200 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS date for the ministry? Decided in the affirmative. I was in the chair. It was very interesting." It is also fair to remember, in comparison of old days with new, that in the early nineteenth century higher education was considered necessary only for the minister, the lawyer and the doctor. General education went no further than the three R's, sketchily taught in a few winter months in the log schoolhouse. Not many schools took Webster so seriously as the group at Brownhelm. Such students as went on to the Academy may be compared with the picked students of those colleges and universities today which are hardest to enter. The boys who went to college were such earnest students as now go on to the best professional post graduate schools. A few girls went to the academies, usually for the single purpose of preparing to teach in elementary schools. None went to colleges. Oberlin, very radical for its time, held a high courage, when, in 1833, it ventured to maintain, not only that women had minds, but that they had a right to cultivate them. It carried out logically its principles of freedom. It not only came to grips with its Presbytery in matters of organization which would seem small today, but it was always making trouble for preconceived notions of what was right by its upsetting liberality, its adherence to ideals of freedom of thought and doctrine. It was a hotbed of anti-slavery propaganda, and an important station on the Underground Railroad. It was regarded as a disturbing factor in the ecclesiastical life of the Reserve. One aged minister in the Huron Presbytery is quoted as having said : "We have had peace in our Zion for a generation, and now Oberlin has come in to produce confusion." Harriett L. Keeler, Cleveland teacher and naturalist, wrote in her "Life of Adelia A. F. Johnston" that: "The storm of abuse, calumny, misrepresentation and contempt, that fell upon that quiet, peaceful, devout, scholarly community is positively inconceivable today. Such a thing could not happen now under any circumstances. But slavery was not only intrenched in economic privilege but also in church and state." THE PIONEERS - 201 (Since the World war people are not apt to be so sure of what can or cannot happen in this supposedly more civilized world of a hundred years later). The privileges accorded its women students would seem very meager to today's Oberlin or Vassar girl. But they were the seeds from which have sprung today's open laboratories, libraries, intercollegiate conferences and university degrees. That black people had bodies which they had a right to own, lives which they had a right to direct for themselves, was then strange doctrine. But no stranger than that doctrine that women had minds. There had been in the past, of course, a Hypatia, a Helena of Cornaro, an occasional daughter of a learned man who grew up as her father's capable pupil and valued assistant, in Chaldea, in Egypt, Judea, Greece, Rome, the Oriental countries, as well as in later Germany, Italy, England, Holland and France. But these were sporadic cases—matters of individual family peculiarity, hidden, for the most part, from the public, because of the general feeling against any woman who knew more mathematics than enough to keep the family accounts, any language besides her own, any history save a little family tradition, any science beyond that of the cookery pots or any art beyond embroidery or skilful weaving. In its definite stand in favor of the education of women, Oberlin was the one strong pioneer. Elmira Female College, opened in 1855, and Vassar, the first well-equipped college exclusively for women, graduating its first class in 1867, came nearly a generation later. The studies at Reserve, like those at Oberlin, were hard, and quite on a level with those at Yale, on which the college was modeled. Freshmen had Greek and Latin, Algebra, Grammar and English Composition. Textbooks were bought second-hand and sold again to next year's students. The standards of scholarship were high. The first chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in Ohio was organized at Reserve in 1847. As to the body of knowledge acquired, many a high school today gives as much. What our British cousins call "the 202 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS modern side"—the sciences with their laboratories and methods of research—was entirely lacking. There were games, of course, but there was no time wasted in athletics, as athletics are known today. "These students," argued the Reserve trustees, "may as well do something useful, and earn money, while they are getting their exercise. They can make furniture, wagons, butter-tubs and barrels, or work on the college farm." Shops were therefore set up. "For their work the young men received from three to twelve cents an hour, according to their diligence and their ability to handle tools. Three to twelve cents an hour is certainly not handsome pay, but in those days seventy-five cents