HISTORY OF CLAY COUNTY                      283

and snatch weak humanity from the vices, immorality, crimes, and
debauching influences that menace our very altars, the bastions of
society, and the ramparts of good government, whether municipal,
state or national. Show me a community cursed with ignorance,
idleness, vice and crime, and I will show you a community led by men
ignorant of the knowledge and the virtue that buoy up the soul to
high purpose and noble aspirations. It is the leaders, everywhere,
that are the educators. If for good, then peace and happiness. If
for bad, then strife and damnation. As we sow, by precept and
example, and tolerate by indifference, or more culpable smiles, so
must the harvest be. If the seed be of tares, who will expect the
golden harvest?
    The advance in agriculture, in the arts, and in science, are the
great marks that tell the story of our progress. Who that, like your
humble servant, was born in a wild forest of the west, in the early
twilight of this nineteenth century, and reared between the handles
of the barshare plow, with its wooden mold-board—who harvested
with the old hand sickle—thrashed with the flail—ground the meal
for his mush and the johnny cake on the hand-mill—the flour for
his Sunday cakes, crullers and turnovers, on the horse’ mill, and,
standing here today, looking back through that long vista of years
and their crowding events, will say there is no progress? What a
wondrous battle with all that then environed our fathers. Most of
Ohio, and all the west and northwest, possessed by savages and wild
beasts, and covered by forests that so stubbornly resisted our axes.
Then the steam engine, nor improved machinery, did none of our
work. In 1815 the steam engine first ground flour in Cincinnati.
Right vividly do I remember the midnight awakening of four
urchins, fisher boys, from their midnight slumbers, on the beach of
the Ohio river, by the second steam boat that “walked its waters as
a thing of life,” and uttered hideous bellowings and belched forth
fire as though all the fabled demons and furies were abroad that
night. Rude and imperfect as this boat was, it was the pioneer prom-
ise of the world’s wonderful steam commercial marine of today.
Then, and for years later, the Mike Finks and the Captain Shrives
did the commercial transit on the Ohio and Mississippi in the keel-
boat and the barge propelled by human muscle applied to the setting
pole, the tow-line, the cordel and capstan. Right well do I remem-
ber the stories of adventure told by the returning farmer who had
freighted his own surplus produce and that of his neighbors to New
Orleans on the flat boat, and walked back through the wilderness
to Cincinnati. They did the round trip in three months. A few
such voyages, save the walking back, have been made out of Clay
county, starting in Eel river. It is fit to record, right here that the
bar-share plow, the sickle, the flail, the threshing-floor, where horses
tread out the wheat, the cleaning of wheat by winnowing by hand
and fanning with a sheet, the hand-mill, the horse-mill, and hand-
bolt with its wooden crank, the “flax patch” where boys and maidens
had their merry-making at the “flax-pulling,” the distaff, spinning-
wheel, and old loom of our mothers, the keel-boat, the barge, and
the flat-boat, so familiar to us older men and matrons, have all gone
before the tide of progress in the brief span of our own existence.
None of you of middle age need be told of when and how railways