OHIO STATEWIDE FILES OH-FOOTSTEPS Mailing List Issue 32 ************************************************************************ USGENWEB ARCHIVES(tm) NOTICE Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgenwebarchives.org ************************************************************************** OH-FOOTSTEPS-D Digest Volume 05 : Issue 32 Today's Topics: #1 Fw: Tid Bits -- Part 21 A ["Ohio Archives EV1" To: OH-FOOTSTEPS-L@rootsweb.com Message-ID: <081801c5364b$54dd8d20$0300a8c0@margaret> Subject: Fw: Tid Bits -- Part 21 A Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ----- Original Message ----- From: "Darlene & Kathi kelley" To: Sent: Monday, March 21, 2005 3:56 AM Subject: Tid Bits -- Part 21 A Contributed for Use in USGenWeb Archives by Darlene E. Kelley March 20, 2005. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Historical Collections of Ohio And Then They Went West Know Your Ohio by Darlene E. Kelley Tid Bits - Part 21 A +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Tid Bits - 21 A Cleaveland's Business Beginnings A distinction has been made somewhere along the line between trading with the Indians and commerce with the trader's own kind. Exactly how to make it is not easy to see. Conquering the populace, killing some inhabitants and making slaves of others for the purpose of grabbing off the gold was the Spanish method. The perpetrators saw nothing immorial in it. It had always been done. The only reason why it seems immoral today is that the Spanish Conquistadores who were so startlingly successful at it are so near in time to people of a different view of life. The French method shows an advance. The French were always thrifty and foresighted than the Spanish. They took another step. Instead of making for gold, the finished product they went after a souce of gold. They were wise enough to want not only furs and fish for today but furs and fish for tomarrow also. So instead of killing off the Indians they gave them a sort of friendship along with their exploitation. The English moved still further in the direction of doing things for themselves. Gold in itself was not their main ambition, and with them trading for furs and fish was merely an incident. If they could get land, they could produce for themselves, not only this year and next, but forever, all things that suited their more democratic needs. So as any story of the beginning of business by people of English descent, trading with the Indians counts little. It is comparable with cutting down trees for a cabin or planting wheat among stumps; it was not the beginning, but a prerequisite-- what had to be done before they actually begin. Like living in a one-room cabin and planting before the land is cleared, however, Indian trading lingers on and interweaves among the real beginnings. There was Indian trading in these parts pretty far back. A man named Meginnes had a cabin up the river near Newburgh some years before the Connecticut Land Company bought its land. A Frenchman had another. These are the ones known. Undoubtedly there were others before that. A little swapping went on the first summer, and Edward Paine made trading his business the first winter. Whenever a woman made white bread, Indians would give any amount of game for that delicacy. Squaws made a nuisance of themselves hanging around kitchens waiting for bread to come out of the oven, even if it were made of " rye an' Injun " for lack of milled wheat. Pioneer women often endeavored to teach their Indian visitors how to make bread for themselves, and were sometimes fairly successful. One of these instances occurred in the family of the present writer. The woman felt it was not fair to the Indians to take so much fur or game as they considered needful to give for what seemed to her such trifle as a loaf of home-baked bread. She told a squaw that if she would come on a Saturday ad watch a few times, she could learn to bake bread for herself. The result was that she had to do her Saturday baking for not one but many squaws lining the walls of her kitchen. They learned in time, but thir bread was seldom to be compared with her own. Perhaps it was a certain cleanliness in the preliminary processes, perhaps a recial deftness of touch, that was lacking. Teaching them to make the desired things for themselves may be perhaps be called the negative side of trade. At any rate, in these matters, kindliness of the white woman prevailed over any desire of gain by exploitation. The first four years of Cleaveland life were given up to the most primitive pioneering. There were but a few colonists, and they were using up the goods brought with them and endeavoring to make a beginning of getting food from the land. By 1800, however, there was more wheat than enough to carry over, and no market for it. Then David Bryant came along, with a still which he had in Virginia. He ans his son Gilman built a still house under the sand bank on the side hill about twenty rods from Lorenzo Carter's cabin and about fifteen feet above the river. This first business establishment