Ohio History Journal

The Short Life of Manhattan, Ohio

 

By JOHN W. WEATHERFORD*

 

 

Lured on by the geographical promise of the Maumee Valley,

and by the venturesome spirit of the times, speculators in the middle

1830's scattered a brood of infant towns along the Maumee River,

there to compete for their lives. If the founders and inhabitants of

these rival towns--Port Lawrence, Vistula, Oregon, Maumee,

Perrysburg, Marengo, and Manhattan--agreed on anything, it was

on the future greatness of the Maumee Valley as a channel through

which would pass commerce and emigrants. Goods from New York

flowed through the Erie Canal and across Lake Erie to its western

end. The necessity to transfer cargo from canal boats to lake boats

generated a thriving forwarding business at Buffalo. The necessity

to transfer cargoes again from lake boats to canal or land con-

veyances at the other end of the lake was expected to generate a

similar activity and consequently a new Buffalo. The western counter-

part of the Erie Canal was the Wabash and Erie Canal, which (by

1842) linked the Maumee with the Wabash, the Ohio, and points

west. Just now, however, the Wabash and Erie Canal matters less

as a reality than as a great expectation, for the town-building had

waxed and waned and run its course in the eight years between the

authorization and the completion of the canal. As a hope, the canal

affected activity in the valley perhaps more than it ever did as a

waterway. Somewhere on the Maumee, lake boats would meet

canal boats, and there a city would rise. The area in which the

second Buffalo could be born was thus defined. Since it had to be

where lake boats could go, it had to be between the mouth and the

rapids of the Maumee. Here it was, then, that the scramble took

place.1

 

* John W. Weatherford is manuscripts librarian of the Ohio Historical Society.

1 For histories of this region, see: Clark Waggoner, ed., History of the City of

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MANHATTAN, OHIO              377

 

Port Lawrence and Vistula coalesced into Toledo, and have re-

ceived from historians that attention which the successful merit.

Even Marengo, Maumee, and Perrysburg, though they never won

the laurels to which they once aspired, at least survive as towns

to this day. Manhattan led an active life of only about six years

after its foundation in 1835, and its plat was vacated altogether in

1848. Perhaps on its own merits as a town it ought never to take

up more than a paragraph or two; but its origin, brief career, and

fate may represent broader things. As a failure it may all the better

stand for the speculations of the 1830's, and be a microcosm of the

Zeitgeist as no success could be.

Manhattan was the creature of speculators, largely based in

Buffalo, and operating through the Maumee Land and Railroad

Company, which they incorporated in October 1835. Much of what

can be learned about the venture is to be found in the papers of

one of these speculators, Jacob A. Barker, of the Buffalo forwarding

firm of Barker and Holt. One of Judge Zenas Barker's many sons,

he could not have been more than twenty-one at the time he under-

took his active part in this ambitious financial risk. Barker and his

eleven associates corporately bought the land, platted it, and

erected buildings.²

Before all this, however, they had to pick a site on which to

bet their $350,000. J. T. Hudson and Daniel Chase (accompanied

by a certain Bennett) shopped for a location in June 1835 on the

left bank of the Maumee at its mouth. Chase had soundings made,

and found a twenty-foot channel that came in from the lake and

led up towards the bank about five miles below Toledo, coming, he

Toledo and of Lucas County, Ohio (New York and Toledo, 1888); Charles S. Van

Tassel, Story of the Maumee Valley, Toledo, and Sandusky Region (Chicago, 1929);

and above all, Randolph C. Downes, History of Lake Shore Ohio (New York, 1953).

2 The letters referred to hereafter are in the Jacob A. Barker papers at the Ohio

Historical Society. These are a series of about 150 letters to Barker from various partic-

ipants in the Manhattan speculation. Barker apparently spent most of his time in

Buffalo during the whole period at hand. There are other Jacob A. Barker papers,

but this writer has been competently assured that they do not concern Manhattan.

Jacob A. Barker is not the Jacob Barker of Buffalo in the Dictionary of American

Biography. He and his family are mentioned in H. Perry Smith, ed., History of Buffalo

and Erie County (Syracuse, 1884), II, 39. The twelve stockholders are said by Clark

Waggoner to have been J. A. Barker, Henry N. Holt, Charles Townsend, George

Coit, Sheldon Thompson, James L. Kimberley, J. T. Hudson, George P. Barker,

John W. Clark, Stephen G. Austin, George W. Card, and Platt Card.

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378    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

thought, as close to potential docking facilities as the channel at

Toledo. Keeping a deep basin dredged out would apparently be

necessary both there and at Toledo; but Chase suggested to Barker

that maintenance of the basin would be cheaper at the proposed

site than at Toledo. Platt Card, another of the investors, had been

looking over the location as well, and conceived the additional

advantage, that at this low-lying spot grading down to the water

would cost $50,000 less than at Toledo.

Chase thought that room could be made for a hundred sail. This

reference (all too short) to sail can no more than raise the question

whether the selection of the very mouth of the river for a port

was not prompted partly by an expectation that accessibility to sailing

vessels would constitute an advantage over towns farther up-

stream. Counting on sail just at this time would have been a

blunder, for already steamers plied the lake, and in a very few years

were to obliterate sailing traffic. Unfortunately, in all the cor-

respondence that grew out of the venture, this mere slip is the only

reference to what one would have expected to be a vital con-

sideration.

The canal, authorized in the previous year, had not reached the

stage at which anyone knew where it would "come out," or join

the navigable waters of the river. It has been said that the ex-

pectation of the Wabash and Erie terminating below Toledo led to

the establishment of Manhattan at the terminus. Certainly Hudson

was not counting at all on the canal coming out at Manhattan.