would pay a boy's board bill for a whole week, and six dollars his room-rent for a year." The workshops were not very successful, however. The students of Reserve seem to have been entirely head-minded, and not at all hand-minded. Debating throve, but the butter-tubs languished. The boys "conveniently overslept in the morning and found innumerable excuses for leaving early in the afternoon." It is the old story of Martha and Mary. The mind which can keep its owner sitting quietly for hours at the feet of wisdom seldom develops that other sort of patience required to cut accurately the barrel-stave. It might be ungracious to mention at all the fact that boys have always overslept and made excuses, still do and probably always will. But these boys worked hard enough at the things which interested them. Farm work was drudgery, but was done well enough because it was necessary. Mental work was a delight. Careful hand-work was simply out of their line. And speaking of the modern side : "The workshops were splendidly equipped. They even contained a steam-engine. But the steam-engine would not run. The shop superintendent could not make it run. A committee of the faculty could not make it run. The trustees could not make it run, nor could an expert from Cleveland. Finally there appeared a student who mastered the difficulty, but sadly enough he showed so little interest in his studies THE PIONEERS - 203 that the faculty felt it necessary to excuse him from school altogether." The workshops became a coffin factory, and were burned in 1844, but the workshop idea still persisted till 1851. The workshop experiment cost as much as building the chapel—six thousand dollars. The chapel is still dignified and lovely, still in daily use, after one hundred years. In the beautiful laboratories and workshops of today's Western Reserve Academy, which now owns the campus and old buildings as well as the splendid new ones given by James W. Ellsworth, boys, who do not have to earn their very bread while studying, work with great joy. No college today will graduate a boy or girl who has not had some training in the laboratory of at least one science. Most primary and secondary schools require some domestic science or manual training. Crafts may not have been popular, but the scientific idea early took root at Reserve. In 1838 Elias Loomis there established the first astronomical observatory west of the mountains, and the third in the country. One had been built in 1830 in North Carolina, and one at Williams College in 1836. But at this time, Vassar's Maria Mitchell, with her valuable work not only in astronomy itself, but in path-breaking for women in the exact sciences, together with such great observers and observatories as those of Harvard, Lick, Yerkes, Mount Wilson, existed only, as Fairchild might put it, in the plan of Providence. Nor was Elias Loomis limited in his service to astronomy and mathematics : "In February, 1842, Northern Ohio was swept by a violent storm. Professor Loomis, with the help of Professor St. John, made a careful study of the storm, and determined by the direction in which the trees had fallen, the directions in which the winds had blown. In his account of the storm in The Ohio Observer Professor Loomis asked that any weather observations (barometric pressure, the temperature, the direction and velocity of wind, precipitation, etc.) which had been taken anywhere at the time of the storm, might be sent him. He then made a much wider study of the storm and in May, 1843, published an account accompanied by thirteen 204 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS maps. In these maps he drew lines connecting all points of equal barometric pressure, at certain pressure intervals. He used arrows to indicate the direction and velocity of the wind, and shaded portions of the map, to indicate rain or snow—in short he evolved the type of map which is now used by the United States Weather Bureau. Also he was the first to use these maps in series to show the progress of one of these great storms across the country." Another famous name was that of Charles A. Young, astronomer and author of important books on astronomy. That of Edward Williams Morley, who cooperated with A. A. Michaelson in the ether drift experiments was another. But he did not come till 1868, and neither he nor Lemuel Potwin nor any of the other splendid educators of the later time belong rightly in this chapter. In 1882 the college moved to Cleveland, encouraged to this step by a gift of land and money endowment. In memory of Adelbert Stone, son of Amasa Stone, the donor, it was called Adelbert College from this time on, and became the nucleus of Western Reserve University. The Academy, after a losing struggle with fate and being closed for a period of about ten years, has been given a new lease of life and now flourishes under the original elms. Music seems to have come to Cleaveland with Major Samuel Jones, who played the violin. He played gaily for dances, more seriously for himself and a