500 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO At one time doctors had to pay a $5 per annum tax to practice. Educated and trained physicians were not provided for by law until 1868 when the first legislation to that end was passed. The law of May, 1868, was entitled "an act to protect the citizens of Ohio from empirics and to elevate the standard of the medical profession." The first step to control the practice of medicine and surgery was in May 1896, when the state board of registration was created with Dr. N. R. Coleman, of Columbus, as president. Dentistry was not born in West Central Ohio if the boundaries of these twenty-two counties be strictly observed, but the founders of the two first dental colleges in the world, Dr. Chapin A. Harris and Dr. James Taylor are identified with Bainbridge which in a sectional and topographical sense is part of West Central Ohio. A tablet at Bainbridge recites their accomplishments. Harris and Taylor are credited with lifting dentistry from a trade to a profession. The world wide supremacy of American dentistry can truthfully be said to have originated in this section of Ohio. Dr. B. S. Brown, of Logan County, left some reminscences of medical practice at a time when there were no physicians north of Bellefontaine for 50 or 100 miles. Doctor Brown recorded there was in winter but one mudhole, and that extended all the way. Mudroads in winter when frozen after being chipped and chopped up were so rough that a horse could proceed but at a walk. If the mud was very deep and was not frozen far enough the horse punched through to its knees. Messengers would come through the night from ten or twelve miles and insist upon night trips, often through the woods. Coming to one log cabin, Doctor Brown saw such a large fire he thought the cabin was burning. It was just the neighbors gathered to assist the family and not wishing to fill the cabin too compactly and disturb the sick man, they had built a bonfire in the yard. All the women of the neighborhood for miles around HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 501 arrived to assist at childbirth and the doctor might find a dozen or more gathered. The convalescent mother was kept well dosed with whiskey punch to keep her from taking cold. The self-elected nurses sampled it rather freely to ascertain that it was just right. Every community had its "half doctors" who had lancets for bleeding and tooth drawers. Women generally felt they had to be bled at least once a year. If bleeding and a dose of salts did not suffice to right the sufferer, the half doctor would consent to the sending for the real doctor. Doctor Brown's account contains an interesting account of an Indian woman patient and her burial. Cholera was one of the early epidemics before which medicine was powerless; 1833 and 1854 were especially years of the scourge. Dr. J. W. Pearce in the Van Wert County History gives sidelights on its origin, saying the winter was excessively cold and followed by a summer drought. Due partly to the weather the roads, streets and alleys were full of filth since rain had not washed it away. The land burned, cattle sought water feverishly. The birds and houseflies fled ! Doctor Pearce admits morals had been a bit low in the neighborhood. The sick died in a few hours after being stricken. Forty out of seventy-five inhabitants of Wiltshire died. One who escaped was the village drunkard. Doctor Pearce thought it a good opportunity to assist his prospective widow and made up ten pills out of red pepper and asafetida and ordered them given every two hours, prepared his anticipated widow for the worst and departed. When Dr. Pearce came back Bill was about well ! CHAPTER L INDUSTRY AND NATURAL RESOURCES MANUFACTURING-NATURAL GAS-INVENTION-DEVELOPMENT OF MANUFACTURING- NATURAL RESOURCES. West Central Ohio offers a base for manufacturing that is exceptional in some fields. There is that combination of intelligent labor, central location, unexcelled transportation, cheap food supplies, accessibility to coal and iron ores and raw materials which are fundamental to manufacturing profit. The whole drift of American industry is claimed to be toward a triangle with its base from Buffalo to Chicago, and its apex at Atlanta, Georgia. West Central Ohio is approximately in the center of such a triangle. Because of the central location the printing and publishing field has shown a marked tendency to gravitate in this direction. The ancestral stocks which settled West Central Ohio were such as had, in many instances, an industrial heritage. The Pennsylvania Dutch have ever been good artisans; the Virginian and Kentucky stock had little mechanical heritage but in many instances had keen and adaptable minds. The New Englanders were of the best financial and industrial school in the world. These basic stocks were supplemented by the direct importation of skilled mechanics from the East and from Europe as the special demands developed. West Central Ohio has lagged in the production of literary men, scientists and native born military geniuses, but it has stood - 503 - 504 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO preeminent in the development of inventive and industrial genius. The invention of the airplane alone outweights in potentialities half of the more than million patents granted since the United States became a nation. It was in agricultural implements that West Central Ohio first dominated the world. In the hey day of applying mechanical aids to farming, West Central Ohio and especially Springfield was to farming equipment what Detroit is to the automobile trade. It was the revolt against backbending, backbreaking farm labor that brought forth the reaper, the mower, the drill, the threshers, feed grinders, hay rakes, manure spreaders, which lifted American farmers out of the "Man With the Hoe" class.  West Central Ohio is a comparatively flat country, especially the northern section. It is a country which has grown marvelously. Hence there came forth the steam shovel born of demand; it is a country dependent upon rail transportation. Navigable rivers do not penetrate it. There came forth the answer in car shops, locomotive shops, electrical and steam equipment; it is a great farm section and the center of much electrical equipment for farms found its demand close at hand. It is adjacent to Detroit and the auto empire and the manufacture of automobile parts became a great industry. Automobiles call for roads and the greatest line of road building machinery is produced in West Central Ohio. The discovery of natural gas and oil in and around Lima in May, 1885, gave the whole northern section an impetus which it sorely needed. This portion of West Central Ohio had lagged due to certain causes touched on elsewhere, such as defective natural drainage due to glacial action. The land was slow in settling due to swampiness, fevers, etc. This acted against it in a historical sense since its settlement was a slow process occurring when the dramatic period had passed. The boom period followed the discovery of petroleum in Lima when B. C. Faurot found it at 1,251 feet while boring for gas. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 505 The oil field was found to extend into Hardin, Auglaize, and Mercer counties. Although overestimated at the beginning and not a patch on the Mexican, California, Oklahoma and Texas fields of today, the Lima field was a great thing for its time and gave a great impetus to its section. As a consequence of the finding of oil and gas so close at hand, the oil pumping and gas and oil engine business came into existence in West Central Ohio. Oil came as a belated recompense for the costly effort in clearing and draining the Black Swamp section which had defied man until great ditches had gridironed the land. Here again was a field close at hand for such an implement as the Marion steam shovel. Manufacturing literally began on the family unit basis. Every settler had all over West Central Ohio to be his own mechanic, inventor, or else he starved, froze, bogged in mud. Every member of a family that aimed to prosper did a little bit of a great many things. There were a thousand tasks on the farms which today are done by machinery. It took the toil, the sacrifice, the patience and the savings of the first three generations to get experience of what was needed in wholesale lots, to get capital to build a small manufacturing plant and to find means and ways of getting materials in and out. Manufacturing began in almost every instance with a still. Man's first need was food, his second, shelter, third, clothing, common utensils and finally drink, medicine and amusement. He had to and could provide food, shelter, clothing and utensils for himself. But distilling just naturally lent itself to special and quantity production with simple apparatus. Whiskey stills, flour mills, blacksmith shops, hominy mills, wagon shops, carding mills, tanneries, all came by degrees as the inhabitants of a given locality accumulated a surplus for exchange and could trade a bit and afford to buy instead of always making their necessities. These simple, small industries could get power from the small streams and so mills dotted the landscape. Some counties have 506 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO nearly 100 old mill sites. Many were unwisely chosen. When the forest was cut off the water flow failed and the mills stood high and dry most of the year, but they had taught young men the simplest mechanics, that a way existed to make water work for you. After the land was once opened there came in that second and third wave of immigration which looks for improved land and can and will pay for improvements that will not come until they exist. In other words capital began to filter in along with a mechanical minded people. Mills increased in size and number and an industrial and mercantile class began to rise and be distinct from the farming, laboring and professional people. This might be said to have been in faint evidence from the beginning but when families ride 40 miles to the mill as did people in Clark County, going down to Lebanon for flour, then it can not be said the industrial class exists as a class and even such millers did a lot of other work for themselves. The National Pike and the canals provided the first real outlets to which we can look for that system of exchange which industry must have to broaden out. With the coming of the canals the pikes and later the railroads, manufacturing began to look up. The decade, 1840-1850, seems to mark the transition from the old neighborhood mill to the factory. The Civil War with its tremendous demands and opportunities for profiteering did the rest. At the close of the war manufacturing was set. The towns began to really grow and the industrial magnates to arise. Previous to this the people had been very much of one class and one way of living. Of course there had been from the first traders and millers but after all the farmer of wide acres could hold his own with them and wealth was in land and stock rather than