"That old bed of the creek," he wrote, "can be turned to good

account if the canal terminates at Toledo with a little expense & if

the canal terminates at Perrysburg or Maumee the nearer the City is

to the lake the better.^"3

Haste was as important as selecting a proper site. Platt Card

had long wished to lay out a town at the mouth, but had been

deterred by the caution of the "Buffalo folks." Now that Toledo

had a good start, speed became essential to success. "I have no

doubt," wrote Hudson, "if a city had been laid out there & a

name given to it 6 mths ago we should have had considerable of a

 

3 Hudson to Barker, June 19, 1835.

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MANHATTAN, OHIO          379

 

settlement there by this time."⁴ The sooner lots were sold in the

projected town, the fewer Toledo would sell, and the sale of lots

meant not only money, but boosters recruited for the town. In

Platt Card's mind boosters were more important at the outset than

cash. He planned to sell lots very cheaply to the commercial men

in Buffalo so that they would "take hold with us." Every day, he

warned, that Toledo sold lots, she gained both money and influence,

which "we mite as well have as not."⁵ G. W. Card thought in terms

of shares rather than lots, but his object was the same. He suggested

winning influence by selling an eighteenth of the shares in the

Maumee Land and Railroad Company at Oswego, an eighteenth at

Detroit, another eighteenth at Cleveland and Erie, and perhaps

another eighteenth for more Buffalo influence.⁶ If the merchants

of these cities had a stake in the new port, they would send their

commerce to it. During July the Cards pressed Barker to act, or

to get others in Buffalo to act. Platt Card informed Sears that he

had sold out his holdings in Toledo "to prepare for the change.^"7

He did not in fact sell out altogether, for he appeared in subsequent

years as a tax delinquent for lands he owned in Toledo.⁸ In the same

month (July 1835) he is said to have bought 160 acres at the

mouth of the Maumee from the Ottawa chief Wasaonoquit.⁹ G. W.

Card, too, stood ready, waiting, and importunate. He had a sur-

veyor and a "1st rate merchant" on call. He asked Barker to send

a pile driver, and advised him to be "ready to put up in a hurry

a cheap saw mill." Then he would need men to start a brick yard

and a ship yard. "Then," he wrote, "we move in with our Docks,

Store House, Tavern, and School House for holding meetings in."

He urged Barker to break ground by mid-September.l⁰

The basic problem was not, however, an internal one, but rather

to bring to the new town the commerce essential to its survival.

4 Ibid.

5 Platt Card to Richard Sears in Buffalo, July 6, 1835.

6 G. W. Card to Barker, July 23, 1835.

7 Platt Card to Sears, July 6, 1835.

8 Toledo Blade, November 14, 1838.

9 Waggoner, History of Toledo, 933-934.

10 G. W. Card to Barker, July 23, 1835.

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380    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

For this end the promoters did not rely entirely on lake commerce,

but worked by multifarious schemes to make Manhattan a cross-

roads. Even before the foundation of Manhattan, Barker attempted

to gain control of the Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad. This rail-

road, intended to run between Toledo and the Kalamazoo River

and form a short cut from Lake Erie to Lake Michigan, was the

first railroad to run in the West. Though it never reached the

Kalamazoo, it did enjoy in 1835 a solid existence compared to the

many paper schemes that characterized the West, since, before the

year was out, it actually ran between Adrian and Toledo. Its two

steam locomotives were not to arrive until June 1837, but in the

meantime it made do with horses.11 To gain control of it and make

it terminate at the projected town was an early plan which Barker

tried to effect in June 1835, or before. His plan was apparently for

a friend of his on the Erie and Kalamazoo board to have the stock

issue expanded, whereupon Barker, anonymously through inter-

mediaries, would buy enough to gain control of the railroad. Little

can be learned of this plot. It failed, possibly because of the suspi-

cion of some of the Erie and Kalamazoo board.¹²

Whatever prevented Barker from winning the Erie and Kala-

mazoo, he was soon to seek substitutes for it. The charter of this

railroad permitted any railroad crossing it to use it freely at

standard rates. One had therefore but to build a small branch from

Manhattan to join the Erie and Kalamazoo track, and it was all

open to Manhattan interests; so Hudson advised Barker.13 By

late August 1835 the group had succeeded in getting a Michigan

charter for just such a line, the Maumee Branch Railroad; it could

join the mouth of the Maumee with the Erie and Kalamazoo at any

point, with single or double track, and use the older railroad. The

Maumee Branch was capitalized at $100,000. As the new road

need not have been longer than ten miles to accomplish its purpose,

and considering the part it seems to have played in Barker's scheme,

it is odd that the Maumee Branch was never built. It joined the

 

11 "The Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad," Historical Society of Northwestern Ohio

Quarterly Bulletin, XII (1940), No. 2, pp. 15-19, reprinted from the Adrian Daily

Telegram, June 20, 1934.

12 Hudson to Barker, June 19, 1835.

l3 Ibid.

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MANHATTAN, OHIO          381

 

scores of chartered railroads that never had a foot of track. Another

railroad that was to lead to Manhattan did not even reach the

charter stage. Barker, in 1837, ordered a survey for a single-track

line, the Manhattan and Havre Railroad, to connect Manhattan

with Havre, another dream town half way between Manhattan and

Monroe, Michigan.¹⁴ This was half of a plan to connect Manhattan

with Monroe by rail. The other half of the plan was to lobby to

have the Havre Branch Railroad chartered to touch Monroe. These

projects, nebulous though they were, remained a part of the

scheduled development of Manhattan as late as October 1840, when

D. S. Bacon of Monroe wrote to Barker, "We look upon the con-

nexion of Manhattan and Monroe by the Rail Road as certain, and

as being the salvation of each place."¹⁵

During the first year of Manhattan's existence the terminus of

the Wabash and Erie Canal remained an open question. D. W.

Deshler of Columbus, for example, advertising lots in Marengo,

used the "probability of the termination of the Canal at this point"

as an attraction to buyers.¹⁶ Even though, as we have seen, the

Wabash and Erie was not one of the original expectations of the

Manhattan investors, it soon became one of their most cheering

prospects. When, in April 1836, the board of public works chose

Manhattan as the terminus, that town scored a victory that must

at the time have seemed decisive to many. In May 1837 bids were

taken for the building of the section from the rapids to Manhattan.

In July the company expanded its stock to $2,000,000.17 In May

1838 the jealous towns at the rapids petitioned the legislature to

make the canal join the river there.¹⁸ The next month the Toledo

Blade announced that the canal would come out at three points:

Manhattan, Toledo, and Maumee.¹⁹ The canal, after all, lent its

facilities equally to the main contenders, and remained neutral

 

14 John M. Bulkley, History of Monroe County, Michigan (Chicago and New

York, 1913), I, 375-377.

