Ohio History Journal

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THE SHANDON        CENTENNIAL.

 

 

ALBERT SHAW, NEW YORK.

[On August 26 and 27, 1903, there was held at Shandon, Butler

County, Ohio, a centennial celebration of the Congregational Church and

community of that place. The order of exercises embraced addresses

by the Reverend M. P. Jones, Pastor of the Church, Mrs. M. P. Jones,

Mr. Stephen R. Williams, Mr. Minter C. Morris, Mr. Stanley M. Roland,

Mr. Michael Jones, Miss Edna Manuel, Dr. W. O. Thompson, Mr. Murat

Halstead and Dr. Albert Shaw. The proceedings of that centennial have

not been published and it is through the courtesy of Mr. Albert Shaw,

the editor of the Review of Reviews, that we are herewith permitted to

put in public print for the first time his admirable address delivered upon

that occasion. Dr. Albert Shaw was born in Shandon, Butler County,

Ohio, July 23, 1857.-EDITOR.]

As this centennial occasion has from time to time been in

my thoughts, I have found one idea presenting itself in a more

fixed and definite way than any other. That idea is the sense of

gratitude and pride we ought to feel in being the sons and daugh-

ters of a race of sterling pioneers. It is a great thing to found

a nation or a state or a worthy community. In all history we can

discover the records of no better or braver people than the men

and women who subdued the American wilderness; prepared it

to be the home of millions of people speaking the same language

and possessing the same kind of civilization, and left to us the

heritage of their hope, their courage and their faith.

Our ancestors in England or Wales, or Scotland or Ireland,

or Germany - or whatever other ancient land - may have been

very humble, or they may have been of educated or even of aris-

Vol. XIV-1.             (1)

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2         Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications. tocratic lineage. We are willing, indeed, to know anything about them that we can find out. But, after all, for most Americans it will always suffice to trace their ancestry back to the first of their forefathers who crossed the seas and cast in his lot with the makers of this new world. Very many, perhaps the majority, of the English nobility do not run their pedigree back more than two or three hundred years. We have, on the other hand, a great many families in this country who clearly trace their descent from ancestors who helped

create our original Eastern colonies more than two hun- dred and fifty years ago. In April last, I was on the James River, in    Virginia, conferring with the men who are  preparing  four  years hence to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of the first permanent white settle- ment north of the Spanish post at St. Augustine.  New York   City  has just cele- brated the two hundred and fiftieth  anniversary  of the town's original charter. Our oldest       Eastern  universities have         been   observing  the anniversaries that remind us of the devotion to educa-

tion of the early pioneers. My own home is now on the Hudson River, and the highway that passes my house was opened almost two hundred and sixty years ago. When Washington was in camp there, during the Revolution, the village was already much more than a hundred years old. And yet, it was only the merest fringes of our great country that were occupied before the Revolutionary period. It was not until after the Revolution that the great movement of expansion set in, and the United States began to develop in earnest. To

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The Shandon Centennial.                3

 

some of us who have been in the habit of thinking that New York

and New England are comparatively old regions, it might be

interesting to call to mind the fact that in the East, as well as

in the West, the country's development has been principally in

the past one hundred years.

Thus, to be personal, I might illustrate by saying that while

two of my four great-grandfathers were pioneering in the Ohio

River country, the other two had gone out from Massachusetts

and Connecticut respectively as pioneers to help open the then

unbroken wilderness of Vermont. Northern New England and

Northern and Western New York are of just as recent develop-

ment as Ohio. The same thing is true of almost the entire area

of the Southern States. There were settlements along the tidal

streams of Maryland and Virginia, and along the coasts and the

navigable rivers of the Carolinas and Georgia; but there was little

or no development of the great interior areas and valleys of those

States until well after the Revolutionary War.

Our own ancestors, who came to this particular neighbor-

hood, belonged, therefore, to the true pioneering generation. The

process of pioneering went on subsequently in successive waves

until it reached the great Mississippi prairies, the plain beyond

the Missouri; the Rocky Mountain regions, and the Pacific coast.

It has been a part of my experience to have seen something of the

methods of pioneering in Iowa, the Dakotas, Montana, and other

parts of the West. But the great generation of American pio-

neers was that which lived and worked in the thirty or forty

years following the Revolutionary War - the period before rail-

roads were built, and before river and lake steamboats had come

into much use.

This was the generation that floated down the rivers on flat-

boats, and that crossed the mountain passes with ox-teams and

antique wagons. Washington's interest in Ohio had done much

to give the region fame, and the circumstances under which the

colonies had ceded their northwestern territories to the Union

had left several of them with lands to dispose of, either as free

grants to Revolutionary soldiers or else as bargains to home-

seekers. The northwestern ordinance, forever excluding slavery

from the country north of the Ohio River, had its influence also

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in helping to fix the character of the people who chose to par-

ticipate in the arduous work of redeeming this region from its

wilderness condition and making here a home for themselves

and their posterity.

