Historic Towns of the Western States Part 7

A much graver calamity, coming not long after, was the Indian wars, which were not to end for five long, weary years. During this time the town was strained to its generous capacity to receive under the shelter of the Campus Martius the men, women and children from remoter settlements. The settlers worked in the fields like the Israelites at the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem,--every man with his weapon in his hand. On the puncheon cabin-floors, mothers rocked their babies in the first cradles of Ohio, while often, on some far-off hill, they could see savage warriors brandishing their blood-stained hatchets in defiance at the fort.

The news of the defeat of General St. Clair's expedition caused consternation, and threatened for a time to break up the settlement. So disastrous was the defeat that when in 1793 Mad Anthony Wayne camped on the General's battlefield, his soldiers could not lie down to sleep for the bones of the unfortunate army. Humiliated by his misfortune and its implied disgrace, the Governor soon left his Marietta home. The colonists mourned with his loss that of his daughter Louisa, so brave, so lovely, so brilliant, that it seems no mere legend that the great Indian chief, Brandt, was madly in love with her.

In the grim terror of the times, an amusing incident now and then comes like a lilt of girlish laughter. Once the signal gun gave the alarm that the Indians were besieging the town. The night was dark and the confusion indescribable. Men rushed to their posts and the women and children scuttled to the central blockhouse. Colonel Sproat led the way with a box of valuable papers; next came a woman with her bed and children, and tumbling after her, old Mr. Moulton, with his leathern ap.r.o.n full of goldsmith's tools and tobacco. His daughter Anna carried the china tea-pot.

Lyddy brought the great Bible. When all were in the frightened cry was raised that Mrs. Moulton was missing--that she had been scalped by the Indians. "Oh, no," said Lyddy calmly, "she'll be here in a minute. She stopped to put things a little to rights; she said she _would not_ leave the house _looking so_." And in a few moments the old lady scuttled in, bearing the looking-gla.s.s--a triumph of New England housewifery!

A certain regularity of living was maintained in spite of the continuous fear. Every Sabbath morning church was held in a blockhouse where Psalms were droned with Puritan unction, and the sermon by Mr. Story, the scholarly Ma.s.sachusetts divine, was tasted with much critical ac.u.men by the learned backwoodsmen, many of whom were graduates of Harvard and Dartmouth. On the long Sabbath afternoons the children of the settlement studied their catechisms in the simple log cabin of Mrs. Mary Lake, the earnest woman who thus started what was perhaps the first Sunday-school in the United States. On week days they were gathered together for lessons, nor was the rod kept in less perpetual pickle because of the proximity of the Indians.

[Ill.u.s.tration THE MILLS HOMESTEAD, MARIETTA.]

The war once over, a busy activity ensued. Mills were built, bridges made, and more comfortable houses erected. It was not strange that the sons of the old coast States, with the siren voice of the sea still in their ears, should become notable builders of ships. The great trees of the forest were masts ready for felling, and many a stately vessel slipped into the water from this inland ship-yard, to glide down the Ohio into the Mississippi, and from thence to the shining ocean beyond. The town became a centre of industry and traffic, a position which she was not long to keep, for gradually trade drifted from her, and by and by she fell asleep commercially beside her pleasant waters, to nod and dream serenely through years to come. But not only was the early Marietta noted for her industrial prosperity; she was a centre of culture as well, and her place in this regard she has never lost. As soon as a greater wealth and leisure came to the pioneer colony, there bloomed abundantly the flowers of an intellectual refinement, which was the birth-right of those heroic men and women.

[Ill.u.s.tration HARMAN BLENNERHa.s.sETT.]

It is with this gracious era, redolent of sweet old customs and stately courtesies, that there is a.s.sociated the romantic, old-time tragedy of the Blennerha.s.setts. On the lovely island lying some twelve miles below Marietta, Harman Blennerha.s.sett, the dreamy Irish exile, built his idyllic mansion, whose grandeur was the wonder of the West.

"A shrubbery that Shenstone might have envied," wrote Wirt, "blooms around him. Music that might have charmed Calypso and her nymphs, is his. An extensive library spreads its treasures before him. A philosophical apparatus offers him all the secrets and mysteries of nature. Peace, tranquillity, and innocence shed their mingled delights about him. And to crown the enchantment of the scene, a wife, who is said to be lovely even beyond her s.e.x, and graced with every accomplishment that can render it irresistible, has blessed him with her love."

[Ill.u.s.tration MRS. BLENNERHa.s.sETT.]

Here he plotted a new empire with the bad and brilliant Aaron Burr, whose hands were still red with the blood of the murdered Alexander Hamilton; and from here he fled accused of treason to his country, disgraced and ruined.

