(RETURN TO THE TITLE PAGE) HISTORY HAMILTON COUNTY, CHAPTER I. DESCRIPTION. There is a land, of every land the pride, Beloved by Heaven o'er all the world beside, Where brighter suns dispense serener light, And milder moons imparadise the night ; A land of beauty, virtue, valor, truth, Time-tutored age, and love-exalted youth : The wandering mariner, whose eye explores The wealthiest isles, the most enchanting shores, Views not a realm so bountiful and fair, Nor breathes the spirit of a purer air. Man, through all ages of revolving time, Unchanging man, in every varying clime, Deems his own land of every land the pride, Beloved by Heaven o'er all the world beside ; His home the spot of earth supremely blest, A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest. JAMES MONTGOMERY, "My Country." HAMILTON, the second county erected in the territory now covered by the State of Ohio, but, almost ever since, the first in the State in wealth, population, and general importance, is the southwestern most subdivision of the Commonwealth. It is bounded on the south by the river Ohio, next beyond which are the counties of Campbell, Kenton, and Boone, in Kentucky; on the west by Dearborn county, Indiana, and at the southwestern corner by the Great Miami river; on the north by Butler and Warren counties, Ohio, formed from its own territory in 1808; on the east by Clermont county and the Little Miami river, beyond which, from the northeastern corner of the county, runs a narrow strip of Warren county. Upon no side of its territory is the boundary a direct line throughout. The tortuous windings of rivers supply great curves on the eastern and southern boundaries, and also break up the western line as it nears the southern extremity; and the northern line is considerably zigzagged by the irregularity of the early surveys in the Symmes (or Miami) Purchase. The area of Hamilton, once so great as to include about one-eighth of the present territory of Ohio, is now among the smaller county areas of the State. It includes but about three hundred and ninety square miles, or two hundred and forty-nine thousand acres. Its surface was probably part of a vast plain many thousands of years ago, but has become exceedingly diversified and broken by the long wash of streams and by the changes of the geologic ages. It is a remarkably well-watered and fertile country. The underlying rocks of the Miami country are calcareous, and the drift-gravels usually composed largely of limestone. From both these sources fertilizing elements are imparted to the soil. The valley of the Ohio is about five hundred feet below the general level of the county; while the valleys of the Great and Little Miamis, of the Dry fork of White-water, of Mill, Duck, and Deer, Taylor's and Blue Rock creeks, and many small streams corrugate further the surface of the country. The characteristics of some of these streams were noticed by travellers at a very early day. Captain Thomas Hutchins, of His Brittanic Majesty's Sixtieth regiment of font; afterwards geographer of the United States, during his service with the British armies in this country in the last century, made many explorations in the western wilderness between the years 1764 and 1775, the results of which are embodied in a valuable Topographical Description published in London in 1778. It contains, probably, the first printed notices of the Miami river extant. He says: Little Miami river is too small to navigate with batteaux. It has much fine land and several salt springs; its high banks and gentle current prevent its much overflowing the sur10unding lands in freshets. Great Miami, Afferemet, or Rocky river has a very strong channel; a swift stream, but no falls. It has several large branches, passable with boats a great way; one extending westward towards the Wabash river, and then towards a branch of the Miami river (which runs into Lake Erie), to which there is a portage, and a third has a portage to the west branch of Sandusky, besides Mad creek, where the French formerly established themselves. Rising ground here and there a little stoney, which begins in the northern part of, the Peninsula, between Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan, and extend across the Little Miami river below the Forks, and southwardly along the Rocky river to Ohio. A part of Captain Hutchins' description would hardly be approved nowadays. However industrious he was in observation, he would have necessarily to rely much upon hearsay; and no little knowledge that he seemed to have appears absolutely incorrect, or vague and indefinite, wnen confronted with the facts. Imlay, an English traveller, wrote in 1793, evidently borrowing from Hutchins: The Great Miami is about three hundred yards wide at its mouth, is a rapid stream, without cataracts, with several large branches navigable for batteaux a long way up, the principal of which intersects with a branch of the Miami river, which runs into Lake Erie, to which there is a portage, and a third has a portage to Sandusky. 9 10 - HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO. This region forms one of the richest, as well as the most beautiful, sections of the State, an extension, indeed of the far-famed "blue grass region" of Kentucky.* The system of agriculture in this valley is esteemed the best in the State, except that of the Western Reserve. By underdraining and other permanent soil-improvements and ameliorations important changes have been effected. It is the most famous tobacco region of the State, and in it more than forty per cent. of all the tobacco raised in Ohio is produced. The very richest bottom lands are selected for this crop, and the average yield for five years is ascertained to be eight hundred and sixty-six and one-half pounds per acre. In the early day comparatively little wheat was grown in the valley, but within the last quarter of a century it has sown a greater breadth, and harvested a larger quantity than any similar area in the State. A comparison of the Miami valley with other parts of Ohio, made a few years ago, showed that fifty per cent. wider breadth of soil was sown to wheat in this valley than in any other part of the commonwealth. The corn crop was also very large, averaging thirty-eight and one-fourth bushels per inhabitant, against thirty-seven and one-half bushels per inhabitant for the general average of the State. Says the report cited below: The farms throughout the valley are, as a rule, in good order; the surroundings in neatness and good taste more nearly resemble the Western Reserve than does any other valley in the State. Many of the inhabitants are Pennsylvanians and Marylanders, who have brought with them their ideas of good shelter and care of domestic animals; hence, throughout the valley are found well-constructed and good-sized, comfortable barns and other outbuildings. The interiors of farm-houses, especially the more recent ones, are well arranged for convenience and comfort, and many of them are even luxuriously furnished. t How greatly and essentially the character of the county is changing, however, is shown by the following extract from the report of the secretary of the Hamilton County Agricultural society to the State Board of Agriculture, published in its annual report for 1871. He says: Our county is no longer a farming community. Our farms are now occupied as dairies, rented by gardners, used as pasture or meadow, and on the railroads and leading thoroughfares are being subdivided and improved as country homes by the business men of Cincinnati. Other crops are produced in great abundance and variety from the soil of Hamilton county; the fertile valleys near Cincinnati, especially the broad valley of Mill creek, which has a peculiarly favorable location, are in great re, quest for market gardening. The lands here, and indeed generally throughout the county, are exceedingly valuable; and large sums are invested in and large fortunes realized by the pursuits of agriculture in this region. The Mill Creek valley just mentioned, which constitutes one of the most prominent and important physical features of the county, begins near Hamilton, in Butler county, not far from the valley of the Great Miami. Indeed, it is said that in wet seasons the water is discharged from a large pond near Hamilton at the same time through Pleasant run into the Great Miami and by Mill creek into the Ohio river, This creek becomes a considerable stream as it nears Cincinnati; and traversing, as * Ohio Geological Survey, vol. I, p. 26. t Ohio Secretary of State's report for 1877. it now does, the greatest breadth of the city, it is justly reckoned, notwithstanding the pollution of its water by manufactories and other establishments along its borders, an important element in the topography of the city and county. Other streams, except the Miami and Ohio rivers, are comparatively insignificant, although some of them, in the course of the ages, have come to occupy broad and deep valleys. North of the range of hills adjoining, or rather now mostly in the city, in the country beyond Avondale and the Walnut Hills, is a spacious basin or amphitheater of about twenty-five square miles, in which a splendid city might advantageously be located, but to and through which the city of Cincinnati will undoubtedly one day extend. It is traversed by the Marietta & Cincinnati railroad, and the Montgomery and other turnpike roads. The soil in this and the northwest portions of the county is for the most part friable clay, resting on limestone, which gives them an excellent character as grass-growing regions, from which much of the hay to Cincinnati is supplied. Permanent springs are not very numerous in the county, but well water of excellent quality is in general obtained without difficulty. Ponds and morasses were formerly frequent, especially in the northern part of the county, but are less known now. More attention is given in this valley to grain and wool-growing than to stock-raising. The secretary of State's report for 1877 says: The lands are entirely too dear to be devoted to sheep growing for wool; hence comparatively few fine-wooled sheep are in the valley, the bulk of sheep being "native" and mutton breeds. As early as 1816 attention was being directed to the improvement in the horse stock of the valley, and from that time until the present that interest has been fully maintained. Those who are familiar with the strains of thoroughbreds will find that many of the famous horses of the west either were bred in this valley or else traced back to stock in this region for its ancestry. Less attention is given to cattle in this valley than other agricultural operations indicate, or than the wealth and fertility of the valley warrant. But the lesser interest in cattle is fully compensated by the greater interest in horses and in swine. This latter species of domestic animals is one of the "leading agricultural pursuits" of the region. The justly famous "Magie" (pronounced Maggee) breed of hogs is claimed to have been originated in this valley. Early maturity and large weights are the peculiar commendatory qualities of this breed, it being no unfrequent occurrence that a head of fifteen or twenty are slaughtered averaging near about six hundred pounds net. The average throughout the State is eight head of swine for every one hundred acres of area. In the Miami valley the average is over thirteen head, or sixty-three per cent. more than the general average; or, the State average is seventy-seven head for every one hundred inhabitants, and in this valley there are, in round numbers, seventy-nine head t\o to one hundred inhabitants. When it is remembered that more than one-fourth of the population of the State resides in this valley, it will be seen at once that one-fourth of all the swine in the State are grown here. Notwithstanding the Scioto valley has fifty-eight head of swine more to the one hundred inhabitants, it has less to the hundred acres than the Miami. The climate of this part of the Ohio valley is mild and genial. The average temperature of the year is about 54̊ Fahrenheit, above zero, against 52̊ at Marietta, also in the Ohio valley, 5o̊ on the south shore of Lake Erie, and 49̊ to 48̊ in the highlands, of the interior. In the early day the temperature was even milder. Dr. Drake, in his Notices concerning Cincinnati, published in 1810, says: HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO - 17 "The latter [the Ohio river, which he was comparing with the Delaware at Philadelphia] at this place is but seldom blocked IT with the ice which it floats, and was never known to freeze over." In his Picture of Cincinnati, published five years later, he notes the average temperature of 1808 as 56.4̊; that of 1811 as 56.62̊, and the average for the eight years, 1806-13, as 54.25̊, which, he says, "may be regarded as an accurate exponent of the temperature of Cincinnati." One