of the city of Cleaveland was a house of hewed logs a story and a half high, twenty feet by twenty-six in size. Water was taken in a trough from springs coming out of the bank, along into the second story of the house. At first the whiskey was made from wheat. Later, when other markets appeared for the wheat crop, they used corn. The setting up of this still was a natural development. Whisky was considered an essential in every household. Wheat was begging for a market, and whisky had to be brought in at a high price for transportation. Converting wheat into whisky was an obvious solution of both problems. Whisky alo served as coin of realm in trading for furs. The latter use had its disadvantages when the Injuns got too much, but the state of affairs, too, was taken for granted at that period in the world's history. Prerequisite to the distilling business was the mill which ground the wheat which was made into whisky, but it can not be counted the first business in Cleaveland because it was built in Newburgh. Wheeler W. Williams and Major Wyatt erected it five miles east of Cleaveland on the trail to Hudson. David and Gilman Bryant got the stones for this mill from the Vermilion River and made them ready for use. The latter says: " The water was conveyed to the mill in a dugout trough, to an undershot wheel about twelve feet over, with one set of arms, and buckets fifteen inches long, to run inside of the trough, which went down the bank at an angle of forty-five degrees, perhaps. The dam was about four rods above the fall; the millstones were three and a half feet in diameter, of grey rock." One of these millstones has been preserved and was located at a place of honor in the Public Square. The first domesticated fowl were brought in 1799 by Timothy Doan's family -- a box of live geese. The boat overturned at Grand River and the geese were carried out into the lake, but the box burst and the geese swam back to shore and were captured. The first frame house built was Kingsbury's, on the ridge. Theirs also was the first crop of apples. The second of Cleaveland's commercial institutions seems to have been a store opened by Elisha Norton in Carter's house in 1801. He carried staple dry goods and groceries for the white folk and giddy calicoes, beads and such matters of joy and desires for the indians. Three years later Oliver Culver-- who had been with the surveying party of 1797 -- came to start a store. He brought a boatload of dry goods, groceries and liquors, and paid three dollars a barrel for transportation from Black Rock, near Buffalo. He stayed only one year, so apparently his venture did not pay well enough to be repeated. Nathan Perry, who had come with cattle in 1796, brought his family to Ohio in 1806. He bought a thousand acres of land in what is now Lake County at fifty cents an acre, and also five acres in Cleaveland, in the block bounded by Superior, St. Clair, Water and Banks streets. He added to these investments a farm near the corner of Broadway and Perry Street (now East Twenty-second Street ) and another tract in what is now Lorain. In 1808, he decided Cleaveland was the best place to make a living, so he then started a little store with a Mr. Hanchet, next to the post office. ( This was Luke Hanchet, probably, of the surveying party of 1796 ). Soon Perry built a combined home and store, and a few years later a brick store. The first brick store anywhere in the region, however, was built by J.R. and Irad Kelley at Newburgh in 1814. Elias and Harvey Murray came to town in 1810 and soon became leading merchants. Lorenzo Carter about this time built a warehouse on Union Lane. Some of the prices of this period are interesting. Muslin was fifty cents a yard, Calico thirty-seven and a half. salt and flour were priced alike, at fifteen dollars a barrel. Butter was six cents a pound and eggs four cents a dozen. One Anna McCullough of Canfield, Ohio, whose father died, leaving small children, went out to work as household helper at the age of thirteen. Her salary was fifty cents a week. This was 1814. At a store in Windham, Ohio, in September, 1817, a bill of goods was sold by Deacon Isaac Clark, whose whole stock was valued at five hundred dollars, a great sum then, to John Seeley, as follows: To 1/2 lb. tea @ $1.50 ------------ $ .75 " 1/2 yd. cambric @ .80 cents .40 " 1/2 paper pins @ .25 cnts . 