15 Bacon to Barker, October 24, 1840. Bacon was General George H. Custer's

father-in-law.

16 Platt Card to Sears, July 6, 1835.

17 Waggoner, History of Toledo, 933-934. It also formed the East Manhattan

Land Company to develop lands across the river.

18 Toledo Blade, May 16, 1838.

19 Toledo Blade, June 6, 1938.

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382    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

in the struggle--at extra cost to the state. To Manhattan the

decision must have been disappointing, for whatever benefits the

canal offered, they were less when shared than when enjoyed

exclusively.

The original conception of Manhattan was, it will be recalled,

as a lake port; and to be a lake port was the ambition of the

rivals all the way up to the foot of the rapids. The steamers

Jackson and Brady, of Detroit, had reached Perrysburg in the spring

of 1834 (sixteen years after the first attempt by the Walk-in-the-

Water), and thereafter steamboats visited various parts of the river

between the rapids and the mouth.²⁰ The ports up at the rapids, how-

ever, were at the mercy of the river level, and only in the wetter sea-

sons was an adequate channel assured.21 The Toledo Blade, of

course, made the most of this fact. "The 'Miami of the Lake,' " wrote

the editor of the Blade, "censures us for trying to stop the naviga-

tion of the Maumee with trash published in our paper. The trash

with which the Maumee is impeded, is good substantial rock and

sand bars, placed there by nature.^"22 The Maumee Express admitted

that sometimes, in a very strong west wind, water was sometimes

too low for navigation, but claimed (in October 1837) an average

of one ship a day since navigation opened.²³ A petition to have the

canal widened for lake boats suggests that the inhabitants of Maumee

did not have full confidence in the navigability of the river.²⁴ If the

need for a deep channel favored Toledo over Maumee and Perrys-

burg, it might be expected even more to have favored Manhattan,

lying nearer to the lake. At the mouth, though, were two channels,

one leading to Manhattan, and the other (the main one) ascending

the stream past the other towns. Thus, when the Maumee Express

cheerfully adverted to three ships running aground at Toledo, the

Blade was careful to point out that the mishaps had occurred in

the Manhattan channel, and had nothing to do with Toledo traffic.²⁵

 

20 Maurer Maurer, "Navigation at the Foot of the Maumee Rapids," Historical

Society of Northwestern Ohio Quarterly Bulletin, XV (1943), 159-194.

21 Ibid.

22 Toledo Blade, May 30, 1837.

23 Maumee Express, October 7, 1837. This claim presumably includes river

steamboats.

24 Maumee Express, February 17, 1838.

25 Toledo Blade, June 20, 1837.

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MANHATTAN, OHIO          383

 

Despite this configuration of the river bed, steamboats called at

the new docks of Manhattan. Evidence on these visits is scant, but

we do have two tables of arrivals and departures, one for the week

of August 8 to 15, 1837, and the other for July 24 to 31, 1838. The

former table shows that the one-year-old port had seventeen visits

during the week, from a schooner and nine steamboats. Of these, two

steamboats cannot be considered lake traffic, as they stayed on the

river, plying between Maumee and Manhattan. The schooner and

two other steamboats coming in from the lake were merely stopping

at Manhattan on their way to or from ports upriver. The remaining

five steamboats called at Manhattan on their way to or from

Buffalo and Detroit. They were the important visitors, for only they

represent commerce which the port at the mouth enjoyed to the

exclusion of its rivals on the Maumee; and only exclusive com-

merce could count in the competition of these ports. These five--the

Robert Fulton, North American, Governor Marcy, New York, and,

DeWitt Clinton--were of the type that would have to frequent

Manhattan. Five, of course, were not enough in a week. During

1837 Toledo claimed 756 steamboat visits.²⁶ Even supposing the

shipping season to have been thirty-five weeks, it is clear that a

majority of boats went to Toledo without stopping at Manhattan.

A year later Manhattan showed a slight superficial improvement,

suggested by sixteen visits from eleven steamboats within a week.

Of these eleven boats, nine represented lake commerce which

Manhattan did not have to share with its rivals upstream: the

Champlain, General Wayne, Commerce, North American, General

Brady, Oliver Newberry, Erie, Robert Fulton, and Commodore

Perry. By now, not only Buffalo and Detroit, but Sandusky and

Cleveland, traded with Manhattan; but the increase was probably

not commensurate with the growth of activity on the lake.²⁷

More than one steamboat company used Manhattan, but that

of Barker and Holt deserves notice, and reminds us that part of

the strategy of building the new port was to nurture the investment

 

²⁶ Toledo Blade, January 31, 1838.

27 The Manhattan Advertiser is a very rare newspaper, of which no complete

collection is known to exist. The issues of August 16, 1837, and August 1, 1838, are

at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland. The society courteously pro-

vided photostats for the writer.

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384    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

by sending it trade. Barker and other forwarding men were in a

favorable position for selecting those lake towns which were to

enjoy the vital commerce, and those which were to wither for lack

of it. Still too much can be made of this point, since there was

always this threat, that shippers in Buffalo might reach a point

where their own interests as shippers transcended their interests as

city-builders and no longer permitted the artificial injection of

trade into pet towns. Thus it is that, as early as 1837, at least one

of Barker and Holt's steamboats (the Sandusky) made the Buffalo-

Detroit run without stopping at Manhattan at all.²⁸ Two years

later the town-builders were even neglecting the dredging requisite

to the function of Manhattan as a port.²⁹

It ought to be remembered, however, that during all these

difficult times (and they include the nation-wide "hard times" of

1837) there were prospects that buoyed up the investor, and hopes

that died hard. For example, even the little lake traffic just cited

might justify the existence of some kind of town at the mouth of the

Maumee. Add to this example the uncertain but powerful influence

of the railroads that were expected to connect Adrian and Monroe

with Manhattan, and the mediocre showing in lake traffic can be

borne, for the sake of the future. Add, again, the hope which

subsisted through the winter of 1837-38, that the Wabash and

Erie Canal would terminate at Manhattan and not at Maumee or

Toledo, and we can see how Manhattan could still be considered a

fair bet. If the present belonged (already) to Toledo, the future

was still in the reach of Manhattan. This hopefulness was, more-

over, prolonged, when the discouragement of the Wabash and

Erie's termination at three points was supplanted by a new hope,

in a new railroad.