few friends. This Major Jones was quite a person. He arrived in 1800, with the fiddle, and wherever he appeared, things moved a little faster. It was Major Jones who, just at the close of the War of 1812, rode horseback all about the settlement, carrying the news that boats of Indians and British had been seen heading for the Cuyahoga, and urging all citizens to collect at Doans Corners where they would be better able to protect. themselves. When the boats landed, however, and their passengers were found to be not foes but friends returning after the surrender of Hull, it was Captain Allan Gaylord, who had remained at the mouth of the River with a few trusty souls, who came riding up to the settlement at the Corners raising the twenty-four-hour siege by shouting "To your tents, Oh Israel !" THE PIONEERS - 207 Music had not arrived at the dignity of being considered an art or its practice a profession in the days of Major Jones. There is a story of a young lady on the Reserve who had actually studied the violin in the East, and who practiced on her instrument alone in her room an hour or two a day. She was considered "queer" by her neighbors. Behold the growth of tolerance ! Not so many centuries earlier other estimable women had been hung or burned at the stake for less. It was in 1832 that the first piano came to town—a whole generation after the first settlement. Whether there were spinets or harpsichords, we are not told. Pianos were new to the world at the turn of the century, and there were few of them anywhere. The melodeon, later so popular, was not invented till 1806 and was but gradually coming into use when the first piano appeared in Cleaveland. Beethoven, it will be remembered, was the first great composer to use a piano. He lived until 1827. Mozart, who died in 1791, tried out the noisy new soft-loud instrument, but always preferred the harpsichord. Twenty years more went by before reed organs began to creep into churches which had considered anything in the way of instrumental music as smacking of "popery" and hence to be abjured. But with all their little prejudices and taboos, how the pioneers did let themselves out in their hymn-singing ! And the early singing-schools, held in the schoolhouse of a Friday or Saturday evening, were social occasions of high enjoyment, in which merry glees and roundelays were practiced as heartily as the more sober chorales for Sunday meeting. Nor was courting, while seeing Nellie home, entirely neglected. Art, like music, was never a distinguishing characteristic of New England civilization. It had a look of time-wasting to the harried and hard-working pioneer—not to mention its obvious connection with people of warmer climes and less dignity. But the love of beauty which is instinctive in every human heart, no matter how stern or busy, found its outlet nonetheless. As soon as pioneer women acquired any leisure at all, exquisite quilting and delicate embroidery took the place of the first hard, necessarily ungraceful stitchery. 208 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Bright calicoes were made into charming and becoming dresses, the pieces left over going into gay or gorgeous quilts. Tatting edged the underwear and trimmed pantalettes and aprons. Weaving became decorative. Hooked rugs, in patterns charming by any standard, or in patterns absurd, but in any case artistically satisfying to their makers, appeared upon the floors. Knitted or crocheted afghans blossomed on the "lounges." Did Mother ever lie down in the day time? Certainly not. That would have been "slack." But Grandma rested a full half-hour every afternoon, drawing the flowered afghan neatly and comfortably over her. When only one pot could be had, the pioneer woman took what she could get. When she could have more than one, choice entered the matter and form was considered along with function. The climax of this love of beauty, however, found its expression in the growing of flowers. The least and humblest cabin had its handful of posies by the door, and some of the gardens were really notable. "The Widow Calahan" is said to have had a very beautiful garden surrounding her home down in the flats. Mrs. Dudley Baldwin (Henrietta Hine) had another worth mention at her home on what is now West Sixth Street, and a still finer one in her later and larger home with spacious grounds on what is now East Twenty-first Street. After the first keen edge of pioneering necessity wore off a bit, when comfort and leisure began to seem more normal than being driven at the sword's point of want, real beauty began to appear in the handicrafts. Cleveland has had its great industrial growth by being at the point where coal and iron meet. Artistically and intellectually Ohio has gained much by being the focal center of several important streams of migration. New England came in from the east ; France from the west, by way of Detroit; Germany through pioneering life in Pennsylvania ; Virginia up through Marietta. Rhea Mansfield Knittle, author of "Early American