in industrial equipment. Gradually the manufacturer pulled away from the farmer, came up along side the merchant in his style of living and then moved on into a class by himself. Of HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 507 course, there were always rich merchants and small struggling manufacturers but the tendency was increasingly industrial. Class lines began to develop around 1870, at first insenibly, and then it became clearly evident that the manufacturer who employed many men and controlled the destinies of thousands, who could by a wave of his hand dictate the fate of his dependents had risen to a power and place untouchable by his cousin who had remained on the farm or gravitated as a hand to the factory. Although West Central Ohio is pre-eminently an agricultural land no great fortunes have ever been built therein strictly by farming. Families might prosper, enlarge their holdings and their children marry and pool the common resources, still the amount was far less than wealth of the leading manufacturers, every farmer had the man with a hoe as a competitor the world over. Every manufacturer had the man with the hoe as a customer. Industrialism was bound to repeat in a sociological way the experiences and cleavages of Europe. It undoubtedly raised the level of the good laborer above the ancient kings so far as creature comforts went, but it raised the industrialist still faster. Had it come too suddenly there would have been burning resentment. It came just gradually enough for the mental adjustment to be made. Admiration of industrial and managerial brains kept ahead of envy. Then there was also a rapid importation of foreign labor accustomed to class differences. The popular mind divided into those two attitudes expressed recently by Mr. Hoover and Mr. Roosevelt. One group believed in super-men, that prosperity was handed down or filtered down, exuded as it were from the wealthy and that wealth represented by irrefutable evidences a superiority and an ability to rule and that its rule, even if a despotism, was often a benevolent despotism. That some truth abides in this view must be conceded. Undoubtedly singleness of purpose, determination, industry and shrewdness do acquire and deserve to acquire more rewards than scatter brains, laziness, dumbness and lack of foresight. 508 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO As opposed to this arose the feeling, first evident in the 1896 campaign, that some malign thing had stolen the birthright of thousands. The industrialist and merchant opinioned it was lack of brains and industry which was that malign thing which had created the class difference. There was a measure and a good measure of truth in this but some minds that considered themselves as keen as the industrialist denied this was the sole factor. Tariffs, monetary ratios were trotted out and discussed but they were above the average voter. He voted for the full dinner pail and it must be said that he got it. Industry largely justified its contention that it created wealth and allowed it to filter down according to the just deserts of the individual. The World War gave industrialism a tremendous new impetus. Industry leaped forward so rapidly that Randall and Ryan, writing in 1912, had wondered vaguely when industry would equal agriculture in Ohio. Some day but it would be a long time, was their conclusion. A decade had done it and politically and socially there was no comparison. Industry was king as much as ever Cotton was king in the Old South. And then the Machine reared its head as a Frankenstein and Howard Scott began to babble of Industrial Efficiency which devoured its customers much as sows which lack the right ration eat their pigs. It began to look as though the social ration was not rightly balanced. Some vitamin was missing. Mankind had a social scurvy, a pelagra of some sort. At present the pendulum of public opinion has swung to the other extreme and industry is confronted with isms and panaceas contrary to all its past practice. The reader who has endured this far may protest that industrial history is a record of what has happened, a roll call of factories, and not a comment. This is what has happened. It calls for comment. The function of history is to digest, not to heap high a plate with facts and expect the reader to bolt them. The Industrialist should ask himself "What brought forth the agi- HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 509 tator? What shall I do with this by-product? What flooded the mine? What clogged the carburetor? What is the matter with my machine?" The agiator should ask "If I wreck this machine, can I build a new one? Will it function as well as the old one? Dare I discard the operator of this industrial machine?" Upon these two answers depends the future history of West Central Ohio and perhaps of the world. Tell the answer and you foretell the future. MINERAL RESOURCES West Central Ohio lacks coal and iron but has an abundant supply of limestone, clays, gas, oil, cement materials, road building materials as a basis for local needs and export. In general as one mounts northward through these 22 counties the mineral wealth increases decidedly until in Van Wert, Allen, Auglaize and Hardin counties there is encountered a wealth of oil and some gas. Roughly speaking the oil field runs southwest from Hancock County to Lima where one arm runs almost due west to Wiltshire in Van Wert County and a second arm runs southwest to Saint Marys where there is a connecting arm thrust up to unite with the westward arm. There is a second small oil area in Mercer County and touching northern Darke and two much smaller oil areas in Shelby County, south of Lake Loramie. Hardin County has two gas fields in opposite corners, one east of Dunkirk and the other at Roundhead. The Buckeye, the Illinois and the Tidewater pipe lines cross through the territory, the Illinois through northern Mercer, a corner of Van Wert, southern Allen. The Tidewater line comes into Darke at the southwest, passes Greenville, touches northwest Miami, southwest Shelby, bisects Logan and Marion, touching northwest Union. The Buckeye line runs through southern Van Wert, Allen, bisects Hardin and touches northern Marion counties. All of the oil and gas lies north of the Tidewater line. 510 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO Ceramic plants are plentifully spotted over the area of most of these 22 counties. These are mostly north and east. Clinton has none, neither has Montgomery, Preble, Greene, Clark, Miami, Morrow or Champaign. Fayette has one at Good Hope, Warren one at Franklin, Madison one at London, Union one at Marysville, Delaware three at Delaware, Galena and Center Village; Marion has two, Larue and Morral, Hardin one near Kenton; Logan three, West Mansfield, Lakeview and on the north boundary near New Hampshire. Darke has three, Greenville, Versailles and Yorkshire; Shelby two, Anna and Loramie ; Auglaize four, Minster, New Knoxville, Waynesfield, Kossuth ; Mercer six, Celina, Rockford, Mercer, Beaver Creek, Coldwater and Fort Recovery. Another at Burkettsville, near the Darke County boundary ; Van Wert has two, near Delphos and in Pleasant Township. Allen County has ceramic plants near Lima and at Beaver Dam. Lime kilns, quarries and crushers are found most plentifully near Springfield at Durbin. Cedarville, Greene County; Ostander, Delaware County; Owens and Marion in Marion County. Cement plants of outstanding size are found at Osborne, Greene County, and sand and gravel plants of consequence along the Miami in Montgomery County, there being five of such rank; German Township, Darke County; Springfield, Clark County; Urbana and Mechanicsburg, Champaign County; and Xenia, Greene County; all have pits of commercial size while numerous farms along the tributaries of Mad and Miami rivers have local pits which supply township roads or farm needs. Allen County has an oil refinery on the Buckeye pipe lines. Many localities have small deposits of clay suitable for tile and brick which supplied the original drainage and building needs but which are no longer worked due to the passing of the local market or the competition of higher grade brick from outside territory. The ceramic industry is almost entirely confined to tile, the flat nature of the land creating the need of much drainage. The HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 511 fact that much of this industry centers in the northern counties attests the fact that these were later in settlement and the work of laying drainage tile is not yet fully completed, also the old lake bed of glacial times demands more drainage than farther south. Dayton limestone has a crushing strength of 20,000 per square inch which outranks Bedford limestone almost three to one and many types of granite. Delaware limestone is dark blue which on exposure changes to buff or yellow. Iron in the stone governs the shade of Ohio limestones. Dayton limestone is too tough to carve well. The lime of Springfield is noted far and wide for its excellence. The Ordovician stones of Southwestern Ohio have thin, even beds which helps the quarrying. Most of West Central Ohio has Silurian rock for its quarrying material. The Clinton limestone of around Dayton was used in the National Soldiers Home. The Springfield limestone and the Cedarville limestone are of the Niagara rock formation. The Dayton stone is found in Miami, Montgomery and Greene counties and the supply is inexhaustible. The Upper Silurian stone is worked at Springfield or Durbin more extensively than any place in Ohio. It is one of the most important centers in the United States for lime. This Springfield stone can be seen in the Masonic Home, Christ's Church, Snyder Memorial Arch, Springfield, etc. It has a high rank for building purposes, stands fire, weathers well, has an attractive color and good crushing strength. Piqua, Covington, Ludlow Falls, Eaton, Lewisburg have all limestone quarries suitable for building. The Bellefontaine limestone is fitted rather for road crushing than for building. CHAPTER LI AGRICULTURE PIONEER METHODS-CONDITIONS-IMPROVEMENTS-WHEAT AND OTHER STABLE PRODUCTS-PRICES-SOIL-STOCK RAISING-CLIMATE. Agriculture in West Central Ohio is not 140 years old in a literal sense yet it came into this virgin Miami Country as old as the race. Strange to recollect, it here witnessed greater changes in 100 years than it had in the preceding ten thousand. The mechanical genius of West Central Ohio farm boys had much to do with the change, a change more wonderful than the metamorphosis called forth by a magician for this was a change durable, a change which was to banish famine from most of the world. Agriculture came into the Miami country on the level of the days of Boaz when Ruth garnered grain behind the sickle men and oxen tramped out the grain which was forked up to be winnowed by the wind. It was almost wholly a hand proposition, literally a hand to mouth business, for each clearing fed its family and save as the hoe was supplemented by the gun, they starved. The influence of the Pennsylvania