Ohio History Journal

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NEWS and NOTES AN EARLY PHOTOGRAPH of the Ohio State Capitol has been received through the kindness of Dr. Wilcomb E. Washburn, curator of the division of political history of the Smithsonian Institution, Washing- ton, D.C. The glass negative was acquired recently by the Smithsonian from the archives of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail- road. It is shown on the opposite page. The picture was probably taken in the early 1870's. The Columbus City Hall, completed in 1872, is shown at the right. WILLIAM E. MARSHALL, formerly head of the department of exhibits and design of the Ohio Historical Society, has been ap- pointed executive director of the State Historical Society of Colorado. After eight years with the Ohio society, Mr. Marshall joined the Colorado institution in 1960 as deputy director. His final major work for the Ohio Historical So- ciety included the installation of the new Bird Hall and the new Arts and Crafts Hall in the Ohio State Museum. Several other members of the Society's staff have likewise moved on to distin- guished positions with other institutions in recent years. These include Robert L. Damm, the Society's field representative (1958-62) and supervisor of education (1959-62), who is director of education of Old Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecti- cut; Bruce C. Harding, state archivist of

Ohio (1957-61), who is archivist of Mich- igan; John S. Still, the Society's curator of history when he resigned in 1959 after nine years' service, who is assistant to the chief curator and curator of craft shops at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan; George F. Jenny, supervisor of education (1945-59), who joined the Columbus public school system to develop and head its conservation education program; Frances L. Goudy, reference librarian (1958-59), who became head librarian of Grove City College, Pennsylvania; Robert C. Wheeler, head of the newspaper divi- sion of the Society's library (1942-50) and field representative till 1957, who is assistant director of the Minnesota His- torical Society; and John W. Weather- ford, curator of manuscripts (1954-57), who resigned to become assistant director of libraries at Miami University. Dr. Still served as president of the Mid- west Museums Conference in 1962. He was also editor of the Midwest Museums Quarterly for several years. THE NATIONAL HISTORICAL Publications Commission has submitted a printed re- port to President Kennedy containing "a proposal . . . to meet existing and antici- pated needs over the next ten years under a national program for the collection, preservation, and publication, or dis- semination by other means, of the docu- mentary sources of American history." Included in the report are proposed amendments to the federal records act of 1950, which created the commission, au- thorizing and providing for congressional appropriations of not more than $500,000 a year for a grants-in-aid program in which grants can be made to federal, state, and local agencies and to non-profit organizations and institutions "for the collecting, describing, editing, and pub-

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lishing . . . of documentary sources sig- nificant to the history of the United States." The commission's proposals call for a minimum of $1,000,000 a year for ten years to underwrite the grants-in-aid pro- gram, half or more of this amount to be provided by private philanthropic sources. The National Historical Publications Commission was created by congress to issue and promote the publication of his- torical works and collections of historical sources and to cooperate with federal, state, and local agencies and private or- ganizations and individuals "in collecting and preserving and . . . editing and pub- lishing the papers of outstanding citizens . . . and such other documents as may be important for an understanding and ap- preciation of the history of the United States."

In the past nine years the commission has promoted and assisted more than twenty documentary publication projects, and is working with some ten more proj- ects in the planning stage. The projects to publish the papers of Thomas Jeffer- son, Benjamin Franklin, the Adams fam- ily, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madi- son are, perhaps, the most significant and best publicized among those now under way, while others include the papers of Henry Clay, Woodrow Wilson, John Jay, and John C. Calhoun. Among these projects is that of the Rutherford B. and Lucy Webb Hayes Foundation to publish selected papers of President Hayes and his family. The papers of Hayes in his capacity as presi- dent of the Slater Fund for Negro Edu- cation, 1881-93, have been issued in a two-volume work entitled Teach the Free-

