Ohio History Journal

NEWS and NOTES SEVERAL LANDMARKS in American history which are of importance to Ohio histori- ography and which were published many years ago have been reprinted in a series called American Classics in Political, Economic, and Literary History, being issued by Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc., of New York. They are My Autobiography, by S. S. McClure; The Acquisition of Political, Social and In- dustrial Rights of Man in America, by John Bach McMaster; The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier, by Ralph Leslie Rusk; Social and Industrial Con- ditions in the North During the Civil War, by Emerson David Fite; and His- tory of the Civil War, by James Ford Rhodes. McClure's Autobiography and McMas- ter's notable volume are presented with introductions by Professor Louis Filler of Antioch College. McClure, founder of McClure's Magazine, became one of America's most famous editors. Among his discoveries were O. Henry, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, Ida Tarbell, and Willa Cather. In it the Muckrakers made their significant exposures, and Lincoln Stef- fens printed his disclosure of corruption and bossism in several American cities. The McMaster volume consists of three lectures given at Western Reserve Uni- versity sixty years ago, and serves as a "key" to his multi-volume History.

Rusk's two-volume work stands as per- haps the most important work on the cultural beginnings of the early Middle West, as revealed in travel journals, news- papers, magazines, scholarly writings, schoolbooks, fiction, poetry, and drama. The subjects of the Fite and Rhodes vol- umes are evident from the titles. James Ford Rhodes was a wealthy Cleveland industrialist who retired from business to become one of the nation's most fa- mous historians in the first quarter of the present century. WELCOME TO OHIO is the title of a small volume, issued in August 1962, on the history of the Mennonites of the five- county area of which Kidron is the ap- proximate center. The fifty-three-page booklet was written and published as a souvenir for a number of members of European Mennonite congregations who visited the Ohio community last summer. There are some 12,000 members of Mennonite congregations in the Ohio community, who live in Wayne, Holmes, Tuscarawas, Stark, and Medina counties. The two largest groups there are the Old Order Amish, with fifty-four congrega- tions and 5,000 members, and the Men- nonites, with forty congregations and 5,800 members. The other Mennonite groups represented in the area are the General Conference Mennonites, the Old Order (Wisler) Mennonites, the Church of God in Christ Mennonites, the Re- formed Mennonites, and the Beachy Amish. The fifty-four congregations of the Old Order Amish are scattered throughout the five counties, and hold their services in the homes and barns of the members. The other fifty-three con- gregations have meeting houses. The lead- ing Mennonite towns in the community in terms of members are Kidron, Hart- ville, Orrville, Smithville, Berlin, Wads- worth, Millersburg, and Sugarcreek.

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The Mennonite migration into the five- county region began as early as 1806, when members of the faith moved into Stark County from Pennsylvania and Maryland. Pennsylvania continued to send a number of Mennonite families, but others began arriving also from France in 1817 and from Switzerland in 1819. In their new Ohio home, these people were farmers. In recent years, however, while they are still essentially a rural people, many have gone into business, industry, or the professions. In the sev- eral towns, Mennonites are operating stores of various types, manufacturing plants producing, for example, truck bodies, agricultural equipment, wood products, and Swiss cheese, feed and grain elevators, and a variety of other business ventures, and Mennonite women are taking employment away from home. "Sweeping changes are occurring in the economic life of the people here," the booklet states. "Urbanization is creeping upon us. Sociologically, our patterns of life are being changed from the way they were in former days." This booklet was produced under the editorship of James O. Lehman of Apple Creek. The several authors were Jacob C. Meyer, Mrs. Leonard C. Kreider, and Lester Graybill. Paul A. Neuenschwander provided the photographs, and Merl Leh- man the maps and art work, and Mrs. George C. Amstutz handled the proof- reading and distribution. The volume contains a complete German translation of the text, provided by Mr. and Mrs. William J. Shuette.     IN MARCH 1897 a civil and mining engi- neer by the name of Robert Brewster Stanton arrived in Columbus, Ohio, with two purposes in mind: to visit coal- mining operations and study mining ma-

