OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: Tidbits of Ohio -- Part 16A ************************************************************************ USGENWEB ARCHIVES(tm) NOTICE Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm All documents placed in the USGenWeb Archives remain the property of the contributors, who retain publication rights in accordance with US Copyright Laws and Regulations. In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, these documents may be used by anyone for their personal research. They may be used by non-commercial entities so long as all notices and submitter information is included. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit. Any other use, including copying files to other sites, requires permission from the contributors PRIOR to uploading to the other sites. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. http://www.usgenwebarchives.org ************************************************************************** File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Darlene E. Kelley http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 March 7, 2005 ************************************************************************** Historical Collections of Ohio And Then They Went West Know Your Ohio by Darlene E. Kelley Tid Bits - Part 16. A. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Akron; The Impulse of the New Born City. [ part 1 ] It was not in the American tradition that men must remain on the land where they were born, any more than they must follow their father's trade. More than any people on the globe, they are free to go where they chose and make there living in any way they want. After the Revolutionary War, the nation was on the march with a great continent to occupy and rule. Akron had two advantages, its founders and its neighbors, to balance against its unfavorable location. To a greater degree than any other state in the union, Ohio, first state carved out of the Northwest Territory, would bear the imprint of the two dominant strains of American life; the Cavaliers of Virginia and the Puritans of New England. Akron was settled by men from Connecticut, who brought their traditions of manufacture with them, along with their bibles and spinning wheels. It would grow up in an industrial atmosphere and could look south to a good trading territory where it might sell its goods, if it could make goods, and a great source of raw materials, if they could find some way to put those materials to use. >From its vantage point atop the continental divide it might become a link between the industrial north and the agricultural south. The mark of Virginia and Connecticut would lie across the land and give the state a balanced economy and culture that made it one of the great states of the Union. The Virginians brought their traditions of broad lands and gracious hospitality with them; of riding horses and hunting dogs, great brick and stone homes of Georgian and colonial architecture with broad halls and winding stairways which you may still find around Chillicothe and along the National Turnpike. The New Englanders built their villages around town squares, with high-spired meeting houses and churches in the center, surrounded by white houses with green shutters and red roofs, such as you will find in Hudson, Tallmadge, Leroy, Streetsboro, Twinsburg-- and for that matter, Marietta, another Connecticut settlement-- which still looks much like transplanted bits of New England. A great Virginian of that day, Thomas Jefferson, might well express the hope that America would always be an agricultural nation, leaving the bickering of commerce and trade to whoever cared for it. Trade to him meant scheming and sharp practice, wooden nutmegs, and let the buyer beware. He might have held different views if he had had to make living in the Connecticut valley or on the rocky hillsides of Vermont. In any case, this narrative will point out how America came into a broader conception of trade, realized it could make more money by producing things people needed and could use, that the seller rather than the buyer must beware if he was to build up a permanent business. Because of its location and topography there could easily have been no Akron at all, or at best only a small canal town which would flourish briefly with its water-bourne traffic and fall into obscurity once that passed. In the conquest of the West men by-passed other sections no less inviting and no harder to traverse, continued on, leaving them isolated. But these New Englanders were one group in all the country to whom such a terrain would be no deterrent. They had lived in much the same kind of country, and finding land not too well suited for farming, had fallen back on their ingenuity to make a living in other ways, with the result that New England had become the principal manufacturing section of the nation. Such men would see possibilities in Northern Ohio. The hills and streams meant potential water power to them, and water power would turn mill wheels. Historical facts as well as topography divided Ohio into a North and South. Immediately after achieving independence, the young republic set out on the task of settling the country beyond the Appalachians; the millions of rich acres which the fortunes of war had laid in its lap. The Indians had owned the country, the French had explored and occupied it, the British had defeated the French, and now with England in turn beaten, whatever title there was to this area, beyond that of the real owners, the Indians, rested with a new nation. In organizing the Northwest