Dutchman on American history has been much neglected and underrated. He gave us the two essentials to the conquest and possession of the West : the Long Rifle to win it and the vegetable garden and farming skill to make it. Agriculture never realized its possibilities in America until the Dutchman touched it with his heavy, but conserving hand. - 513 - 514 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO The Virginian was too much dependent upon slave labor to make an ideal agriculturist and the Scotch-Irish, while unequalled for fighting Indians had acquired much of the Indian's hunter complex. Agriculture in West Central Ohio crept in on a flatboat and walked out to market on a hog's hoofs or gurgled in a demijohn. Its growth waited for adequate transportation. And while it waited, "Adam delve and Eve span" and each household was almost a self-supporting unit. Men sought the high watershed, since these had natural drainage. They looked for a combination of good springs which at once watered stock, supplied the household and running through the cool milk troughs made dairying possible. So to this day many farm houses sit far back on the hillsides and reach the roads by lanes. In a land of woods, agriculture began amid stumpage often so close together that the horse could not be used and corn was dropped by hand and covered with a hoe. In the beginning there was not room to swing a scythe or to cradle wheat, rye or oats. Corn fitted the land. Corn loved the loose rich leaf loam of the woods and did far better than wheat and it was easier cultivated in individual hills. As the stumps rotted there came in the single shovel plow, pulled by one horse and then, miracle of miracles, some bright genius thought of forking the plow beam and putting a shovel on either side of the row, a "straddle buck !" Agriculture was looking up. With the "cradle" a scythe with a series of parallel bars ranged above the blade, the expert cradler could lay a swathe for the binders to follow and as they hurried and raced each other, each would seize a handful of grain, with a dexterous twist, tie it into a band and, running an arm along the stubble under the swathe, gather in a sheaf which again in trice was whipped tight by the arms and the band knotted about it. If any one imagines this was not a highly developed knack let him try binding wheat HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 515 with wheat so that it lay uniform in length and bound so firmly it held when the rude wooden fork was thrust into it. A backbreaking task and not without danger since the rattler in the cool of evening loves to crawl under the sheltering swathe and waits there for the blind hand of the binder. Then came the reaper with men raking off the reaped grain from the platform. By degrees came horses instead of the plodding oxen in the furrow. Threshing outfits travelled the roads and the flailing in the barns ceased although the threshers were run by horse power, the horses traveling endlessly in a circle. The farm boys who had brains and fled from the horrible toil were now in the cities making machinery to end the nightmare of their boyhood. The narrow tread wagons which cut deep into the clays were supplanted by the broad tread, the buckboard and the spring wagon came with better roads and lastly, proud families, oozing prosperity, sported covered spring wagons. The farm work in West Central Ohio was waxing ostentatious as it waxed fat. Laws were made to make men work the roads and the gaping countryside might be treated to the excitement of a procession of new fangled contraptions whereon a rider sat some six feet above ground and propelled a big wheel in front of a little one. The high wheeled bicycle had come along with bustles for the women and the days of crinoline were gone and the "Horse and Buggy" for Sunday night wooing was abroad in the land. By now it was the '90s and villagers were treated to some young blood who had inveigled his doting parent (observe parents were becoming human) into buying a "Safety" as the first two-wheeled bikes were called. Round and round the village square the dashing bycyclist would circle holding his audience as spellbound as the circling hog does the threatened rattler. About this time the countryside belle confided to her jealous cronies that "George was going to get rubber tires for his buggy" and each girl went home highly resolved that no farm hand was 516 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO going to take her driving with a set of rattle trap tires which could be heard clattering and clanking a quarter mile away. So was another nail driven in the coffin of the wayside blacksmith shop, for cutting tires which slipped from shrunken wheels, contracted by the dry heat of summer, was the blacksmith's summer standby. So by backs bent over o'er middle age, with hands so horny and rounded by pitch fork and ax handles they would never straighten, in queer ill-fitting garments, and curious makeshifts of self-help and neighborly exchange the farming population of West Central Ohio came into its heritage of drained land, good roads, threshing machinery, binders and riding plows and was ready for the miracle of the 20th Century—a century which was to bring the telephone to the farm, the rural free delivery to the door, and a by no means unmixed blessing, was to deliver autos and tractors to the farm. We will never forget as a young school teacher, standing talking to a big black bearded director who had clumped in with his heavy cowhide boots to discuss discipline, and how when we were getting cornered, a toot of an auto set his team to rearing. We can see him today, stepping down the school aisle, his great boots lifted high and his voice roaring curses as he charged out the door while the Dayton drivers of the chugging contrivance meekly tried in vain the placate his boiling wrath. So, timidly and apologetically did the auto first come to intrude upon Dobbin's age old prerogative of the right of way, and William N. Whitely, a West Central Ohio boy, had a great hand and head for its development. It is an epic of the Miami Valley grainfields how William Whitely in competition with Ben Warder, seeing his rival was cutting grain in a field test as fast as Whitely, leaped from his machine and unhitched one horse. Warder did the same and in Herculean fury, Whitely unhooked the last horse and in a frenzy of emulation dragged his machine by sheer man power the length of the field. But the reaper had to wait for the canal so wheat could move to market and even as late as 1849 there was scarce a fifth of the HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 517 wheat raised in West Central Ohio as is done today. Madison and Union counties in that year each raised but 20,000 bushel all told. That is not enough for bread for a thousand families. But we forget corn bread, mush, corn cakes, lye hominy, coming from the cornfield. Next came the self rake which raking off the sheaves for the binders and our reverend grandfather, beholding its marvelous efficiency, vowed the end of mechanical perfection had been reached, man would never go farther. The railroad was nosing into places where the canals could not come. Markets broadened. These railroads were bringing in cheap prints and the hum of the spinning wheel slackened, but up even until the '90s women knitted the hose and mittens for the family, saved rags, cut them in strips and the first task of many a small boy or girl was to sit at his mother's feet, sewing carpet rags which when taken to the loom were to be pounded into floor coverings. It was a century of prodigious toil on West Central Ohio farms. The land had to be cleared, ditched, for the low places were morasses, the houses, barns and outbuildings had to be hewn out of the primeval woods, the fences split from rails, wood cut and seasoned for the devouring fire places. Boys went to work as soon as they could toddle and we have known men who ploughed corn when they had to reach up to the handles, and their older sisters led the horse, for such a small boy could not manage plow and horse at the same time. Again we turn to family happenings which were typical. Our maternal grandmother crept to the barn to harness the horse for her oldest who could not swing the heavy harness over Dobbin's back. We say crept for the stern code of that day did not stand for pampering. We have been told by an old woman born in West Central Ohio in 1810 how her father, when his boys loitered a bit at the binding, leaped from the reaper and with the long "blacksnake" whip of the driver, wound it round and round their slothful bodies. Every prosperous farmer was a driving man with the disposition of a drill sergeant. He was a drill sergeant engaged in marshal- 518 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO ling an awkward squad of growing boys in an endless war with threatening want. Save for incessant toil by all hands they starved. This tradition of toil lingered even after the stern necessity had vanished. Human anecdote enlightens more than tomes of narrative. We once knew an old lady who in her childhood was roused long before dawn and piled in a rough farmwagon, jolted off across the country for miles and then turned loose to husk standing corn, as the wagon drove down 'the field. The father took six rows on one side, the little girl of eight years, two rows, and her older brother four, and as the desperate child stifled her sobs of fear when she saw her rows fall behind, her brother, risking a horse whipping each time, would reach over and husk or shuck a hill or two on her rows. And the memory of that brotherly hand was green in her soul in her eighties. So came this country by terrible toil that made men callous and laid mothers in graves so that many farmers had three and four wives in succession, and women were bowed by child bearing and the endless succession of 16 and 18 hour days with nights broken by nursing children. Wheat is a vital factor in West Central Ohio history. Next to corn it is the principal crop and unlike corn it is generally a ready money crop. The corn goes to market in form of hogs and cattle, dairy products and poultry. Wheat brings in the hard money that caresses the horny palm of the farmer. By the price of his wheat does he judge the condition of agriculture and the rewards of farming. The historian of the future is going to pay a vast deal of attention to the price of wheat, farm products and factory wages, foreclosures, taxes and the like when he writes the history of the 20th Century. Every so often there comes a series of related happenings which change the spirit and the viewpoint of the age and then politics, history and man's development, mentally and spiritually, take new channels. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 519 In Ohio for the first forty to fifty years the American Revolution as it found voice in Thomas Jefferson, was the dominant influence. Then came slavery and the state about faced and for 90 years the fire, the smoldering ashes of fierce political and social hates blasted a path down which men traveled so long and so far it seemed they would never seek another. Beginning with the slump in farm prices in 1920 and reinforced by the industrial debacle of 1929 the individual living problem came to the fore. As the Populist had vainly ranted in the 90s to deaf ears, but his cry that it had become a question of the right to live had at last under other captions and from later sources dinned itself slowly into the soul of the farmer and worker. Only from such a field plowed by adversity and watered by calamity could have come forth the strange and to Ohio alien growths which so astonished the conservative. Ohio in 1933 is supporting drastic almost revolutionary changes in the national capital. The milk from contented political cows has soured, men's minds have begun to feed on strange menus and all is in a state of flux. Wheat at forty cents a bushel is not merely the cold arithmetic of losses, it becomes a tocsin to the primal passions. It is ruinous and therefore not to be borne. It is a hard cold fact which no political sophistry will placate. Draw a line from Jefferson in Ashtabula County to Cincinnati and very little wheat is grown east of that line in Ohio, West Central Ohio in all of its 22 counties, with the least in Van Wert, Fayette, Hardin, Marion, Morrow, Logan and Union. The heavy wheat counties are Preble, Darke, Mercer, Montgomery, Miami, Auglaize, Greene, Champaign, Madison, Clark, Warren, Shelby, in about that order. There is a sharp difference in the value of Ohio soils between the glaciated and the unglaciated sections. All of West Central Ohio soils are in the glaciated section. This accounts for their general fertility. There is a difference between the old lake bed 520 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO soils north of the Height of Land or divide and those south of it. This lake silt section includes the northern portion of Van Wert. In general West Central Ohio soils are of limestone formation with islands of lake silt or muck, the latter found in Mercer, Darke, Miami, Logan, Shelby, Union, Madison, Fayette and Clinton, marking where swamps or lakes once stood. Southeast Warren has a loose soil underlaid with limestone. Northeast Allen County has the lake silt soil. The soils vary according to elevation, erosion and the glacial deposits. Naturally the uplands have the thinner soils and the valleys the black soils which are the most fertile for corn and rye, while the upland is better for wheat. Much of the soil has lost its original fertility and must be fertilized for good results. For general farming it remains an area not surpassed in the world. Streams of West Central Ohio have a variable flow, generally a wide flood plain. A few ponds or lakes dot its surface with areas of a few acres at most. The ten acre pond or lake being about the usual size. The Miami at Dayton has a mean flow of 2,900 second feet; the Stillwater, at Pleasant Hill, 612; Mad River at Springfield, 699; the Auglaize at Defiance, 2,090. Saint Mary's Reservoir contains about 15,748 acres; Indian lake, 6,134, and Loramie, 1,900. The Miami Valley is the greatest tobacco district north of the Mason and Dixon Line. Montgomery County is first, Darke, second, Preble third, and Warren fourth in tobacco production. Ten acres is considered a large unit to handle and the product should run into thousands of dollars. Hardin County and its marshes are the great onion countries, while the sugar beet thrives in the Great Black Swamp of Van Wert, Mercer and Allen counties. Twenty-nine per cent of Ohio drains to Lake Erie and 71 per cent to the Ohio river. The Height of Land runs through northeast Marion; central Hardin, southeast Allen, southeast Auglaize, northeast Shelby and southeast to northwest Mercer. The mouth of the Miami is 423 feet above sea level and Lake Erie, 573. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 521 Soil erosion is robbing West Central Ohio with increasing tributes. This humus accumulated for perhaps millions of years or at the very least since the last ice age, is a loss that can never be replaced in the time of man. It is a shrinking natural asset to which public opinion awakes often too late as in the case of Spain and China. Within the lifetime of the writer hill slopes that once were grass or forest covered are now seamed with great gullies that eat back like cancers into the land and fill the stream beds with silt and gravel throwing up over their valleys in destructive floods. Soil is best appreciated by peoples who have packed on their shoulders, baskets of humus up to terrace the denuded hillsides as they do in Japan and some parts of Europe. Ward B. Shepard, United States Forest Inspector, has well stated the situation in Forests and Floods, Bulletin No. 19, United States Department of Agriculture. He says : "The excessive silt load carried by so many of our rivers comes from the washing away of topsoils under unskillful methods of farming and grazing, from the gullying of worn-out or abandoned hillside farms, and from the erosion of forest soils after destructive logging or fire. Injury or destruction of the vegetative cover, whether grass or forest, and of its spongy leaf litter and vegetable mold, accelerate the run-off of rain and snow water. In large portions of the Mississippi Valley, once clothed with dense forests, a slow, inconspicuous, but immensely significant process has been going on for decades—the deterioration of the vegetative cover, the loss of leaf litter and humus, and the laying bare of mineral soil." Within the memory of living men many a farm in West Central Ohio had its living spring which perpetually cooled the milk or watered the stock. These springs in many cases have sadly dwindled or too often entirely disappeared. On this score Shephard again says : "The influence of deforestation in drying up springs is widely established by authoritative examples both in America and in Europe. Springs form a 522 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO striking and common evidence of the presence of underground water, which is the principal contribution of forests in equalizing and prolonging the flow of streams. The disappearance of springs after deforestation is ordinarily proof that rainfall has run more rapidly from the denuded surface instead of sinking into the ground. These scattered woodlands of the central farming region are often in poor condition. They are apt to be thinned by hap-hazard culling of timber, by overgrazing and trampling, and—particularly in the southern portion of the region—by frequent 'woods burning.' The agricultural character of this region precludes the extension of forests on any scale sufficient to materially influence the discharge of its streams." The climate of West Central Ohio is greatly effected by the great cyclonic and anti-cyclonic pressure areas, most of the storms of the United States central portion passing out through the Saint Lawrence and converging on Ohio at the rate of two lows and two highs per week. The lows bring warm unsettled weather and the highs, fair, cool, weather. The elevation of Logan County reduces its average temperature about one degree the year round. There is a great bend southward in the isothermal lines in connection with the Mad River and Little Miami. From this fact, Marion and Greene counties have about the same average temperatures; and Delaware and Northern Clinton the same. Western Clark and Champaign are one degree warmer than the eastern portions of these counties. This drop in temperature extends straight down from Logan County to the Ohio River effecting every isothermal line. The first killing frosts in the fall and the last one in the spring follow this same eccentric course. There is five days difference in the last frost between Warren and Clark and Champaign, ten days between Warren on April 25 and Van Wert, Allen, Logan, Hardin on May 5; Northern Fayette gets its last frost on the same days as middle Mercer, Shelby, Champaign and HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 523 Clark, due to this bend southward. In the fall, Van Wert, Allen, Hardin, Marion, Auglaize, Shelby, Champaign, Clark get their first frost on the average at October 10, while Darke and Preble, Montgomery and Warren wait until October 15. The crop growing season likewise varies from less than 150 days in northern Van Wert to 178 days in Darke, Miami, Preble and part of Montgomery. This practically marks out the tobacco country. Most of Fayette, all of Clinton, western Greene, Clark, Champaign, southwest Logan, Shelby, southern Mercer and northern Darke have from 164 to 178 days, while the land north of this winding line has 150 to 164 days as contrasted with 192 at Cincinnati and Sandusky. CHAPTER LII POLITICAL PARTIES "THE INS AND OUTS"-EVOLUTION OF ISSUES-PARTY NAMES-BIRTH OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY - CIVIL WAR - NEWSPAPERS-TREND OF COUNTIES-PARTY LEADERS-PROHIBITION. Politics in West Central Ohio is streaked like good bacon, a streak of lean and a streak of fat. During most of the century and a third; the Democrats have been the lean streak and the Whigs and Republicans the fat one. The first 40 years were Democratic, the last 100, Whig and Republican. However, there have always been streaks of Democratic counties parallel to the Republicans. Broadly speaking the western and northwestern counties have been Democratic, the middle and eastern counties Republican. The strongholds of the latter follow the lines of the Underground Railroads while the Democratic faith has endured along with tobacco in Darke County and with the German-Irish settlements along the canals and railroads. There has always been an adamnant strain of Democracy scattered through the Republican rural sections, the Democratic heritage of early Virginian and Kentuckian ancestry or of Pennsylvania Dutch democracy. The battle began as soon as the territorial government was set up. Saint Clair, the Federalist follower of Washington, Hamilton and Adams, was soon at grips with Edward Tiffin and Thomas Worthington, the followers of Jefferson. The latter had freed their slaves in coming to Ohio but were of the Virginian school. They hated Saint Clair and all his strong government notions. Finally through Jefferson they - 525 - 526 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO triumphed and Saint Clair who had opposed statehood or at best wanted Ohio to include the eastern half which could be controlled by the Marietta New Englanders, was removed. This initial victory of the Jeffersonians was for the good of Ohio, since it started the new state with a broad and liberal basis of popular rights, drawing heavy immigration. As the Virginia Military Lands cover such a large portion of West Central Ohio, the first immigration was largely Virginian, Kentuckian and Pennsylvanian, and the rapid growth of the Miami and Scioto sections overbalanced the Western Reserve and Marietta strongholds of New England influence and Federalistic leanings. However this early Democratic preponderance in West Central Ohio had a fatal political