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.
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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-
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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feeling; they foretell social and
political pressures that maim the
mind and cripple the spirit of man.
Here the Ohio past has some-
thing imperative to say. It shows the
supreme value of vigorous and
individual minds, of various attitudes
and tempers, of human
diversity.
Seventy years ago Henry James wrote:
"Americans lack the
deeper sense," and he regretted
"our silent past, our deafening
present." Since then we have
acquired some sense of history, and
this year in Ohio the past sounds
clearly through the strenuous
present. It speaks of a law of
continuity and a law of change. It
tells of people like ourselves who
changed a dark wilderness into
an enlightened commonwealth. It gives
purpose and hope for
the future.