|
THIS IS THE STORY of a city
which grew up at the wrong place.
By all the rules there should
never have been even a settlement here. Most cities started as trading points at
strategic locations, around land-locked harbors, or the junction of great
rivers, where people could get in and out easily—and usually with important
natural resources nearby. Akron lay back in the woods, on top of a series of
hills and swamps with neither mineral wealth nor even good farm land at hand. No
rivers ran through the town. It was only thirty-five miles from Lake Erie, but
that in a day when men must travel on foot or horseback made it all but
inaccessible, considering the topography along the way.
Looking back at it now, there
seems no reason for people to settle here, and many reasons which all but for
bade it. But a city of a third of a million people did grow up here, one which
pioneered in canal boats, railroads, street cars, interurbans, truck lines, bus
lines; which changed the breakfast habits of America, and drove the vine-covered
backhouse out of the American scene; which grasped and held three-fourths of the
billion-dollar rubber industry.
It is a city which saw the
beginnings of price-fixing, mergers, big business, the sit-down strike and the
ClO; which saw the beginnings of mass production and the evolution of a program
under which America would pay the world’s highest wages, and become the greatest
industrial nation of the world.
All of the principles of
private enterprise can be traced by actual case examples in this one city—the
risks and rewards of business, the character of competition and its effect on
the competitors—and the public; the effect of financial success on the people
who win it and the community; and finally the impermanent character of business fortunes.
Akron became the center of the
rubber industry, the last place in the country one might expect that industry to
locate. It had to go to Brazil or Africa, and later half way around the world,
for its rubber; to Egypt’s Nile valley or the Sea Islands off the Georgia coast
for its cotton— and no ocean vessel could get within 500 miles of it.
Rubber is a particularly
thirsty industry and the city lies at almost the highest elevation in the state.
What water falls on top of a hill runs away. Even today Akron has to go over to
the next county for its drinking water.
Still people have been able to
make a better-than- average living in Akron for a hundred years.
Why did a city ever grow up at
this point?
The story of Akron, as of all
cities, goes back to a million years B.C. The cooling of the earth’s crust left
a great continent rising out of the ocean. As there was not room enough for all
the land masses, writhing contortions threw up great mountain chains. In those
mountains the mysterious chemistry of the universe left natural resources which
would be useful to man if he had the wit and the will to uncover them—iron ore,
coal and petroleum. Using those resources and the highways which the lakes and
the rivers provided, men might create a Ruhr valley there, around the Great
Lakes, with great cities at such strategically located points as Detroit,
Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and even at outposts like Chicago, Milwaukee and
Minneapolis.
But Akron was not in a position
to share in this. Not only was it away from any navigable stream, but it lay
squarely astride the continental divide which separates the nation’s two great
river systems, the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence. Two rivers swing up toward
it, the Cuyahoga from the north and the Tuscarawas from the south, but both turn
back before the barricade thrown up by the divide.
The only semblance of a natural
highway Akron had was an Indian trail between the two rivers. The divide is only
eight miles wide at this point, and Indians portaging canoes and household goods
over it had worn a path which for twenty years served as the western boundary of
the United States through a treaty with the Six Indian Nations in 1785.
George Rogers Clark, Arthur Lee
and Richard Butler signed for the new United States Government at Ft. McIntosh
near Beaver, Pa., with the chiefs of the Wyandots, Chippewas, Delawares and
Ottawas, and any white man who crossed west of the portage, or any Indians who
crossed east of it, was on his own, and neither tribe nor government took
responsibility for what happened to them.
The boundary was confirmed by
two later treaties, that of Ft. Harmar in 1787, and the treaty of Greenville in
1795, after Mad Anthony Wayne’s victory in the Battle of the Fallen Timbers. It
was not until 1805 in the treaty of Ft. Industry (Toledo) that the Indians gave
up title to all the Western Reserve lying west of the portage. Akron is still
proud of the fact that Portage Path, its leading residential thoroughfare, was
once the western boundary of the United States.
The divide where Akron lies was
not a sharp ridgepole, with the rainfall draining north and south in orderly
fashion. Rather it was a broad stretch of broken and irregular terrain, marked
by escarpments of hills, valleys, swamps and outcroppings of rock.
Twenty lakes were trapped on
top the watershed by holes in the ground, until one could well believe that Paul
Bunyan’s blue ox, who was twenty-four ax-handles and a plug of tobacco wide
between the eyes (some people say he was forty-two ax-handles wide and that Jim,
the pet cow, got lost one winter flying across to his favorite roosting place on
the left horn, but that probably is an exaggeration), had stamped around there a
while, left his footprints, and went on.
The two rivers which come
almost into Akron are in striking contrast to each other. The Tuscarawas to the
south moves leisurely downhill for 300 miles across the state to the Ohio River,
like most well-behaved streams.
But the Cuyahoga, meaning
crooked in the Indian language, descends 400 feet in thirty-five miles. It had
to smash through solid rock in the glacial en to carry the vast accumulation of
ice to Lake Erie; created narrow gorges 200 feet deep in places, wide twisting
valleys else where, difficult to traverse or to cultivate.
Akron’s topography is further
complicated by an ambitous tributary, the Little Cuyahoga, which cut squarely
across the present town to join the main river, less than a mile from the
Portage Hotel. A mighty stream in its day, it created a valley ten times too
wide and deep for it today, and for nearly a century sweating teams and groaning
electric cars had to make a long dip and a toil some climb to go from North Hill
to downtown. The viaduct which finally bridged it is more than 2,800 feet long.
Further to complicate the
strange topography of Akron was a great gulley carved through the center of town
a hundred thousand years ago by the advances and recessions of the ice caps—then
filled up again with dirt, sand, gravel and glacial deposit.
This gulley, running north and
south, was a mile wide, and more than twice as deep as the present Little
Cuyahoga valley. One edge of the valley was in the center of downtown Main
Street, the other edge was half way up West Hill. This accounts for the old
stone quarry where the Ohio Building later went up, while just across the street
the contractors on the Flatiron Building could excavate for the foundations with
a mule and a dump truck.
The Merriman home, which is
still standing on West Market Street, with the chain and bucket hoist along
side, was at the other side of the valley. Doctor Merriman could get all the
water he and his neighbors wanted by digging a well fifteen feet deep, but
Doctor Weller, next door, went down 150 feet without striking water.
Scenically the country around
Akron was superb. The gorges, cut through solid rock, hold dignity and majesty.
The hills and valleys were kindly treated by wind and sun and rain, and were
covered by great forests of oak, walnut, hickory, maple and chestnut, and
occasional stands of elm, sycamore, beech, silver birch and sassafrass, willows
along the creek bottoms, and here and there the buckeye which gave the state its
name. Wild flowers and berry bushes grew tall and lush, dogwoods in the spring
and the scarlet sumac in the fall contrasted with the green, orange and flaming
reds of autumn leaves. There was game aplenty; bear and deer, wild geese, ducks
and turkeys, even buffalos—a happy hunting ground for red man or white.
But the section was not
particularly adapted to agriculture, manufacture or commerce. Early settlers
seeking farm land took one look and continued on west where the land lay flat
and fertile for a thousand miles.
So the question is asked. Why
did anyone ever stop at Akron when he had all the country to choose from?
Any given city is merely a
collection of people trying to get ahead in the world. The nation is the sum
total of their energies, ambitions and resourcefulness. So the story of how
difficulties were overcome at Akron may throw some light on the kind of people
we are and the principles on which this nation was built.
Next Chapter
Contents | 