hundred degrees, from below zero to above, was the mean temperature of those years. During nine years' observation the thermometer at Cincinnati was below zero but twice in a winter. The mean summer heat for those years was but seventy-four, and the thermometer stood at ninety degrees or above for an average of but fourteen days a summer. In those times, according to Dr. Drake's observation of six years, there was an average per year of one hundred and seventy-six fair, one hundred and five cloudy, and eighty-four variable days. The annual fall of rain and snow amounted to thirty-six inches, while now it is forty-seven and forty-three one-hundredths inches at Cincinnati and along the Ohio valley, against thirty-six in the northern part of the State. Said Dr. Drake, in his publication of 1815: This country has never been visited by a violent storm, either from the northeast or southeast, nor do the clouds from any eastern point often exhibit many electric phenomena. But from every direction on the opposite sides of the meridian they come charged with lightning and driven by impetuous winds. Of these thunder-gusts the northwest is by far the most prolific source. They occur at any time during the day and night, but most frequently in the afternoon. He gives a vivid description of such a storm, which occurred May 28, 1809, and of which some notice will be found hereafter in the history of Cincinnati, in this work. For eighty-three years ending with the last day of 1879, during which observations had been taken at Cincinnati, the average temperature of the year was 57̊ 65', and for the last decade of that period it was 53̊ 65', showing a change of five degrees for the colder since 1797. Some of the cold seasons in that day, however, were intensely severe. The lowest degree of Fahrenheit's thermometer ever registered in the city was noted January 8, of the year last named, when, according to the observations of Colonel Winthrop Sargent, secretary of the Northwest Territory, it went to 18̊, and would have gone lower, it is believed, had not the then dense forests of southern Ohio and the Cincinnati basin broken the icy northwest wind that prevailed. The winter of 1806-7 was also thoroughly frigid, and the seventh of February, of that season, when the thermometer marked II̊ below, has come down in local tradition as "the cold Friday." Other cold winters were those of 1855-6, 1856-7, and 1857-8, when the thermometer thirty-two times indicated temperatures below zero, and at one time the Ohio was for two months so solidly frozen over that loaded wagons crossed safely. Another severe winter was that of 1863-4, which brought so much suffering to soldiers in the army. On the first of January, 1864, which has a permanent reputation in meteorology as "the cold New Year," 14̊ below was touched at Cincinnati. Since then, the winters of 1870-1, 1872-3 and the three succeeding winters, and those of 1877-8 and 1878-9 have been among the coldest known in the valley. Among warm winters that have been observed are those of 1792-3-4, 1795-6, 1799-1800-1, 1805-6-7, 1809-10-11 , and 1879-80, the last of these warmer than any other since 1827-8, and to̊ warmer than, any other since 1835-6. The thermometer exhibited 69̊ above in the shade on Forefathers' day, December 20, 1877, although that was a generally cold winter, and stood at 63̊ or more for some days. The average rainfall per year, during the eighty-three years designated, has been 39.71 inches, and somewhat lighter, 37.61, for the last twenty-five years of the period. Least fell in 1856-22.88 inches; and most 69.42, in 1847. The average snowfall annually is about twenty inches, against thirty-five in central and northern Ohio. The greatest depth at one time ever observed in southern Ohio was twenty-eight inches, January 18, 1862, though twenty-two fell January 19, 1846. Sixty-nine inches fell in the winter of 1855-6, and sixty-five just ten years thereafter. Snowfalls in April sometimes occur, but very seldom later. April 2o, 1814, ten inches fell, and five April 11, 1874. Forest trees abounded in the early day in great variety, and are still, notwithstanding the dense population and extensive cultivation of the soil in the county, prominent among its physical features. Dr. Drake in his day enumerated over one hundred and twenty species, and from their number and the luxuriance of the forest growth he argued the superiority of the soil to that of the United States generally—"for it has as many kinds of trees above sixty feet in height as all the States taken together, while it has only one-half the number of species." He also enumerates a great number of such herbaceous plants as are deemed useful in medicine and the arts, most of which are indigenous to the soil. . Of trees, the following-named are twenty of the most common species in Ohio, which are now found in Hamilton county, in the relative order of abundant growth in which they appear in the list: Oak, beech, hickory, sugar maple, poplar, walnut, elm, sycamore, ash, locust, mulberry, pine, cottonwood, white walnut (butternut), cherry, gum, soft maple, tulip, buckeye, and silver maple. In 1853 the county still had eighty-eight thousand one hundred and twenty-three acres, or thirty-seven and seven-tenths per cent. of the area, in forest; within seventeen years thereafter fifty-three thousand six hundred and fifty acres were removed, and in 187o it had but thirty-four thousand four hundred and seventy-three acres in forest, or fourteen and seventy-six hundredths per cent. of its acreage—by far the least of any county in the State—and the breadth of its woods is annually decreasing. The great municipality of Hamilton county, as all the world knows, is of course Cincinnati, with its area comprising about one-fourteenth of the entire territory of the county and its population of more than a quarter of a million. The townships of the county along the Ohio river are: To the east of Cincinnati—Anderson, between the Little 12 - HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO. Miami and the Clermont county line, and Spencer, adjoining the city; west of Cincinnati, in order—Delhi and Miami. Those west of the Great Miami are Whitewater, Harrison (in the northwestern corner of the county), and Crosby (east of Harrison on the lines of Butler county and the Little Miami river). Other townships in the northern tier, between the Great and Little Miamis, from west to east, are Colerain, Springfield, Sycamore, and Symmes. There remain, all these adjoining Cincinnati, Green township on the west, Mill Creek township on the north, and Columbia, between Mill Creek and the Little Miami. The post offices of the county, besides Cincinnati, are [February, 1881]: Banesburgh, Bevis, Bond Hill, California, Carthage, Cedar Point, Cherry Grove, Cheviot, Cleves, College Hill, Columbia,* Creedville, Corryville,* Cumminsville,* Delhi, Dent, Dunlap, East Sycamore, Elizabethtown, Elmwood Place, Evendale, Forestville, Fruit Hill, Glendale, Grand Valley, Groesbeck, Harrison, Hartwell, Karr, Linwood, Lockland, Ludlow Grove, Madeira, Madisonville, Miami, Mill Creek,* Montgomery, Mount Airy, Mount Healthy, Mount Lookout, Mount Washington, Newton, North Bend, Norwood, Oakley, Plainville, Pleasan Ridge, Pleasant Run, Pleasant Valley, Preston, Reading, Remington, Riverside, Sater, Shannville, Sixteen Mile Stand, Sedamsville,* Spring Dale, Sweet Wine, Symmes, Taylor's Creek, Terrace Park, Transit, Trautman Walnut Hills, Winton Place, West Riverside, and Wyoming. Many of these are also incorporated villages; those marked * are within the corporate limits of Cincinnati, and are branches or "stations" of the Cincinnati post office. The description of Hamilton county will be incidentally continued through the next, necessarily a much more elaborate chapter. CHAPTER II. GEOLOGY AND TOPOGRAPHY. Where is the dust that has not been alive? —YOUNG, " Night Thoughts." THERE was life in the valley of the Ohio untold ages before man came to gaze upon its beautiful hills and waters. Away back in the stately march of the geologic, epochs, the Silurian seas here swarmed with animate existence, many of its forms so small that the aid of the microscope is needed to trace them; and some so numerous that great and valuable layers of rock are composed almost wholly of their remains. The history of the countless varieties of sentient life that so abounded here eons on aeons ago may be read for us only in the rocks of the valley and the hills. It is otherwise unwritten, except in the books of their Creator. Industrious inquirers, working slowly and carefully through many years, have traced the forms of them, have given them names, and catalogued them. It does not fall within the province of this work to present a list of these. It may suffice for our purposes to say that the paleontological catalogue published within two or three years by Professor Mickleborough, of the Cincinnati normal school, and Professor Wetherby, of the University of Cincinnati, represents no vertebrate, and their presence in the rocks of Hamilton county is exceedingly rare; but from the sub-kingdoms are presented fifty-seven species of annulosa (besides seventy-eight undetermined), one hundred and forty-five of mollusca, one hundred and thirty-nine of molluscoida, sixty-three of ccelenterata, and nine of protojoa, besides sixteen species representing, in a very small way, the vegetable kingdom. The duty of the historian, in this, one of the opening chapters of this work, is to present something of the topography and geology of the county. In accordance with our custom in this series of local histories, we rely almost exclusively for these upon the authorized Report of the Geological Survey of Ohio, for which the section relating to Hamilton county was prepared by Professor Edward Orton, now of the State university at Columbus. What follows is taken almost verbatim from his report, with the addition of two or three foot-notes, and some slight changes in and arrangement of the text. I. TOPOGRAPHY. The prominent topographical features of Hamilton county divide the surface into two main divisions—highland and lowland. The first division embraces all the higher table-lands of the county, which have a general elevation of two to five hundred feet above low-water at Cincinnati. All of these areas, though often covered with superficial drift deposits, are underlain with bedded rock, which is everywhere easily accessible, and which impresses peculiar features upon the face of the districts that contain it. To the second division are referred the valleys of the county, and not only those which hold the present rivers, but also those in which no streams of considerable size are now found, but which are due to the eroding agencies of an earlier day. Both of the classes of valleys are often filled with heavy accumulations of drift, but they agree in being destitute of bedded rock—except at the levels of the streams they contain, or, as is often the case, at considerably lower levels. The thickness of the drift beds does not generally exceed one hundred feet, and thus it will be seen that in the Ohio valley the lowlands have a maximum elevation of one hundred feet above low-water at Cincinnati; but as we follow back the Miamis and the lesser streams, we find these beds assuming higher elevations, as the floor of the country that sustains them is gradually elevated, so that they sometimes attain, in the northern and eastern portions of the county, a height of one hundred and fifty or even two hundred feet above the same base. In other words, the highlands of the county are the areas in which the bedded rocks remain, to an elevation of three hundred feet and more above the Ohio river, while the lowlands are those areas from which the Wks HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO - 13 have been removed, at least to the existing rivers and lesser streams. The slopes that connect these two kinds of areas are commonly precipitous, as in the river-hills of Cincinnati; but sometimes the descent is broken by the interposition of drift deposits. The valley of the Ohio, which here runs in an east and west direction, makes the southern boundary of the county, and, though deep, is comparatively narrow. Several of the north and south valleys that traverse the county are absolutely wider than the Ohio valley; and when the volumes of the streams that they contain are taken into the account, the disproportion between them and the first-named valley is very great. A similar state of facts obtains through southwestern Ohio—the valleys that trend to the west of north especially having been excavated on an ampler scale than the rest, other things being equal. These facts seem to point to glacial erosion as a prominent cause in the production of the surface features of the country, as the glaciers are known by the striae they have left to have advanced from the northwest. An