Glass," the standard work upon the subject, is now (1932) engaged in writing a book to be called "Ohio Pioneer Arts THE PIONEERS - 209 and Crafts." Mrs. Knittle informs us that Ohio has been consistently overlooked as an important field of artisanship, that the few writers who have referred to our early crafts have done so only in a brief or superficial way. While a few authorities have recognized that Ohio, in its formative decades, was the seat of a converging and co-mingling craftsmanship, not only from all of the coastal states, but from many of the European countries as well, no one has heretofore pursued this subject by diligent or intensive research. Mrs. Knittle finds that Ohio excelled in nearly every form of the then contemporary arts and crafts with the exceptions of silversmithing and cabinet making. She believes the Buckeye State had no outstanding workers in silver, no master furniture makers. However, she has already brought to the realization of the artistic and the collecting world the high merits of our pioneer potters, glass blowers, wood carvers, iron forgers and textile workers. She states that while the streams of artisanship centered mainly in the Muskingum, Scioto and Miami valleys, and in the towns adjacent to the Ohio River, Cleaveland in the period from 1830 to 1845 had makers of Windsor and Hitchcock chairs, after the Connecticut manner, clock makers, carvers and gilders of mirrors, metal workers, portraitists, silhouettists, sign painters and one very remarkable tomb-stone chipper. Cleaveland also had worth while potters, silversmiths and furniture makers. Dean Halliday, editor of Your Garden and Home, in an interview with Mrs. Knittle, regarding her research for "Ohio Pioneer Arts and Crafts," writes this thought-provoking paragraph : "The explanation of why so many of these early Ohio craftsmen should turn out, in time, to be masters, is interesting. Each stream of immigration into the state brought its own special artisans, journeymen fresh from the work benches of their masters in the east. Skilled, eager hands from New England, patient, painstaking hands from the regions of the Pennsylvania Dutch, inspired hands from the Virginias, and zealous hands among the religious sects filtered in from the Old World. Hands trained under strict, narrow taskmasters, who would brook little in the way of 210 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS experiment or innovation. Hands suddenly set free in a wilderness where necessity spurred ambition, and there was freedom for the creative spirit. Is it any wonder, then, that in time, these hands, trained in the traditional artifices of the Eastern states, but freed from the trammels of proud taskmasters, should become in turn the hands of masters—of masters who, having the courage to pioneer in a new country, also had the courage to pioneer in self-expression? Thus, Ohio's early crafts have a virility, a beauty, a strength of design that easily sets them apart, and in many instances, even above the formerly more honored handicrafts of the seaboard states." The first Cleaveland building with any architectural grace was the house of Alfred Kelley, built of brick and stone, sometimes called the second brick building in Cleaveland. Kelley had started to erect this house for the use of his parents in 1814, but after the death of his mother, which soon occurred, he took it over for himself, and to it he brought his bride in that famous first carriage, in 1817. This is an interesting point because to the Kelley love of beauty is due one of modern Cleveland's choicest possessions—the Cleveland Museum of Art, established on a foundation bequeathed to the city by descendants of this Alfred Kelley. Books are another of those things taken for granted by the New England settlers, and not so often mentioned as the present student is apt to wish. The first bookstore in Cleveland was that of Herschel Foote, kept in the first schoolhouse. S. P. Orth says : "There was a book shop in Cleveland when there were but a few hundred inhabitants. A library was established in the town when there were scarce half a dozen west of the mountains, and the works of standard authors were sold in the substantial bindings that characterized a day of substantial things. In the homes of Cleveland when pianos were unknown and carpets were almost a luxury, books were necessities." There were very few books in any house, in the earliest days, however. There was scant time for reading except on Sunday, and the reading of that day was limited to the Bible THE PIONEERS - 211 or weighty religious works. A generation so restrained by religion and necessity, was one which learned, nevertheless, much of the world's best poetry and knew familiarly the great words of those who wrote The Book. The daily speech and thought of the people were colored and formed by psalms and proverbs; by the stern, strong narratives of the Old Testament and by the tenderness and mysticism of the New. This study and meditation were in themselves richly