Memories of the "Blennerha.s.sett days" are many, for the great man was for several years a partner of Dudley Woodbridge, the first merchant of Marietta, and both he and his accomplished wife were familiar figures in Marietta homes. Fancy, inspired by local annals, has a charming glimpse of the loving mistress of the hospitable mansion, dashing through the woods on her spirited horse, like some brilliant tropical bird, in her habit of scarlet cloth, and white hat with the long drooping plume. A pretty story is told of her wit and beauty at the famous "Burr ball" which the fashion of Marietta once gave in honor of the crafty statesman and his daughter Theodosia. To-day, the site of the regal dwelling is marked only by an old well and some magnificent trees. "Blennerha.s.sett's Island" is a point of attraction for pleasure-seekers, who give little enough thought to its sad story; but sometimes there journeys to it a lover of past years who looks with blurred eyes at the spot where once was enacted one of the most pathetic little tragedies in all American history.

But Marietta is not altogether a tale of yesterdays; she has as well her to-day, with its rich promise for the morrow. To-day, a stranger in the town has pointed out to him "New" and "Old" Marietta. In New Marietta, brought into existence by the discovery of vast surrounding oil-fields, there are thriving factories, modern business blocks, new hotels, improved school-buildings, electric cars; there are evidences of wealth and business prosperity, and signs of an increasing population. This commercial progress, from a civic standpoint, is undeniably a benefit, yet it must be admitted, for the time being, it gives Marietta a little the appearance of a kindly, old-style grandmother, startled from a long afternoon nap in the chimney-corner, to find her cap gone, her scanty petticoats replaced by strangely ample frills, and the caraway seeds in her limp black bag supplanted by indigestible bon-bons. In Old Marietta the scene shifts. Here is the drowsy peace of a New England village; here are wide streets shaded by avenues of splendid trees, and ancient houses, generous-portalled, serene. Here is the burring of bees in old-fashioned gardens. And is not this lingering fragrance the smell of the lotos-flower?

[Ill.u.s.tration MARIETTA COLLEGE BUILDINGS.]

The glory of the old dispensation is the venerable college, whose buildings cl.u.s.ter picturesquely on the green lift of College Hill. Founded in the fear of G.o.d by the first scholars of Ohio, it has behind it a proud history. At its head have stood men of rich culture and ability, among whose names shines pre-eminently that of Israel Ward Andrews. In the list of its instructors have been scholars who have led it upward to all that is n.o.blest and best. From its cla.s.ses have gone out students who have taken a fitting and often distinguished place in the professions and in politics.

When the call of 1861 came, the student sons of Marietta responded with a gallant patriotism and a devoted service, some among them winning the highest recognition. To-day, with its able faculty, its fine library, its well equipped cla.s.s-rooms, it holds no mean place in the roll of American colleges. It pays to its past the precious thanks of a worthy present. And with happy confidence it looks forward to its future, under the guidance of its sixth and latest President, Alfred Tyler Perry, but recently called to its leadership from Hartford Theological Seminary.

[Ill.u.s.tration MOUND CEMETERY, MARIETTA.]

In the old Mound Cemetery sleep an honored dead. In its center is the prehistoric mound, as well preserved to-day as when it was discovered by the pioneer fathers, a vast monument to the unknown fittingly encircled by the quiet dignity of this ancient Acre of G.o.d. General Putnam's grave is marked by a plain granite monument, bearing the simple inscription more touching than the loftiest eulogy:

GENERAL RUFUS PUTNAM

A Revolutionary Officer And the leader of the Colony which made the First settlement in the Territory of the North-West.

Born April 9, 1738, Died May 4, 1824.

[Ill.u.s.tration OHIO COMPANY'S LAND OFFICE.]

Not far from him are the majority of the Revolutionary heroes who came with him from New England. It is claimed that there are buried here more officers of the Revolution than in any other burying-ground in the United States. About them lie thirteen soldiers of the War of 1812, and a number of the brave men who fought in the Mexican War. Here too, are the resting-places of many early citizens of Marietta, who are as a "Choir Invisible"

"Of those immortal dead, who live again In minds made better by their presence."

The gates are seldom open now to the silent caravans, for the graves in the cloistral gra.s.s lie close.

