OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: Tidbits of Ohio -- Part 17 ************************************************************************ 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 8, 2005 ************************************************************************** Historical Collections of Ohio And Then They Went West Know Your Ohio by Darlene E. Kelley Tid Bits - part 17. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Akron; The Impulse of the New Born City [ part 2 ] In meticulous New England fashion, the Connecticut land company surveyed the land in checkerboard pattern, quite different from Virginia's plan. Sections called ranges were laid out a mile square, and thirty-six of these ranges, six miles each way, constituted a township. Then it held a drawing among its stockholders. Whether they drew good land or bad was a matter of chance. But it was one thing to own a great tract of distant land and quite another to get people to live on it. Connecticut men were no timid stay-at-homes, as their exploration of the seven seas bear witness. But they were seafaring and commercial folk. A few came out fairly early to the accessible sections. Moses Cleaveland of Hartford ( 1754-1806 ), Yale graduate and one of the original stockholders of the land company, drew a stretch of land along Lake Erie just where the Cuyahoga River breaks the shore line to create a harbor. Being a surveyor, like many men of his day, including George Washington, he realized the value of the property. Cleaveland organized a group of fifty-two men. followed the two lakes by boat until July 4,1796, he came to a river he assumed was the Cuyahoga, and went ashore to celebrate. He discovered a few days later that he had stopped at the wrong river, the Cuyahoga lying twenty miles further west. Naming the first river the Chagrin, in acknowledgement of his mistake, he went on to lay the foundation of the town which bears his name today. That done, he went back to Connecticut, and never lived in his town. The legend is that a printer on an early newspaper changed the name of the town, as it was one letter too long to fit a headline, so he left out the first " a," which he thought was not necessary anyhow-- and everyone decided it was a good idea, so Cleaveland became Cleveland. Ohio's first city grew slowly. It was incorporated in 1814, but did not break into the census figures until 1830, when it showed a population of 1,076 people. John Young started the town of Youngstown in 1799, but it did not amount to anything until the first rolling mill and blast furnace was started in 1845/46. An Indian stockade was built on the site of Toledo in 1800 an a townsite laid out in 1807, but the town was not incorporated until 1843. By contrast, Dayton was incorporated in 1805, and Columbus became the state capital in 1812. A few people went inland from Cleveland, picking out the better sections. Deacon David Hudson came out from Bradford, Connecticut, in 1799 to start the town of Hudson; Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge from Litchfield in 1806 to start the town bearing his name, and Jonathan Hale from Glastonbury in 1810 to start the town of Bath. The oddy-named town of Twinsburg, just north of Hudson, honors Moses and Aaron Wilcox, ( 1771-1828 ), of Killingsworth, Connecticut, who were not only identical twins, but married sisters, had the same number of children, owned their property in common, fell ill of the same disease, died the same day, and were buried in the same gave. These twins were among several proprietors of the Twinsburg area, and when they came west in 1823, at the age of fifty-two, they found the sttlement already started. The first comer had named it Millsville, for himself. Moses and Aaron donated six acres of land for the towns square which every Akron- Cleveland traveller remembers, and spent twenty dollars in cash to improve it, on the condition that the settlement change its name. Nobody came to Akron, though Captain Joseph Hart, a Revolutionary soldier, took up the tract in 1807 at Middlebury on the Little Cuyahoga two miles east, and a Major Miner Spicer joined him three years later, took up a 260 acre section in the woods where Buchtel College was built afterwards. There were a few Indians still around, but they made no trouble and disappeared after the War of 1812. Using their New England training, the settlers built dams across the Cuyahoga River at Peninsula, Bath, and one at Middlebury. There were enough settlers around to rally to the colors during the second war with England. Legend has it that three of the vessels for Perry's squadron, the Portage, the Porcupine and the Hornet, were built at Bath ad floated down the Cuyahoga River to the lake. When Sam Lane came to town in 1835, he found many people who claimed they heard the cannonadng in the battle of Lake Erie, and Bath would celebrate the anniversary of that engagement for many years. Warren, near the Pennsylvania line, was an important town. It was the county seat of Trumbull County which comprised the entire Reserve, and was named for Governor Jonathan of Connecticut. Warren is of interest to Akron because it was there that Simon Perkins, a young surveyor from Litchfield, Connecticut, came in 1798 