cultural, and gave a dignity to the speech and thought of the humblest. By the second generation transportation and earning had both eased enough so that books could, in moderation, be bought. In the 1830s Sir Walter Scott was becoming a great favorite among the Clevelanders. A list of new books advertised in 1837 includes Scott's complete works, Bryant's poems, the works of Maria Edgeworth. The next year brought Bulwer-Lytton's "Lady of Lyons," the "Retrospect of Travel" by Harriet Martineau, and Fielding's "History of Amelia." Soon after that Washington Irving became a delight. Scott is seldom read today. The hurrying reader, gulping his two or three novels a week, is impatient with Scott's long-windedness. But when a reader had but two or three books a winter, and a cherished hour of candle-light two or three evenings a week, squeezed out by careful planning from the day's multifarious and unescapable duties, in which to enjoy his book, he reveled in the leisurely description and savored every word. He wanted a novel to last a while ! There are middle-aged persons of today who can remember a grandfather's talk with a crony about Scott, the arguments and discussion pursued by them about Kenilworth or Peveril of the Peak, the chuckles over Irving and the ready quotations from the Sketch Book or Wolfert's Roost. Persons with such memories are favored, indeed. They grew up in an atmosphere of literary criticism less keen and subtle than today's, perhaps, but very honest and based on real values. Among the magazines, Godey's Ladies' Book and Graham's Magazine came early to town. In 1837 the foreign quarterlies were advertised in Cleveland papers—The London Quarterly, The Edinburgh Review, the Foreign Review, the London and Westminster Review. There were club rates 212 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS then as now, one for three dollars the year, two for five, three for seven and all four for eight. Blackwood's Magazine cost five dollars the year in those days, and the Metropolitan Magazine and Review was sold for four. One of the first illustrated weeklies was the New York Mirror, coming out first in 1838. This was, according to its own advertisement, "A repository of polite literature and the arts, embellished quarterly with a splendid copper plate engraving and weekly with a popular piece of music, arranged with an accompaniment for the piano." All this the Clevelander could get for four dollars the year. One imagines it sold a little faster than the Edinburgh Review. There was a great development in the literary life of Cleveland and of the country in general after 1850, but this chapter treats only of the early period, that, roughly speaking, of the first forty years. Those forty years which began in 1796 with privation, hardship, danger and often disaster, ended with homely comfort, comparative ease, and with a good start in the direction of those finer things, the flowers of leisure, which tend to enrich and to make pleasant this otherwise workaday life. The general way of life in the second generation can be deduced without difficulty from an address made by James Harris Fairchild to a meeting of farmers in 1853. This address as a whole seems to the present writer a very remarkable presentation in a few pages not only of the manners and customs of the generation passed and the one to come, but a clear statement of the principles and philosophy underlying gracious living in any time and clime. Necessity and beauty both have their place in it. Work is assumed, and also leisure. Art has its place, and friendships, and those finer spiritual forces which are the souls of all these things. From this address are here quoted the paragraphs which seem best suited to giving the modern reader a picture of the mode of life and the theory of living possessed not only by Fairchild but by other high minds of his time : "The work accomplished by the departing generation we may well be proud of. The records of the world may be searched in vain for a more remarkable example of the tri- THE PIONEERS - 213 umph of human energy. The forests have fallen not before ponderous machinery driven by the powers of nature, but by the arm of man, nerved by an indomitable will. And such forests neither they nor their ancestors had ever beheld. A faint-hearted race would have shrunk from the conflict. Today we rejoice in the fruits of their strong-heartedness. In place of a frowning forest we look upon smiling fields. Churches and schoolhouses greet us on every hand, pleasant villages are clustered along our thoroughfares, and thriving cities spread their commerce upon inland seas. The locomotive thunders across our farms dragging Eastern civilization in its train, and the electric wires, with the silence and the swiftness of thought diffuse among us daily the news from distant lands. "However magic-like the transformation from the wilderness of forty years ago, these changes have come by no supernatural causes. The men are alive among us who can explain every step of our