Ohio History Journal

SOME LOCAL HISTORY.

 

 

LUCY ELLIOT KEELER.

[Miss Keeler of Fremont, Ohio, has been a valued contributor to

the QUARTERLY. The following, from her pen, is a delightful bit of

historic sentiment, which originally appeared in Scribner's Magazine. -

EDITOR.]

I have watched numberless persons walk around a great

stone-a round stone with a hollow in the top, filled with water,

where the birds come to drink-and dilate learnedly after this

fashion: "Think how it was carried for thousand of years on the

back of a glacier, and how it was rubbed and ground by ice and

stones till its angles were worn down into this perfect sphere."

All very true were this stone a boulder, but it happens to be

quite another thing, a concretion, which grew round from baby-

hood and never had any angles to rub off. It started perhaps

with a bit of shell or fish bone falling into the mud of a stream.

This nucleus acted like a magnet, attracting to itself little particles

of congenial matter which hugged it layer after layer like an onion

while the water above, holding iron and lime and silica in solu-

tion, percolated through the growing concretion and cemented it

into a solid stone.

After such fashion does local history grow up. You take a

house or bit of land, a road or a river or Indian treaty, as a

nucleus; and as you read old books, newspapers, and letters;

examine old maps, plans, and pictures; and as you talk with old

residents-your facts form layer after layer around your centre;

and as you compare and generalize and let your imagination

flow over all, your house or bit of land, or road, or river, or

Indian treaty grows and crystallizes into a shapely, lasting con-

cretion of local history.

In choosing some nucleus for a study of local history, one

cannot do better than begin with one's house or yard. One

should trace back the several ownerships to the original grant;

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58      Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

discover what other buildings were ever on the place, with some-

thing about the earlier people who lived there; if Indians ever

hunted on it or soldiers ever tramped over it; changes of topog-

raphy; when adjacent roads were opened; and one's own family

traditions. One incident will inevitably lead to another, fasci-

nating facts will peep from every cover, and conversation will

follow the trend. All one's finds should be firmly held in place

by the little rivets of accurate names and dates.

Take, for instance, my own home in the heart of a busy

manufacturing city of the middle West. My garden lies about

midway between two ancient "cities of refuge," built by the

Neutral Nation about three centuries ago. Warring tribes of

the West might enter the Western city, and those of the East

the Eastern, but "sanctuary" reigned within. Later my garden

was part of a Wyandotte village; and during the War of 1812

two companies of British regulars, veteran troops of Welling-

ton's Peninsular campaign, attacking a local fort, marched over

where my cardinal flowers now bloom. Later a small French

colony used the plot for a burying-ground.  The patent for the

first sale of this land was signed by Andrew Jackson, and be-

came a part of a family tract. Sixty years ago my mother, from

"down East," arrived for a visit, and penetrating beyond the

reach of railroads came up the little river by boat. At the land-

ing-place she was hoisted to a seat on her trunk in a wagon to

be driven into "the woods." Three blocks from the river the

wagon stuck fast in the mud, the trunk was dropped out on a

hummock, and she finished her journey on foot.  When she

married, some years later, and the choice of any lot in town was

offered her for a homestead, she selected this spot where her

trunk was thrown off in the mud.  After a few years the chil-

dren of the growing neighborhood needed a school, so a little

wooden building was erected in the rear of the yard, and there

not a few of the younger grandfathers of the city learned their

alphabets. Later, a pair of magnificent eagles being given to my

father, the old school-house was converted into a cage. All sum-

mer the birds lived there, but one autumn day my parents opened

the door and stood watching the great creatures as they rose and

soared off westward. These things happened long before I was

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Some Local History.                 59

 

born, but they add inexpressible interest to the place for me, and

are earnest of the story and tradition which linger about your

own homes if you but ferret them out.

I like to tell the little children who visit me how out in the

busy street where now passes an almost constant stream of auto-

mobiles ran a clear brook in which I used to set water-wheels

and catch minnows. Their eyes grow round as my age presses

home, yet two generations in town still regard me as a "girl."

Our Western towns grow rapidly. A dear old lady in Cleve-

land, who died but a few years ago, told me that she remem-

bered her father coming in much elated to tell her mother that

they had just finished counting the inhabitants, and there were

876! Ohio's largest city!

Whatever your nucleus, your concretion will rapidly out-

grow your locality. The story of my lot enlarges into a history

of the town and trails off down the river to old forts on the

lake, and in the other direction along the famous Harrison

Trail to ancient mounds, the Mississippi, and New Orleans.

When a citizen of my town became a President of the United

States I was plunged into the very middle of American history.

Nor did it stop there, for I have but just learned of a villa of

three thousand inhabitants in Paraguay, named after this local

resident who as President acted as arbiter in a territorial dispute

between Paraguay and Argentina. Modestly local, however, do

I keep my collection of data, believing that my business in the

matter is to edit just that bit of land and lore under my own

charge, and make the most of it in the limited time at my dis-

posal.

Thus as the annalist lovingly gleans the harvest fields of

home, ruminating on its topographical, climatic, and scenic

effects; fingering over the dress and customs of earlier denizens;

wandering through rooms which birth has gladdened and death

has hallowed, where infancy dreamed and where each step is

on a memory; little by little she acquires the "idiom" of the

place, finding it a far subtler influence in shaping thought and

action than the uninitiated suspect.

There is nothing new in all this, but the simple catalogue

of it may kindle the spark of a new interest in other quiet lives,

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60        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications. leading them to cherish the legends and customs that would otherwise be lost in historic haze. Whatever else may result from such study of "this infinite go-before of the present," it chains the student to that inspiring injunction of old Pindar which Plutarch liked to quote of those, heirs of the centuries, who "Do match their noble ancestors in prowess of their own And by their fruits commend the stock whence they themselves are grown."

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