examination of the map of the county, * in the light of the facts already known, will serve to show, what an acquaintance with it abundantly, confirms, that its surface has suffered a vast amount of erosion. The most interesting facts in this connection are not the valleys which are occupied by the greater streams of to-day, but those deep and wide valleys that are at present either entirely deserted by water-courses or traversed by insignificant strenms, wholly inadequate to account for the erosion of which they have availed themselves. Attention will be called to one or two instances of this sort. The broad valley now occupied in part by Mill creek, and in part left entirely unoccupied, extends continuously from the present valley of the Great Miami at Hamilton to the Clifton hills, just north of Cincinnati, where it divides into two branches—one passing to the north and east of the city, and entering the valley (of the Little Miami between Red Bank station and Plainville— while the other branch, the present valley of Mill creek, passes directly to the Ohio through the site of the city of Cincinnati. No rocky barriers—nothing, in fact, but the same drift terraces that make the walls of its present course—shut out the Great Miami from entering the Ohio valley at the same points where the Little Miami and Mill creek now enter. Indeed, there is the best of reasons for believing that it has followed, in the past mutations of its history, those very courses to the great valley. Mill creek has taken possession of the middle portions of this valley, but has never occupied more than one of its lower branches, that one the narrower. The most striking examples of this erosion of an earlier day are to be found, however, on the western side of the county, and are, for the most part, to be referred to the same river whose agency has already been invoked. There is an open cut, at least two miles wide, in the * Geological Survey of Ohio, Vol. I. northeastern part of Crosby township, which bears due westward from the present course of the Great Miami. Near the west line of the township this old channel is deflected to the southward, and is thenceforward occupied by the Dry fork of Whitewater, until it is merged in the valley of this last-named river. That the streams which hide themselves in this great valley to-day have had next to nothing to do with its excavation, is evident from the fact that there is not one of them whose course agrees with the direction of the valley, but all cut across it transversely. More than half of the townships of Crosby, Harrison, and Whitewater have been thus worn away and made to give bed to the rivers in the successive stages of their history. The channel above named can be confidently set down as another of the earlier courses of the Great Miami. Still a third of these old channels, more interesting in some respects than either of the two just named, is found near Cleves, Miami township. By reference to the map, it will be observed that the river here approaches within a mile of the Ohio; but, instead of entering the great valley at this point, it makes an abrupt detour to the west and south, and only reaches its destination after a circuit of ten miles. Its approach to the Ohio at Cleves is blocked by a ridge that is interposed, one hundred and fifty to two hundred and seventy-five feet in height. A tunnel that was carried through this ridge, in the construction of the Whitewater Valley canal, and which is at present used by the Indianapolis & Cincinnati railroad, shows it to be composed of glacial drift. The direction of this channel is in the line in which the glaciers advanced, so that its existence can be quite plausibly ascribed to the great agents of denudation. Whether or not the origin of this channel can be referred to the glacial period, its closure was certainly effected there. It tasks the imagination to account for the excavation of these broad and deep valeys by existing erosive agencies, even when they are reinforced by the important additions of glacial ice; but to agencies identical with these the work must be referred. There is no evidence, as has already been shown, of minor flexures or axes of disturbance in the Blue Limestone region, by which the strata could have been thrown into hills and valleys; but, on the contrary, the beds are found to occur in unbroken regularity, being affected only by the slight general dip, of which account has been previously given. It is scarcely necessary to say that opposite sides of valleys give every possible proof of having been originally continuous, the sections which adjacent exposures furnish being absolutely identical in their leading features. The Cincinnati group has been found to demand for its original formation long-continued cycles of peaceful growth and deposition, and in like, manner the fashioning of its bed into the present topographical features of the country must have been in progress through such protracted ages that the historic period in comparison shrinks into insignificance. [The correctness or necessity of the appellation, "Cincinnati group," which often occurs in the geological reports, is gravely doubted by the local geologists. In January, 14 - HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO. 1879, a committee of ten, headed by S. A. Miller, esq., reported to the. Cincinnati Society of Natural History "that the fossils found in the strata for twenty feet or more, above low-water mark of the Ohio river, in the first ward of the city of Cincinnati, and on Crawfish creek, in the eastern part of the city, and in Taylor's creek, east of Newport, Kentucky, at an elevation of more than fifty feet above low-water mark in the Ohio river, indicate the age of the Uiica Slate group of New York. A fauna is represented in these rocks that is not found above or below them. Moreover, brown shales and greenish blue shales and concretionary nodules give a lithological character to the strata which distinguishes them from the strata both above and below." All strata containing triarthrus becki, the committee hold, are to be referred to the age of the Utica Slate group of New York. Above its range is the Hudson River group. The Trenton group is not exposed at Cincinnati nor in the Ohio valley anywhere west of the city, but is probably represented in the rocks of Ohio a few miles east of that point. The Utica group is not represented elsewhere in Ohio. All the lower Silurian rocks in southwestern Ohio belong to the Hudson River group, except the small exposure of the Utica slate in the banks of the Ohio and east of the city in the immediate vicinity of the river. The committee therefore report that the name "Cincinnati group" should be dropped, "not only because it is a synonym, but because its retention can subserve no useful purpose in the science, and because it will in the future, as in the past, lead to erroneous views and fruitless discussions." Investigation, so far, they add, has not red to any other or further sub-divisions than those formerly adopted.] Strictly speaking, there are no hills in Hamilton county, the surface being all referable to the table-lands and to the valleys worn in them. What are called the Cincinnati hills, for example, are merely the isolated remnants of the old plateau, which have so far escaped the long-continued denudation. Indeed, the highlands of the county are all of them outliers or insulated masses, surrounded on every side by the valleys of existing rivers, along the deep excavations wrought out by these streams at an earlier date and under somewhat different geographical conditions. These islands of the higher ground vary in area between quite wide limits,-some of them containing a few scores of acres, and others as many square miles. The high ground immediately appertaining to Cincinnati furnishes a good example of these outliers. By reference to the map, the insulation of this high ground will be seen to be perfectly effected by the Little Miami valley, the Ohio valley, the Mill Creek valley, and the abandoned channel of the Great Miami, already described, on the northern and eastern sides. Very important consequences result to the city from this insulation. It follows, for instance, that there are but two natural ways of ingress to the city by lowland, or, in other words, that there are but two railroad routes possible—one by the Ohio, valley and the other by the Mill Creek valley. Both of these are circuitous and in other respects unfavorable, especially as ways of approach from the east. These difficulties have led to the project of reaching the business center of the city by a tunnel from the northern valley. The Dayton Short Line railroad encounters, near West Chester, one of these outliers in its route, which necessitates a grade of forty-five feet to the mile at this point—the highest grade, in fact, on this line (New York Central) between tidewater and the Ohio river. Another very noticeable outlier is found a mile west of North Bend. The Ohio & Mississippi railroad skirts it on the Ohio valley side, while the Indianapolis & Cincinnati road passes to the north of it, through the old glacial channel, which has already been described. II. BEDDED ROCKS, AND THEIR ECONOMICAL PRODUCTS. The upper division of the Blue Limestone or the Lebanon beds has never been found in Hamilton county. The, lower boundary of the Cincinnati group has not yet been definitely fixed, but enough is known to make it certain that it is not found among the surface rocks of Ohio. The approximate place in the general geological scale of the strata exposed in the hills of Cincinnati has long been known. For the last forty years, at least, they, have been referred to the later divisions of Lower Silurian time and recognized as belonging to the Hudson or Hudson River group of the New York geologists and of the general geological scale of the country. The Cincinnati beds proper come next in order after the Point Pleasant beds, in Clermont county, which are the lowest rocks of the series in the State. They have a their inferior limit low-water in the Ohio and for an upper boundary the highest stratum found in the Cincinnati hills. The greatest elevation above low-water in the immediate vicinity of Cincinnati is given by the city engineer as four hundred and sixty-five feet. Abating fifteen feet for the drift covering of the surface, we can certainly find forty-five feet of bedded rock in this division, almost every foot of which lies open to study within the city limits. The only stratum, however, that admits of easy identification, lies at an elevation of four hundred and twenty-five feet above the river; and this is accordingly assumed as the upper limit of this division. Upon differences in lithological character, with which also changes in fossil contents ally themselves, a subdivision of the Cincinnati beds is possible into three groups, which may be named respectively, in ascending order, the River Quarry beds, the Middle Shales, and the Hill Quarry beds. The first of these subdivisions has a thickness of fifty feet, the second of two hundred and fifty feet, and the third of one hundred and fifty feet. Above the highest stratum of the Cincinnati hills and the lowermost beds of the Upper Silurian age, three hundred feet of rock intervene, that belong unmistakably to the same formation, being connected with it by identity in lithological character and by a large number of common fossils. These upper beds are nowhere found within twenty miles of Cincinnati, and yet there has never been the slightest hesitation in referring them to the same series to which the rocks there exhibited belong. HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO - 15 The names assigned, it will be remembered, to the three divisions recognized here, are in ascending order: The River Quarry Beds; The Middle, or Eden Shales; The Hill Quarry Beds. No explanation is necessary of the first and the last of these names. To the intervening division a name can properly be assigned, derived from the name of the park on the eastern side of the city, in the grading of which so great a display of this division is made. This division can, therefore, be styled the Eden shales, from the Eden park. The whole series of the Cincinnati group is composed of alternating beds of limestone and shale. The shale is more commonly known under the name of blue clay; and this designation is not inappropriate. It is sometimes styled marl or marlite, and the use of the latter designation is also justified by its composition. The most objectionable term by which it is characterized, is soapstone, as this name is pre-occupied by a metamorphic magnesian silicate. The limestone of the series may, in general terms, be described as an even-bedded, firm, durable, semi-crystalline limestone, crowded for the most part with fossils through its whole extent and often bearing upon its surface the