progress since the falling of the first huge oak let in the light of heaven upon a soil that had been shaded for centuries. They built the log cabins that preceded these comfortable farmhouses. They blazed the trees that marked the footpath to their nearest neighbors', they launched the first craft that bore over the waters of Lake Erie the products of Northern Ohio. The nightly howling of the wolf had scarcely ceased from our forests ere we were serenaded by the screaming locomotive. "Those labors are never to be renewed. There is no land between the Mississippi and the Western Ocean so utterly beyond the reach of the appliances of civilization as was Northern Ohio when our fathers found it. How shall we show ourselves worthy sons of our brave-hearted sires? Not by flattering ourselves that it remains for us only to reap the harvest they have sown. They were wise in their generation and we worthily imitate them only when we are wise in ours. The rough work of reclaiming the new country is for the most part done. The work that remains is of a different character. To accomplish this a higher style of agriculture and of the other arts must be attained and new ideas of comfort and convenience must be introduced 214 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS "A similar advance must be made in all the other arts of life. In the early days there was little occasion for the indulgence of taste. The carpenter who could fashion a plow-beam or construct an ox-sled possessed all the skill requisite in a new country. He could furnish the farmer's cabin with a window sash or a battened door hung on wooden hinges with a wooden latch and a leathern string. A column or a cornice was as little in demand as a fancy carriage or a velvet-cushioned sofa. Those days of necessity and primitive simplicity have passed, away. However charming the log cabin as a poetical allusion, and however pleasant the remembrances of those early days, we cannot return to them except in poetry and in retrospection. No doubt our fathers were blessed in their rustic cabins without the conveniences enjoyed in older countries. But they made a virtue of present necessity in the hope of a good time coming. Such self-denial is easy when the object to be attained is a worthy one. Some pity those who suffered the inconveniences of the early times. Such pity is misplaced. Those are to be pitied who have not the energy when the comforts of life are within their reach, to attain them. Your mother was content to use her simple room as kitchen, parlor and nursery, but a similar resignation in your wife would bespeak a lack of thrift and enterprise. On the part of the matron of thirty years ago it was a magnanimous adaptation to circumstances. On the part of the matron of the present day it is an unworthy sufferance of an unnecessary evil. Our fathers and mothers submitted to necessary deprivations, and the necessity saved them from conscious degradation. The same inconveniences submitted to without necessity will produce in their children sordid, groveling habits. "Allow me to call your attention to the importance of a well ordered and pleasant home, and to suggest the attainment of such a possession as one of the prime objects which we should place before us. "The home which we need is not the product of wealth but of patient care and labor under the guidance of cultivated tastes, such a home as we can all secure who are blessed with health and the fee simple of a half-acre of ground. If you THE PIONEERS - 215 have your home to build give some attention to its architecture, so that passers-by shall be refreshed as their eyes rest upon it, and so that your own soul shall feel a quiet satisfaction as the home-roof greets you from a distance. Such a structure is a blessing to a whole neighborhood. The influence descends upon you like that of a smiling countenance which you may meet in a gloomy wilderness. The expense is no more than that of the tawdry ornament so frequently bestowed without taste upon cornice and casement. "But the interior of the house is far more important than the exterior, because by day and by night, in season and out of season, it affects the comforts and welfare of the family. First and foremost there must be a kitchen that is a kitchen. This is one of the inalienable rights of woman. Let the kitchen be so convenient and inviting that the mistress of it shall feel more like a queen than a slave,—so that all the appliances of successful housewifery shall be there to do her bidding. Water in all its requisite forms and in unlimited abundance must be at hand. That old-fashioned fireplace has done good service and furnished you a cheerful light and heat for many a winter evening. But what you need in the kitchen is a convenient apparatus for cooking; and this time-honored fireplace has the disagreeable habit of cooking the cook as well as the dinner. Brick up then without regret that yawning chasm and try the improvement of the nineteenth century. "An essential accompaniment of the kitchen is