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man, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and published by the Louisiana State Univer- sity Press. Watt P. Marchman, director of the Rutherford B. Hayes Library at Fremont, who serves as general editor in charge of the publication of the Hayes papers, is editing the messages and public papers of Rutherford B. Hayes, the diaries and notes of Hayes, and the family corre- spondence of the president. James H. Rodabaugh of the Ohio Historical Society is editing the correspondence of Hayes and William Henry Smith. President Kennedy endorsed the com- mission and its work in a letter of Janu- ary 19, 1963, in which he said, in part: "For more than a decade, the Commis- sion has done the most valuable work in stimulating publication from the docu- mentary sources of American history. This work, now progressing with such momentum, must not be allowed to falter. I note with pleasure that our scholars are already speaking of these remarkable co- operative undertakings as achieving no less than a 'bloodless revolution' in Ameri- can historiography. ... It must have resources on which it can depend. ... The amendatory legislation needed to make this cooperative program a reality has my full approval."   REPRINTS FROM THREE nineteenth-century volumes of significance to Ohio as well as American historiography have ap- peared recently. They are William Cooper Howells' Recollections of Life in Ohio from 1813 to 1840, originally published by the Robert Clarke Company of Cin- cinnati in 1895, now issued, with an introduction by Edwin H. Cady, by Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, Gaines- ville, Florida ($7.50); David Ross Locke's The Struggles of Petroleum V. Nasby, first published in 1872, now offered in an abridged edition, edited and with an

introduction by Joseph Jones and with notes to the chapters by Gunther Barth, by Beacon Press, Boston   (paperback, $2.45); and William T. Sherman, Sher- man's Civil War, published in 1872 as his Memoirs, now presented in abridged form, edited and with a foreword by Earl Schenck Miers, by Collier Books, New York, as one of its Collier Civil War Classics (paperback, $1.50). The Recollections of William Cooper Howells, William Dean Howells' father, is one of the literary gems that sprang from Ohio's soil. William Cooper came here from Wales as a small boy, and, as he grew to manhood, lived on several farms in eastern Ohio and in the towns of Mount Pleasant and Steubenville. Thereafter he followed the printer's trade and served on newspapers in Mount Pleas- ant, Chillicothe, Hamilton, Dayton, Co- lumbus, Ashtabula, and Jefferson. His is the story of a boy's experience in the hard, coarse, agrarian life of early Ohio. The Nasby volume reproduces a selec- tion of the letters written under the pseudonym of Petroleum V. Nasby by David Ross Locke for the Bucyrus Jour- nal, the Findlay Hancock Jeffersonian, the Cincinnati Commercial, and the Toledo Blade from 1860 through the Civil War, and for a number of years thereafter. Nasby, who, according to Harvey Ford of the Toledo Blade, was inspired by "a Findlay loafer named Levi Flenner who spent his time cadging drinks and slander- ing Negroes," was a conceited, illiterate, coarse, vulgar bum who pontificated on the side of slavery, secession, the South, and the "Dimokratic" party. In his buf- foonery, Locke found, as he said, "a con- venient vehicle for conveying political truths, backwards." In other words, Ford has suggested, "whatever side Nasby took, decent people would take the other." The Nasby letters were enjoyed by Abraham Lincoln, who read them to his

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colleagues and even at least once to the cabinet. George S. Boutwell, a congress- man from Massachusetts, in a speech at the end of the war, ranked the Nasby letters as one of the principal forces, along with the army and the navy, that brought victory to the Union. The letters also won for Locke a position among America's top humorists. Sherman's Civil War is edited to cover the Civil War years and thus to serve as a companion volume to Grant's Civil War, another in the Collier Civil War Classics series. It relates his story from the time he left New Orleans, shortly before the declaration of war, to his general orders on taking leave of "Sherman's army" on May 30, 1865. Sherman's Memoirs, from which the selections for this book were taken, were characteristic of the man; they were astonishing, vigorous, blunt, honest, courageous, and personal, both in their expression of his own ideas, loyal- ties, reactions, and prejudices, and in their stinging criticism of personalities of the North and South.   LOYD D. EASTON, professor of philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, is one of ten persons who have been awarded research grants by the American Association for State and Local History for the year 1963. Professor Easton's study is the history of the writings and activities of Ohio Hegelians from 1840 to 1900. Others from the Midwest who won grants are Sidney Glazer, professor of history at Wayne State University, De- troit, for a study of midwestern urbanism, and Roy W. Meyer, a teacher at Mankato State College, Mankato, Minnesota, for a history of the Sioux Indians of Minnesota.   THE MINNESOTA HISTORICAL Society spon- sored a unique conference on underwater

