Ohio History Journal

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Ethan Allen Brown

Ethan Allen Brown

And Ohio's Canal System

 

By JOHN S. STILL*

 

 

The most important stimulus to Ohio's economy in the first half

of the nineteenth century was the construction of a canal system,

and the individual most responsible for this accomplishment was

Ethan Allen Brown. Yeoman service, it is true, was rendered by

Alfred Kelley, Micajah Williams, and others, but from the years

when his was a voice in the wilderness until the canals were actually

in use, Brown stood at the forefront.

There was nothing in Brown's early background to presage such

a consuming interest in internal improvements. Born in Connecticut

in 1776, he studied law with Alexander Hamilton--a combination

not calculated to inspire concern for the problems of frontier Ohio.

Like many of his contemporaries, however, Brown turned his eyes

westward. Having become somewhat familiar with the terrain

during a flatboat voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in

1802, he returned a year later and purchased several thousand

acres in his father's name at a promising spot on the west bank

of the Ohio some thirty-five miles below Cincinnati. There, with the

arrival of other settlers in the ensuing decade, the village of Rising

Sun, Indiana, came into being. Brown remained only long enough

to clear a few acres and to see one of his brothers well established

on the new farm. Then, in 1804, he moved to Cincinnati to launch

his legal and, ultimately, his political career. In that "dirty little

village" of a thousand inhabitants,1 he had the good fortune to

 

* John S. Still is curator of historical collections of the Ohio Historical Society.

His doctoral dissertation, upon which this article is based, was "The Life of Ethan

Allen Brown, Governor of Ohio" (Ohio State University, 1951).

1 Edward D. Mansfield, Personal Memories, Social, Political, and Literary, with

Sketches of Many Noted People (Cincinnati, 1879), 19.