This route, the Ohio Railroad, was chartered in March 1836, to

stretch from the Pennsylvania line northeast of Cleveland to the

Maumee opposite Manhattan and up the river to Perrysburg. Its

purpose was to carry freight and passengers between October and

March, when lake shipping was closed. Even in summer, it was

28 Ohio Daily Journal (Columbus), July 25, 1837; see also the shipping list for

August 1837 above.

29 Wright to Barker, March 15, 1839.

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MANHATTAN, OHIO       385

 

hoped it might compete with the steamboats for passengers and

light freight. So long a line, however, would have taken a long time

to build, in the infancy of railroads, and in fact it was not even

begun until 1838. If, therefore, the road were commenced at the

Pennsylvania line, Manhattan might die of old age before a train

could reach it. Fortunately for the Manhattan interests the road

was begun simultaneously at Lower Sandusky (Fremont) and the

bank opposite Manhattan, the two crews working towards each other,

so that the first stretch of track would link Manhattan with Lower

Sandusky. Thus in the very year that the canal ceased to be an

exclusive benefit, the Ohio Railroad promised to be one.

This turn of events cannot be attributed to luck, if we are to

credit Thomas Richmond, one of the first commissioners of the

Ohio Railroad. He asserted that Nehemiah Allen (a state repre-

sentative from Geauga County), as president of the Ohio Railroad,

had forwarded his own investment in Manhattan by commencing

the line there--and this without any authority from the stockholders

of the railroad. What made Allen's perfidy particularly despicable

to Richmond was that his own town, Richmond, which he had

built on the proposed line between Lower Sandusky and Cleveland,

had now to pine indefinitely for the railroad. There is not much

reason to doubt Richmond. Nehemiah Allen held lots in Manhattan,

and even lived there in the 1840's. Moreover, the Ohio Railroad

was noticeably infiltrated with Manhattan interests. G. W. Card

owned $92,333 worth of stock; John G. Camp, a Whig state

representative who looked out for Manhattan interests in Columbus,

held $1,000; Benjamin F. Tyler, the Brooklyn financier who had

bought stock in the East Manhattan Land Company, $30,000; A. T.

and G. H. Tuttle, who owned a store in Manhattan, $10,000; Jacob

A. Barker, $30,000; Daniel Chase, $30,000; Henry D. Ward, cashier

of the Manhattan Bank, $10,000; Platt Card, $40,000; Benjamin

Franklin Smead, the editor of the Manhattan Advertiser, $10,000;

H. S. Knapp, Smead's assistant, $2,500; the Maumee Land and

Railroad Company, $64,000; Sheldon Thompson and J. S. Kimberley,

original stockholders in Manhattan, $10,000 jointly; Stephen G.

Austin, another original stockholder, $19,100; John T. Hudson,

$5,600; Nehemiah Allen, $52,000; and John W. Clark, another

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386     THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

Manhattan stockholder, $28,000.30 These stockholders all had stakes

in Manhattan, and there may have been others as well. The known

holdings of the Manhattan interest in the Ohio Railroad come to

$435,333, out of a total of $1,875,951. And so it is not surprising

that the Manhattan-Lower Sandusky part was begun first. Even so,

Manhattan had to pay a price, according to the Maumee Express:

land equal to the cost of the whole line to Lower Sandusky.³¹

In November 1838 Nehemiah Allen advertised for pilings at a

dollar each^32--for it was on pilings that the railroad was to cross

the marsh that comprised most of its right of way.³³ By March

1839 the road bed was completed and awaiting pilings. One naturally

wonders what this means; pilings obviously substitute for a road

bed. To say that the route is ready for pilings is merely to say that

the swamp is still there. In June, at any rate, a pile driver arrived

at Manhattan on the schooner Hubbard.34 In the meantime other

preparations had been made. The Ohio Railroad called in an

installment of five dollars per share from its stockholders (for that is

how   the stock was bought),35 and a ferry began crossing the

Maumee between Manhattan and the opposite bank, where the

road work would begin.³⁶

According to the plan, two pile drivers were to work towards

each other from opposite ends of the line. Ten days after its arrival

the Manhattan driver went to work, driving fifty-two piles on its

first day. In a few weeks it reached a rate of 132 a day.³⁷ Benjamin

F. Smead (of the Manhattan Advertiser), naturally sanguine about

this development, visited the monster shortly after it had begun

crawling across the swamp towards its mate from Lower Sandusky.

 

30 C. P Leland, "The Ohio Railroad, That Famous Structure Built on Stilts,"

Western Reserve Historical Society Tracts, No. 81 (1891); see also the local history

columns in the Toledo Blade for May 13 and May 20, 1882.

31 Maumee Express, July 29, 1837.

32 Manhattan Advertiser, November 17, 1838. All copies of the Manhattan Adver-

tiser cited, except for the two from Western Reserve, were consulted in the Toledo

Public Library, which has the largest holdings, beginning with Vol. III, No. 1,

August 22, 1838.

33 Leland, "The Ohio Railroad," 268.

34 Manhattan Advertiser, June 12, 1839.

35 Manhattan Advertiser, March 13, 1839.

36 Manhattan Advertiser, March 27, 1839.

37 Manhattan Advertiser, June 26, July 24, 1839.

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MANHATTAN, OHIO           387

 

It has two hammers [he told his subscribers] guaged to the width of the

road, (7 feet,) and when both are in play, and the whole machine well

attended, the facility of its movements is astonishing. Everything is done by

steam, even to the sawing off of the piles, and moving the machine forward

to the next set. The locomotive saw-mill which is to accompany it, has not yet

arrived, but is expected every day.