archaeology, April 26-27. Professional and amateur archaeologists, historians, and divers were invited to attend. The Minnesota society's interest in this fascinating form of archaeological and historical searching arose out of the dis- covery and subsequent recovery of his- toric metal Indian trade objects in Minne- sota waters several years ago. Sessions at the conference were devoted to the following subjects: nature and limitations of underwater archaeology; applications of underwater archaeology; legal aspects of underwater archaeology; archaeological techniques under water; underwater photography and archae- ology; historical research and identifica- tion; and conservation of artifacts from salt and fresh water. Special reports were given on underwater archaeological projects in Ontario, North Carolina, Mis- sissippi, New York, and Minnesota. Twenty experts in various aspects of the general subject from sixteen institu- tions in the United States and Canada were speakers or panel participants at the conference. In addition, George F. Bass, leader of an expedition to excavate a Byzantine shipwreck, spoke and presented an hour-long film, and Anders Franzen of Stockholm, Sweden, spoke on "The Ghost Ship, Vasa," which he discovered.     TIE UNITED STATES Internal Revenue Service is looking into the accumulation of funds by tax-exempt institutions, in- cluding historical organizations. Among other things, the I.R.S. is challenging the policy of some institutions of saving por- tions of their income instead of spending them on the charitable objects which entitle them to exemption from federal income taxes.   THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM of Natural His- tory has recently issued two significant

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publications: The McConnell Site: A Late Palaeo-Indian Workshop in Coshocton County, Ohio, by Olaf H. Prufer, and A Coelacanth Fish from the Upper Devonian of Ohio, by Bobb Schaeffer. Dr. Prufer is assistant professor of anthropology at Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, and Dr. Schaeffer is curator of the depart- ment of vertebrate paleontology of the American Museum of Natural History, New York.   IN ITS MARCH Newsletter, the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio reports on a campaign to enroll business firms of the Greater Cincinnati area as members. At that time twelve firms--the Central Trust Company, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Cincinnati Post and Times-Star, the Cincinnati Transit Company, the Clopay Corporation, the Fifth Third Union Trust Company, Oliver M. Gale, the Andrews Jergens Company, E. Kahns Sons Com- pany, the C. J. Krehbiel Company, the H. & S. Pogue Company, and the Provi- dent Bank--had signed up for member- ship. "The motivating factor in this cam- paign," the Newsletter says, "is the realization that, when the Society is lo- cated in its new quarters in Eden Park, it will have to add to its income to meet increased operating costs. There is also the pressing consideration of furnishing our new quarters and purchasing stacks." "The Society is about to enter a new era in its long history. It will soon be providing a wide range of services to the community at large, and should add a new dimension to Cincinnati's cultural and educational life."

"MENTION OHIO, and many people picture an industrial giant, a recreation treasure land, a mecca for historians. Others link the Buckeye State to rich, rolling farm- lands and wooded hills, lowlands laced with lakes and rivers, or educational and cultural centers. "Our state is all of this and more, which makes it so inviting to travel-bent Americans that over 16 million of them come to visit each year. "Ohio ranks fourth in the nation as a tourist state--a rather meaningless sta- tistic except when income from out-of- state tourists is added up. It exceeds $1.5 billion, placing travel third--behind man- ufacturing and farming--among Ohio's revenue producing industries."  (From The Sohioan, February 1963.)   FROM THE APRIL issue of the News Letter of the Institute of Early American History and Culture comes the following item re- printed from the Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia, of October 2, 1959:     THE EDITOR An Editor knocked at the Pearly Gates His face was scared and cold He stood before the man of fate For admission to the fold. What have you done St. Peter asked To gain admission here? I've been an editor, Sir, he said, For many and many a year. The Pearly Gates swung open wide St. Peter touched the bell Come in, he said, and choose your harp You've had your share of hell.

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