weakness. It was not a commercial or industrial breed and with the rise of Ohio along these latter lines, the farming and small town type was bound to succumb before the superior political acumen or financial leverage of the bankers, industrialists and corporate interests with its following supplemented by the enfranchised negroes and the Civil War desertions from the Democratic ranks. The downfall of Democratic domination began with the Van Buren panic which identified hard times with the Democrats. Hard upon the heels of this came the slavery agitation and then the tremendous appeal of the Civil War to local patriotism. Upon the triumph of the Republicans was reared the conservative, military-political machine of the Republican party, bolstered by pensions, political preferment and possession of money bags protected by tariffs. Strange to believe today, the Democrats had been the original "Hard or Sound Money Men" having as agriculturists suffered most from the worthless bank note manipulations of their Whig bankers in the early days. On slavery the Federalists of New England origin were mainly on record in the constitutional convention for giving the negro the right of suffrage. The Virginians were badly divided. They were in a large majority and finally decided to reserve the HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 527 right of suffrage to such negroes as were then resident in the state but to forbid it to later arrivals. In the main the prohibition cause drew its strength from Republican ranks and the rural sections, while the liberal or wet element had its strongholds in the cities, mainly among the German-Irish and those ancestry had been long associated with liberal customs. However the prohibition question was never a clear cut issue between the two parties, each party having a strong minority which held issue with the main drift of the party as a whole. The Democratic party received what appeared an almost mortal wound in the Hip-hurrah "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too," campaign, but came back strong in 1841 in favor of specie payment in the banks, and Shannon, the Democratic candidate, defeated Corwin, the Whig idol, in 1842, on the sound banking and currency issues. As early as 1844 the Know Nothing-Ku-Klux Klan issue was rearing its head when Ohio German-Irish refused to support Webster because a convent had been burned at Charleston, Massachusetts, Webster's state. Ohio Whiggery went overwhelmingly for Clay and his "American system." Clay was frequently passing through West Central Ohio to Washington and return and quartering en route at Tom Corwin's house at Lebanon where much Whig strategy was doubtless hatched. Clay entered Ohio in 1842 to stump for Corwin. Both hammered to get the public tariff conscious, one of the meetings at Dayton having 100,000 in attendance. Lebanon held a meeting where resolutions were passed favoring a national bank, protection and distribution of the proceeds of public lands among the states. John McLean, who had once resided in Warren County, was proposed in some quarters as a substitute for Clay, for the presidency. The annexation of Texas gave a great boost to the Liberty party which had supported Harrison. Many Whigs hated it since they perceived the ultimate threat to the Whig party. For the 528 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO same reason the Democrats spoke courteously toward it since it threatened the Whigs. At this time the anti-bank Democrats dominated the party as opposed to Lewis Cass, the conservative Democratic leader. They denounced Cass and his friends as that "rotten, corrupt, venal Cass Clique, which should be guillotined from one end of the country to the other." At this time the Whigs held the Western Reserve, the Democrats the Virginia Military Lands in the main, the northwest and the east central portion settled by Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch. In 1844 the Democrats along the National Road were fearful lest Polk be against that project while Clay was accused of saying that if people were not permitted to have black slaves they must have white ones as such as he could not cut wood or black shoes or their wives work in the kitchen. The Germans supported Polk because Clay was thought to favor the "Native" American spirit. David Tod, the Democratic candidate and later Republican governor, threw the campaign by going over to the Whig banking position. One result was the election of Tom Corwin of Lebanon to the U. S. Senate, on the crest of a victory which was interpreted as Ohio's opposition to annexation of Texas, victory for the banks and for repeal of the Black laws. However, Polk had carried the nation and William "Sausage" Sawyer of Mercer County voiced the political creed of the time: "The Democratic party have a right to demand the Federal party leave the different offices from the highest to the lowest." The Democratic dissensions of this period foreshadowed the later desertions of David Tod, John Brough and Edwin M. Stanton. The Whig Xenia Torchlight pointed out Polk's strong attitude on the Texas boundary against weak Mexico and denounced as cowardly his compromise with England on Oregon. Ohio Democrats felt the North had been robbed by the 49th parallel boundary in Oregon. Southern Ohio began to turn against the Democrats due to racial prejudice coming from the accumulation of escaped slaves. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 529 In 1847 the Democrats of Mercer County vowed in resolutions they would not vote for an Abolitionist or anyone who favored the repeal of the Black Laws. The Whigs in 1846 had carried the state on that platform but never carried out their promises. The Xenia Torchlight, Whig in politics, openly espoused the cause of the Mexicans in the Mexican War, saying : "They fight for their country, their altar and their homes. We, for power, for plunder and extended rule. They are fighting for liberty; we, to extend the area of slavery." Governor Bartley declared the war a violation of the fundamental principles of our government. The Madison County Whigs in September, 1847, condemned the war as "uncalled for, inexpedient and unjust." The Whigs of Greene County, May, 1847, urged the impeachment of Polk for "Wanton, reckless and wicked assumption of power." Tom Corwin struck the prevailing keynote of Ohio Whiggery and his own political death note in his famous speech of February 11, 1847, in the U. S. Senate in which he said : "If I were a Mexican I would tell you 'Have you no room in your own country to bury your dead men? If you come into mine we will greet you with bloody hands and welcome you to hospitable graves.' " The speech did not take and Corwin was deserted by the senate Whigs and left to face an infuriated public opinion. The Democrats of Miami County likened Corwin to the Federalist secession movement in New England during the War of 1812. Brown County Democrats nominated him for president of Mexico. On the Wilmot Proviso the Democrats of Montgomery County under the leadership of Clement Vallandigham practically enunciated for the first time the doctrine of Squatter Sovereignty. Corwin's speech had cost him the Whig nomination for the presidency which went to Zachary Taylor. But the Xenia Torchlight ranted against Taylor until it was mistaken for an Abolition sheet and the Lebanon Star asked why one should vote with 530 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO "His eyes bandaged" for Taylor. The Miami Valley was still loyal to Corwin. A fine lot of jockeying took place between the Whig partisans of Corwin, McLean and Clay. R. McBrattney of the Xenia Torchlight led the Corwin men at the state convention. Even when the nomination of Taylor was inevitable, the Lebanon Star was fulminating against "Thrusting a slave holding military chieftain on the Whig party." McLean might have won the nomination were it not for Corwin. Meanwhile the Democrats were equally torn between the Cass and Van Buren men, the latter going Free Soil. It shows the inconsistencies of politics that Corwin was soon on the stump for Taylor, hero of the Mexican War, and that the Democrats swore Taylor used bloodhounds in running down his slaves and that he had 250 while Corwin vowed Taylor only used bloodhounds to track his slaves. Taylor lost Ohio for the Whigs due to the lukewarmness of Clay and McLean and the growth of the Free Soil party. The Democrats blamed Taylor's national victory to the treason of the Southern Democrats in preferring a Southern Whig to a Northern Democrat. Politics in Ohio was going round much as a dog chasing its tail. From 1840 to 1850 Ohio was a political whirligig where the old Democratic control was breaking to pieces over slavery and industrial depression, where the Whigs were being devoured by the Abolition sentiment; where the Whigs had right about faced from the wealthy to espouse by voice the poor man's cause during the panics but still did duty for wealth by favoring the banks; where the Democrats lost many to the Free Soil theory but recruited from the German-Irish and held tight on the frontier in the Northwest. The Democrats had been hurt in Ohio by the Southern leaders, not giving them national patronage or realizing the important strategic position of the state. The sectionalism of the South and that of the North tended to tighten its political belt. The Republican party was born of the sectional consciousness of the North. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 531 It was at Dayton in September, 1859, that Abraham Lincoln, called in from Illinois to help the Ohio Republican cause, first heard on a platform his name mentioned for the presidency. Lincoln had appeared upon the platform with Robert C. Schenck and the latter had done the graceful thing by referring to Lincoln as an honest, competent man whom it might be well to name for the presidency. Schenck went to the Chicago Republican convention and was one of Lincoln's staunchest supporters. Ohio during the Civil War was a center of Salmon P. Chase's manipulations to supplant Lincoln in 1864. In 1864 McClellan carried Mercer, Darke, Auglaize, Allen, Shelby and Marion counties. West Central Ohio having a strong Democratic sentiment was a place of turmoil during the war. The bitterness, immoderation and fury of partisanship even broke out in riots such as that of Dayton. The position of the Democrat was much similar to that of the German born citizen during the World War, when insult, accusation and threats were continually hurled regardless as to whether the accused had sons at the front or not, or whether his accuser might or might not be a profiteer and a slacker. Still the Democratic party was so strong in Ohio that it survived the war and was a factor to be reckoned with, which was true in the North only in Indiana, Missouri, Oregon and California. Villandigham had dared lead so boldly during the very white heat of the Civil War as to make Ohio the storm center of the North. Ohio was the industrial center of the United States and following the Civil War the center of political leadership. The war marked the turning point of the state from the agricultural to the industrial. The war made profits and created fortunes. West Central Ohio had leaped into the van in the making of agricultural mechinery. The war had checked the Mississippi River traffic and developed the railroads. The newspapers of Western Ohio, the 532 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO Cincinnati Enquirer (D.) and the Cincinnati Commercial (R.), led the political cohorts of the Middle West. The Democratic voter when he went to town returned with his Enquirer. It was his political bible. Newspapers wielded an influence not comprehensible today. As an eight-year-old boy the writer remembers lying on the floor with the Enquirer before him, trying to understand the mysterious jargon about the "McKinley Bill" by "Bill McKinley." Which was which and what was what sorely puzzled the small boy, but when he rose after prolonged mental wrestling the Enquirer had fulfilled its function in that household. He understood that the "McKinley Bill" was something very, very bad which had been done by "Bill McKinley" which was what the Enquirer was printed to convey. In smaller compass the Dayton Democrat and Springfield (Ohio) Republican served the same function. These and kindred ones in county seats were four-page papers with a little news, a lot of politics of the "Maine went hell bent for Gov. Kent" type and changed but little from 1860 to 1880. Any of them might well have flown a bloody shirt for a masthead. All Republican papers cheerfully voiced Horace Greeley's dictum that "Not all Democrats were horse thieves but all horse thieves were Democrats" while the Democratic papers were more circumspect as became the defeated party yet managed to convey the idea that the only good Republican was a dead one and that something was wrong with either the soul or mind of a Republican or he would not be a Republican. They were prepared to concede that if a Republican had a good soul he must have a poor mind unable to perceive the iniquity of his course, and if he had a good mind able to see what he was doing, he must have a bad soul or he would not do it. Of course if he had a good mind and a good soul he must follow the dictates of spiritual light and solid logic and be a Democrat. The rancor born of "Copperhead" and "Black Republican" days still endured and flared anew at each election. Little Re- HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 533 publicans at school collected in groups and militantly marching home would shout: "Trash goes before the broom" and the little Democrats would yell back : "Pigs follow the corn." Their elders devoted campaign time to marching about under torches that dripped grease over their campaign plug hats, yelling themselves hoarse for "James G. Blaine, the man from Maine," or vice versa, and if it was vice triumphant the Democrats hied to the woods and spliced several tall trees together and had a "pole raising" on the village square. Little Democrats at school and church got accustomed to hearing that if their father was a three-year volunteer who had re-enlisted for the war, he was merely tolerated; but if a Little Republican had a father who had been out in the 100 Days, he was a hero. If the first had an arm off or was disabled by a musket ball he got six to twelve dollars a month pension. The second got $24 a month since he "Voted as he shot." Generally these neighbors lived together amiably enough save at such times as the close elections of 1876 and 1884, when the specter of civil war leered again over the land due to contested elections. But as the Republicans stole one in 1876 and the Democrats reciprocated in 1884, they gave each other a grudging respect for their political talents and gradually settled down into tolerance and good feeling. Since the average schooling of this period was about on the third grade level, it might be imagined these Republicans and Democrats knew but little of the real issues. Strange to say, the understanding of most issues save for such obtuse ones as tariffs and monetary ratios was keener than any time up to 1933, since politics was ceaselessly debated at every corner grocery, each a countryside forum. Delaware, Union, Madison, Clark, Champaign, Logan, Greene, Warren and Clinton were rock-ribbed Republican, the heritage of Tom Corwin's spellbinding. Miami, Montgomery, Fayette and Preble leaned that way. Darke, Auglaize and Mercer were Democratic. Marion, Shelby, Allen and others were debatable. 534 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO This solidarity had not come at once when the war was over. The Unionist had been Abolitionists, Free Soilers, Know Nothings, and Anti-Slavery Democrats. These tended to fall apart after the struggle was over. Pensions, political offices and victory plus the spoils garnered by political pull held them together. President Johnson tore them apart over recognition of the South. The Democrats were fortunate in having such men as George H. Pendleton and Allen G. Thurman for leaders and brilliant and courageous Vallandigham was still a power. Ben Wade and J. D. Cox, the Unionist leaders, came to grief on the question of negro suffrage, Wade because he went farther than Ohio opinion and Cox because he lagged behind the Unionists. The campaign of 1866 brought out Rutherford B. Hayes, born in Delaware County. The issue was whether negroes should be enfranchised while at the same time white men who had deserted or evaded the draft should be disfranchised. Wagons laden with Democratic girls waved banners reading, "Fathers, save us from negro equality" ; Republican girls waved the answer from banners inscribed : "Honest black men are preferable to white traitors," "Democrats murdered our President," "If any man pulls down the American flag, give him a postoffice —A. Johnson." Hayes was elected by a small majority but the Democrats defeated the amendment, carried the legislature and elected the U. S. Senator. Substantially a victory for a party which had been divided by a terrible war. By 1868 the Republicans had reversed themselves on their previous record on money. The Republicans had issued fiat money during the war. The Democrats denounced it. By this date the Democrats advocated paying off bonds with greenbacks. They cried out against paying bondholders in gold and labor in greenbacks. The Republicans under John Sherman rushed in to befuddle the issue. For a time it looked as though the West would join with the South against the industrial East. The issue was practically evaded and Grant's war record carried the day, leaving the Republicans as the sound money and bankers' party. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 535 Vallandigham, who had blocked Pendleton's nomination in 1868, was accidentally shot while demonstrating a pistol to be used as evidence in a murder trial in Warren County. He died in the Grand Hotel, Lebanon. He was the idol of the Ohio Democratic masses but disliked by the Democratic politicians, which would seem to be a double recommendation. The Allen County Departure of 1873 was an outgrowth of various attempts made to gather the reformers and those disgusted with the war issues and Grant administration scandals into a "New Deal." It originated in Allen County under the leadership of T. E. Cunningham and Shelby Taylor and in a convention denounced the money corporations, lobbying, and class legislation. Allen G. Thurman, seeing the threat to Democracy, hamstrung the movement and nominated his uncle, "Roaring Bill" Allen, for governor at the Democratic convention. Allen was elected. Former Republicans began to gravitate to the Democrats. The Democratic party became more conservative in consequence. The industrial profits began to introduce that thing called "Society." Class lines began to develop. The farmers got together in the Grange, the Knights of Labor began to arise. The caste system of the East and of Europe was taking root. The Woman's Temperance Crusade had originated in Highland County in 1873, and a new issue was born which was to grow and for fifty years befog and run diagonally across every other issue. It was to reach the heights of fanaticism on both sides that had marked the Civil War. It was to divide the communities into sheep and goats; destroy friendships ; decide state and national elections; elect men regardless of their fitness for office, save as they did or did not square with that one issue. It began with an address December 23, 1873, in Music Hall, Hillsboro, given by Dr. Dio Lewis. It grew into the Anti-Saloon League and the 18th Amendment and the "Noble Experiment" and its repeal. It racked and convulsed society, it rose and fell like a ship in a stormy sea. It supplied Protestant pulpits with an almost exclusive theme for a quarter of a century. It is gone 536 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO but not forgotten and will come back again. Like the poor, the temperance question promises to be ever with us, being interwoven into human nature. Mother Stewart of Springfield, Wayne B. Wheeler, Dr. Howard Russell and Perly A. Baker were the leaders of this temperance movement which in political consequences was almost as unsettling as the Civil War in that it crowded all other issues off the stage and left them ignored until these latter assumed monstrous proportions. Every community, every village, every town rocked to its wet and dry fights. Parades were held with the burning zeal of a crusade. It was slow in gathering momentum and did not hit its stride until the state had seen the campaign of 1896. Prohibition was overshadowed at first by the results of the panic of 1873. Industrial depression was long and poverty gripped the land. Rhodes in his History of the United States says: "Between laborers and employers developed a degree of suspicion and cynicism hitherto scarcely paralleled in the hundred years of national life." This was the time of the demonetization of silver, which was to rise in 1896 and 1933 as a national issue. Many of the issues and debates of 1873 like those of 1819 and 1837 cover some of the issues of the present, showing there is something fundamentally wrong in the financial setup which crops up perennially and remains to be settled. Finance is a long way from being a science and remains for the future to solve. The campaign of 1879 was important in that it introduced modern campaign methods. Straw votes had been taken in taverns in 1839 but it remained for Charles Foster, known as "Calico Charlie" by his opponents, to introduce the thorough organization, polling precincts, paying precinct workers, barbecues, free feeds, etc. Foster was elected. The campaign of 1881 was listless, due to President Garfield lying at the point of death, and John W. Bookwalter of Springfield, the Democratic candidate against Foster, was defeated. Bookwalter had been a Republican but was said to have been HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 537 seen once carrying a torch in a Democratic procession and he had the necessary money to qualify as a candidate, being a