121/2 Jeriamiah Lyman was charged by Clark with goods purchased, to wit: To 51/2 yds Calico @ .60 cents -- $3.30 " 1 skein silk .09 " 2 1/2 yds fulled cloth @ $1.75 4.37 " 1/2 lb. pepper @ .50 lb .25 Apparently it was Mrs. Jeremiah who did the shopping, and it is evident she was finishing her summer fancy work, perparing to do her fall sewing and and putting up her autumn pickles in between. Almost everything purchased was paid for in barter of some kind. Elias Cozad built the first tannery, out at Doan's Corners, which was followed within the first year by one put up by Samuel and Matthew Williamson. In 1801 there was a Constitutional Convention at Chillicothe, with Samuel Huntington as representative of Trumbull County. In February , 1803, Ohio was made a state, seventeeth. The first state legislature met in Chillicothe, and Samuel Huntington was made judge of the Ohio Supreme Court. The first doctor was David Long, who came in 1810. When he arrived, the nearest physicians were at Hudson, Painsville, Wooster, and Monroe. He was geatly needed, and his practice soon became large. He was interested, however, in other ventures, as nearly every pioneer who succeeded had to be. He was a candidate for county commissioner when the location of a new courthouse was in question. Cleaveland was then but " a small village six miles from Newburgh," and the settlers of the latter place naturally hoped to get the new building with the ensuing convenience and prestige. Dr. Long was elected, and his vote went to Cleaveland, which decided the matter. The doctor lost rather heavily on a contract for building a section of the canal, but he got on pretty well none the less. He moved in 1836 to a farm on Woodland Avenue. He built a stone house on this property, afterward occupied by Erastus Gaylord , and later he built the brick house on the corner of Woodland Avenue and Longwood Avenue ( now East Thirty-fifth Street. Long was a director of the Commercial Bank of Lake Erie and was connected with the Cleaveland Pier Company. He was one of the organizers of Trinity, the first church. He was on a commitee to buy a hearse, harness and brier. He was a member of the early fire department. These are a few of his many activities. He married Juliana, daughter of Judge John Walworth. His daughter, Mary, married Solomon Lewis Severance, the first of the Severance family to make Cleaveland his home. Their son, Lewis Henry Severance, was the father of the John L. Severance . The benefactions of the Severance family to art and education in Cleaveland and the Reserve have been many. The last beautiful gift, is that of Severance Hall. The first dentist, Benjamin Strickland, did not arrive until 1835. The first lawyer was Samuel Huntington, who came in the summer of 1801, but there was not much law business to be done, so he engaged in many other affairs, and soon moved on into public service, later becoming governor of Ohio. The first lawyer to do a real law practice was Alfred Kelley, who came on horseback in 1810, along with Dr. Jared P. Kirtland and Joshua Stow. It was in 1801 that Amos Spafford resurveyed the city streets and lanes, planted fifty-four posts of oak, one foot square, at the principal corners, at fifty cents per post, and charged fifty cents for grubbing out a tree at the northeast corner of the Public Square. The original Streets of the village were Water, Ontario, Miami, and Erie streets running north and south, and Bath, Federal, Lake, Superior, Huron, and Ohio streets running east and west. These streets surveyed were not at once opened and cleared of trees and stumps. By 1812 the only street really cleared was Superior west of the Square. Ontario was passable for teams, north of the Square and south of the Square it was an open road, along the present Broadway to Newburgh . Water Street was scarcely more than a path. Lake and Huron streets were unopen while Erie Street was partly opened and cleared of underbrush. Superior Street was planned for the principal street of the city. It was the widest streets in America -- 132 feet. Originally it stopped at Erie Street . Fine houses were built on it between the Public Square and Erie Street and west of the Square it remained the principal retail district. Euclid was not in the original plan, but grew into a road because it was the most direct way of reaching the village of Euclid, the settlement laid out as extra pay for surveyors. Prospect was surveyed by Ahaz Merchant in 1881. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ to be continued in 21 B. ______________________________ ------------------------------ X-Message: #2 Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 18:43:40 -0500 From: "Ohio Archives EV1" To: OH-FOOTSTEPS-L@rootsweb.com Message-ID: <081e01c5364b$77625fb0$0300a8c0@margaret> Subject: Fw: Tid Bits - part 21 B. Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ----- Original Message ----- From: "Darlene & Kathi kelley" To: Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 2:28 AM Subject: Tid Bits - part 21 B. Contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Darlene E. Kelley March 22, 2005 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Historical Collections of Ohio And Then They Went West Know Your Ohio by Darlene E. Kelley Tid Bits- part 21 B +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Tid-Bits 21 B Cleaveland's Business Beginnings (con't ) The first Blacksmith shop was that of Nathaniel Doan. Blacksmithing was a necessity in a horseback age, and Doan was given a lot on Superior Street on condition he open and conduct a blacksmith shop, that the surveyors' horses might be shod. After the surveys had been completed, and after a siege of fever and ague when all nine members of his family were down