impressions of these fossils. Its color is not uniform, as the designation by which the whole series is familiarly known, "blue limestone," would seem to imply. The prevailing color, however, may be said to be a grayish blue, chiefly due to the presence of protoxide of iron, which, upon exposure, is converted into a higher oxide. The weathered surfaces generally show yellowish or light gray shades, that are in marked contrast with the fresh fracture. Drab-colored courses occasionally alternate with the blue. The limestone varies in all these respects somewhat, however, in its different divisions. The Point Pleasant beds, and the lower courses of the Cincinnati division, deviate most widely from the description already given. They are lighter in color than the upper courses and in some instances are slaty in structure, while in others they have a tendency to assume lenticular forms of concretionary origin, sometimes to such an extent as to destroy their value as building-rock. The layers are also exceptionally heavy, attaining a thickness of sixteen or eighteen inches, and are often so free from fossils as to afford no indication of the kinds of life from which they were derived. A few feet above low-water at Cincinnati, a very fine and compact stone comes in, that is found in occasional courses for fifty to seventy-five feet. It is composed, as its weathered surfaces show, almost entirely of crinoidal columns, mostly of small size, and mainly referable to species of heterocrinus. The courses vary in thickness from an inch to a foot. The lighter layers ring like pot-metal under the blows of a hammer. Ascending in the series, the limestone layers are very generally fossiliferous and are rarely homogeneous in structure, being disfigured, to a greater or less degree, by chambers of shale or limestone mud, from some of which cavities, certainly, fossils have been dissolved. The thickness of the courses varies- generally between the limits indicated above, but a large proportion of the stone ranges between four and eight inches. Now and then, however, a layer attains a thickness of twenty inches, or even two feet. Near the upper limits of the formation the lavers are thinner and less even than below, affording what quarrymen call "shelly" stone. The composition of the limestones from the upper half of the group is quite nearly uniform, averaging about ninety per cent. of carbonate of lime; but as we descend in the series the limestones grow more silicious. The shales, clays, or marlites, which with the limestones make up the Cincinnati group, must next be characterized. They constitute a large part of the system, certainly four-fifths of it in the two lower divisions, and probably not less than three-fifths of its whole extent. The proportions of limestone and shale do not appear altogether constant, it is to be observed, at the same horizon, a larger amount of stone being found at one point than at others. The shales, as implied in one of the names by which they are known, "blue clay," are generally blue in color, but the shade is lighter than in the limestone. In addition to the blue shales, however, drab-colored clays appear in the series at various points. As the blue shales weather into drab by the higher oxidation of the iron they contain, the conclusion is frequently drawn that the last-named variety marks merely a weathered stage of the former. But, aside from the impossibility of explaining the facts as they occur on this hypothesis, analysis disproves it, and shows that the differences in color are connected with essential differences in the composition of the belts to which they belong. Most of the shales slake promptly on exposure to the air, and furnish the materials of a fertile soil; but there are other portions included under this general division which harden as the quarry-water escapes, and become an enduring stone if protected from the action of frost. The shales are sometimes quite heavily charged with fossils, which generally have a firmer structure than the material that encloses them, so that the fossils, often in an admirable state of preservation, 'remain behind after the shales have melted away. All of the groups of animals that are represented in the limestones are found also in the shales; but from the unequal numbers that are represented here to-day, it seems evident that some sorts were able to adapt themselves to the conditions which shaly deposits imply much more easily than others. The proportions of limestone and shale in the series we have already spoken of in a general way; but it will be profitable to give additional statements on this point. In the River Quarry beds, the lowermost portion of the Cincinnati beds proper, there are about four feet of shale to one foot of limestone, but the shales increase in force as we ascend in the series, until at about one hundred feet above low-water the proportion was more than twice as great. For the two hundred feet next succeeding, that have been styled the Eden shales or Middle shales, there is seldom more than one foot of stone in ten feet of as- 16 - HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO. cent. The amount of waste is so large, therefore, that quarries cannot be profitably worked in this whole division. The third portion of the series, the Hill quarries, have often lower limits—the beds in which the solid rock has risen again to as high a proportion as one foot in five or six feet of ascent. From this point upward to the completion of the group, there is no such predominance of shales as is found below, though in the lower parts of the Lebanon beds shales still constitute more than one-half of the whole thickness. It is seen from analyses made that a notable quantity of alkalies and phosphates, sometimes at least, occurs in the composition of the shales. It is upon these substances that the fertility of soils in great measure depends; and as they are in this case properly distributed through the sand and clay that make the bulk of the shale, it is in no way surprising to find very fruitiful soils forming from the weathering of these beds. The most noteworthy fact in this connection is the rapidity with which they are converted into soils. Most of the rocky shales of the State require a long course of progressive improvement before they can be justly termed soils. Their elements are slowly oxydized and disintegrated, and vegetable matters slowly added. The exposure of a single season, however, suffices to cover the Cincinnati shales with a varied vegetation. All of our ordinary forest trees, when opportunity is furnished for the distribution of their seeds, establish themselves promptly upon the shales. The black locust seems especially well adapted to such situations. There is no other use to which the steep slopes of the Cincinnati hills can be turned that would subserve as many interests as planting them with black locust would do. Dr. Locke called attention to a peculiar feature of the Blue Limestone beds, viz., a waved structure of the solid limestone, somewhat analogous in form to the wave-lines and ripple-marks of the higher series of the State. This peculiar structure was noticed by him in the upper beds of the formation, but it is even a more striking characteristic of the rock in its lower beds, as shown in the river quarries of Cincinnati, or in the lowermost hundred feet That are there exposed. The rocks exhibiting this structure at the point named are the most compact beds of the fossiliferous limestone. The bottom of the waved layer is generally even, and beneath it is always found an even bed of shale. The upper surface is diversified, as its name suggests, with ridges and furrows. The interval between the ridges varies, but in many instances it is about four feet. The greatest thickness of the ridge is six or seven inches, while the stone is reduced to one or two inches at the bottom of the furrow, and sometimes it entirely disappears. The waved layers are overlain by shale in every instance. They are often continuous for a considerable extent, and in such cases the axes of the ridges and furrows have a uniform direction. This direction is a little south of east in the vicinity of Cincinnati, but in traversing the series these axes are found to bear in various directions. Dr. Locke's explanation of these facts, involving a fluid state of the carbonate of lime and sheets of shale falling in a "vertical strata" through deep seas, seems entirely inadmissible. The only other explanation thus far proffered is that suggested by the name, viz., that the floor of the Cincinnati sea was acted on from time to time by waves or similar movements of the ocean waters. In opposition to this view it may be said : First, that there are many reasons for believing that the Cincinnati rocks grew upon the floor of a deep sea, far below the action of the surface waves; and, second, that the fact of the limestone layers alone being thus shaped is sufficient to set aside the explanation. If these inequalities of surface are due to wave-action of any sort, it is impossible to see why the action should be limited to the firmest limestone beds of the series, while the soft shales, which could easily register any movement of the waters, never exhibit the slightest indications of such agencies. While both of these modes of accounting for the facts are rejected as entirely unsatisfactory, nothing in the way of explanation will be offered here, save the suggestion that the facts seem to point to concretionary action as the force to which we must look. THE ECONOMICAL PRODUCTS of the Cincinnati group are limited to building stone, lime, brick and pottery clays, and cement; and of these none but the first two have, at present, any great importance. The series yields everywhere abundant supplies of stone, suitable in every respect for building purposes. The advantages that the city of Cincinnati reaps from toe quarries that surround it, are immense. While blue limestone has been used as a building stone from the first settlement of the country, it has hitherto enjoyed the reputation of being serviceable rather than beautiful; but within the past few years it has been so treated by combination with other building stones as to produce very fine architectural effects. Numerous exhibitions of this skillful use of the blue limestone can be seen in the recent buildings of the city and suburbs of Cincinnati. The analysis of the stone shows it to contain ninety or more per cent. of carbonate of lime. From this it will be concluded that it can be burned into a lime of a good degree of purity and strength. When water-washed pebbles from gravel banks or river beds are used, the product is excellent; but the quarry stone always carries with it so much of the interstratified shale as to darken the lime and so reduce its value for plastering. For this last use the mild and white magnesian limes derived from the Upper Silurian formations that surround Cincinnati, are the only varieties that are at present approved. The native supply can, however, be furnished much cheaper at but little more than half the cost, indeed, of Springfield lime; and as it makes a strong cement, the shales that adhere to the stone possibly adding an hydraulic quality, it is generally used in laying foundations of all sorts. The shales are sometimes resorted to for the manufacture of brick, tile, and pottery ware. The instances are, however, rare, and are confined to the uppermost beds of HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO - 17 the system. The products were, in the few instances noted, unusually fine, the clay working very smoothly and burning into cream-colored ware of great strength and excellence. The occurrence of concretions in the shales of the Point Pleasant beds and in the lowest strata of the division found at Cincinnati, has already been noticed. The analysis of specimens from the river quarries suggests hydraulic cement, and they are in fact found to possess a high degree of hydraulic energy. The supply of these concretions depends upon the extent of the quarrying, but at the present rate several hundred tons are thrown out each year, and as the concretions prove nearly enough uniform in composition, they can certainly be turned to good, economical account in the manufacture of a fine quality of cement. The famous Roman cement of England is obtained from similar concretions, which are generally gathered on the shore after, storms and high tides, though sometimes obtained by digging. All of the river quarries from Point Pleasant to Lawrenceburgh, Indiana, yield these concretions—the lowermost beds of all most abundantly. It may be added that the limestones enclosing the concretions are silicious enough in composition to transfer them to the best of cements. The Cincinnati section exhausts the scale of the county, the upper division of the blue limestone, as before stated, having never been found