The machine was erected at the Company wharf [the Ohio Railroad wharf,

opposite Manhattan]. . . . It has now barely left the wharf, and is con-

sequently driving in the water. . . . When the saw-mill arrives, the timber

for rails and ties will be got out and laid, and every thing made ready for the

reception of the iron as they progress.³⁸

It apparently continued to run until November, when the loyal

Smead announced that the pile driver was little impeded by the

autumn gales that had stopped shipping.39 There followed a long

silence on this subject until April 1840, when the Maumee Express

hopefully enquired whether the pile driver had "gin out." "Pshaw,"

replied Smead. "Put your head under the hammer once and if the sap

don't fly, then it's because there's none in it."⁴⁰

By that time, though the Ohio Railroad had lost its momentum,

and so had Manhattan. The grandiose transportation schemes were

to no avail. Nehemiah Allen, who had gambled on both, blamed

the Manhattan investors for letting him down. His letter to them,

written in November 1840, is not devoid of hope. He points so

clearly, however, to one of the probable causes of failure that it

would be best to use his words:

 

Understanding from friend Wright that he is about to visit thy place I

thought it might not be amiss for me to write a few words in relation to

the Maumee B. R. Road. We have timber prepared to commence operations

and the Pile Machine [another one, of course] is completed and will prob-

ably be delivered this week and a competent gang of hands in readiness to

operate it. So far all is well, but how we are to keep up the steam appears

at present to be involved in some mistery. I must complain a little of the

Manhattan company. The impression is so general that you have abandoned

your interest here, that it is a matter of surprise with many that the ORR

Co. should continue to exert their energies to build up a place abandoned

38 Manhattan Advertiser, July 3, 1839. C. P. Leland, incidentally, says that the rail-

road had no ties. "The Ohio Railroad," 268.

39 Manhattan Advertiser, November 27, 1839.

40 Manhattan Advertiser, April 1, 1840.

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388    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

by its proprietors. Even some of our directors say to me "you have got 500

lots but you cannot raise 500 cents upon them till our Company build up

the place." Others say to me that they thought your company would do

something to bring the place into notice. Even the engineer upon the canal

is reported to have said that it would be time enough five years hence to

talk about locating locks in the river here. Not a gentleman composing your

company I think has been here this or the last year. Will not your company

or the moneyed men in it point out some method to assist me in some

way to raise money on a pledge of unquestioned security, provided you

would be satisfied that the interest and principal would be punctually paid.

It seems that the prudent course would be to know how the work is to be

continued before I go so far that ruin must follow a suspension of the work.

I am not one who abandons an object as long as there is a ray of light by

which to pursue it, but it must be confessed from present appearances that

Manhattan is now in a total relapse & unless it had other & better friends

than its proprietors it would be eternal. Please write to me at Willoughby

& say a word of comfort by way of saying where the needful may be had.⁴¹

So wrote the unenviable Nehemiah Allen, who had so far staked

the future of the Ohio Railroad on Manhattan that he had to

boost the town after its very proprietors had lost interest. In two

years the state auditor wrote the epitaph of the Ohio Railroad in

a report explaining how much the taxpayers had lost in the enterprise

owing to the "plunder law."⁴² Its assets were a trail of waiting

pilings. Yet there had been a time, say in 1838, when it looked as

if all roads might lead to Manhattan.

Hope died slowly. Two years after Allen's plea for action,

Frederick Wright sent a very similar, though more sanguine, mes-

sage to Buffalo. He expected, even then, that vigorous action would

save the whole investment, and spoke still of "the great necessity

of enlisting the heavy forwarding concerns of Buffalo." He warned

that

 

the present appearances indicate that Toledo will make a bold dash in

the spring--whilst we as yet have not apparently even a Corporal's Guard,

with which to show fight and do battle. The Canal is ready for us, and we

must rally or beat a retreat. It opens for navigation in the early part of

March. . . . Jay & Webster, & Hunter, Balmer, & Co. must be induced

41 Allen to Austin, Townsend, and Barker, November 9, 1840.

42 Leland, "The Ohio Railroad."

• 13
 

MANHATTAN, OHIO           389

 

to put shoulder to the Wheel and give a friendly hoist. We have always de-

clared to the public that the success of our enterprise was based entirely on

the business of the Canal.

 

Even at this late date Wright believed that three months' activity

would "infuse new life into the concern."⁴³ It is interesting to note

that Allen thought only of rails, and Wright only of water transport.

At the convergence of all these routes, what was there? Manhattan

was not a mere paper town, even though its commercial grandeur

never left the drawing board. Less than a year after the site was

chosen, a writer whose main object was to speak for Marengo

mentioned Manhattan in his description of the valley in the spring

of 1836:

 

As you ascend the river, which is deep and broad, the first town which

meets the eye is Manhattan, now a thriving village with a population of

several hundred, where, about six months ago, there was scarcely a house,

if indeed there was one. It has sprung up as it were by magic.⁴⁴

Manhattan had warehouses, an inn, at least two lawyers and three

physicians, a barber shop, a clothes cleaner, a painter (whose wife

was a milliner), a grocery, a bakery (though the baker soon deserted

to Toledo), and two or three general stores. James L. Chase

bought steamboat fuel wood, wheat, and dubious bank notes; he

sold vinegar, almanacs, and shoes. 0. Smith advertised "Lots of

goods--wet and dry--for sale." A. T. and G. H. Tuttle, in December

1836, revealed the "Great News!" that they were opening a store

"surpassed by no other establishment west of Toledo"-- an

ambiguous boast, considering that they were not west of Toledo.

William Crane sold India rubber clothing to those "traversing the

western wilds."⁴5

The panic of 1837 struck business here as elsewhere. The

advertised pleas of the shops for the payment of debts show distress,

and also the fact that much of their trade must have been on credit.

Still, the shops generally limped on after the panic for two or three

 

43 Wright to Barker, December 5, 1842.

44 Ohio Daily Journal, May 31, 1836, quoting the Ravenna Star.

45 Manhattan Advertiser, 1837-40, advertisements, passim.

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390    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

years. An anonymous traveler has left us a sketch of Manhattan

as he found it in May or June, 1837:

 

Manhattan like all other points in this country . . . is now entirely

prostrate. Indeed, I do not see how any amount of business can be done,

save such as comes from the river. Town lots, with the native forest still upon

them, are held as high as property on Main st. Lancaster. . . . I passed a day

at Manhattan, where I found a very good house, and had I written this

sketch in the midst of the ennui in which I dragged out that period, I doubt if

I had not spoken somewhat more harshly of that city. As it is . . . it has

many and fine advantages; and when its proprietors shall cease to stand in

their own light . . . it will become a flourishing place.⁴⁶

 

The suggestion that the proprietors were pricing their lots high

is not found anywhere else. If it is true, of course the practice

must have had a particularly stultifying effect at that time.