with the plague at once. Doan moved to the region known thereafter as " Doans Corners." now Eucid and East105th Street. For a time the city itself was without a blacksmith. Then came Abram Hickox in 1808, who opened his smithy on the north side of Superior Street where the Johnson House later stood. At one time he had a shop south of Superior near Seneca. Later he had a small smithy on the corner of Erie Street and Hickox Lane. Hickox was a picturesque person. Over the door of his shop hung a sign, " Uncle Abram Works Here " with the print of a horseshoe in wood. He is said to have been honest and patriotic. On the Fourth of July, lacking canon, he rang his anvil, making a mighty noise. He was also the sexton and for years made all arrangements for burial of the dead. he wore, as a rule, a homespun gray suit, wide rimmed wool hat, steel-bowed spectacles and carried a stout hickory staff." He was quite a philosopher, and many earnest discussions went on in his smithy. Every pioneer was something of a builder-- the rough carpentry necessary to put up log cabins, shelves, and build a boat that would float and in which one could get about a little fair weather, was essential. But the first real builder, who had knowledge of building as a trade, was Levi Johnson, who turned up in 1808. He built the log courthouse and jail combined, the gallows on which the Indian Poccon Omic was hung ( which deserves special mention as the first execution ), the first frame house in Cleaveland proper, that of Judge Walworth on Seperior where the American House later stood and under which trains now come in to the terminal. He built the Buckeye House in 1811, for Rudolphus Edwards, out on Woodland Hills Avenue, the schooner " Ladies' Master in 1814, the schooner " Neptune " in 1817 and the first steamboat constructed in Cleaveland, the " Enterprise. " He sailed on the lake and in 1830 built the old stone lighthouse where the present one stands, then one at Cedar Point, and set bouys marking the channel in Sandusky Bay. He also built some seventeen hundred feet of the Cleaveland east government pier. The first boat built worthy the name was the " Zephyr " constructed by Major Carter in 1808. It was followed by the " Sally "-- Joel Thorpe, " Dove" -- Alex Simpson. A really pretentious boat, sixty tons, was the " Ohio," built by Murray and Bixby in 1810. The first steamboat on the lakes was the " Walk-in-the-Water, built--but not here-- by Captain Job Fish who had been an engineer for Fulton. Fulton is remembered as the builder of the " Clermont," first steamboat anywhere, nicknamed "Fulton's Folly" by the conservatives who were unable to believe that steam could move wheels and make a boat go. The first post office was established in 1805, with Elisha Norton as postmaster. Receipts for the first quarter of 1806 amounted to $2.83. " As early as 1801," says Kennedy, " the mail was brought to Warren, the seat of Trumbull County, once in two weeks, by way of Pittsburgh, Canfield and Youngstown, and that was the terminus of the mail route for a couple of years, before it came to Cleaveland. The route from Warren was by way of Deerfield, Ravenna and Hudson, and from Cleaveland to Detroit along the old Indian trail to Sandusky, Toledo and so on to Detroit; from Cleaveland it went to Warren via Painsville and Jefferson. A collection district for the south shore of the lake was also established this year, called the ' District of Erie' and John Walworth, of Painseville, was appointed collector." The first framed building of any sort hereabouts, was that of the office of mails and customs. It was built in 1809, and "regarded as a novelty with metropolitan suggestions." In 1809, the export trade with Canada was valued at fifty dollars. The first highway supervision was performed by a committee elected April 14,1804 consisting of Lorenzo Carter, Timothy Doan, James Kingsbury and Thaddeus Lacy, who had charge of roads from Cleaveland to Hudson, and around back along the ridge to Doans Corners and down town again. Their appointed tasks were as follows : Carter, the road from the City of Cleaveland to Hudson to Daniel Ruker's and the road from Cleaveland to Euclid, to the bridge near Tillotson's; Timothy Doan, the road from Isaac Tillotson's to the east line of the town of Euclid; Kingsbury, the road from Daniel Ruker's leading to Hudson, to the south line of the Town of Cleaveland. The first road to the westward was along the trail to Detroit. The state legislature, in 1809, granted an appropriation for a road from Cleaveland to the mouth of the Huron River. The committee was Lorenzo Carter and Nathaniel Doan of Cleaveland, Ebenezer Murray of Mentor. This was first called the " Cleaveland and Huron Road," then the " Milan State Road, " and as it advanced farther towards Detroit, finally " Detroit Road which it remains beyond Rocky River, being called " Detroit Avenue" through Cleaveland and Lakewood. The mail to and from Detroit was first carried on foot by Edward McCartney, The whole mail in 1809 weighed from five to seven pounds, and