within its limits. The River Quarry beds do not constitute a marked feature, in any respect, of the geology of the county. There are but comparatively few points where these strata are exposed. A moderate amount of building stone of superior quality is taken from the Covington quarries, opposite Cincinnati. But little of the stone in this portion of the series can be burned into lime, but the concretions so abundant in many of the beds, as just hinted, constitute an hydraulic lime of great energy. The second element of the Cincinnati section—the Middle or Eden. shales—is as much more prominent than the first in the county as its greater extent in the vertical scale Would lead us to infer. It is, however, mainly found in the slopes of the hills, as it is not firm enough in structure to resist denuding agencies, when unprotected by the higher series. Very few products of economical value, as we have seen, are derived from this part of the scale. Indeed, its relations to economical interests are mainly in the way of disadvantages to be overcome. These disadvantages result directly from the nature of the materials of which these beds are composed. It will be remembered that in the two hundred and fifty feet now under consideration, not more than one foot in ten is limestone; the remainder being soft shales, or soapstones, as they are variously designated. These shales have scarcely tenacity enough to hold their place in steep descents when acted on by water and ice; still less, when they have been removed from their original beds, can they be made to cohere; and they thus form treacherous foundations for buildings erected on them or for roadways constructed in them. The city of Cincinnati, in many of its building sites, streets, and approaches, encounters these disadvantages, which can only be overcome by increased outlay in the way of foundations. These facts are most clearly shown in the approaches to the city from the east by the Ohio valley, frequent slides occurring along the steep slopes of shale in which streets and dwellings are involved. Gilbert avenue, in process of construction through Eden park, especially suffered from its geological formation, and required a large expenditure to give it stability along this line. Nearly all the smaller streams that are bedded in these shales show contortions and flexures of their strata that have resulted from the slipping of the higher beds into the valleys. The third division, viz., of the Hill Quarry series, which makes the upland of the county, is by far the most important of the three, in the area it covers and the products it furnishes. The summits of the insulated masses already named belong to this division, and constitute about three-fourths of the surface of the county. Most of the quarry stone of the county is also derived from this source. The Cincinnati quarries have thus far been vastly more important than those of any other district; but as the hills within and adjoining the city limits are being occupied for building sites, it will result that railroad transportation will be invoked; and when it comes to this, the more desirable building stone of the different formations from adjoining counties will come into competition and be more largely used. It may be noticed ,here that it is chiefly due to the fact that so large an amount of quarrying has been done about Cincinnati, that this particular locality has become the classic ground in the way of fossils that it now is. The numerous and ample exposures gave to the earlier collectors unexampled opportunities—opportunities which are not likely to be 'repeated. Many of the most interesting localities of twenty to twenty-five years ago are now covered by permanent buildings, and every year diminishes the available areas. The waste of the hill quarries furnishes, however, by far the larger proportion of the admirable fossils in the vicinity of Cincinnati. Scarcely any exposure of it in the county has failed to yield choice forms of the various and rarer groups. DRIFT DEPOSITS, OR SURFACE GEOLOGY. The drift formations of the county are mainly divided into two groups, corresponding to the main topographical features of the county already indicated, viz. : First—The drift deposits of the highlands and slopes. Second—The low land, or valley drift beds. I.—Drift deposits cover the highlands of Hamilton county, with but very limited exceptions. Towards the southern boundary these beds are light, measuring but a few feet (four to ten) in thickness; and, as already intimated, areas are occasionally found from which these deposits are altogether absent, the shallow coating of soil found in such areas being native or referable to the decomposition of the limestone that has been bedded here. There is a good degree of uniformity among these 3 18 - HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO. high level drifts, and the distinction between them and the native soils, indeed, is not always very manifest. The presence of rounded pebbles of blue limestone and of northern rocks, the drift beds, though often but very sparingly distributed, is the best means of distinguishing these beds from the native soils. The drift clays are certainly derived in large part from the waste of blue limestone, effected in their case by glacial attrition; while the native soils have the same origin, except that the work of disintegration has been done in their case by the slow action of the atmosphere. The agreement between the drift soils of these southern counties and the native soils which are met here, is closer than is found between native and foreign soils in most sections of the State. This seems to be accounted for by the fact that a large area of the same formation lies north of them, which the glacial sheet was obliged to traverse and denude before striking upon this region. The blue limestone of these counties is thus largely covered with blue limestone waste. The average thickness of these upland drift beds falls below twenty feet, but occasionally heavier sections are found. In the northern part of Sycamore township, in the vicinity of White Oak school-house, a high drift ridge occurs in which twenty feet of surface clays are underlain with a deposit 'of fine yellow moulding sand. This stratum, when filled with water, is a quicksand, and renders wells impossible, or at least very difficult to secure. But little clean gravel occurs in the uplands of the county, and boulders also are infrequent. The yellow surface clays sometimes overlie a few feet of tough blue boulder clay, filled with scratched and striated pebbles, apparently the product of the melting glacial sheet. This is not, however, by any means a constant element in the section. In short, the upland drift of this county is not as varied and interesting as that of the regions immediately to the northward, or even to the eastward. The slopes show the same characters in their drift beds that have already been described, except that the deposits are generally heavier. II.—The second division, or the lowland drift-beds of the county are in their characteristic formations of much later date than the deposits already discussed. These deposits can be classified in their superficial aspects, under the principal divisions, viz: (a) The-bottom lands; (b) the terraces or second bottoms. These divisions are distinguished from each other, not only by their different elevations but also by the different materials of which they are composed, the terraces being largely composed of gravel, with occasional beds of sand and clay, while the bottom lands contain, in all cases, a greater proportion of fine materials. Of the upland drift no general or typical section was given, for the reason that, aside from the monotonous deposits of yellow clay, there is no uniformity in the order in which the different formations occur; but in the case of the division now -under consideration, it is possible to represent in a single section the more important facts that are to be observed. The deposits of the Ohio valley, it will be remembered, are to be especially considered in this report. A section is here appended, taken at Lawrenceburgh, Indiana, which gives the general structure of the Ohio bottom lands more clearly than any exposure met with, strictly within the limits of the county. Beginning at low-water, we find the deposits that make up the river bank arranged in the following order (ascending): FEET. 6. Brick clay, covered with one to two feet of soil - 6 5. Land, gravel, and loam - 30 4. Ochreous sand - 1 1/2 3. Carbonaceous clay, an ancient soil or forest bed - 7 2. Ochreous sand - 1/2 1. Clean gravel - 6 Total - 51 The elements of this section will be noted in their order. The first of them, six feet of gravel, is perhaps the least constant of the series, being sometimes substituted by some of the clays of the drift. The gravel of the Ohio differs from that of the Miamis in being largely composed of sandstone pebbles instead of limestone. It is, consequently, less durable than the river or bank gravel of the Miami districts, and this fact, taken in connection with the difficulty of access, withholds it generally from applications to road-making. The second, third, and fourth elements need to be taken together, as they are closely connected in their history. The point to be noted in regard to them is the constant occurrence of carbonaceous clay between the seams of ochreous gravel. The clay is quite heavily charged with vegetable matter, much of it in such a state of preservation that it can be readily identified, and often portions again intermingled in a fine state of subdivision with the substance of the clay. The minutest roots of trees—some of the latter still in place—twigs and branches, layers of leaves, ripened fruits, grapes, and sedges, are all clearly distinguishable. Several of the species of trees can be determined, some by their wood, others by their leaves and fruits. Among them may be named the sycamore, the beech, the shellbark hickory, the buckeye, and the red cedar. A cucurbitaceous plant, probably the wild balsam apple, is also shown to have been abundant by its seeds, which are preserved in the clay. The leaves frequently occur in layers several inches thick, and are very like the accumulations that are now left in eddies of the river by freshets or floods. The deposits of the river at present always have an elevation of at least twenty feet and sometimes even of forty feet above the bed now under review. The constant occurrence of vivianite or phosphate of iron in this deposit is to be noticed. Its presence, indeed, is an invariable characteristic. The mineral is usually found in small grains, but sometimes it replaces twigs and leaves and other vegetable growths. The quantity in some portions of the beds is considerable, amounting, sometimes, to two or three per- cent. of the whole deposit. In such cases it imparts its color to the mass, and this justifies the name by which it is known, "blue earth." HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO - 19 Several apparently trustworthy accounts have been received of the discovery of the bones and teeth of the mastodon and mammoth in this deposit; but these and all other mammalian remains are of very rare occurrence. It is possible that The "chips" and "axe-marked" stumps reported at various points in excavations in the drift beds, attest the former presence here of the gigantic beaver now extinct—castoroides Ohioensis. It was certainly a tenant of the State during the general period to which this old forest bed must be referred. That its work upon trees might easily be mistaken for axe marks, will need no proof to any one acquainted with the work of the existing species of beaver. In a few instances, land and fresh water shells have been found in the clay, sometimes in quantity enough to convert the clay into a shell marl. This stratum is shown at all points along the valley in which bottom lands occur. Its elevation above low-water varies from five to twenty feet. It is generally covered superficially with the waste of the overlying banks; but even in such cases it reveals its presence by the long lines of willows and other vegetable growths that establish themselves upon its outcrop. Two things conspire to adapt it especially to the growth of vegetation. In the first place, it is an impervious stratum, and turns out the water that descends through. the 'overlying loams and sandy clays, thus giving to willows and other plants of like requirements a constant supply of moisture; and secondly, this stratum, as has been already intimated, is in reality an ancient soil, having been carried at an earlier day through the processes of amelioration by which beds of sand and clay are fitted to support vegetable growths. There are, however, many places where the force of the current in high water uncovers these beds, and where consequently good sections are always