chinery in the state, and to seek financial backing to develop a large project for placer mining for gold in Glen Canyon on the Colorado River. In mid-August a contract was signed with Julius F. Stone, a wealthy coal com- pany official, Frank S. Brooks, another coal man, and W. A. Mills, a railroad offi- cial, and arrangements were made for preliminary tests to be made in the can- yon. The prospects looked good, and the Hoskaninni Company was formed in March 1898 by Stone, Brooks, Mills, E. C. Morton, and R. K. Ramsey, with Stone and Brooks as president and secretary respectively. The account of the nearly five-year effort to locate likely gold samplings, to employ engineers and workmen, to equip the mining camps, to build a large dredge, to organize the company, and to finance its operations is given in the diaries of Robert B. Stanton, edited by C. Gregory Crampton of the University of Utah and Dwight L. Smith of Miami University and published by the University of Utah Press under the title of The Hoskaninni Papers: Mining in Glen Canyon, 1897- 1902 (University of Utah, Department of Anthropology, Anthropological Papers, Number 54). In the end the company failed, and Stanton was appointed receiver in Octo- ber 1901 and wound up its affairs early in 1902. Estimates of expenditures on the Glen Canyon enterprise have run from $100,000 to $350,000 or more. In 1938, when Julius Stone, the company's first president, was making his second trip down the canyons of the Colorado, his party stopped where the remains of the Hoskaninni dredge could still be seen. A pot of coffee was boiled, and, as Stone drank a cup, he said: "This is the only return I have ever had from the Hoskan- inni investment. . . . This cup of coffee cost me $5,000.00."

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REGIMENTAL PUBLICATIONS & Personal Narratives of the Civil War: A Checklist. Volume One, Northern States, Part V, Indiana and Ohio, is an eminently useful publication for Ohio Civil War buffs, published recently by the New York Pub- lic Library. It was compiled by C. E. Dornbusch, a specialist in military his- tory who has been a member of the New York library's staff since 1925. Forty-six pages of the booklet are de- voted to Ohio military units in the war, including two heavy artillery regiments; two light artillery regiments with twelve batteries; twenty-eight independent light artillery batteries; thirteen cavalry regi- ments, two cavalry battalions, two cavalry companies, one cavalry squadron, one independent cavalry unit, known as the Union Light Guard, which served as Lin- coln's bodyguard; one infantry brigade (Fuller's), one hundred and ninety-eight infantry regiments, and four infantry battalions; and ten companies of sharp- shooters. The data given for each of the units include the muster in and muster out dates, changes in designation and arm of service, general sources of this informa- tion, and a list of unit rosters and his- tories, reunion proceedings, personal rec- ollections, prison narratives, funeral ser- mons, and other publications, where such material is available. There are 450 of these latter references listed, the titles of more than one-third of which were fur- nished by the Ohio Historical Society. The compiler acknowledges the assistance of Mrs. Elizabeth R. Martin, the Society's librarian, in the preparation of the Ohio checklist.   THE UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE, in coop- eration with the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation, will award two Hagley Mu- seum Fellowships in April of 1963 for the academic years 1963-65. Recipients

of these grants take graduate work in history and related fields at the Univer- sity of Delaware. In addition, they spend half of each week during the academic year at the Hagley Museum, Wilmington, Delaware, where they receive training in museum work, and at the Eleutherian Mills Historical Library, where they con- duct research. They complete their work, including a thesis, in two years, and graduate from the University of Dela- ware with a master of arts degree in American history. The program is of special interest to those who wish to study the development of American industry and technology. Each fellowship carries an annual stip- end of $2,000, and is renewable upon satisfactory completion of the first year. Applications should be received by March 5, 1963. For further details, address the Chairman, Department of History, Uni- versity of Delaware, Newark, Delaware.   ANOTHER REPRINT important to Ohio his- tory is A Tour from the City of New York, to Detroit in the Michigan Terri- tory, Made Between the 2d of May and the 22d of September, 1818 . . . by Wil- liam Darby (Chicago, Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1962). This book, originally printed in 1819 in New York, is in the form of an observant traveler's letters written at a number of stop-over points along his route and describing the towns, lands, rivers, lakes, roads and canals, and other features in northern and western New York, lakeshore Ohio, and Michigan. Of particular importance to those interested in Ohio's history are Darby's reports on the towns and rivers along Lake Erie, and the lake islands, in the post-War of 1812 period, and his discussions of the feasibility of canals between the lake and the Ohio River.   ANY SUNDAY AFTERNOON from the first of

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May to the end of October will find a crowd of people viewing the old interur- ban and street cars, steam locomotives, and other equipment at the Ohio Railway Museum in Worthington. The museum was established in 1948 by several person who were interested in railroad trains. Their first piece was an early wooden interurban car of the type built in the first decade of the twentieth century. The museum group also ac- quired a short stretch of the right of way of the Columbus, Delaware, and Marion Electric Railroad on the east side of Worthington. There they laid ties and rails and placed on them the interurban, known as Car 21. Later Car 5012, an electric car equipped with gasoline gen- erators, was obtained from the Erie Railroad, and it produced the current to operate Car 21 on the track.