the mailman walked about thirty miles a day. Joseph Burke carried it to Hudson, Ravenna, Mesopotamia and around back via Painsville to Cleaveland. From about 1812 on, mails were carried on horseback, and by 1820 they attained the dignity of transportation by stagecoach. The first bank was the Commercial Bank of Lake Erie, undertaken in 1816. It failed in 1820, but managed to pay off its liabilities and was reorganized in 1832. It ran from this time till the expiration of its charter in 1842. The first newspaper was the Cleaveland Gazette and Commercial Register, springing upon the world in 1818. The Cleaveland Herald was first published in 1819. Somewhere between April 12th, 1832, and June 8th, 1833, the CLEAVELAND Herald changed its name to CLEVELAND Herald, and the name of the town changed with it. There is a break in the files over that period so the exact date cannot be determined. Many stories are told of the reason for this change. One is that the paper furnished one issue of the Advertiser was too small, and the printer had to drop a letter off its title. Kennedy rejects this as not being reasonable. More plausible, he says, is the theory that a " "sheep's foot" struck the A and battered it out of shape nd usefulness. The story most likely to be true, however, seems that told by Rufus P.Spalding before the Early Settlers' Association; " An act of piracy was committed on the word by a newspaper publisher, who, in procuring a new head-piece for his paper, found it convenient to increase the capacity of his iron frame by reducing the number of letters in the name of the city. Hence the Cleveland Advertiser, and not Moses Cleaveland, settled the orthography of the Forest City's name for all time to come. Generally this story is told in connection with the Herald rather than the Advertiser." ++++++++++++++ At any rate, a book containing the records of the township of Cleaveland spells the word Cleaveland from 1803 to 1832, the wavers a bit and finally drops the A. [ " This Cleveland of Ours" is trying to do as the Cleavlanders do-- it carries the A through the pioneer section, and drops it forever when, with the Canal Era, the village has definately grown into the City of Cleveland.] +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ cont. in part 21c ______________________________ ------------------------------ X-Message: #3 Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 18:44:36 -0500 From: "Ohio Archives EV1" To: OH-FOOTSTEPS-L@rootsweb.com Message-ID: <082401c5364b$9946d390$0300a8c0@margaret> Subject: Fw: Tid Bits -- Part 21 C Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ----- Original Message ----- From: "Darlene & Kathi kelley" To: Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2005 1:51 AM Subject: Tid Bits -- Part 21 C Contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Darlene E. Kelley March 23, 2005 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Historical Collections of Ohio And Then They Went West Know Your Ohio by Darlene E. Kelley Tid Bits - part 21 C +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ part 21 C One of the most entertaining first things is the carriage. Alfred Kelley married his fair lady in Lowville, N.Y., bought a carriage in Albany, and then they started out in style. in the year of 1817, for their new home in Ohio. They drove to Buffalo on difficult and muddy trails, so they decided there to take a ship the rest of the way, and to drive to Niagara Falls while waiting for the schooner to sail. While they were gone, the schooner sailed without them. So they had to fall back on the carriage. It took them seven days to drive to Cleaveland, and the roads were so bad they walked most of the way, but even so, they arrived before the schooner did. It may be noted that bad as the roads were, it was at least possible to get te carriage over them. Twenty years before, there was only a trail, impracticable for oxen yoked in a team. The carriage, needless to say, caused a great sensation, and was often borrowed for State occasons. Leonard Case brought his bride home in it. " In the midst of life, we are in death." The first burying ground was on Ontario Street, where Prospect now meets it. The Erie Street Cemetery was laid out later, and seemed then, in 1823, quite far from town. It was in 1820 that the first stage route was established. This ran to Columbus. In the fall of the same year another started to run to Norwalk, and wagon lines were soon running to Pittsburg. This was a " curious wagon with a canvas top, set solidly on a springless wagon, with three plain boards for seats." The passenger by stage-coach had a comparatively easy time in the summer, but in spring or fall he was sure to have to walk part of the way, and often had to " shoulder a rail and carry it from mudhole to mudhole to pry out the vehicle in which he was supposed to be riding." The hotel business, naturally, was one of the earliest. A period of horse transportation required stopping places near enough together to fit the strength of the team. Lorenzo Carter, it