Ohio has recently had a great centennial Statehood anniver-

sary, and there have already been numerous local celebrations.

Much has been written and much has been said by way of a

review of the origins of this great commonwealth. I shall not

attempt to add anything on that score of an historical character.

Surely nature was lavish in her gifts to this beautiful and pro-

ductive region that lies west of the Alleghanies and south of the

Great Lakes, and that embraces the better-favored side of the

Ohio River valley, with its marvelously rich tributary valleys.

But, there are other fair and rich countries - some of them fairer

and richer even than this - that lie desolate to-day because they

have lacked the right kind of men. They have needed but have

not found men with brawn and brain and heart to wrest wealth

from the soil; to utilize the forces and bounties of nature; and to

plant those seeds of social life and of religious and political insti-

tutions, that count for more, after all, than fields of waving

corn or golden grain.

Last week I was wandering over the rock-ribbed pasture

lands of old Connecticut. At best the thin covering of soil

seemed only a few inches deep. In lieu of fences, the tiny fields

were separated by massive granite stone walls, blasted and hewn

out of the solid rock, or else heaped up with giant boulders by

those Yankees of prodigious industry a hundred years or more

ago. They raised poor crops, those hardy farmers, but they

planted churches and schools, and they produced men and women.

These are the real tests of the greatness of a community or a

State. If rural life has since decayed a good deal in those New

England regions, it lives and flourishes yet, where New England

has been transplanted, in the Western Reserve of Ohio, in Illi-

nois, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas and Ne-

braska, Colorado and California.

If in the same spirit of devotion and courage those New Eng-

land pioneers had perchance made their farms on richer soil, they

would have been none the worse for it, and the results in a local

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The Shandon Centennial.                5

 

sense would have been more enduring. They built up men and

women for the glory of the nation and the peopling of prairie

States yet unborn. But in thousands of instances their farms, so

painfully redeemed from forest and from rock, have now relapsed

to a state of wilderness, where some gnarled old apple tree, in the

very thick of a dense young growth of scrub oak, birch, spruce

and pine, reminds us that here were once cleared fields and orch-

ards, thrifty homesteads, men who plowed and women who spun,

all for the glory of God and the greatness of the American name.

Only a hundred years ago - or even seventy-five years or

fifty years ago - these were tidy, decent farms. To-day they are

lost in mile after mile of tangled young forest, where the fox

dwells, where the wild deer has come back, and where even the

wolves and panthers are likely soon to reappear. Of course,

within a few miles there are thriving manufacturing towns, and

there is progress along other lines. But these manufacturing

towns are made up of a new and strange population of polyglot

origin; and in the lesser of the farming hamlets, there remain few,

if any, who would care to celebrate the one-hundredth or the

two-hundredth anniversary of the neighborhood, or who possess

either the knowledge, the reverence, or the personal interest to

save the tombs of the stalwart forefathers from neglect and decay.

From the spectacle of these deserted New England farms,

and these ruined New England villages, I come with congratula-

tion and thanksgiving to greet you, my friends and old neighbors,

and to rejoice with you in the preservation intact of our own

beautiful Ohio community. It has not, like some of those East-

ern places, forgotten itself. Its farms are better tilled than ever.

Our forefathers, with faith and devotion akin to that which set

a beacon light for the world on the hills of New England, had

the further wisdom and good fortune to pitch their tents and

make their abiding place where the soil was rich, the rainfall was

equable, the climate was wholesome, and the geographical situa-

tion was bound to give permanence and continuity to the work

of their hands.

When they cleared the land in this valley, they knew that the

conditions were such as to give long and abiding prosperity to

the neighborhood, and to justify at least a part of their descend-

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ents in remaining here to maintain the high character of the-

neighborhood's life, and to keep the memories and traditions of

the men and women of the first half of the nineteenth century

from lapsing into oblivion.

They were large-minded people, who from the very first

were determined to possess good church advantages, good school

advantages, and a home life made the more dignified and refined

by good houses and substantial improvements. They were peo-

ple of high ideals and unbounded self-respect.

The life of a little country community, when it is stagnant

and listless and without the touch of idealism and other worldli-

ness, is about the pettiest and worst of all possible kinds of life.

The city, even with its darker aspects of misery and vice, stimu-

lates the mind by its rush and roar-its external activities-its

ever-changing sensations and novelties. But the dull, dead, rus-

tic hamlet, where nobody cares for anything or believes in any-

thing beyond the gratification of a few sordid material wants, is

in danger of sinking to a lower moral level than the slums of the

great towns. We all know that there are such depraved neigh-

borhoods, where fair skies shine on scenes of natural loveliness.

without seeming in the very least to lift up the minds and souls

of men to noble thoughts and aspirations.