the wood-house with its well-seasoned contents. The husband feels at liberty to fret if the breakfast is not prepared in time, and the potatoes must be well baked, too; but where is the wood for such a performance? Soaking in a two days' rain, perhaps, or split from a green log last night after supper,—and the wife must be thankful if it is split at all. She can never fret nor show the least impatience if the wood boils instead of burns in its excess of moisture. What an addition to her comfort to split that wood a little in advance, and shelter it snugly in a convenient place. If your wife is dispirited and inclined to nervous headaches, with a little tendency to acidity of the stomach, try as an antidote ten cords of dry wood kept constantly on hand. It requires just as many loads of wet 216 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS wood to supply a family for a year, as of dry wood ; to say nothing of the barrels of water so prodigally wasted. "Next in order comes the family sitting room, the place where you and the wife and children may enjoy each other's society, and help each other in the higher pursuits of life after the labors of the day are over. A home is not a home without such arrangements. There must be time and place for quiet social intercourse—with books and periodicals and objects of taste at hand which shall aid in the development of the mind and heart. The place for these associations is the family sitting room. It is, in fact the center of the home, the point to which the wanderer looks back with longing heart when far from his father's house. You supply, then, a great family necessity when you provide a comfortable, quiet, tasteful room with suitable furniture, in all particulars inviting as a gathering place for your family evenings at home. "A door from the sitting room to the nursery, snug and tidy, spacious and well ventilated, and comfortably warm —not a close sleeping room, six by seven, partitioned off from a corner of the kitchen, as if it had been forgotten until the plan for the house was completed. Of parlor and dining room it is not necessary to speak. The house that presents kitchen and nursery and family sitting room, well arranged and furnished, cannot be a failure. All other necessary things will take care of themselves when these are appreciated and provided for. "But a house without suitable grounds would be like a diamond without the setting or a bird's nest in a tree after the autumn wind had stripped it. It is a small chore to plant a tree, but some of us have been taught to regard the trees as our greatest foes, and we seem to have a jealousy of their being installed in the soil from which they have been so recently eradicated. We must rid ourselves of this hereditary prejudice "It is not necessary to be at great expense for evergreens and exotics. A few evergreens judiciously disposed will add a charm ; but they are too prim and stiff to give a pleasant character to the home. Foreign trees have a sort of interest, THE PIONEERS - 217 but give us our native trees,—the elm, the maple, the ash, the splendid tulip tree or whitewood. Native trees, too, are better suited to the climate and soil, and may be relied on to grow, unless you take pains to prevent it. The street in front of the house is yours by decision of the courts. Occupy it with a row of trees. "If your house is located as it should be, it stands back from the street fifty or a hundred feet, or more. Do not crowd this front yard with fruit trees. They are not adapted to ornamental purposes. Flowering shrubs and annuals, tastefully arranged and well cared for, may sometimes be added to advantage ; but you may depend with entire safety upon the rich green turf beneath, and the spreading trees above "An essential feature in the country home is a well selected variety of fruits ; and of all the homes on the face of the earth those of Northern Ohio should enjoy this luxury. The apple, the cherry, the plum and the whole tribe of berries and grapes are native here. With even a moderate chance they vindicate their right to the soil. But let us understand that there is a marked difference between a Newtown pippin and a native crab. It is hard for some of us to relinquish the idea that our seedlings are not as good as anybody's apples. But they take just as much room and cost just as much labor as the best of their species—the pippin, the Porter, the Baldwin or the Cooper. It is not wisdom to keep the worse when we can have the better "Your wife has a claim upon you for a convenient home and pleasant grounds about it. The home is the scene of her life's labors. She cannot escape from it. She would not if she could. But it is cruel to subject her unnecessarily to constant annoyances which crush her spirit or shut her away from the charms of Nature so bountifully diffused around us. "You owe a pleasant and inviting home to your children. No accumulation of wealth for them can compare with such a benefit. It will do your neighbors good to look into your pleasant grounds. The ostentatious display of wealth would offend and discourage; but the unostentatious exhibition of taste and beauty inspires hope and encourages imitation. 