millionaire manufacturer of water turbines. John Sherman's querulous complaints against Garfield and McKinley's betraying his ambition to be President are chapters that thread through every Ohio county. Mark Hanna, who appeared upon the scene in 1896, put big business into politics with both feet and the politicians' hands into its pockets up to the elbows. Hanna's methods may endure until the end of the republic and probably will cause that end. Calvin S. Brice of Allen County had mounted leadership of the Democratic National Committee by 1890. Brice and Hanna were of the industrial-corporation school which had by now definitely taken the leadership in both parties. Brice fell afoul of the free silver issue and new leadership sprang into the Democratic saddle in 1896. Bryan, the Democratic candidate, was rotten egged by Chicago college students and denounced as a "Mouthing, slobbering demagogue, whose patriotism was all in his jawbone." The campaign reached depths of bitterness and excitement unmatched since 1840. Almost every schoolhouse in West Central Ohio had several rallies by each party. Parades and processions, banners, pins, pictures cluttered society. The Democracy fought with the fervor of the Moslem dervish and the Republicans with the stolidity of a British square. The Democracy did not recover from the defeat until 1910. As the high water tide of Democracy in West Central Ohio between the Civil War and 1933 so far as fervor went, the result is interesting as showing the bed rock proclivities of the counties. Mercer, Darke, Allen, Auglaize, Marion and Shelby went Democratic. Van Wert, Preble, Montgomery, Miami, Logan, Champaign, Clark, Greene, Warren, Clinton, Fayette, Madison, Union, Hardin, and Morrow went Republican. Ohio had definitely allied itself with the Industrial East and West Central Ohio had 538 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO done so just as definitely. The history of the country from 1896 to 1932 was written in November, 1896. The election of Woodrow Wilson was a political fluke caused by a political split in the Republicans growing out of the Industrialism which first came to absolute control in 1896.. The World War continued Wilson in office. Save for this hiatus the political history of Ohio and United States for thirty-seven years was a monotonous repetition of reaffirmation of the Industrial viewpoint shot through with local spasms of prohibition. Under it all there slowly formed the fundamental issues buried in 1896, but which like Banquo's ghost, "Will not down," and have come forth to challenge their MacBeth. From 1896 to 1933 voting in West Central Ohio was a tame performance of duty or a registering of prejudice or partisan position. This was true in state and national elections especially, where the only exception was that of 1916 and that was lacking in anything approximating fire, although marked by deep settled conviction. The long stretch of political apathy was relieved by local struggles over prohibition which cut across party lines, and were signalized by a fierce rancor and frenzy that on a small scale echoed something of the flame of the past. The father of the writer, who had participated in the fighting frenzy of the BroughVallandigham contest of 1863, was moved when watching a dry parade in Springfield about 1909-10 to say he had seen nothing like it since the Vallandigham campaign. When the Ku Klux Klan hit its stride in 1923 with its fiery crosses on the hillsides, night meetings in the fields and huge parades in the cities, something of the old-time hysteria, which had marked other generations gone mad over causes, was again apparent. Both the dry and the Ku Klux Klan movements had a religious atmosphere, the one thing needful to set men marching with the fervor of an at least supposed crusade. Both causes swamped and for the time being usurped the Protestant pulpits or were the dominant thought of those congregations. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 539 When the historian of the future views these local tempests in a teapot through the long perspective of the years, it is likely he will see them in the light of indirect values rather than direct ones. It was a thawing out and breaking up of the cold ice field of political apathy which had descended with the industrial age. It was a preparatory breaking up of Civil War relations in which many a man was held fast in what was really an alien element much as a ship in the ice. The ship seems one with the ice but it is not. Many a Republican or Democrat by temperament was born into the opposite party and remained there from lack of political storms to set him free. This came about because when Republicans and Democrats marry, the children will partake of the divided heritage. The writer holds to the theory that man was made politically as much twain as the sexes, that like heat and cold, summer and winter, day and night, centrifugal and centripetal, positive and negative, man is made into great classes of political thought which have existed from the beginning and will exist to the end regardless of their nomenclature; that Republicans and Democrats existed long before the terms were coined and will exist when the designations are forgotten. Whether it be patrician and plebian in Rome itself, or Republican versus commercial as in Rome and Carthage, or King and Commons, or Tory and Whig or Conservative and Liberal as in England or agrarian versus industrial, North against South or East versus West and South, capital versus Labor, property rights against human rights, all are phases of an enduring and perpetual struggle of the past to consolidate and hold its winnings and of the present and future to seize, alter or possess them. The line of cleavage is seldom clean-cut and often dovetails as closely as the crack in a billiard ball and again it yawns as wide as the Grand Canyon or Great Rift in Africa. Better even than the metaphor of a frozen ice field, holding men contrary to their natural drift, is that of a lava field that has spouted hot from the crater of civil strife and cooled with 540 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO men building vineyards and orchards above it while the hidden fires accumulate below the peaceful surface. The Civil War was an unnatural alignment of the Industrial and Commercial East with the Agrarian West to conquer the Agrarian South. The South had a natural alignment with the West but the unnatural condition of slavery brought about an unnatural wedding of its ally, the West, with its enemy, the East. This condition was bound to break up once slavery vanished from the picture. These dry and Klan crusades were the breaking up process. They aligned dry Democrats and dry Republicans and wet Republicans and wet Democrats. They brought the Republican with 100 per cent American proclivities the alliance of his Democratic brethren of similar tendencies. They mixed and mingled the political elements for a new fusing, even if the fusing was delayed for other crucibles; they broke up the ore into chunks which could be carted to a new furnace. In this process of preparation, the position of the Democrat following the Civil War is at once illuminating and pathetic. For almost two generations he was a political pariah in Republican counties. To be a Democrat was to suffer a handicap socially, to be taboo politically and to be injured in a business way. It was a reproach to the young so that it helped create the condition described by the overworked term : inferiority complex. In consequence the Democratic party suffered a continual drain due to the desertion of its young into the opposite camp where opportunities were better. It speaks volumes for the stamina of the Democratic faith that it endured in rural sections at all. It received no nurture from national or state or county offices; it was apologetic, on the defensive, continually defeated. In such counties as Darke, Mercer and Auglaize it had the comfort of numbers and the grease of county office. Elsewhere it was open to the ridiculing cartoons of the Republicans which depicted it as a jackass starving HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 541 in a desert and rushing about seeking some chance thistle of an issue for food. On the opposite side, Brand Whitlock has pictured from the standpoint of his Urbana Republican background, how unthinkable it was for a man to be anything but a Republican. It was not questioned; it was not debatable; it just was; socially, politically, industrially, the Republicans sat under the bay tree and looked out contemptuously upon their politically Bedouin neighbors. Save that the rural Democracy descended from the Pennsylvania Dutch who had come through the fiery furnace of the Thirty Years War, the horrors of the Palatinate and the terrors of the ocean passage as indentured servants of whom 80 per cent died enroute amid cannibalism, storm, typhoid and typhus; save that the Scotch-Irish had grown dour in battle for the faith, with the cold sod of northern Ireland and in half century of struggle with the red savage, it could not have endured. Charles Foster had taught organization; Mark Hanna had added the twin ideas of the well filled war chest and the weapon of coercion, industrial, commercial or wherever it would be effective. The World War alienated many of the Germans and Irish from the Democracy; the industrial age sapped the ranks with its flood of prosperity. Men ceased to care for or to talk politics. They became enamored of sport, pleasure ; they grew soft; they affected disdain of politics as something "dirty." They abdicated as rulers. The Symphony of Sour Notes might be said to have its beginning in 1920 when all the discontent growing out of the World War sullenly set itself for a change. The Republican who had drawn in his politics with his mother's milk resented the Democratic occupation of power as an usurpation of his divine right. He had been loyal during the World War but he was sick of his suppression, itching to reinstate himself, sore at the industrial 542 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO and business restrictions imposed upon him. With a shrewd, sound political instinct he was determined the Democrats should not solidify the prestige of a great war into a permanent hold as the Republicans had so successfully done after the Civil War. In 1920 the German-American was supremely disgruntled. He had been wounded in the house of his friends. The Democratic party had brought opprobrium upon him and offended his racial loyalties and pride. The Irishman was sore over the failure of Wilson to dictate to English on Irish rights; the Italian was in a frenzy over Fiume. The returned soldiers were discontented over supposed losses of wage profits. Even the religious cults were martialed by skilful Republican leadership. President Harding's brother-in-law was lining up the Seventh Day Adventists against the League of Nations as the Beast of the Revelations. No group was too small to be mustered. Nineteen twenty-two with its repercussions of the panic of 1921, had its