offered. Excellent disclosures of them are found at New Richmond, Clermont county, and also at Point Pleasant, on the Kentucky shore. The spring flood of 1872 furnished an unsurpassed exhibition of this formation at the 'mouth of the Little Miami river. Rafts of tree trunks are shown at all of these points, though the wood generally perishes very quickly when exposed to the air. That this very interesting stratum so long escaped observation is probably due to the fact that it could so easily be referred to the agencies that are now at work in the valley. When the trunks of trees and layers of leaves belonging to it have been noticed in the banks of the river, it has naturally enough been supposed that they are the deposits of earlier floods, agreeing as they do with the materials 'transported by the floods of our own time. But in describing the Lawrenceburgh section, now under consideration, as the general section of the Ohio valley deposits, it has already been shown, at least by implication, that this explanation is inadmissible. The extension of this sheet of carbonaceous clay under all the various drift deposits of the valley, as is shown by very numerous natural and artificial sections, proves that it is of earlier date than these overlying deposits, and the character of this stratum shows that it has a very different history from that which these higher deposits record. It is, perhaps, still too early to write out this history in its minuter features, but the facts already given show us that we have in this sheet of blackened clay the bottom lands of the Ohio at an earlier day, and, indeed, under very different conditions from those that now prevail. The river then ran in a channel lower by forty feet, at least, than that which it now holds, and the great valley was then empty of the immense accumulations of sand, clay, loam, and gravel, which constitute its bottom lands and terraces to-day. The various vegetable growths with which this stratum is filled, are to be regarded as largely the production of the soil on which they are now found. There is no other satisfactory mode of accounting for the particular kinds and enormous amount of vegetable matter traced here. The ochre seams above and below this ancient soil seem to point to marshy conditions that were brought in with the changing levels of the valley. Of the two, the upper seam is the more constant. In the Lawrenceburgh section we find thirty-five feet (thirty to fifty in the general section) of sands, gravels, clays and loams, which constitute the Ohio bottoms, as the term is generally used. There is no fixed order in the alternation of these materials, except that the surface portions have, for a few feet in depth, a tolerably uniform character. The soil of the bottom lands is quite homogeneous in constitution, and has obviously been formed by the subjection to atmospheric agencies of just such material as it now covers. Beneath the soil, and extending to a depth of about fifteen feet, beds of yellow clay occur. The proportions of sand mixed with the clay vary somewhat, increasing towards the lower limit named, and below this the beds consist rather of sand than clay. The beds of clay above named furnish an excellent material for brickmaking. The supply of the Cincinnati market is almost entirely derived from this horizon. The great depth of these brick clays, and their entire freedom from pebbles, render a very economical manufacture of brick possible. Below this limit, sand and gravel and streaks of loam are met, without regularity of arrangement. Of the fifteen to twenty feet intervening between the bottom of the brick clays and the summit of the buried soil, the larger part consists of gravel. The gravel of this horizon is seldom clean, like that described at the level of low-water; but consists of large-sized sandstone pebbles, four to six inches in diameter, mingled with finer materials. An equivalent of these beds, but of local occurrence, is the fine-grained clay described in the geological reports as "Springfield clay." It never occurs in extensive sheets, but is quite limited in vertical and horizontal extent. The heaviest accumulation of it observed in Hamilton county is in the city of Cincinnati, on East Pearl street, above Pike. It has a thickness there of more than thirty feet, as has been ascertained in the excavations for the foundations of buildings. It has been turned to account in its different exposures for different purposes—at Miamisburgh, for the manufacture of paint; at Springfield, for the manufacture of "Milwaukee brick," the clay being rich in lime and poor in oxide, and thus 20 - HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO. burning white, while a new use has been found for it in Cincinnati. It was successfully employed in preparing the floor of the new reservoir, its fineness of grain and consequent toughness fitting it admirably for this purpose. It must have been accumulated in eddies or protected areas, during the later ages of the period of submergence. The gravel terraces occupy a higher level than the formations already described. The terrace on which Cincinnati stands, may be taken as a fair example of them all. Its altitude above low-water varies from one hundred to one hundred and twenty feet, the average elevation being one hundred and eight feet. It is composed of distinctly stratified gravel and sand of varying degrees of fineness and purity. The gravel stones are all water-worn. In weight they seldom reach ten pounds. The upper tributaries of the Ohio supply the materials in part, but a much larger *portion in the vicinity of Cincinnati is derived from the limestone rocks of western Ohio and the crystalline beds of Canada. The proportion here t0 be noted among the smaller-sized pebbles is, of ten feet, five of Upper Silurian and Devonian limestones, three of Lower Silurian, least worn, one foot of granitic, and one of sandstones, etc., of the Upper Ohio. Occasional seams of clay loam occur, but seldom of extent or tenacity enough to constitute reliable water-bearers. Less frequently met, but still constituting a noteworthy feature of the gravel terraces, are seams of bituminous coal, in small water-worn fragments. The terraces overlie, as will be seen, the formation previously described. Few sections are carried deep enough to reveal the lower beds, but the leaves and wood of the buried soil are occasionally met at considerable depth, and usually, on this account, they attract attention. The following general order of materials will be observed in passing from the surface of the terrace to low-water. Soil - 2-5 Gravel and sand, with seams of loam - -4060 Brick clay, with sand and loam - 20-30 Buried soil, with trees, leaves, etc - 5-10 Gravel and clay - 5-10 72.115 The leading facts in the structure of the terraces show that their history is not to be explained by the present conditions of the continent. They must have been formed under water at a time when the face of the country held a lower level than it now does, by one hundred or more feet. They thus bear direct testimony to two of the most surprising conclusions which the study of the Drift period has furnished to us, viz: That the continent sank, during the latter stages of this period, considerably below its present level, and that it was afterwards re-elevated. There is one other line of facts in connection with the drift beds of the county that must not be omitted here. It is the great depth which some of these deposits have been found to hold below the present drainage of the country. The series of facts obtained by Timothy Kirby, esq., in boring a deep well in Mill Creek valley, at Cumminsville, now within the corporate limits of Cincinnati, proves very interesting in this as well as in other respects. Beginning at an elevation of ninety feet above low-water of the Ohio, a succession of drift deposits was penetrated until a depth of sixty feet below low-water was reached, the bedded rock being first struck at a depth of one hundred and fifty-one feet below the point of beginning. The deposits included, in descending order, twelve feet of soil and brick clay, four of sand, thirty-four of blue clay with gravel, nineteen of gravel, three of coarse sand, eleven of sand with fragments of bituminous coal, nine of blue clay with gravel (at the bottom of this the level of low-water in the Ohio was reached), sixteen of blue clay and fine sand and sprinkled with coal, and forty-three of sand, water-worn gravel, and blue clay, with occasional fragments of bituminous coal, below which, at the depth of one hundred and fifty-one feet from the surface, were the shales of the Blue Limestone group. Several remarkable facts are to be observed in this section, the most striking of which is the great depth to which the excavation of Mill Creek valley was formerly carried. The bed of the stream that occupies the valley to-day is at a higher level by one hundred and twenty feet than that of the ancient channel. It is easy to see that this erosion could not have been effected under existing conditions. It can only he explained by a higher altitude of the continent, and is thus referred to the opening division of the glacial period. It has not been demonstrated that continuous channels exist at this great depth; but the rocky barriers that fringe the streams do not at best disprove this theory, as there is always room f0r a deeper channel on one side or the other of the great valleys. Another interesting fact is the occurrence of waterworn fragments of bituminous coal, quite similar to those found in the terraces already noticed. They occur at various depths, the lowest at one hundred and fifty feet below the surface and the highest at eighty feet below. These facts, so far as known, stand by themselves, and no explanation is proposed. It is hard to see how the waste of Ohio coal-fields should find its way in quantity into Mill Creek valley, and there is certainly no other obvious source of supply. The well from which these facts were obtained was carried to a depth of five hundred and forty-one feet below the surface. Analysis of the chips and borings brought up and preserved reveal the character of the strata underlying Ohio to a depth greater by about four hundred feet than any other rocks exposed within the limits of the State. The shales of the blue limestone series appear to continue to a depth of four hundred feet from the point of beginning. Carburetted hydrogen gas escaped from the well in considerable quantity from a depth of two hundred and eighty feet downwards, but no large accumulations of petroleum compounds were indicated. HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO - 21 CHAPTER III. THE ABORIGINAL AMERICAN. Are they here— The dead of other days ?—and did the dust Of these fair solitudes once stir with life And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds That overlook the rivers, or that rise In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, Answer. A race that long has passed away, Built them ;—a disciplined and populous race Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields Nourished their harvests; here their herds were fed, When haply by their stalls the bison lowed And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke. . . . . . The red man came, The roaming hunter-tribes, warlike and fierce, And the Mound Builders vanished from the earth. —W. C. BRYANT, "The Prairies." THE AMERICAN ABORIGINE. The red men whom Columbus found upon this continent, and whom he mistakenly calls Indians, were not its aborigines. The Western, not the Eastern hemisphere is the Old World. Agassiz finely said: First-born among the continents, though so much later in culture and civilization than some of more recent birth, America, so far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the New World. Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line from Nova Scotia to the Far West. Great, learned, and eloquent as was Agassiz, however, his doctrine of the separate creation of the races of humanity—that men must have originated in nations, as the bees have originated in swarms, and as the different social plants have covered the extensive tracts over which they have naturally spread—has failed to obtain general acceptance among the scientists. Later investigations tend to return anthropology and ethnology to their ancient basis, upon the principle sounded forth by Paul in the scholarly air of Mars Hill: "God hath made of one blood all nations of men." America, old world as it is, is not a cradle-land. Her native physiognomies, the manners and customs of the races found by Europeans upon her soil, their traditions, and something in their architecture, point toward the historic regions of the far east. The travellers who see Kalmuck Tartars upon the Asiatic steppes, with almost the precise face and figure of the American Indian, catch thus a hint of the far-away past of emigration to and colonization of this continent. Not only across the tract now occupied by Behring's Straits,—very likely dry land in the period of exodus from Asia,—but also across the Atlantic sea, storm-driven or pushed by adventurous souls who never returned to tell their tale, the wave of immigration may have come. Quite certain it is now, the time of man's appearance upon American soil dates long back among the ages previous to the advent of Christ. Before the Indians were, as dwellers here; before the Mound Builders; before Aztec and Nahuan and Mayan civilizations, was still, in all probability, the pre-historic man of millenniums ago. So long since, in the study of our antiquities, as 1839, Dr. McGuire, in the Transactions of the Boston Society of Natural History, brought forward evidence, from discoveries recently made in the improvement of the High Rock spring at Saratoga, to show the presence of human beings there fifty-five hundred years before. The find of a human bone near Natchez, in association with the remains of the mastodon and the megalonyx; the human skeleton dug from an excavation at New Orleans, at a depth of sixteen feet, and beneath four successive buried forests of cypress; the matting and pottery found on Petit Anse Island, Louisiana, fifteen to twenty feet below the surface, underneath the fossil bones of the elephant and the mastodon; the mastodon found in his miry grave on the bottom lands of the Bourbense river, in Missouri, with every token about his remains that he had been hunted and killed by savages there; the skeletons found under some depth of soil and accumulations of bones in caves at Louisville, Kentucky, and Elyria, Ohio ;—all, with other facts developing from time to time, seem to point a high antiquity for the aboriginal American. Colonel Whittlesey, of Cleveland, in his Evidences of the Antiquity of Man in the United States, argues from the find in the Elyria cave, that, "judging from the appearance of the bones and the depth of accumulations over them, two thousand years may have elapsed since the human skeletons were laid on the floor of this cave." The arguments from other finds multiply this number to several scores of centuries. In a later and very recent pamphlet Colonel Whittlesey says: Man may have existed in Ohio with the mastodon, elephant, rhinoc eros, musk ox, horse, beaver, and tapir of the drift period, as he did in Europe; but to decide such a question the proof should be indisputable. There is some reason to conclude that there were people on this territory prior to the builders of the mounds. Our cave shelters have not been much explored, but as far as they have been examined the relics lying at the bottom of the accumulations indicate a very rude people. I anticipate that we shall find here, as in other countries, that the most ancient race were the rudest and were cave-dwellers. I have seen at Portsmouth, Ohio, on the banks of the Ohio river, fire-hearths more ancient than the earthworks at that place. Whoever the people.were who made these fires, they must have had arrow-points, war-clubs, and stone axes or mauls. But we have at this time no evidence to connect such a primeval race with the human effigies scattered profusely throughout Ohio. These effigies present no uniformity of type, and, therefore, cannot represent race features. They approach nearer to the North American savage than any other people, but are so uncouth that they are of little or no ethnological value. There was no school of art among either the cave-dwellers, the builders of the mounds, or the more recent Northern Indians, which was capable of a correct representation of the human face. These effigies must have been the result of the fancies of idle hours, produced under no system and with no uniformity of purpose. They thus have no meaning which the historian or antiquarian can lay hold of to advance his knowledge of the pre-historic races. THE PRIMITIVE OHIOAN. We are thus brought to consider the peoples who, possibly later, but still anciently, dwelt in the valley of the Ohio. They left no literature, no inscriptions as yet decipherable, if any, no monuments except the long forest-covered earth- and stone-works. No traditions of them, by common consent of all the tribes, were left to the North American Indian. As races, they have vanished utterly in the darkness of the past. But the comparatively slight traces they have left tend to conclusions of deep interest and importance, not only highly probable, 22 - HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO. but rapidly approaching certainty. Correspondences in the manufacture of pottery and in the rude sculptures found, the common use of the serpent-symbol, the likelihood that all were sun-worshippers and practiced the horrid' rite of human sacrifice, and the tokens of commercial intercourse manifest by the presence of Mexican porphyry and obsidian in the Ohio Valley mounds, together with certain statements of the Mexican annalists, satisfactorily demonstrate, in the judgment of many antiquaries, the racial alliance, if not the identity, of our Mound Builders with the ancient Mexicans, whose descendants, with their remarkable civilization, were found in the country when Cortes entered it in the second decade of the sixteenth century. THE MAYAS. It is not improbable that the first marks of Mayan civilization upon the continent are to be found among the relics of the Mound Builders, particularly in the Southern States. The great Maya race, the first of which Mexican story bears record, inhabited Yucatan and the adjacent districts as early as 1000 B. C., when Nachan, the "city of the serpents," afterwards Palenque, the seat of remarkable ruins to this day, was founded as their capital. It is accounted to have been among the most civilized of the American aboriginal nations. It possessed an alphabet and so a literature, engaged in manufactures and trade, cultivated the ground, sailed the waters, built great temples and other edifices, and executed sculptures which remain, the wonder of antiquaries, at Palenque, Copan, Uxmal, and other ancient capitals and centers of population. It was, undoubtedly, the oldest civilization in the Western Hemisphere; and so permanent was its influence, and so numerous did the race enjoying it become, that no less than fifteen languages or dialects of Central America, north and south of the Tehauntepec sthmus, are found related to the Mayan tongue. It was already ancient and perhaps decaying when the Nahuas pressed upon it from the northward, partially adopted it, carried it on, and gave it fresh life and vigor. The legends of the Maya people indicate an origin in the Mediterranean countries of Europe or Asia. It is supposed, accordingly, that their home here was upon the Atlantic coast, and that thence they emigrated to Cuba, and in due time into Yucatan and the region south of the Tehauntepec isthmus, whence they spread in both directions, reaching finally as high as Vera Cruz at the northward. Their story, as still found in the manuscripts, is that their ancestors went into the country from the direction of Florida, which was long afterwards the general name of the country traversed by De Soto (who gave the name), from the present Florida coast to the Mississippi. It seems quite within the limits of probability, then, that some of the more ancient of the remains in the east and south of the United States, particularly the immense shell-heaps on the Atlantic seaboard, found all the way from Nova Scotia to the Floridian peninsula, along. the Gulf shores, and up the southern river valleys, were left by the Mayas in their advance on the final home in Central America. It is hardly probable, however, though not at all impossible, that their habitations extended so far north, on any line west of the Alleghanies, as the Ohio valley. THE NAHUAS-THE TOLTECS. The conclusion is different, however, concerning the race which, many ages after the settlement of the Mayas at their ultimate destination, confronted them there—the Nahuas, notably that tribe or nation of them known as the Toltecs—neighbored, probably, somewhere in the valley of the Mississippi by 'the conquerors of the latter in the eleventh century of our era. The Chichimecs are believed to be racially, if not identically, the same with our Mound Builders. The Mexican traditions name the Olmecs as the first of Nahua blood to colonize the regions north of the Tehuantepec isthmus, where they overcame a race of giants, and found also the Miztecs and Zapotecs, not of Nahua stock, who had built up, in what is now the Mexican State of Oajaca, a civilization rivaling the subsequent splendor of the Aztecs. The Olmecs came in ships or barks from the east, as did their relatives some time after, the Xicalancas. The former tribe settled mainly in the present State of Pueblo, and built the tower or pyramid of Cholula, as a memorial, tra dition says, of the tower of Babel, whose building the progenitors of the Olmec chiefs witnessed. Other of the Nahua tribes, as the Toltecs, possessed a tradition of the deluge coming close to the Scriptural account. Both of these look to the other side of the continent as affording the points of ingress for the later immigration, which was doubtless originally from Asia, and many think was of Jewish descent. Long before entering Mexico, however, as the story runs, the seven families of similar language who were the ancestors of the Toltec nation, wandered in many lands and across the seas, living in caves and enduring many hardships, through a period of one hundred and four years, when, five hundred and twenty years after the flood, twenty centuries or more before the Christian era, they arrived at and settled in "Hue hue Tlapalan," which has been identified with reasonable probability as the valley of the Mississippi. Here their families grew and multiplied, extending their boundaries far and wide, until about the middle of the sixth century after Christ, when two families of the land revolted, but unsuccessfully, and were driven out, with their numerous followers, and took their way by devious wanderings to Mexico. Here they fixed their capital at Tulancingo, and eighteen years afterward more permanently at Tolean, on the present site of the village of Tula, thirty miles northwest of the city of Mexico. The character and dates of subsequent Toltec or Mound Builder immigrations, with slight exceptions, has not even the dim light of Mexican tradition to reveal them. The last irruption of the Nahuan tribes is fixed at about 1100 A. D. One of them, and the best known, the famous Aztecs, did not reach Anahuac with their unique and magnificent civilization until near the close of the twelfth century. Previously, however (1062 A. D.), the Toltec capital had been taken and its empire had-fallen by the hands of the martial Chichimecs, their former neighbors in the far north, who had followed them HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO - 23 to their new home, and upon a son of whom, three and a half centuries before, as a peace offering, they had bestowed the throne of the Toltec monarchy, The Toltecs now disappear from history, .except as amalgamated with their conquerors, and as founding, by many of its fugitive noble families and in conjunction with Maayn elements, the Quiche-Cakchiqual monarchy in Guatemala, which was flourishing with some grandeur and power so late as the time of Cortes. The migrations of the Toltecs from parts of the territory now covered by the United States, are believed to have reached through about a thousand years. Apart from the exile of the princes and their allies, and very likely an exodus now and then compelled by their enemies and ultimate conquerors, the Chichimecs, who, as we have seen, at last f0llowed them to Mexico, the Mound Builders were undoubtedly, in the course of the ages, pressed upon," and finally the last of them unless the Natchez and Mandan tribes, as some suppose, are to be considered connecting links between the Toltecs and the American Indians—driven out by the red men. The usual opening of the gateways in their works of defence, looking to the east and northeastward, indicates the direction from which these enemies were expected. They were, not improbably, the terrible Iroquois and their allies, the first really formidable Indians encountered by the French discoverers and explorers in "New France" in the seventeenth century. A silence as of the grave is upon the history of their wars, doubtless long and bloody, the savages meeting with skilled and determined resistance, but their ferocious and repeated attacks, con_ tinued, mayhap, through several centuries, at last expelling the more civilized people "And the Mound Builders vanished from the earth," unless, indeed, as the works of learned antiquaries assume* and as is assumed above, they afterwards appear in the Mexican story. Many of the remains of the defensive works at the South and across the land toward Mexico are of an unfinished type and pretty plainly indicate that the retreat of the Mound Builders was in that direction, and that it was hastened by the renewed onslaughts of their fierce pursuers or by the discovery of a fair and distant land, to which they determined to emigrate in the hope of secure and untroubled homes.