To this original equipment have been added two four-wheel streetcars of the kind that operated in small towns for many years, an eight-wheeled streetcar with side doors than ran in Detroit from

1931, an interurban car built by the G. C. Kuhlman Car Company of Cleveland in 1924, an electric steeple-cab locomo- tive and electric Work Car 067, which were used by the Columbus Railway Power and Light Company from the 1920's, a high-speed steel interurban car, known as Car 119, that ran between Cin- cinnati and Columbus from 1930 to 1938, a four-wheel, "saddle tank," steam switch engine, and a 285-ton steam passenger locomotive, which was operated in and out of Columbus by the Norfolk and Western Railway from 1917 to 1944. All pieces of equipment have been re- stored and put in working condition by the members of the Ohio Railway Mu- seum association. They have announced plans to extend their track, which now is about one mile in length, by some 1,500 feet. The information for this note was ob- tained from an article entitled "The Ohio Railway Museum," by Victor A. Ketchum, which appeared in the spring issue of Landmarks, the quarterly publication of the Franklin County Historical Society. HOBART TAYLOR, JR., executive vice chair- man of the president's committee on equal opportunity, was the featured speaker at the annual convention of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, held at Central State College, Wilberforce, October 25-27. Built around the theme "In Pursuit of Freedom: History and Realization, 1862- 1962," the meeting offered nine sessions with scholarly papers and addresses on subjects of significance to the history of the Negro, given by historians and other educators from a number of institutions throughout the country. President Charles H. Wesley of Central State College, who was also the current president of the Association, opened the meeting with an address entitled "Citi-

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zenship and Education of Negro Ameri- cans in Ohio in the Decade After Emanci- pation." Other Ohioans who participated in the sessions were Milton S. J. Wright, Wilberforce University; Harold Hancock, Otterbein College; Robert Cruden, Bald- win-Wallace College; W. A. Hammond, president of the Greene County Historical Society; Carl Klopfenstein, Heidelberg College; Louis Filler, Antioch College; Edgar Toppin, Akron University; John Cady, Ohio University; James H. Roda- baugh, Ohio Historical Society; Harvey Wish, Western Reserve University; Low- ell J. Ragatz and Foster Rhea Dulles, Ohio State University; and Lewis A. Jackson, Carleton Lee, Prince Wilson, Wilhelmena Robinson, Richard and Mary Kidd, and Paul McStallworth, Central State College. Professor McStallworth served as chairman of the committee on program and local arrangements. GROUND WAS BROKEN this summer for the construction of a $6,500,000 Georgia State Archives Building in Atlanta. The new sixteen-story marble building will provide 568,000 square feet of floor space for the preservation of valuable perma- nent records and the efficient manage- ment of current records of the state and its political subdivisions. "OHIO IN THE WAR OF 1812" is the theme of the Ohio Year Book 1963 published by the Ohioana Library Association, Co- lumbus. The 128-page booklet presents thirty-six stories and thirty-seven illus- trations featuring Ohio people and places that were significant during the early nineteenth-century conflict between the United States and Great Britain. Among the subjects are the Indian chiefs Tecum- seh and Leatherlips, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who eliminated the Eng- lish fleet from Lake Erie, Thomas Worth-

ington, who opposed the war in the sen- ate, but, after its declaration, served his nation well as negotiator with the Indians and governor of Ohio, Generals William Henry Harrison and Duncan McArthur, Fort Meigs, Clay's Crossing on the Mau- mee, Newcom Tavern in Dayton, and South Bass Island, from which Perry moved against the British and Harrison island-hopped to Amherstburg.

The Year Book, which serves also as a fine calendar-diary, may be purchased, gift-boxed, for $1.50 from the Ohio His- torical Society. The proceeds from its sale are applied to research and publication projects in Ohio history. THE DEPARTMENT OF the interior has asked congress to permit the removal of the words "National Monument" from the name of the Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial National Monument, which is located at Put-in-Bay in Lake Erie. The requested legislation would also authorize the secretary of the interior to purchase 11.2 acres of land adjacent to the memorial grounds, in order to provide a buffer area against encroaching developments and space for a mall, a visitors' center, and service facilities.

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