It is not in a spirit of pride or boastfulness that we proclaim

the fact that ours has always been a good neighborhood to live

in. Its superiority has been due, as we all know, primarily to

the religious and intellectual qualities of the early settlers, and

secondarily to those distinctive facts that made the community so

largely homogeneous. Narrow sectarianism has been a blighting

curse to many a small community. It has destroyed all unity of

feeling. It has kept the people from forming the habit of co-oper-

ation, and from developing the neighborly spirit which is so

essential for the best purposes of local life.

The greatest boon we owe to our noble Welsh pioneers of

this valley is the strong undenominational church they formed.

It was more than a church - it was a veritable center of light and

leading; a focus of intelligence; a nursery of patriotism; a mother

of schools; a patron of music; a rallying place for innocent social

life; a teacher of the art of public speaking; a rewarder and pro-

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The Shandon Centennial.                7

 

moter of eloquence-a place ever hospitable to those having a

message to the heart or to the head, from the great outside world.

This undenominational church - which called itself Congre-

gational in order to have some sisterly relations with other inde-

pendent churches--readily assimilated Presbyterians, Metho-

dists, Baptists, Episcopalians or Lutherans. Its influence was

benignant and its spirit was tolerant through a period of such

sectarian throat-cutting in many another place as our younger

friends here to-day cannot understand, or even imagine. Such a

church attracted and held good preachers. It was known and

respected in Cincinnati, Oxford, Columbus, Oberlin and Cleve-

land - and it was highly appreciated in the New York and Boston

headquarters of benevolent and missionary societies. It was also

well known in Wales, and in the other Welsh settlements of

this country.

What more can be said for the church and community in

those early days than that it had such a man as Dr. Chidlaw for

its spiritual and intellectual leader, and that it so held itself as to

be worthy of such leadership? Wales, as you all know, was a

famous center of Bible study and pulpit eloquence in the period

which furnished the chief Welsh emigration to this country. It

was in that regard superior even to Scotland. A finer race never

came to America than these devout, keen-witted Welsh folk. I

am not able to claim any blood kinship with them; but at least I

may hope to have derived benefit from close association with

them in home and school and church, and to have inherited some-

thing of what my father gained as a pupil of Dr. Chidlaw and

of other distinguished Welshmen who were school-masters here

in the old days.

Thankful, then, we all should be for the circumstances that

brought here in the early period men of such force of mind and

character as to leave their impress through a rounded century.

These men believed in learning, as only next in importance to

religion. There never has been a time when this community was

not prepared to transmit a considerable degree of scholarship and

knowledge of books to the rising generation. The old-fashioned

school-master, such as our fathers knew, was an educator of no

mean ability. I am not on this programme as local historian, and

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I am not thoroughly versed in the earliest annals of the neighbor-

hood; but I have heard of a number of men of masterly minds

who taught school here in the days when my own father, for

instance, was a pupil.

They were not all Welshmen. A young man named Den-

nison, who afterward became Governor of the State, was one of

them, and I believe Congressman Shields, before he went to

Washington, had some teaching experience. I know that later

on, in the fifties and early sixties, there were teachers of marked

culture and enthusiasm. Among these were Scott and McClung,

and various others.

My own first teacher was the Rev. Mark Williams. While

he was fitting older boys for college, he was looking after a few

children who were too small to go to the district school.

It was his brother-in-law, the lamented James A. Clark, who

afterwards prepared me to enter college - as he prepared others

of you - and to whose patience and thoroughness I have always

felt myself greatly indebted. In the old days, our schools at-

tracted here a great many good pupils from other communities

round about, and gave their educational beginnings to a large

number of able, well-instructed men.

Just now the educators of the whole country are giving their

attention to what for many of them is the new idea of uniting

districts and consolidating country schools, in order to supply a

central school with better equipment and teaching,and with a

graded system such as one finds in larger towns and cities. This

very thing is what you were able to accomplish fully thirty years

ago, when the old district schools were abandoned, the private

high school superseded, and the present free, graded school estab-

lished. This helped to sustain and continue the idea of a well-

ordered, unified neighborhood that had been fostered from the

beginning by the Church. For that achievement we were indebted

to such energetic and able citizens as Abner Francis, Griffith

Morris, Evan Evans and others.

The tradition of scholarship is a persistent one in families

and communities. There are good things, fortunately, as well

as bad ones, that are catching. Ambition to study and to learn

is one of these good things that may become endemic, so to speak,

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The Shandon Centennial.              9

 

in a neighborhood; and it has flourished here persistently to the

fourth and--in some families, perhaps-  to the fifth genera-

tion of those who came here in the beginning.