with his bride and stayed on as agent for the land company. An aggressive personality, who won the rank of brigadier general in the war of 1812 with special commendation from Willam Henry Harrison for leadership and courage, Simon Perkins bought a considerable tract of land near Warren in 1804, and three years later picked up a thousand acres, fifty miles to the west, which was sold for taxes. General Perkins knew this tract because he had surveyed it. It was uneven, rough, swampy in places, and was crossed by two valleys. He had no special use for it, but the taxes amounted to only a little more than four dollars a year; something one could buy and forget about. He would not know for another eighteen years how good a buy he had made. It has been said that the easiest way to make money is to have your grandfather buy a farm in what later will be the business center of an important city. General Perkins did just this. The property picked up for taxes is today the heart of downtown Akron. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Beginning of Akron Akron was born in 1825 with the building of the Ohio Canal. The surveyors found, as the Indians had before them, that the easiest way to get from lake Erie to the Ohio River was to follow the two river valleys and cross over at the narrowest point. That was at Akron, where eight miles separated them. The red man left the Cuyahoga valley five miles from town, followeda ridge high enough to be safe from ambush, reached the summit at West Market Street and Portage Path, where the Indian statue now stands. The elevation there was 1,100 feet, the highest in Akron, and the second highest point in Ohio. It was an exhausting climb however for men burdened with canoes and tepees. The surveyors did nor worry about a steep climb. They looked for the lowest elevation since that meant fewer locks. So the canal route followed the main Cuyahoga valley to the edge of town, then went several miles up the Little Cuyahoga to the edge of the downtown district. There it climbed the steep sides of the valley with a series of locks like stair steps, and reached the summit a Exchange Street, a stone's throw from the Mayflower Hotel and the Goodrich factory. The elevation there was only 960 feet lower than the Indian portage. Once on top, the canal could stop for breath. The seven-mile level lay ahead, and it would be that far before it would need another lock, out in the Portage Lakes district near the headwaters of the Tuscarawas. This route took the canal directly through the present business district paralleling Main Street, the city's major business Thoroughfare. Lock Nine is back of the Portage Hotel, Lock Five behind the big bank building. Lock One is at the summit at Exchange Street, the other Locks being numbered north and south from there across the state. Water will not run uphill, but the Ohio Canal, starting at an elevation of 575 feet above sea-level at Lake Erie, had to climb 395 feet in the first thirty miles. However, it made 200 feet of that climb in the two mile stretch through Akron. Anything that stops the movement of transportation creates a business opportunity at that point. A canal boat stop is longer than others. A boat moves into the lock, waits while the sluice gates close behind it, waits again while the water rises to the elevation of the next section when the gates ahead are opened. Each lock stopped traffic, but twenty one stops in two miles meant that it would take a canal boat at least six hours to pass through Akron. A blind man could see that a town would grow up there. No passenger is going to sit on the deck all that time if there was anything to be done ashore. A town built there could collect a toll from every passenger who came through. Once the canals were in operation, horse drawn carriages would meet the boats at Lock one and Lock Twenty one, whisk the passengers to the Empire House or the Cascade, where they could spend half a day buying, selling, trading, eating drinking, or having a game of cards in the back room before it was time to overtake the boat at the far side of town. But there was no town. Settlers were pouring in from New England by this time, all but decimating some Connecticut towns, but they had not come to Akron. Middlebury, two miles away, was a town of 400 people, had four grist mills, a blast furnace, two sawmills, several inns, half a dozen stores. It was on the stage coach line from Warren, which ran along the crest of the divide, continued down Exchange Street near Lock One and on up Perkins Hill, where a second tavern had gone up overlooking the whole section where John Brown of Harper's Ferry lived later. The rest of the present city was almost entirely wilderness. A few hardy pioneers, scattered over thousands of acres, lived in log cabins clinked with clay, cooked corn meal and hominy, Johnnycake and wild game in copper or cast iron kettles hanging in te fireplace, made their own clothes out of deerskin, planted corn, carried their grain in to the grist mills at Middlebury, where they bought calico at a dollar a yard, or could get whiskey for a dollar a gallon-- though the storekeepers usually kept a bottle on the counter for their customers. The canal would change all that; create a town in