-t Professor Short, however, arguing from the lesser age of trees found upon the southern works, is "led to think the Gulf coast may have been occupied by the Mound Builders for a conple of centuries after they were driven by their enemies from the country north of the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio rivers:" He believes two thousand years is time enough to allow for their total occupation of the country north of the Gulf * We have so far relied chiefly upon the very excellent and recent work from the pen of Professor John T. Short, of the State university at Columbus, Ohio, the latest and probably the best authority on "The North Americans of Antiquity" yet in print. Harper & Brothers, 1880. Professor Short must not, however, be held responsible for all the statements, inferences, and conclusions set- out in the foregoing paragraphs. + See, further, Judge M. F. Force's interesting paper on the Builders; Cincinnati, 1872 and 1874. of Mexico, "though after all it is but conjecture." He adds: "It seems to us, however, that the time of abandonment of their works may be more closely approximated. A thousand or two years may have elapsed since they vacated the Ohio valley, and a period embracing seven or eight centuries may have passed since they retired from the Gulf coast." The date to which the latter period carries us back, it will be observed, approximates somewhat closely to that fixed by the Mexican annalists as the time of the last emigration of a people of Nahua stock from the northward. THE MOUND BUILDERS' EMPIRE. Here we base upon firmer ground. The extent and something of the character of this are known. They are tangible and practical realities. We stand upon the mounds, pace off the long lines of the enclosures, collect and handle and muse upon the long-buried relics now in our public and private museums. The domain of the Mound Builders is well-nigh coterminous with that of the, Great Republic. Few States of the Union are wholly without the ancient monuments. Singular to say, however, in view of the_ huge heaps and barrows of shells left by the aboriginal man along the Atlantic shore, there are no earth or stone mounds or enclosures of the older construction on that coast. Says Professor Short: No authentic remains of the Mound Builders are found in the New England States, . . . In the former we have an isolated mound in fly: valley of the Kennebec, in Maine, and dim outlines of enclosures near Sanborn and Concord, in New Hampshire; hut there is no certainty of their being the work of this people. . . . . Mr. Squier pronounces them to be purely the work of Red Indians. . . . Colonel Whittlesey would assign these fort-like structures the enclosures of western New York, and common upon the rivers discharging themselves into Lakes Erie and Ontario from the south, differing from the more southern enclosures, in that. they were surrounded by trenches on their outside, while the latter uniformly have the trench on the inside of the enclosure, to a people anterior to the red Indian and perhaps contemporaneous with the Mound Builders, but distinct from either. The more reasonable view is that of Dr. Foster, that they are the frontier works of the Mound Builders, adapted to the purposes of defence against the sudden irruptions of hostile tribes. . . . It is probable that these defences belong to the last period of the Mound Builders' residence on the lakes, and were erected when the more warlike peoples of the north, who drove them from their cities, first made their appearance. The Builders quarried flint in many places, soapstone in Rhode Island and North Carolina, and in the latter State also the translucent mica found so widely dispersed in their burial mounds in association with the bones of the dead. They mined or made salt, and in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan they got out, with infinite labor, the copper, which was doubtless their most useful and valued metal. The Lower Peninsula of that State is rich in ancient remains, particularly in mounds of sepulture; and there are "garden beds" in the valleys of the St. Joseph and the Kalamazoo, in southwestern Michigan; but, "excepting ancient copper mines, no known works extend as far north as Lake Superior anywhere in the central region. Farther to the northwest, however, the works of the same people are comparatively numerous. Dr. Foster quotes a British Columbia newspaper, without giving either name or date, as authority for the discovery of a large number of mounds, seemingly the 24 - HISTORY OF HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO. works of the same people who, built further east and south. On the Butte prairies of Oregon, Wilkes and his exploring expedition discovered thousands of similar mounds." We condense further from Short : All the way up the Yellowstone region and on the upper tributaries of the Missouri, mounds are found in profusion. . . . The Missouri valley seems to have been one of the most populous branches of the widespread Mound Builder country. The valleys of its affluents, the Platte and Kansas rivers, also furnish evidence that these streams served as the channels into which flowed a part of the tide of population which either descended or ascended the Missouri. The Mississippi. and Ohio River valleys, however, formed the great central arteries of the Mound Builder domain. In Wisconsin we find the northern central limit of their works; occasionally on the western shores of Lake Michigan, but in great numbers in the southern counties of the State; and especially on the lower Wisconsin river. The remarkable similarity of one group of works, on a branch of Rock river in the south of this State, to 'some of the Mexican antiquities led to the christening of the adjacent village as Aztalan—which (or Aztlan), meaning whiteness, was a name of the "most attractive land" somewhere north of Mexico and the sometime home of the Aztec and other Nahua nations. If rightly conjectured as the Mississippi valley, or some part of it, that country may well have included the site of the modern Aztalan. Across the Mississippi, in Minnesota and Iowa, the predominant type of circular tumuli prevails, extending throughout the latter State to Missouri. There are evidences that the Upper Missouri region was connected with that of the Upper Mississippi by settlements occupying the intervening country. Mounds are found even in the valley of the Red river of the north. . . . Descending to the interior, we find the heart of the Mound Builder country in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.' It is uncertain whether its vital center was in southern Illinois or Ohio—probably the former, because of its geographical situation with reference to the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio rivers. . . The site of St. Louis was formerly covered with mounds, one of which was thirty-five feet high, while in the American Bottom, on the Illinois side of the river, their number approximates two hundred. It is pretty well known, we believe, that St. Louis takes its fanciful title of "Mound City" from the former fact. The multitude of mound works which are scattered over the entire northeastern portion of Missouri indicate that the region was once inhabited by a population so numerous that in comparison its present occupants are only as the scattered pioneers of a new-settled country. . . . The same sagacity which chose the neighborhood of St. Louis for these works, covered the site of Cincinnati with an extensive system of circumvolutions and mounds. Almost the entile space now occupied by the city was utilized by the mysterious Builders in the construction of embankments and tumuli, built upon the most accurate geometrical principles, and evincing keen military foresight. . . . The vast number as well as magnitude of the works found in the State of Ohio, have surprised the most careless and indifferent observers. It is estimated by the most conservative, and Messrs. Squier and Davis among them, that the number of tumuli in Ohio equals ten thousand, and the number of enclosures one thousand or one thousand five hundred. In Ross county alone one hundred enclosures and upwards of five hundred mounds have been examined. The Alleghany mountains, the natural limit of the great Mississippi basin, appear to have served as the eastern and southeastern boundary of the Mound Builder country. In western New York, western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and in all of Kentucky and Tennessee, their remains are numerous and in some instances imposing. In Tennessee, especially, the works of the Mound Builders are of the most interesting character. . . . Colonies of Mound Builders seem to have passed the great natural barrier into North Carolina and left remains in Marion county, while still others penetrated into South Carolina, and built on the Wateree river. Mounds in Mississippi also have been examined, with interesting results. On the southern Mississippi, in the area embraced between the termination of the Cumberland mountains, near Florence and Tuscumbia, in Alabama, and the mouth of Big Black river, this people left numerous works, many of which were of a remarkable character. The whole region bordering on the tributaries of the Tombigbee, the country through which the Wolf river flows, and that watered by the Yazoo river and its affluents, was densely populated by the same people who built mounds in the Ohio valley. . . . The State of Louisiana and the valleys of the Arkansas and Red rivers were not only the most thickly populated wing of the Mound Builder domain, but also furnish us with remains presenting affinities with the great works of Mexico so striking that no doubt can longer exist that the same people were the architects of both. . . . It is needless to discuss the fact that the works of the Mound Builders exist in considerable numbers in Texas, extending across the Rio Grande into Mexico, establishing an unmistakable relationship as well as actual union between the truncated pyramids of the Mississippi valley and the Tocalli of Mexico, and the countries further south. Such, in a general way, was the geographical distribution of the Mound Builders within and near the territory now occupied by the United States. THE WORKS. They are—such of them as are left to our day—generally of earth, occasionally of stone, and more rarely of earth and stone intermixed. Dried bricks, in some instances, are found in the walls and angles of the best pyramids of the Lower Mississippi valley. Often, especially for the works devoted to religious purposes, the earth has not been taken from the surrounding soil, but has been transported from a distance, probably from some locality regarded as sacred. They are further divided into enclosures and mounds or tumuli. The classification of these by Squier & Davis, in their great work on "The Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley," published by the Smithsonian Institution thirty-two years ago, has not yet been superseded. It is as follows: I. Enclosures—For Defence, Sacred, Miscellaneous. II. Mounds—Of Sacrifice, or Temple-Sites, of Sepulture, of Observation. To these may properly be added the Animal or Effigy (emblematic or symbolical) Mounds,• and some would add Mounds for Residence. The Garden-Beds, if true remains of the Builders, may also be considered a separate class; likewise mines and roads, and there is some reason to believe that canals may be added. In the treatment of these classes, briefly, we shall follow in places the chapter on this subject in our History of Franklin and Pickaway counties, Ohio. I: ENCLOSURES FOR DEFENCE. A large and interesting class of the works is of such a nature that the object for which they were thrown up is unmistakable. The "forts," as they are popularly called, are found throughout the length and breadth of the Mississippi valley, from the Alleghanies to the Rocky mountains. The rivers of this vast basin have worn their valleys deep in the original plain, leaving broad terraces leading like gigantic steps up to the general level of the country. The sides of the terraces are often steep and difficult of access, and sometimes quite inaccessible. Such locations would naturally be selected as the site of defensive works, and there, as a matter of fact, the strong and complicated embankments of the Mound Builders are found. The points have evidently been chosen with great care, and are such as would, in most cases, be approved by