Ohio History Journal

THE OHIO HERITAGE*

by WALTER HAVIGHURST

Research Professor of English, Miami University

The past is a short word with a long meaning. Once a tropic

ocean covered Ohio, and now the limestone ledges of our rivers

are crusted with sea shells, skeletons of fish, and stems of coral

from the profuse life of that ancient sea. Three times a continental

glacier crept over Ohio, covering as much as three-fourths of the

state with a vast carpet of ice. Once a race of men raised burial

mounds beside the rivers; they shaped giant effigies in the earth

and heaped up earthen platforms, perhaps to celebrate occasions

like a sesquicentennial. These people vanished from the land, and

new tribes marked out hunting trails from the Ohio River to

Lake Erie. And still our history had not begun.

How long is 150 years? Seen against the deep past of the ancient

earth and waters, a century is but a moment; it may have taken

many times that long for the last retreating glacier to move from

Columbus to Worthington. But this is our time on the Ohio earth.

Our drama is unfolding, and we bring a different measure. Already

we have long memories in the land.

Change comes quickly in America; it came dramatically in Ohio.

Every spring Ohio farmers turn up arrowheads in their fields. A

man holds in his hand that little wedge of flint and for a moment

he thinks of the savage life that held the Ohio stage before us.

Just beneath our strenuous and complex civilization is the elemental

wilderness. With a flake of flint found in our flower garden we

can look back to the beginnings. That is one of the unique aspects

of America.

Two centuries ago Ohio was nine-tenths forest, with scattered

tribes camped beside the streams. If its Indians had all been brought

together they would have made a town not larger than Middletown

or Mansfield. Since then it has become a complex commonwealth,

* An address delivered before the annual dinner of the Ohio State Archaeological

and Historical Society, April 10, 1953, at which there was a special observance of

the sesquicentennial of Ohio's statehood.

211

212 Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

212 Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

with cities, towns, and villages, with mines, mills, and quarries,

with farms, gardens, and orchards. The old faint Indian trails are

crossed by highways, railways, airways. Above the burial mounds

rise television towers. In 1953 Ohio has more people than Austria,

Greece, or Sweden. With these dramatic changes, 150 years seems

an impressive span of time.

On an anniversary a man or a society takes a long view and

seeks for identity. In 1776, before its first settlement, Ohio had a

clear and positive character. It was an outlying land of darkness

and mystery. The black forest covered it like a rug, threaded by

the paths of the Indians and the tracks of the great game animals.

In that year George Rogers Clark brought 500 pounds of gunpowder

to Kentucky, to keep the Indians in Ohio. A decade later the first

settlers came, with caution and daring, and for a generation Ohio

was a wild land. The first settlements were primitive and precarious,

but civilization began. The people of pioneer Amesville traded

coonskins for a shelf of books--The History of England, Gulliver's

Travels, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ohio was the

far West, a land of danger and promise, and it fascinated people

even across the Atlantic. When young Lord Byron learned that his

poems had been added to the Coonskin Library he wrote in his

journal: "These are the first tidings that sound like fame to my

ears--to be read on the banks of the Ohio." It was like an author of

today learning that his book is being read on the banks of the

Yukon. In those years Ohio had identity. It meant coonskin caps,

a bounty on wolves' ears, a cabin in the clearing.

Now Ohio has no quick and easy identity. What symbol appears

on the cover of the Ohio Guide? Not a buckeye. The early settlers

found buckeye trees in their forest but they took no special interest

in them; only by chance did Ohio become the Buckeye State.

Thirteen years ago when the Guide was published there must have

been some debate before the cover design was chosen. It shows

a sheaf of wheat and an automobile tire. There is no state symbol

there, no gathering of folklore and common feeling--though

once Ohio led the nation in wheat production and it now

leads the world in manufacture of rubber tires. There was no

symbol to choose because Ohio is too varied for a single char-

The Ohio Heritage 213

The Ohio Heritage 213

acterization. The wheat and the tire are merely parts of the

Ohio story.

To make the design represent the Ohio tradition we might add

another figure. It would be a lean, long-handled, keen-bladed ax.

Three symbols: the ax, the wheat, the tire. They call up pictures

from the Ohio past: a cabin in a forest clearing; a spreading farm

with grain fields ripening in the sun; and then another forest, of

smoking chimneys and loading towers, the silhouette of industry.

Into that earliest picture of the dark and silent forest the first

Ohioans brought their songs and their firelight; they also brought

the ax. There were a few natural openings in the forest, like the

Darby Plains and the Pickaway Plains. The ax-men would make a

thousand openings; they would open the whole domain. In Conrad

Richter's novel The Trees, Sayward Luckett, recalling her girlhood

in the Ohio wilderness, exclaimed: "O, you had to be a stout body

to be a woman way back there, for this was way up west in the

Ohio wilderness. The trace ran through the deep woods and over-

head the trees were thick as a roof, almost. At the far end you

could just see the faint promise of light. That was George Roebuck's

clearing." The clearing was to become a town-site, and in time

a city with its new forest of telephone poles and chimney stacks.