will be remembered, " kept tavern " as soon as he had a cabin up. Rudolphus Edwards made a business of keeping tavern out on Wodland Hills about where the road from Doans Corners to Newburgh met the one from Cleaveland to Kinsman and Hudson. In 1820, Michael Spangler came to town and opened his " Commercial House, " which was long a landmark. Peter Weddell came about the same time, but it was not until 1845 that the famous Weddell House was built, at the corner of Superior and Bank streets ( now West Sixth Street ). His first venture was in the dry goods firm of Peter M. Weddell and Co., Dudley Baldwin and Peter P. Weddell being other partners. In 1819 came Joel Scranton with a schooner load of leather, and John Blair of Maryland with three dollars saved to start his future fortune. Blair made a fortunate deal in pork, and was soon able to open a produce and commission store on the river. The same year Jabez Kelley opened a candle and water store nearby. The first shipment of flour from the Western Reserve has an interesting story back of it. It seems that William A. Otis, a native of Massachusetts, direct descendant of James Otis, came from Pittsburgh in 1818, worked in an " iron establishment" and put all his savings into the business, which failed. "He then walked westward to Bloomfield, Trumbull County, Ohio, where he cleared land, kept a tavern and established a primitive mercantile establishment, furnishing the settlers with goods in exchange for ashes, wheat, and other produce. The ashes were used in the manufacture of a crude potash, ' which was the only strict cash article in the country.' But it was difficult to get wheat, four or potash to the eastern market. Mr. Otis, therefore, selected an oak tree and had it cut, sawed and split into staves from which barrels were made. A few miles from Bloomfield was a custom grist mill. Mr. Otis bought wheat for twenty-five cents a bushel, had it ground into flour, teamed the barrel flour and potash, thirty five miles to Ashtabula Creek whence it was carried by schooner to Buffalo and thence by canal and river to New York-- the first such shipment of flour from the Western Reserve. He later added pork and wool to his shipments; his business prospered and he served two years in the state legislature. In 1835 he moved to Cleaveland where ' he was at once given rank with the foremost business men.' He still delt in flour, pork, and potash, but gradually concentrated his energies upon iron manufacture and thus became the pioneer iron-master of Cleveland. His increasing shipping interests naturally turned his attention to transportation facilities and he became an active advocate in railway building. He was also active in banking enterprises and served as president of the Comercial National Bank. He was a member of the State Board of Control, was one of the founders of the Cleveland Society for Savings and acted as its president for thirteen years. He was one of te originators of the Board of Trade from which was evolved the present Cleveland Chamber of Commerce. he died in 1868." The business adventures of Mr. Otis are quoted in detail, not because he was any more important in the history of the city than many of these early men dismissed with a line, and many left unmentioned, but because in his one person and one life the transition was made from the first shipment of flour to the iron trade which was the foundation of Ceaveland's wealth and high place, from the pioneering situation in which he had to pick out a tree to cut and make the barrels from, in order to ship his flour, to the definately commercial situation of the city with its banks, railways, ships and complicated business of the time of his death. One of the most interesting points about the early records of business beginnings is not a record at all, but the omission of one. The story of the fisheries is conspicuous by its absence. Only in 1892 was any effort made to prepare statistics as to the importance of the fish trade on the lakes. An old timer talking about the olden times of Ohio was asked about food of his first year, remarking it was always possble, of course, to catch fish. " Fish!" exclaimed the pioneer. " Not one of us so much as knew there was a fish in the whole Georgian Bay that summer. It was two years before we were far enough along with clearing the land so any man dared take a day off to go fishing !" Yet fishing is now the main industry in that region. Farming, as a money-making affair, is inconsequential beside it. Doubtless the first pioneers felt the same way. Fishing was lazy stuff-- it wasn't done in working time by grown men. It was alright for small boys or Indians. The lack of ice was an important factor in the absence of a fishing trade and salt was expensive. Fish caught had to be eaten that same day or thrown away. Commercial fishing was to come in later days --------. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ cont. in part 22. -------------------------------- End of OH-FOOTSTEPS-D Digest V05 Issue #32 ******************************************