218 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS "Patriotism, too, invites to this good work. We need a more general cultivation of the private virtues which gather about the fireside. The excitement of politics and of commerce reach the remotest limits of the land. The homes of our country are the strongholds of quiet and of rational enjoyment. While these are undisturbed no convulsion can harm us." In this story of Cleaveland and the Western Reserve, the Shakers, whose settlement gave the name to Shaker Heights, may seem conspicuous by their absence. They came in 1822 and their community, which they called the Village of North Union, endured until 1889, but their withdrawal from the activities and interests of the outside world was so complete that their story is really a separate tale, calling for a separate telling. The story of Cleaveland, therefore, is here told without them, and the Shakers appear in a chapter of their own in Volume II, Part Four. SECTION IV THE CANAL ERA Chapter I Forest Trails to Towlines Chapter II Two Famous Waterways Chapter III Sailing Vessels Chapter IV Land Rush and Boom Chapter V The City of Cleveland Chapter VI Directory of 1837 SECTION IV THE CANAL ERA CHAPTER I FOREST TRAILS TO TOWLINES Indian Trails were the first roads, running mainly along ridges and rivers. White men wore them deeper through the forest, first afoot and then on pack horses. Supplementing them were the water highways. Birch bark canoes plied the lakes and streams. A shallow creek would bear a canoe and its freight, a river would bear a batteau with the burden of many canoes. Between headwaters were the main trails, worn smooth, wide and deep by the feet of generations of red men and white trappers portaging from water to water. The most famous of these was the seven-mile portage at Akron, over the ridge that separates the Cuyahoga from the Tuscarawas, a link between Lake Erie and the Ohio, the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. The modern Clevelander who spends his vacation with an Indian guide in the Canadian wilderness with canoe, pack and tump-line is merely returning temporarily to the primitive transportation of northern Ohio a little more than a century ago. The water trail was easier for a man carrying skins or food, but the land trail was unbroken, extensible and available the year round. So for inland traffic the latter was more important. There was the experience of ages in those old Indian trails. Anyone who does a little exploring for himself, whether in city or wilderness discovers sooner or later that there is nearly always a path where one should be. Countless pairs of feet, - 221 - 222 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS on common quests, have found a common way—which is always the easiest way—and left it marked indelibly for others to use. So it was in the Connecticut Western Reserve. Near Lake Erie nature had cooperated more than usual in providing easy thoroughfares. Old lake levels, receding, left a series of prehistoric sand beaches along our shore which welcomed moccasined feet. Along them ran the main roads east and west through the woods. One such beach, almost continuous from Buffalo to Detroit, became known in time as Euclid Road and Detroit Road, the "road" changing to "avenue" within the growing city of Cleveland. Now it has a number on automobile road maps. Another—but this is anticipating. It is as hard for an historian to stick to the past as for a swimmer to stay under water. The forest inland was seamed with trails leading to important objective points by devious and reasonable routes. One of them ran to the old "salt spring" near Warren. There was a main route, of course, from the mouth of the Cuyahoga to the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers at Pittsburgh, where the Ohio is born. Others ran south and southwest. And in vindication of the redskin's judgment as an engineer, long stretches of them are now paved highways or railroads. These forest paths, mere ribbons through the woods, were soon trodden to mud and dust by pack horses of pioneers. They were widened a little, by cutting back the timber, to admit first a drag or sled, then a cart or wagon. Eventually they were made wide enough so that two wagons could pass each other, without one turning out. Mud holes were filled. Light and air were let in. Bridges were built. As traffic grew, artificial surfacing was provided. Logs were laid crosswise in swampy ground, making "corduroy" roads. "Plank" roads were built, usually a narrow strip of planking along the middle, only wide enough for one wagon, with dirt shoulders sloping away on the sides. Toll roads or turnpikes were built, so named for the barriers set up at intervals for collection of tolls. Gravel roadbeds began to appear here and there, where the material was accessible, often as private