Besides the stores, lawyers, and physicians, there were a bank,

a newspaper, and a school. The school, it will be recalled, was

originally "for holding meetings in," but more than enough children

appeared to fill it. A Mr. Galpin taught the free school. It grew

too large for one teacher, and in January 1840 the directors engaged

a Miss Washburn to open a free school "for the instruction of young

Misses and a few boys," to take the pressure off Mr. Galpin.⁴⁷ For

two years, Miss Washburn had been running a private school in

Manhattan, where for three dollars a quarter the heirs of paper

fortunes could learn natural philosophy, chemistry, botany, rhetoric,

composition, grammar, arithmetic, geography, history, reading,

writing, and spelling. Miss Washburn mentioned no colleague in

her advertisement, and one suspects that all this knowledge flowed

from a single fount. In May 1840, when public education halted

seasonally, Miss Washburn again opened her private school in her

room on Maumee Avenue.⁴⁸

In an enterprise like Manhattan one bank was worth a hundred

schools. The whole project required money, and its proprietors

knew from its very beginning the close relation among money,

printing press, and bank. If money were needed, why not (in those

 

46 Maumee Express, June 10, 1837, quoting the Ohio Eagle (Lancaster).

47 Manhattan Advertiser, January 15, 1840.

48 Manhattan Advertiser, May 27, 1840.

• 15
 

MANHATTAN, OHIO         391

 

insouciant times) print some? One of the prizes for winning the

Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad would have been its bank in Adrian.

Failing to get this bank, the Manhattan interests set out to have their

own chartered. Daniel Chase went to Detroit in March 1836 to lobby

for a charter for the Manhattan Bank. The territorial legislature

proved difficult. Chase wrote to Barker from Detroit, "I have just

got through one of the hardest sieges I ever had in my life, I mean

of a managing nature." Among his difficulties in obtaining the

charter had been the contrary labors of the Toledo lobby. Despite

the friendly help of Governor Mason, Chase had to postpone his

charter in March; but soon after he succeeded.⁴⁹ The Toledo Blade

alleged (in 1840) that the Manhattan Bank charter "was obtained

in Michigan as a price for the treachery of its stockholders in aiding

Michigan  to retain illegal possession of . . . the disputed

territory."⁵⁰ Unfortunately, the correspondence sheds no light on

this matter. There was a brief time when the Manhattan men and

others in the disputed territory had a choice of capitals in which to

lobby. They could approach Detroit or Columbus, depending on

where they thought success more likely. The boundary settlement,

following closely upon the granting of a Michigan charter to the

Manhattan Bank, might look as if the promoters had treated with

the wrong sovereign. After all, though, time was all-important. A

bank of questionable legality was better than no bank at all. In fact,

the Manhattan Bank spent most of its life in this state of uncertain

legitimacy. Was it a Michigan bank in the wrong state, or an Ohio

bank without a charter? Yet it went on taking deposits and printing

money. Why not, when even the Granville Library Company was

circulating its own currency?

Three years passed before Ohio acknowledged this stepchild by

issuing a charter in March 1839. The charter was moved in the Ohio

senate by John Hough James, the Urbana banker. The bank had by

then been taken over by the Urbana banking system, controlled by

James.⁵¹ At that time the Manhattan Bank had a capitalization of

 

49 Chase to Barker, March 17, 1836.

50 Toledo Blade, August 1, 1840. "The disputed territory" was a strip of land

south of the present Michigan border. It included Toledo and Manhattan.

51 William E. and Ophia D. Smith, A Buckeye Titan (Cincinnati, 1953), 185n.;

Toledo Blade, August 1, 1840.

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392    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

$100,000, with the privilege of expanding to $500,000. Among its

liabilities the bank counted $50,000 worth of stock and $66,700

of its notes in circulation. It claimed assets comprising $13,500 in

specie, $68,300 in bills discounted, $18,600 "due from Western banks

and bankers," and $11,000 "due from Eastern banks."⁵² Against

this published statement must be placed the discovery of the Smiths

in their biography of John H. James that in the panic the Manhattan

Bank was down to $160 in specie, and was only saved by a hasty

transfusion of cash from Urbana.⁵³ Perhaps here, as elsewhere, the

same bit of specie traveled about among various banks for the sole

purpose of supporting cheerful statements of balance when the

examiner paid his visit.

The official reports concealed not only the dearth of specie but

other internal difficulties as well. H. D. Ward, the cashier of the

bank, wrote to Barker on June 26, 1839, that the bank was holding a

note for $4,325.78, made out by Barker, G. W. Card, Sheldon

Thompson, and Charles Townsend (all stockholders of the Maumee

Land and Railroad Company) to John Hough James. It was

protested for non-payment and would have to be attended to im-

mediately. Another note for $500 by G. W. Card as agent for the

company had been under protest for several months. Ward

wondered what to do with it.⁵⁴ Thus, in late June, the cashier had

worries. When the Fourth of July came around, Ward turned for

comfort to the jug. After eleven days Frederick Wright informed

Barker that the cashier had been "grossly intoxicated ever since the

fourth." A previous offense had been forgiven, even though on that

occasion Ward had had the key to the safe with him. This time

he had continued to appear at the bank, where "the regular customers

of the Bank are not only not attended to but sometimes personal

abuse is heaped on them.^"55

Even externally, however, the weakness of the Manhattan Bank

(like the other banks in the valley) had become apparent. The bank

had suspended payment on its notes late in 1838, despite loyal

 