this unfavorable location. But a town had to be built. Three men started the town; a general, a judge, and a doctor. All were born in Connecticut; General Simon Perkins at Lisbon in 1771, Dr. Eliakim Crosby at Litchfield in 1779, and Judge Leicester King near Hartford in 1789. They were men of great force and foresight. Dr. Crosby had gone west as a young man, studied medicine in Buffalo, practiced in Canada, but returned to serve in the United States Army in the War of 1812, forfeiting his Canadian property by so doing. He was forty one years old whe he came to Middlebury in 1820. There he found things more interesting than dispensing pills and delivering babies. He put his bag away and went into business. The town sawmill was not going to well, so he bought it and made money on it. Then he bought the blast furnace and started making plows. After that he moved three-quarters of a mile upstream, where Goodyear plant now is, threw a bigger dam across the river and built a two-story grist mill, the largest in the section. Everything he touched prospered. Judge King, who lived at Warren, had come west in 1817. A strong character and a natural leader, he would serve four years in the Ohio senate, seven years on the bench, be nominated for vice-president of the United States on the anti-slavery ticket, though withdrawing in favor of Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts. He sent his sons to college at Trinity and Harvard, saw one of them married to a grand-niece of George Washington. Another son married Dr. Crosby's third daughter, and curiously enough the Judge himself, later on in life as a wdower, would marry her sister, Calista, widow of the Charles Howard for whom Howard Street was named. General Perkins. we have already met. He was forty six at this time, the leading citizen of Warren and looked like a prosperous English country squire. He mounted his horse one morning in 1825 for a fifty mile ride west. Word had come in that the canal surveyors were driving stakes squarely across his proerty, the despised 1,000 acres he had picked up eighteen years earlier for taxes; for four dollars and one cent, to be exact. He thought the situation through very carefully on the way over. The Canal would bring in settlers, homes, stores. Everyone who had built a home on his land, every baby who was born there would enhance the value of the rest of his property. He could hold the state for a fancy price for the right-of-way, or he could donate the land, persuade his neighbors to do likewise, give the undertaking every possible assistance. On his arrival he looked up two men who also owned property along the route. Paul Williams, who had come out to Middlebury with Major Spicer in 1810, got the point quickly and agreed to donate his land, but Charles Brown, a carpenter from North Stonington, Connecticut, could not see it. " It's all right for you to give away your land," he said. " You're a rich man and can afford it. The State will have to pay me a fair price for my property it gets from me." " You'll get your money back, " said Perkins. " The canal will make the rest of your property that much more valuable." " That could be a long time off." said the carpenter. "If you feel so generous, why don't you buy my land? Then you can do whatever you want to do with it." Perkins reflected. " I do not want to buy, but I might trade," he said. " I own forty-five acres in the Little Cuyahoga valley, or I've got 100 acres farther out, or for that matter, there's a 300 acre tract over in the next county." " I'll take the forty-five acres close in, " said Brown. The next thing was to lay out the town. Not many men have had the experience of owning a large tract of land where circumstances make it certain that many people will soon want to live. General Perkins laid out the town around Lock One, where the stage coach line crossed, planned a business section in the center, and a 300 residential lots surrounding it. He included a town square a hundred yards away such as he was familiar with in New England. The square is still there, a rather drab and smoky park, with a comfort station on it and Perkins School and the Children's Hospital facing it, but none of Akron's present citizens think of it as the center of the city. Later generations forgot all about city centers in the New England sense, but did have the grace to call this block Perkins Square. General Perkins wondered about a name for the town he proposed to build. Remembering its topography he fell back on his Greek, and decided on Akron, meaning a high place. Some years later when Akron found itself on the high road of the nation, and hard drinking, smooth talking gamblers, and light fingered gentry in beaver hats and velvet breeches rode the canal boats , taking toll of the unwary, inspiring Sam'l Lane to start a newspaper to crusade against the scalawags, a friend twitted the General with a classical pun. " In naming your town Akron." he said , "did you not mean Acheron, a river in Hell?" It was late in December, 1825, before General Perkins had completed his plans, filled the townsite plat at Ravenna, county seat of Portage County, in which Akron then lay. A city was born. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Next Tid Bits 17.