Our friends of Virginia and the South love to throw all

possible glamour about the conditions of life in the earlier days of

their States. They glorify their ancestors almost as if those

tobacco planters were some fabled race of demigods. They were,

indeed, a stanch, noble people; and the Southerners of to-day

honor themselves in thus clinging to the memories of their fore-

fathers. Few, if any, of our Ohio pioneers, could or did live in

the manner of the cultivated and aristocratic families who built

stately homes on the navigable rivers of tide-water Virginia, raised

tobacco by slave labor, and sent their own ships to English mar-

kets. Our farmers raised wheat and corn, worked in the fields

with their own hands, and helped enlarge the area of cultivation

by clearing away the heaviest of forests.

But it is all the more to their credit that many of them suc-

cessfully kept--through the roughest and hardest log-cabin

period of their pioneer efforts -a gentle and refined side to their

lives. And it was their good fortune to prosper so rapidly and

substantially that in due time many of their farm-houses were as

large and substantial as all but the very best of the Southern

plantation mansions. For tobacco and cotton were not the only

profitable cash crops of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Cincinnati in those days was dubbed Porkopolis. It was the

greatest meat packing and shipping center in the world. The

flush days of the cotton and sugar planters of Mississippi, Ala-

bama and Louisiana had arrived; and the plantations lived and

thrived on our Ohio flour and cured meats.

In the winter and spring our turnpikes were almost impass-

able for the long droves of fat hogs waddling marketwards

reluctantly. Thus many of our farmers became comparatively rich

men, and thus they built durable and even stately brick houses,

and constructed solid, stone-ballasted roads, along which - like

golden argosies of old -their massive corn-fed treasures moved

safely, without danger of being stuck in the mire. Less pictur-

esque, doubtless, than the white-winged fleets that served the

tobacco planters of the Virginia shores, or the smart, square-

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rigged ships that brought riches to the pious New England fore-

fathers who trafficked in rum and slaves; not majestic, like parad-

ing elephants in gilded trappings on occasion of some pompous

ceremonial in India; not so dignified, nor so suggestive of poetry

as the long caravans of camels that bear precious fabrics across

Arabian deserts; yet worthy of all honor, and to be named with

respect on this occasion, I repeat, is the hog - the prime factor in

our community's prosperity for half or three-quarters of a cen-

tury. Not the varieties known as the Virginia razor-back or the

Kentucky shoat, but the large-framed, broad-beamed, well-

rounded Ohio hog that weighed half a ton, and that gave ample

bacon, pork and lard to the field-hands of the down-river planta-

tions, while providing in return the cash that bought the black

silk dresses our mothers wore, the top-buggies our older brothers

drove, and the pianos and organs that our sisters rejoiced in.

Through the more recent period of feverish rush to the

cities that has in many regions brought country life to a condi-

tion of sad decline and stagnation, you have safely passed. You

have contributed your full quota of young men and women to

the making of the farther West, and to the throbbing activities

of the business and professional life of our towns and cities.

But you have meanwhile kept the old neighborhood running-

all decently and in good order.

When, after years of absence, we of my family came back

here to bury our beloved mother, we were comforted by the sym-

pathy of a host of friends who also loved her and had not for-

gotten us. When later I came here for a day or two, with my

wife, there was all the welcome of a real home-coming for her,

though a stranger. It has always been so. My father, also

born and bred here, had, as a very young man, gone to practice

medicine in newer but larger communities further west. He

came back some fifty years ago with his family, in order to find

healthful surroundings for them. Only a few days ago, letters

were placed in my hands written at that time by my mother;

and they show how hospitable and kindly was the welcome given

here to this New England girl. I have no hesitation in making

these personal allusions, because this is an intimate occasion,

where friends are conferring with one another and where the

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The Shandon Centennial.               11 outside world has no interest or curiosity. I am trying merely to illustrate the fact that the neighborhood life has been abso- lutely unbroken in its continuity. Many a family, readily for itself, bounds the local life of the century now past. My grand- father, whom I well remember, and who was married here in his early manhood to Rebecca Halstead, was born in 1783, and would have been 120 years old if he had lived to attend this celebration. The future of our country communities has very good prom- ise. Communication grows easier, through the multiplication of railways and telegraph and telephone lines. Books, periodicals and newspapers are entirely accessible, and somehow they are much more thoroughly read in the country than in the city. The tide has turned, it would seem, and there is less rush for the towns, and better appreciation of the advantages of country life. I beg you, therefore, who still call this place home, to believe in it as a good place to live in and to determine to make it ever better. Let it continue to stand pre-eminent before its neighbor- ing communities for the intelligence and character of its people. Let its life continue to center around the church, and the school, and let it make another century record worthy of the one now complete and secure.

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