discontent cunningly discharged against the foreign born and negro who had displaced American labor, against the foreign born merchant who had, it thought, seized an undue portion of business. Nineteen twenty-eight under cover repeated the same viewpoint. It was the union of the againsts that carried the day. And 1932 saw a right about face but it was still the coalition of the discontented rather than affirmative who won. Successful campaigns from time of 1920 to 1933 were won by striking these sour notes. The voter voted his resentments. He was "Agin" rather than "Fer." Such victories as were scored by Coolidge in 1924 was just the recording of the unstirred static condition. The voter when stirred was stirred antagonistically and not affirmatively. The voter for the past generation and especially as represented in 1932 and 1933 was in a "Thumbs down," "Off with his head," "Turn the rascals out" attitude. The surly, muttering growl of the discontented, irritated. Whether it represented the irritability that preceded serious sickness or HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 543 accompanies recovery from a debauch, only time can tell. Business had debauched and politics had sickened the public mind. Standing in West Central Ohio in 1933 one could only conclude an article on its century-old politics by saying, A new leaf was definitely turned, a new time coming from under the dawn or going out into the sunset and entering darkness. Which? We only know an era had ended, another one was borning. CHAPTER LIII ART AND LITERATURE DEVELOPMENT OF ART-EARLY ARTISTS-PAINTERS AND THEIR WORK- LITERATURE-AUTHORS, NEWSPAPER MEN-OTHER WRITERS. If a curve is a line of beauty then the corollary may be true that the line of beauty is always curved. Art in West Central Ohio has followed a curve rhythmic as the rising and falling of the waves of time. Strangely enough prehistoric man in West Central Ohio reached artistic heights which surpassed some of his successors. The Hopewell culture is claimed as the highest exposition of art to be found in the Stone Age the world over. This culture reached its apex in its textiles, but its worked copper, its pottery decorated in symbolic geometric designs and its mountings of pearls, its use of colored pigments testified to the possession of no mean artistic sense. It far surpassed in these respects the more utilitarian craft of the pioneer or the Indian. With the pioneer, handicraft turned to the practical, and beauty of line might repose in the curve of the shaven ax handle, the wooden hoe, the heavy timbered plow, in scrapers, hay forks, in carved powder horns, the sweep of riffle butts, or the more homely ladles, mashers, paddles and woodenware of the housewife. Just as for the Indian it crept into the lines of the birch bark canoe, the head dress of the warrior, the curve of the bow and the symmetry of the arrow, so beauty strove and struggled for - 545 - 546 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO expression even amid danger and death. There was beauty in the Long Rifle but it was the beauty of cold menace. With the coming of a bit of leisure, art began to peer timidly and hesitatingly from the gouged rather than carved chest, in the interior woodwork of wild cherry and walnut; it began to be hammered into the wrought iron of doors, the andirons, for art will not be denied and comes and whispers into the wistful ears of the untutored, pointing to the lines of beeches, the bolls of oaks, the ripples of waters and spreads ever open the paintbox God used in coloring the sky, the feathers of the bird and the petals of the flower. From 1800 to 1870 art was burdened by cumbersome lines in which the thought of strength overrode the fine and delicate. Keys of that time are enormous, weapons fit to brain intruders, levers to pry open doors rather than unlock them. The Franklin stove was a cast iron open fire place with andirons rather than a closed, clever, and convenient confinement for fire. At best it transplanted the fireplace into the center of the room. Betty lamps, swung from brackets, burned grease with a dim, faint glow, and fought the dark back until wealth had come in fattened cattle fit for tallow candles. Copper kettles, hammered or spun, were prized possessions and one served a neighborhood for apple butter making. Furniture depended not upon glue but on the wooden pin for joining. Later came the drop leaf tables, where room was so essential in the small houses of the early day. With the drop leaf table came the small bedside stands, simple creations with one drawer. By the light of the Betty lamp, woman pieced and quilted the precious scraps of parti-colored cloth, saved from old dresses, collected like almost as slowly as gold, stored away in sacks, and brought forth in winter evenings while the mother taught the small hands of the diminutive daughter to wrestle with four-patch, nine-patch, onto ocean wave, monkey wrench, Star of Bethlehem, Anchor, Log Cabin, and prideful creations. Like the good HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 547 woman of the Scriptures, she brought her goods from afar, gathering her dyes from the wood and field, boiling and straining out her liquid beauties, visioning her quilt as a painter sees his finished picture. Yet not all life was sordid. Some of the old brick and stone houses that crown the hills and sentinel the valleys date back before the War of 1812. Jonathan Donnell, first settler of Clark County carved 1811 above his capacious stone home by Mad River. Many an old house has walls and beams that are the envy and delight of modern builders. The writer knows a barn whose 18-inch squared beams are many of them of black walnut. He has seen white oak, black walnut cut out of siding when remodeling was going on and ripped up black walnut floors in old factories. The Piatts of Mac-a-chack were building substantial wooden mills fitted for the storms of a century, builders then as ever, forerunners of the English Gothic variant which Don Piatt was to lovingly build for Louise Kirby by the legend bordered Mac-achack. Godfrey Frankenstein was come by the first third of the Century to capture the wild native beauties of Clark County streams and let it carry him to the presidency of the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts. But painting in West Central Ohio first ran rather largely to portraits. S. Jerome Uhl had his studio in Springfield in 1880 but he had been not alone in Clark County nor earliest. Worthington Whittredge, born 1820, had painted such landscapes as "Poachers," "Trout Brook in the Catskills," and risen to the presidency of the National Academy of Design in 1875. Whittredge's own physical form is preserved to posterity in Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware," for which Whittredge acted as model of Washington. West Central Ohio is but one-two hundredth of the area of the United States, but she boasts in John Quincy Adam Ward an American sculptor second only to St. Gaudens. His "Indian 548 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO Hunter" in Central Park, New York; "Garfield," in the Capitol grounds, Washington ; and "General Thomas," are American gems. Ward was of that family which had the curious blend of the white savage in John Ward, the soldier, James Ward of Point Pleasant, and William Ward, companion, partner, and finally bitterly hated enemy of Simon Kenton. Ward began as a child to model in the clay of his fathers farm near Urbana, shaping the head of a negro servant. Visitors to Simon Kenton's grave in Urbana will find an example of Ward's work in Kenton's monument. In Urbana lives Alice Archer Sewell James, poetess, painter, clay modeller, pageant writer, wife of John James, editor, writer, come of a long line of men who loved pen and printer's ink. Mrs. James and her work are listed in Poets of Ohio, in America's Who's Who, and her paintings hang on the walls of Paris salons and Carnegie Institute. Dayton has given West Central Ohio, Charles Soule, Sr., John Insco Williams and Laura C. Berge, portrait painters, and Edmond Edmondson, still life and portrait painter. The Dayton Art Museum, a gift of Mrs. Harrie Gardner Carnell, houses a growing collection that is the pride of Dayton. The Museum was organized in 1912 with Mrs. Henry Stoddard as president. The flood of 1913 destroyed the first collection, but the present beautiful Renaissance building typified the Dayton spirit which rises triumphant from disaster. It houses the Dayton Art School. Dayton painters of distinction include Walter Otto Beck, who did a series on the life of Christ for the Brooklyn Museum; Miss Annie Campbell, teacher and painter; Ernest Blumenchein, of the Taos Indian School of Painting; A. Lytle Wuichet, landscapes and portraits; Juliet Burdoin, oil and water colors, landscapes and flower studies; Mrs. Jess Brown Aull, "Boats of Concarneau," "Red Book" ; John A. King, instructor in the Dayton Art Institute, portraits and still life; Rosalie Lowry, portraits and flower studies; Martha K. Schauer, water colorist and instructor HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 549 at Stivers H. S., and Theodore H. Pond, former director of the Dayton Art School. Cole Phillips, of Springfield, won distinction as an illustrator in New York; Walter Tittle, of Springfield, is famed for his etchings, dry point work, and lithographs. He did twenty-five dry point portraits of the leaders of the Washington Limitations of Armament conference. Tittle has done oils of Joseph Conrad and Bernard Shaw in London. Dayton, under L. D. Sauer, organized the Dayton Society of Etchers in 1920. William A. Rogers, of Springfield, started to illustrate for Harper's Weekly in 1877. His work was praised by Pennell of the London Punch. Rogers is author of the "World Worth While" and has received the ribbon of the French Legion of Honor. Devoos Woodward Driscoll, head of the advertising department of the National Cash Register in Dayton, achieved distinction as a cartoonist. Harry Bressler, once on the Dayton News, received national recognition, as a cartoonist. Orrin Steinberger, Clark County, "The Treetop Artist," in the opinion of many threw away a most promising career to follow health and self-taught fads. Steinberger illustrated for some of the national publications and was art instructor at Wittenberg College. His treetop studio and later his hermit home at Crane City, attracted nation-wide notice. Finally West Central Ohio in Frank McKinney Hubbard, of Bellefontaine, "Kin Hubbard," gave to the nation a chip of original American humor. Hubbard as creator of "Abe Martin" and a series of buccolic character, won a niche in the. Hall of Fame of American humor. When Hubbard died, Christmas Day, 1930, something irreplaceable passed with him. West Central Ohio has the Marion Art Club, organized 1921, with Mrs. James Craumer, president; the Springfield Sketch Club, A. H. Pedrick, secretary, and three art schools : Antioch College, Irving Cannon, head instructor; Ohio Wesleyan, Sallie Thomson Humphreys, director, and the Dayton Art Institute.