Territory, Congress ran into a fact that various British rulers had made grants to the colonies over the years, most of them extending to the Pacific, wherever that was. Charles II, in a generous impulse in 1662, had made the grant to Connecticut. Some of these grants were overlapping, and in any case did not mean to much, since they had not been made effective through settlement or occupancy. The land granted to Connecticut was not even contiguous with the home state. There was considerable jealousy among the states after the Revolution, lest some grow too powerful, and several states which had no western holdings, notably Maryland, made quite a point of this, demanded that the lands be ceded back to the general government before they would join the confederation. Virginia and Connecticut did so with reservations. Virginia asked for enough land to carry out her promises to her Revolutionary soldiers, and Connecticut retained, as its " Western Reserve, " a strip of land along Lake Erie extending 120 miles west from the Pennsylvnia line. It comprised 3,250,000 acres, including the present cities of Ashtabula, Painesville, Kent, Ravenna, Cleveland, Lorain, Elyria, Oberlin, and as far south as Warren, Youngstown, and Akron. Virginia made a better bargain. Knowng the country through surveying and soldiering done by her adventurous sons, she picked the choicest section of the state, a wedged-shaped track along the Ohio between the Scioto and Little Miami Rivers, extending north to the watershed around Bellefontaine and St. Mary's, It was a rolling country, well-drained by creeks and rivers, covered with timber, wild rye, blue grass and clover, and game aplenty. The land picked by Connecticut was much less inviting. South of the divide the land lay fairly level. In fact, six miles south of Akron at the head of navigation of the Tuscarawas, the rainfall seemed to hesitate whether to flow north or south, and at Young's Hotel, a stopping point for travellers for 100 years, they will show you a point at the canal spillway where the water flows both ways, part of it north to the St. Lawrence and part south to the Gulf of Mexico. But this favored section was small in area-- the Western Reserve extended south only to the 41st parallel, a short distance from the watershed. Things were quite different to the north. The Cuyahoga cuts through the center of Cleveland a hundred feet below Euclid Avenue and the valleys of Rocky River and the Chagrin, bounding the city east and west, are fully as deep and rugged. Small wonder Connecticut was in no hurry to claim its inheritance and waited nearly a third of a century; the main tide of immigration not starting until after the war of 1812. Virginia got to its task immediately after the Revolution. Cincinnati would be a great city before Cleveland or Toledo were ever heard of, and, Marietta was thirty seven years old when Akron was born. There were other reasons other than topography why the southern part of the state was settled first. Ohio lay almost in Virginia's back yard. Once over the mountains, settlers would find easy transportation by water. The Ohio River ran along the full length of the state and had broad tributaries like the Muskingum, the Scioto and the Miami, reaching deep into the interior. The National Highway would soon be hewed across the state. Virginia had to battle the Indians, but would not encounter serious physical obstacles. The adventurious Virginians, with land grants from the state in their saddle bags, handy with axe and rifle, familiar with the dangers of the frontier, wasted no time. The size of the grants varied by Army rank. A private got 100 acres, a colonel 5,000, and Baron Von Steuben, drill master of the Revolution, received 15,000 acres. They could pick out their land wherever they chose; blue grass bottom lands for farming, rolling hills and woodland for hunting, with no remote regard for parallels of latitude and longitude-- a circumstance which would bring headaches to later surveyors, dragging their transits and chains along meander lines which ran all over the map, with such bench marks as a lone tree on a hilltop, a large boulder, the junction of two streams, or a monument sunk flush with the ground. Baron Von Steuben selected a tract around Chillicothe, later the state capital. Colonel Alexander H. Spottswood, Washington's aide-de-camp, picked a rolling stretch in Fayette County near Washington Court House, a name symbolic of its Virginian origin. One wealthy planter gave his grant to his daughter on condition that she take her new husband, the stable master, off to Ohio with her, and stay there-- which the couple did, and lived happily and prosperously ever after. Connecticut found Ohio much less accessible. It called for a 600 mile pilgrimage across the whole state of New York, wich men must make on foot or horseback, or toilsomely by ox team, through unsettled country, with few highways and settlements along the way. Some early settlers built boats at the head of Lake Ontario, paddled along the shore to Niagara, detoured around the falls, built new boats at Buffalo, and continued on along Lake Erie to their destination. When the Western Reserve was awarded to Connecticut, the legislature was somewhat of a loss to know what to do with it. Finally it decided to sell off the whole tract to a syndicate of sixty men, the Connecticut land Company, and let them struggle with the job of settling the country. The price was thirty-five cents an acre; the money going into the state school fund. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Continued in Part 16 B. part 1.