Around every clearing in the early years the ax kept thudding,

and a haze hung over all the Ohio valleys. Soft columns of smoke

went up from ten thousand clearings where settlers burned logs,

brush, and stumps at the margin of their fields. Brush burned with

a leaping fury but the great stumps smoldered, making a slow cloud

in the sunlight and a glow in the dark night sky. For hundreds of

miles the air was sweet and sharp with that burning. Land offices

were spaced across Ohio, at Marietta, Chillicothe, and Cincinnati.

To every office new settlers swarmed. They watched the land agent

write their claims on his survey maps; they signed their names or

made their mark. Then they hurried on to begin their own clearing

and open their fields to the sun.

The thud of the ax was Ohio's first chorus. It sounded in every

settlement where men were felling timber, building cabins, making

wooden implements and furniture. These Ohio men were the

greatest ax-men in all history.

214 Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

214 Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

The sound of the ax crept northward from the Ohio. In 1812

there was a great thudding in the old forest on the high east bank

of the Scioto, across from the village of Franklinton. There the

village of Columbus was going up and a site was being cleared, in

the center of the state, for the new state capitol. Wolves still

howled in the forest and deer came down to the Scioto to drink.

It is easy to imagine a winter night in 1812, with stars glittering

in the sky and the forest cold and still. On such a night an old

gray wolf crept to the edge of that clearing and looked at the

lamplit windows--the first lights of Columbus. For a while he

stands there, sniffing the cold air. Then he blinks his eyes and

looks away from a thing he cannot understand. Silently he trots

back into the deep woods, knowing an everlasting change has come

to this country. Something had happened in the heart of Ohio.

The ax was clearing a place for the law-makers.

One version of the great seal of Ohio shows a wheat field of ripe

grain. For twenty years before the Civil War that was the charac-

teristic landscape of the state. When rubber tires, cash registers,

plate glass, and machine tools were still unknown, Ohio was a wheat

state, the leading wheat state, the bread-basket of the nation. In

those years grain wagons creaked over the Ohio roads carrying

the harvest to mills and markets. At Canal Fulton, Newark, Akron,

Lancaster, and scores of other canal towns, long lines of wagons

waited to unload Ohio grain. Canal barges carried Ohio wheat to

the Ohio River and Lake Erie.

Wheat moved northward behind the sound of the ax. Exactly

100 years ago Tom Edison was a boy in the town of Milan. What he

remembered best from his boyhood was the wheat wagons creaking

through the town to the mile-long line of elevators on the Milan

Canal. Hundreds of wagons arrived daily from the northern counties,

and scores of schooners crept out to Lake Erie loaded deep with

Ohio grain. For twenty years the little town of Milan was one of

the great wheat ports of the world.

A man worth remembering in Ohio is John H. Klippart, secretary

of the Ohio Board of Agriculture a century ago. He grew up in

Stark County, where canal horns sounded across the fields. He

studied the diseases of wheat and the diseases of cattle. He had

The Ohio Heritage 215

The Ohio Heritage 215

a tireless dream of fine herds in Ohio's pastures and granaries

bulging with grain. In 1859 appeared his famous book, The Wheat

Plant--a book filled with valuable knowledge, along with one

mistaken prophecy. He declared that Ohio was the westernmost

region in which wheat would grow, that the Maumee River was the

limit of America's wheat lands.

Around the portage lakes south of Akron lay fine wheat fields--

until the rubber industry began. At Akron, in 1827, the State of

Ohio, the first barge on the Ohio and Erie Canal, loaded Summit

County wheat. Then Akron was a village of 250 settlers. Within

one man's memory it became the rubber capital of the world. To

Akron, Youngstown, Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, Columbus, Cin-

cinnati came a great stream of people. The long lake boats were

bringing iron ore to Ohio's blast furnaces, and Ohio products were

going to the distant countries of the world. Ohio boilers pushed

steamboats up the Congo and the Amazon. Ohio wire was strung

on fence posts in Spain and Argentina. Ohio steam shovels dug

into the jungles of Panama. Ohio locomotives whistled in the

hills of Ecuador. Wheat had moved on a thousand miles to Kansas,

and Ohio was one of the chief industrial states of the nation.

Ohio has had two great gifts of diversity. The first gift came

from nature: a great forest and the enlarging plains; a spacious

lake and a lordly river; coal, oil, and gas; sand, clay, and limestone;

and the deep rich soil. But the greater gift has been the diversity

of Ohio's people. No region in history has had such a variety of

settlement. All of Ohio's millions came from over the eastern

mountains, but they came from many backgrounds. Some came from

Virginia and the Carolinas, some from Pennsylvania and New

Jersey, some from New York and New England. So Ohio was

the first all-American state, with a blending of people from

the older colonies. In Ohio northerners ceased to be northern,

southerners ceased to be southern; they became American. In the

generation after the Revolution, Ohio was the proving ground

of the national unity.

