which quaked great morasses. ”

“ At times the path was so overgrown with bushes, that every step had to be cleared with the ax; again, it would be over marshes, so wet that bridges had to be constructed, to keep the cattle from sinking; and still again, the men would be cheered by an easy and rapid day's journey, along the banks of some pleasant stream. Ohio is even yet renowned for its glorious forests, and these, now dressed in all the gorgeous coloring of Indian summer, gave frequent pictures of beauty which impressed the roughest of the sturdy soldiers. ”

“ Committing my baggage to a carman, I ascended the bank of diluvial earth and pebbles with all eagerness, and walked to the point of land where Fort Pitt (old Fort Du Quesne) had stood. It is near this point that the Alleghany and Monongahela unite, and give birth to the noble Ohio. It is something to stand at the head of such a stream. The charm of novelty is beyond all others. ”

“ A traveler in our state, just after it had become a state, believed that we were destined to be more like the people of the North and East than the people of the South, whom he then found, in Kentucky at least, much livelier in mind and manner than the Pennsylvanians, fond of public life and society, very hospitable and courteous, but dissipated, restless, and reckless. Our public spirit did not come from our Southern ancestry, but from our New England ancestry. The South gave Ohio perhaps her foremost place in war and politics, but her enlightenment in other things was from the North. ”

“ We are one people—one in our purposes, aims and lives; one in our fealty to the flag, the Constitution, and the indissoluble Union of the States. [Cheers.]
[486]
Ohio has always maintained a magnificently conspicuous place in the sisterhood of the States—peopled, as she was, by the great patriots of the Revolutionary period; receiving, as she did, in this great basin, that overspill of patriotism that moved toward the West after the Revolutionary struggle was ended. She has given to the Government, in army life and in the civil service, a magnificent galaxy of great men. [Cheers.] ”

“ We passed through a large and very beautiful portion of the State of Ohio; the soil, wherever cultivated, teeming with crops, and elsewhere with a vegetation no less beautiful than luxuriant; a mixture of small weed prairies, and forests of splendid timber. Extensive districts of Ohio are still without inhabitants, yet its energetic people have constructed within a period of five years half as many miles of railroad as the whole of Great Britain contains; they are a "great people" they do "go a- head," these Yankees. ”

“ Of mist and of frost is its.
He hath tippled the buxom beauty,
And gotten her hug and her kiss—
The wide world's royal booty
To pile at her feet for this. [58]
ALONG THE OHIO
Athwart a sky of brass long welts of gold;
A path of gold the wide Ohio lies;
Beneath the sunset, billowing manifold,
The dark-blue hilltops rise.
And westward dips the crescent of the moon
Through great cloud-feathers, flushed with rosy ray,
That close around the crystal of her lune
The redbird wings of Day. ”

“ Ohio is, as you know, a free State, and exactly on the opposite side of the beautiful river which bears its name, lies the Slave State of Kentucky, and slaves flying across the river to reach a free shore were heard of formerly as an every-day occurrence. ”

“ One word more, worthy fellow-citizens. We love Ohio. We love Ohio as our mother who nurtured us and fed us in our in our infancy; and, under any circumstances, although we may hear ill of Ohio, we never fail to remember all that is good that can be said of Ohio, and to be true and honorable for the love of Ohio. But we love our country more, and no man from Ohio would ever be true to his mother unless he were more true to his country all around, from one end of the land to the other. Our country forever from the Atlantic to the Pacific ”

“ In intelligence, means of education, temperance, order and religious observance, Ohio may fairly take its place among the most favored communities in the world. It is a type of what can be accomplished under favorable circumstances by a free people under a free government, where each citizen enjoys the full and undisputed possession of equal rights and opportunities. Ohio commenced its existence on the western border line of civilization on the continent. The center of population has already passed its borders, so that it now takes its place, not in the west, but in the east. ”

“ There were other paths which the Ohio people had to open before they could reach a yet wider world than any that lay to the east of them, or the south of them. Their course to civilization lay not only through the woods and down the rivers and over the mountains, but it ran also through the great realm of books, and every log schoolhouse was a station or a junction on it ”

“ The Ohio is a thousand miles in length from its head, at Pittsburgh, to its junction with the Mississippi, and, in its passage, successively washes the shores of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois—shores which are covered with villages, towns, and settlements, and lined with an industrious and hardy population. ”

“ There are but ninety-two years left to 1880 for the pioneers of Ohio; but what a fruition to their work! The solitary settlement has become a mighty nation of three million people, as large as the whole United States in the Revolution, and how much stronger and with what 25an abundance of wealth and comfort—a centre of intelligence and the home of Presidents! ”

“ The ways of the different emigrations in reaching Ohio were: for the New Engenders, through New York state to Lake Erie, and westwardly along the shore of that water; for the Pennsylvanians, through their own state to the headwaters of the Ohio, and then down the river and inwardly from it; for the Virginians, Marylanders, and Carolinians, the valley of the Shenandoah and the mountain gaps to Kentucky, and so into Southwestern Ohio. At first the white men came by the streets, as the pioneers called the trails that the buffalo and deer had made ”

“ The stream which the Indians had distinguished by the name of Ohio, or Beautiful River, waters one of the most magnificent valleys which have ever been made the abode of man. Undulating lands extend upon both shores of the Ohio, whose soil affords inexhaustible treasures to the labourer. On either bank the air is wholesome and the climate mild; and each of those banks forms the extreme frontier of a vast State: that which follows the numerous windings of the Ohio on the left is Kentucky [in ascending the river it was on our right] ”

“ This was the life of the early settler in every county in Ohio, as each in its turn was organized and opened to settlement. A life so hard, was yet so attractive that many pioneers, when a few neighbors gathered around them, preferred to sell their clearings and push further into the wilderness. In the meantime the older settlements attracted newcomers. Mechanics and tradesmen came along them. Then towns sprang up, and incipient cities, with corner lots and hopeful speculators, tempted eastern capitalists to invest their money in Ohio. ”

“ Ohio can justly claim to be the equal of any other in the sisterhood of states, central in location, rich in resources, the common pathway of all the states, containing over three millions of people as happy in their surroundings as those of any community in the world. We must do our part to advance and improve our condition by wise legislation and by the moral influences of education and religion. ”

“ Those black eyes lured Major Doughty to the only site on the Ohio upon which one hundred thousand people could conveniently live without climbing a very steep and high hill. It is also about midway between the source of the river and its mouth; the Ohio being nine hundred and fifty-nine miles long, and Cincinnati five hundred and one miles from the Mississippi. The city is nearly the centre of the great valley of the Ohio ”

“ To meet this last situation, Congress instituted a systematic survey of the Ohio country, laying it out into townships, sections of 640 acres each, and quarter sections. In every township one section of land was set aside for the support of public schools.
The Northwest Ordinance.—The final problem which had to be solved before settlement on a large scale could be begun was that of governing the territory. Pioneers who looked with hungry eyes on the fertile valley of the Ohio could hardly restrain their impatience. ”

“ In Ohio, wealth is not accumulated in one place, or in a few hands; it is visibly diffused over the whole community. The country towns and villages are invariably constructed in a more elegant and tasteful manner than those of Pennsylvania, and the Northern states. ”

“ Of course the rivers which flow into the Ohio—the Monongahela, Kenhawa, Licking, Sandy, Kentucky, Green, Cumberland, and Tennessee—are rapid, and abounding in cataracts and falls, which, towards their sources, greatly impede navigation. The western side of this Valley is, also, hilly for a considerable distance from the Ohio, but towards its western limit, it subsides to a remarkably level region. ”