Ohio History Journal

  • 1
  •  
  • 2
  •  
  • 3
  •  
  • 4
  •  
  • 5
  •  
  • 6
  •  
  • 7
  •  
  • 8
  •  
  • 9
  •  
  • 10
  •  
  • 11
  •  
  • 12
  •  
  • 13
  •  
  • 14
  •  
  • 15
  •  
  • 16
  •  
  • 17
  •  
  • 18
  •  
  • 19
  •  
  • 20
  •  
  • 21
  •  
  • 22
  •  
  • 23
  •  
  • 24
  •  
  • 25
  •  
  • 26
  •  
  • 27
  •  
  • 28
  •  
  • 29
  •  
  • 30
  •  
  • 31
  •  
  • 32
  •  

The Scioto Company and its Purchase

The Scioto Company and its Purchase.       109

 

 

THE SCIOTO COMPANY AND ITS PURCHASE.

The history of the founding of Gallipolis, now turning in

its career into its second century, is one of the most interesting

and at the same time one of the saddest studies in American

annals.  It is the story of a disappointing and impracticable

scheme; and were it not for the fact that the blood of its found-

ers, mingling with the American stock of their day and genera-

tion, has given strength, versatility and industry to the people

of Southern Ohio, the influence of the early settlers of Galli-

polis would be scarcely noticeable in the history of the State.

Understand me, that I do not underrate the probity or the gen-

ius of your fathers, but their influence by reason of the histori-

cal failure of the settlement, has been in the lines of private and

domestic life, rather than in shaping public affairs or influencing

the destiny of the State. A careful study of the elements

which made up the emigration from France one hundred years

ago and which resulted in the settlement whose centennial we

now celebrate, will readily develop the fact that it was an en-

tirely different stock from that which landed at Marietta or

which settled in the Western Reserve or which located in Cin-

cinnati and its surrounding settlements. The hardihood of the

pioneers who came into the territory of the Northwest from

New England, Pennsylvania and Virginia, was a capital stock in

all their enterprises which the more delicate and impractical

French never possessed. The men and women who came from

Paris and Lyons in 1790, under the flattering representations

presented to them by the leaders of American emigration in

France, were of good families, well educated and brilliant, and

adapted by their previous occupations, methods of living and

their surroundings to any other life then possible in the world,

rather than that of pioneers on the banks of the Ohio. But I

do not propose at this time to go into any discussion in relation

to the social conditions of the French settlers of Gallipolis until

we arrive at a better understanding of how and under what circum-

stances the emigration was accomplished, and to what end I de-

sire to set forth, as clearly and as extensively as is necessary in