The Virginians loved land; they made Ohio a green and fruitful

commonwealth. The Yankees were traders, merchants, manu-

facturers; they filled Ohio with the hum and throb of industry.

216 Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

216 Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

And more diversity was coming. Fresh from Europe to the promise

of Ohio came a living stream of people--the Germans, the Irish,

the Italians, the Hungarians, the Baltic and Slavic people. Each

strain brought its own vitality and its special gifts. The mingling

of these blood streams gave Ohio a bright strong life-force, capable

of many pursuits, responsive in many ways to the common future.

In Ohio towns diverse languages mingled along Main Street, and

in Ohio cities newspapers were published in a variety of tongues.

Then Ohio was more American than ever; for it was the destiny of

America to be a nation of nations. Across the state are scattered

London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Athens, Vienna, Moscow, Lisbon,

Dublin. From the Ohio map these names keep asking: How then

should we ever be a narrow, prejudiced, provincial people?

What a rich stream of life this is, all the natures of the older

colonies and the Old World mingling in one society. And what

a roll call Ohio has mustered, from Johnny Appleseed, who planted

orchards, to David Zeisberger, who taught the Indians; from

Ebenezer Zane, who hacked out the first road, to Caleb Atwater,

who roamed the state and wrote the first Ohio history. That long

roll would include scientists and inventors like Edison, Kettering,

and the Wright brothers; schoolmen like McGuffey, Spencer, and

Ray; men of letters like William Dean Howells and Sherwood

Anderson; humanitarians like Samuel Jones and Edward Allen;

military leaders like Grant, Sherman, Custer, and King; indus-

trialists like Rockefeller, Procter, Firestone, and Mather; civic

leaders like Brand Whitlock, Tom Johnson, and Newton D. Baker;

statesmen like Garfield, Hayes, Harrison, McKinley, and Taft. The

history of America could not be told without these names from

Ohio.

On the upthrust island of Lundy off the English coast there is

an old saying: "Scratch Lundy and you find granite." We can say:

"Scratch Ohio and you find a story," and all the stories come from

the diversity and vitality of Ohio's people. We can remember how

the champions of two Highland County towns fought barehanded

to see which town would get the courthouse; how three rival towns

on the Mahoning united under the name Alliance; how a German

settler in Champaign County built a mansion with a fortune made

The Ohio Heritage 217

The Ohio Heritage 217

by selling horseshoes to the Czar of Russia during the Napoleonic

Wars; how old Simon Kenton, who had privately purchased from

the Indians "half of Ohio and a good part of Indiana," lived

serenely on a pension of $20 a month; how a Marietta crew sailed

a tall-masted ship down the Ohio and across the Atlantic to carry

Ohio grain to starving Ireland; how a boatload of Welsh settlers

built a town in Gallia County because their boat was stolen there;

how a tavern-keeper on the Chillicothe turnpike founded a college;

how a stage driver overturned a party of congressmen on the

National Road and named the place Congress Hollow; how the

"squirrel hunters" marched to Cincinnati to head off rebel raiders;

how the German Zoarites laid out an Ohio garden on a design

from the Book of Revelation; how a Richland County man invited a

slave-searching party to breakfast and said a grace long enough to

allow five slaves to escape from his barn; how young Harvey Fire-

stone heard stagecoaches grind through the village of Columbiana

and got the idea of making rubber tires for buggies; how a Mansfield

woman started the Friendly House for children of foreign-born

workers; how the ashes of Annie Oakley were displayed along

with Chief Sitting Bull's war bonnet and a signed photograph of

King Edward VII in the window of a Greenville jewelry store;

how Irad Kelley sailed a sloop alone over Lake Erie to keep goods

on the shelves of his store in Cleveland; how General James Denver

of Wilmington gave his name to the capital of Colorado; how

the selectmen of Lancaster required any man found intoxicated to

dig a stump from the village street; how Jeremiah Reynolds of

Wilmington sailed in 1829 for the South Pole and gave Edgar

Allen Poe the material for his first tale of strange adventure.

Ohio means variety. There is no typical Ohio story, for this

folklore concerns a various and many-sided people. Their diversity

is the common wealth.

After 150 years of statehood Ohio is richer and more powerful

than Governor Tiffin or Senator Worthington ever dreamed. Yet

this anniversary finds Ohio anxious in an anxious world. Books that

look into the future are dark with misgiving. Aldous Huxley's

bitter Brave New World and George Orwell's frightening 1984

picture a society of automatons, incapable of individual thought and