52 Required statement in Manhattan Advertiser, May 31, 1838.

53 Smith, Buckeye Titan, 294.

54 Ward to Barker, June 26, 1839.

55 Wright to Barker, July 15, 1839. Ward kept his job till autumn.

• 17
 

MANHATTAN, OHIO         393

 

supporters such as the editor of the Advertiser, who declared that

he always treated the notes as if they were money.⁵⁶ This is the

closest the Advertiser came to mentioning the dread word "suspen-

sion" until January 1839, when Smead announced that Manhattan

Bank notes were now being redeemed at face.⁵⁷ The first report of

the Ohio Bank Commission suggests that the Manhattan Bank

hired brokers in Cincinnati to circulate its notes and draw specie for

the bank.⁵⁸ The bank changed hands again in 1840. James had ap-

parently accepted the Manhattan Bank with reluctance, and only

with the inducement of some of the Manhattan promoters offering

him a premium. So, in any case, G. W. Card recalled seven years

later.⁵⁹ Now James got rid of the bank and it came into the hands

of Calvin L. Cole, the author of banking schemes in Binghamton

(New York) and Circleville. Both were insubstantial institutions

which collapsed during the summer. In August 1840 the newly

acquired Manhattan Bank was put under injunction by the state

commissioners, and so its active life ended.⁶⁰

The reasons for the injunction were not made public until March

1841, when a special committee formed to close up the affairs of

the bank reported. The committee found that Cole had bled the

bank to death. He and his Binghamton bank had placed among the

assets of the Manhattan Bank certificates of deposit amounting to

$23,000. "These certificates," reported the committee, "appear to

have been placed in the bank to represent its stock in lieu of specie,

and although utterly unavailable . . . [appear] to have constituted

in part, the basis of the issues of the bank, and the security of the

public." They also found that in sixty days Cole and other principal

stockholders had overdrawn their own accounts in their own bank

by $49,000--at that time $3,000 more than the total capital stock

paid into the Manhattan Bank. The commissioners need scarcely

have said that "no attention appears to have been paid by the officers

 

56 Manhattan Advertiser, September 5, 1838.

57 Manhattan Advertiser, January 2, 1839.

58 First Annual Report of the Bank Commissioners of Ohio to the Thirty-Eighth

General Assembly, December 16, 1839, Ohio Executive Documents, No. 22 (Columbus,

1840), 10.

59 G. W. Card to Barker, May 31, 1847.

60 Toledo Blade, August 5, 1840.

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394    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

and agents of the bank, in this unusual expansion of its issues, to

the security of the mere stock holders." By the end of its career, the

Manhattan Bank had $89,283 of its notes in circulation, against

$9,305 available for their redemption.61

The Manhattan Bank acquired a political significance, largely of

the "horrible example" type. The Cleveland Herald and Gazette

cited the Michigan charter of the bank as an example of the hypocrisy

of the Democratic state administration.⁶² Though John H. James,

who moved the second charter in the Ohio senate, was a Whig, the

president of the bank, Daniel Chase, was an active Democrat. When

he presided over a Democratic meeting in Toledo in 1838, the Whig

Maumee Express could not resist commenting on the disparity

between the theory of bank reform and the practice of the

Manhattan Bank.⁶³

No connection between the Manhattan Bank and the Democrats

was revealed in so spectacular a fashion as that which appeared on

the demise of the bank in August 1840, when the commission

charged with its final affairs found a note for $3,000 signed by

the Democratic governor, Wilson Shannon.⁶⁴ Occurring as it did

at the height of a feverish campaign in which banks were the main

issue, this discovery gave the Whig Blade an opportunity that it

did not pass up. For two or three weeks the newspaper relished its

cause celebre. The Manhattan Bank, it declared, had been "a great

favorite with our federal Locofoco Bank Reform Legislature and

State authorities. . . . Gov. Shannon is known to have exerted his

influence in its behalf." The Blade was not hesitant about making

its point:

 

Among the assets found in the Bank by the Commissioners . . . is his

EXCELLENCY BANK REFORM WILSON SHANNON'S NOTE FOR

$3000. How came the note in this remote corner of the State, if his Excellency

had no connexion with the Coles transaction? Can he explain? The people

are anxious to know. We do not wonder that Governor Shannon was so

61 Report quoted in the Toledo Blade, March 10, 1841.

62 Cleveland Herald and Gazette, November 30, 1837.

63 Maumee Express, August 18, 1838.

64 Toledo Blade, August 5, 1840. Governor Shannon had visited Manhattan for

a few days at the end of May 1839. Manhattan Advertiser, May 29, 1839.

• 19
 

MANHATTAN, OHIO         395

 

devoted an advocate of Bank Reform; for it now appears that no man has

been more familiar with the frauds and corruptions by which the people have

been swindled out of their hard earnings through the abuse of the banking

privilege.⁶⁵

A week later the Blade published an affidavit by Seymour G. Renick

of Columbus, president of the late Circleville Bank confirming the

report that Governor Shannon had borrowed $3,000 from Cole.

Renick swore that Cole had told him that Shannon had been specu-

lating with John Hough James in the north of Ohio. When James

pressed the governor to furnish his share of the money for these

adventures, Shannon had turned to Cole.⁶⁶ The governor denied

Renick's allegations. A. Chamberlain, the last cashier of the

Manhattan Bank, backed up Renick, according to a quotation in the

Cleveland Herald.⁶⁷ Whatever the merits of the case, and the

governor's role in it, it illustrates how the bank of a town of few

people and short life can assume an import that transcends it in

breadth and permanence. What was wrong with the Manhattan

Bank was to a large extent what was wrong with the banking system;

and when complaints were made against the system, they were

sometimes made with the Manhattan Bank in mind.

School, sawmill, warehouses, and bank were all designed to make

a city of Manhattan. But to attract buyers, travelers, and businesses,

to put up a brave front, and to look like a city, nothing could serve

better than a newspaper. And so the Buffalo forwarding men

forwarded to Manhattan a Buffalo editor, Benjamin Franklin Smead,

in 1836. Maumee had its Express, Perrysburg its Miami of the Lake,

Toledo its Blade, each raucously booming and puffing its home

town, and for this, Manhattan had to have its Advertiser. It was

Smead's task to deny that ague was any worse in the Maumee Valley

than elsewhere, to deny that Manhattan sat in a swamp, to deny

that Perrysburg had any chance of success, to assert that every day

in every way Manhattan was growing better and better. Smead was

the cheer leader of Manhattan, a primeval public relations man.