Many relics of bygone days make Old Marietta interesting. The streets running north and south bear yet the names given them by the early settlers, of Washington and his generals. The "Sacra Via" and the breezy "Capitolium" and "Tiber Way" bear witness to an old scholarship. "The Point" recalls the picketed Point of the Indian wars. There still stands the Ohio Company's Land Office, a wee, weather-beaten building, gray with time, probably the oldest structure in Ohio. Opposite this is the old homestead of Rufus Putnam, which stood within the Campus Martius. On the park, fronting the river, is the quaint Two Horn Church of the Congregationalists, erected in the wilderness in 1806 and now Ohio's oldest church building. On the same street where it stands is the stately old mansion of Governor Meigs, which was built two years earlier and which still holds an honored place among Marietta's beautiful homes. In families whose names mark their descent from the "forty-eight immortals" are treasured numerous heirlooms,--ancestral portraits which look from their tarnished frames pink-cheeked, confident and calm; old dresses, dim and faintly odorous; and divers warming-pans, candlesticks and Blennerha.s.sett chairs, together with sundry bits of sprigged, delightful china.

[Ill.u.s.tration OLD TWO HORN CHURCH.]

"Age is a recommendation in four things," runs a Spanish proverb: "Old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, old books to read." To these might well be added a fifth,--old towns to love. To those who know her, Marietta is a hallowed spot. She is a tender-bosomed matron, this mother of many sons. Around her is a fair line of hills, which, whether green with the eternal promise of the spring, or wrapped in the blue smoke from autumn's invisible battlefield, or h.o.a.ry with winter's snows, are changelessly beautiful. About her are broad fields, now quivering to their resurrection, now white to the harvests. Before her are the lovely, far-stretching rivers, calling to her all day long with their old, sweet notes of running water. By the bonds of her historic beauty she holds her children in a very tender thrall. In all times, and in all places, their hearts yearn unto her in the far Horatian cry: "Septimius,--_that angle of the earth laughs for me beyond all others_!"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CLEVELAND

THE PLEASANT CITY

BY CHARLES F. THWING

The first thing to be said about Cleveland is what, with the change of a p.r.o.noun, a Cambridge poet said about one of whom he wrote: "It is so pleasant." Its streets are pleasant to live in and to look upon; its parks are pleasant to stroll in or to ride in; its houses are, on the whole, pleasant to the aesthetic sense; its libraries are pleasant for their selectness though not for their bigness; its people are, above all, pleasant for their dignity, graciousness, genuineness, simplicity and appreciation. In the year 1838 the late Asa Gray spent a short time in Cleveland, and wrote from Cleveland to a friend, saying that the city would "ultimately be a very pleasant place"; he adds: "The people show some signs of civilization; they eat ice cream, which is sold in many places."[1] I wish I were able to a.s.sure my old friend and neighbor, as he now lives with the immortelles and other fadeless flowers, that he has proved to be a true prophet: Cleveland has become a "very pleasant place," and possibly I might be allowed to a.s.sure him that signs of the ice-age of modern civilization still linger.

In that relation in which men commonly use the word "pleasant," the weather, Cleveland is not pleasant. It has as much cloudy weather as almost any part of the world; and yet it has a pleasant climate. Its summers are not hot, its winters not cold. To the worker of any sort this pleasant climate of much unpleasant weather is very pleasing, for in it, as in the climate of London, one can get much work out of himself.

[Ill.u.s.tration VIEW IN GORDON PARK.]

Cleveland is a singular creation of contraries. It is an inland town, but it builds more vessels and owns more vessels than almost any other in the United States. About a quarter of all the steel vessels, rated in tonnage, built in the United States in the last fiscal year of the Government were constructed in Cleveland, the order of precedence being Cleveland, Newport News, Chicago, and Detroit; and almost three quarters of the modern steel ships in service on the Great Lakes are owned or operated by Cleveland vesselmen. It is a city of four hundred thousand people, but it impresses both the visitor and the resident as a big village or a series of big villages. From it can be reached in a long or short night's ride, New York and Chicago, Buffalo and St. Louis, Detroit and Cincinnati; within seven hundred miles of Cleveland dwell more than half the entire population of the country, and yet Cleveland has been called provincial. Its homes are among the most palatial of the world, but the owners of not a few are more at home in New York and Paris than on Euclid Avenue. It is distinguished for its iron, steel and coal interests, but it has scholars and teachers who are known where its steel rails have never been carried. It is a city of the East, and it is also a city of the West--of the East it is the newest, of the West it is the oldest. It is often called conservative, but it is also distinguished by its sense of power and of progress. It represents in its citizens a pure New England type; but it has also gathered up folks from all over the world,--"Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, ... strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians,"

who read their newspapers in a dozen different languages. But, be it said, the New England, the Connecticut and Ma.s.sachusetts type still dominates.

The names of the families which are most representative of the things of the spirit include a large number of New England names.

[Ill.u.s.tration CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, CLEVELAND.]

This city of contraries and of contrasts is yet made a great city by only one or two simple elements. One may say that Lake Erie makes Cleveland.