 

65 Toledo Blade, August 5, 1840.

66 Toledo Blade, August 12, 1840.

67 Toledo Blade, August 26, 1840.

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396    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

With a journeyman and a printer's devil he struggled to put out

his paper. To appear blithe about the future of Manhattan was

made harder by the fact that the newspaper itself so obviously led

a stormy and precarious existence. Usually it had eight pages, but

sometimes it appeared on only one side of one sheet. Sometimes it

did not appear at all. In February 1839 Wright reported to Barker

great financial difficulty in keeping the Advertiser going at all,⁶⁸ but

Smead (true to his trade) attributed the irregularities generally to

the illness of himself or his journeyman. Once he resorted to the

desperate and ludicrous stratagem of printing the same newspaper

that he had previously issued, but with a new date.⁶⁹ Newspapers of

the other valley towns observed these interruptions with a gloating

and expectant relish, made more piquant by the fact that they were

themselves sometimes irregular. Once or twice they announced the

imminent dissolution of the Advertiser. "Our hand in parting, old

friend, and if we ever see thy printed face once more, we will hail

that day as a jubilee," wrote the Maumee Express, prematurely, on

September 15, 1838. Smead kept up a good front. "No paper next

week--can't help it--sorry though. But after that--O, crikie!"

Or sometimes, without apology: "Half Sheet. That's all you get

this week."⁷⁰ If subscribers complained, Smead had a counter-

grievance, that subscribers did not pay. He asked those too poor to

pay to stop taking the paper,⁷1 for like many other things sub-

scriptions were on credit.

Between the Maumee Express and the Toledo Blade there sub-

sisted a geographical competition. Both, however, were Whig papers,

and so they found themselves sometimes enemies, sometimes allies.

But the Advertiser was Democratic, and consequently at constant

war with its neighbors. The town itself seems to have had no party.

Daniel Chase was a Democrat, Platt Card and probably Barker were

Whigs. Smead was left to his own political preferences. When the

Whigs won in 1840, the Express rejoiced that "Manhattan shewed

by her vote the contempt in which she holds the dirty locofoco paper

 

68 Wright to Barker, February 21, 1839.

69 Manhattan Advertiser, September 4, 1839.

70 Manhattan Advertiser, November 7, 1838, January 9, 1939.

71 Manhattan Advertiser, October 16, 1839.

• 21
 

MANHATTAN, OHIO         397

 

of that place, and its low contributors." In reply, the Advertiser

published a letter signed "A Whig" stating that Manhattan Whigs

had always supported the Advertiser despite its party, because it had

always been fair.⁷² One can well suppose that the real reason for

supporting it was not its fairness, but its devotion to Manhattan.

Benjamin Franklin Smead did not live to see this defeat, but died,

at the age of forty, in the summer of 1840, of "brain fever.^"73

Although his journeyman, H. S. Knapp, had taken over the paper

as soon as Smead fell ill, it languished. It missed issues during the

winter of 1840-41, and this time Knapp offered the excuse that "our

neighbors up-river" had engaged all the paper supply.⁷⁴ Knapp

announced that he would accept Manhattan Bank notes at fifty

percent discount, or any goods, in payment for subscriptions. On

this distressed note came the long-expected death of the Advertiser,

in March 1841. It had so often skipped heartbeats that its final de-

cease may not have been immediately credited. The Blade, in a

rather ungracious epitaph, simply recalled it as a "smut machine."⁷⁵

For scurrility, there was little to choose among them.

Thus, by 1843, bank, railroad, and newspaper were all gone.

Early in 1843 the company itself closed up business, but the town

it had deliberately created survived it for a while. Some of the

members of the company kept a thin hope in the town. Platt Card

and Frederick Wright lived there in the 1840's, and so did Nehemiah

Allen, the erstwhile president of the Ohio Railroad. Barker and

Clark continued to be interested in Manhattan. They bought up lots

very cheaply, simply by buying the tax titles to whatever they

wished of the lands held by the company--which of course had

ceased to pay taxes and so forfeited large parts of Manhattan that

it had never succeeded in selling. These men would have liked to

see a revival effected by the Wabash and Erie Canal, which (too

late) joined their village with the West; but Toledo, already far

ahead, won out. The frailty of Platt Card's hope in June 1843 was

obvious when he wrote to Barker: "The passengers begin to take

 

72 Manhattan Advertiser, October 21, 1840.

73 Manhattan Advertiser, July 29, 1840.

74 Manhattan Advertiser, March 3, 1841.

75 Toledo Blade, August 11, 1841.

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398    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

the Boats at Manhattan & if M. Collins would prove True to his

trust (which I fear he will not) we could sustain Business at Man-

hattan and Build up the place. . . . Collins . . . is a Toledo man . . .

he has but one single Manhattan man on all his boats . . . and that

one I am told is to be discharged."⁷⁶ M. L. Collins is the man who,

according to tradition, left his warehouse in Manhattan, moved to

Toledo, and stampeded the five hundred inhabitants of Manhattan.⁷⁷

Thenceforward, Wright, Platt Card, Allen, and Barker abandoned

their more grandiose ambitions and settled down to the milling

business. They rented water from the canal commission, utilizing

the fifteen-foot drop from the canal to the river. Platt Card's plan

to bring a steam engine of Barker's from Monroe, Michigan, and

set up a small factory of some kind never materialized. The mill

continued, somewhat spoilt by the neglect of an incompetent

miller, at least until 1860. In the meantime, though, the legal

existence of Manhattan had come to an end. In 1848 the plat was

vacated by law: lots not occupied ceased to be lots, and streets not

serving those still there ceased to be dedicated. It remained for

some time an almost empty area east of Toledo. If, in the 1860's,

anyone had wished to go from Manhattan to Toledo, he had only

to go to the old limits of Manhattan and take a Toledo streetcar.

Distances that had once seemed of crucial importance had already

dwindled to the reach of the streetcar. What was left of Manhattan

was soon absorbed altogether by Toledo.

 

76 Platt Card to Barker, June 19, 1843.

77 Waggoner, History of Toledo, 933-934.

• 23