Were there no Lake Erie there would be no Cleveland. But Lake Erie is the occasion and not the cause. One may say that the age of steel makes Cleveland. But that this age is the age of steel is only the condition, not the cause. The cause that makes Cleveland Cleveland is that at or near Cleveland the various elements that are necessary in the manufacture of iron and steel can be most economically and efficiently a.s.sembled. The iron ores from the Lake Superior region, the coal from the Ma.s.sillon, Mohoning and Pennsylvania region, the limestone from the Lake Erie islands and southern sh.o.r.es, can here be most profitably brought together.

Cleveland is, too, by rail and by boat a good point for the distribution of the finished product as well as a good point for the bringing together of the crude material. Here ore, coal and lime meet and mingle as naturally as the heat of the sun and the life of the seed unite in the springtime.

Nothing can prevent their meeting, and little can subsidies or other artificial stimulus do to promote it. From this union spring forth factories making nuts and bolts and sewing-machines and engines and the thousand products and by-products of this age and place of steel. Therefore Cleveland is Cleveland.

[Ill.u.s.tration SOLDIERS' AND SAILORS' MONUMENT, CLEVELAND.]

It may not only be said that Cleveland is herself; it should also be added that Cleveland has done some things first which are worth doing anyway, and which are especially worth doing first. As among the colleges Williams and Harvard have done not a few first things, so among the cities Cleveland may claim a certain priority. The city was, if not the first, among the first to adopt the federal system of munic.i.p.al government, a system which, after ten years of usefulness, has proved to be like every other form of democratic government, good if good men are in control, and bad if bad men are in control. Cleveland was the first to adopt the proper method for the government and administration of its public schools, namely the separation of the business side of the administration from the educational, a system, too, which, like the more general plan of government, finds its efficiency in the character of the men who administer it. In Cleveland, too, was organized the great Epworth League of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Here, too, one of the first women in America to enter the medical profession was trained in the old Medical College, now a part of the Western Reserve University. Here the recondite experiments were made by Morley for determining the atomic weight of oxygen, and practical experiments by Brush for giving the best light, as well as the important experiments also made by Brush which resulted in adding "etherion" to the elements. Here, also, important facilities in the use of the public library and in the making of finest machinery, such as is used in astronomical apparatus, were first applied. One, too, should not in a commercial age be suffered to forget that in Cleveland the Standard Oil Company was born and grew to be a l.u.s.ty youth.

This city of first things had as its first man and founder, one whose name it bears, Moses Cleveland. A Connecticut man, born in Canterbury, Windham County, in 1754, graduated at Yale in 1777, admitted to the bar, interrupting his professional practice by service in the Revolutionary army, serving in the Connecticut Legislature and also in the State militia, Moses Cleveland was made agent for the Connecticut Land Company in 1796, and came into the historic territory of New Connecticut, or the Western Reserve.[2] He seems to have had those elements which usually are found in founders of states and builders of cities. Reserved in speech, vigorous in action, friendly with all, grave, shrewd, he was born to command. His career was brief: he died in the town of his birth in 1806; but he lived long enough to entertain a rational hope of the future greatness of the city he founded and named. It is said that he once remarked: "While I was in New Connecticut I laid out a town, on the bank of Lake Erie, which was called by my name, and I believe the child is now born that may live to see it grow as large as old Windham."

Moses Cleveland was a prophet at once true and false. Cleveland became as large as old Windham and even larger, in the lifetime of children born in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The method by which Cleveland has attained the first place in its State, and the seventh place in the United States, is a process, a growth, and not a manufacture. In the year 1830, thirty-four years after the coming of Moses Cleveland, it had only a thousand people; but the one thousand had increased to six thousand by 1840, and in the next ten years the six thousand increased threefold. In the next ten years the number more than doubled, becoming forty-three thousand in 1860, and yet again doubled in the following decade. By 1870, it had become ninety-two thousand. The doubling process could not long continue, but it came so near it that in 1880 there were one hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants, in 1890 two hundred and sixty thousand and more, and in 1900 almost four hundred thousand.

[Ill.u.s.tration ARMORY OF THE CLEVELAND GRAYS.]

A growth more normal and steady, a growth which has also carried along with itself elements far more precious than mere size, it would be hard to find. For these folks do not deserve the epithet which Carlyle applied to London's millions. They are a people of vigor, initiative, progressiveness, carefulness, wealth, work, comfortableness, and good-heartedness.

Cleveland may be conservative; but it is the conservatism of the English nation which Emerson describes in saying: "The slow, deep English ma.s.s smoulders with fire, which at last sets all its borders in flame."

Cleveland's fires are the fires of anthracite and not of straw.