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IT WAS NOT IN THE American
tradition that men must re main on the land where they were born, any more than
they must follow their father’s trade. More than any people on the globe they
were free to go where they chose, making their living in the way they chose.
After the Revolutionary War, the nation was on the march with a great continent
to occupy and rule.
Akron had two advantages, its
founders and its neighbors, to balance against its unfavorable location. To a
greater degree than any other state in the union, Ohio, first state carved out
of the Northwest Territory, would bear the imprint of the two dominant strains
of American life; the Cavaliers of Virginia and the Puritans of New England.
Akron was settled by men from
Connecticut, who brought their traditions of manufacture with them, along with
their Bibles and spinning wheels. It would grow up in an industrial atmosphere
and could look south to a great trading territory where it might sell its goods,
if it could make goods, and a great source of raw materials, if it could find
some way to put those materials to use.
From its vantage point atop
the continental divide it might become a link between the industrial North and
the agricultural South. The mark of Virginia and Connecticut would long lie
across the land and give the state a balanced economy and culture that made it
one of the great states of the Union.
The Virginians brought their
traditions of broad lands and gracious hospitality with them; of riding horses
and hunting dogs, great brick and stone homes of Georgian and colonial
architecture with broad halls and winding stairways which you may still find
around Chillicothe and along the National Turnpike.
The New Englanders built their
villages around town squares, with high-spired meeting houses and churches in
the center, surrounded by white houses with green shutters and red roofs, such
as you will find in Hudson, Tallmadge, Leroy, Streetsboro, Twinsburg—and for
that matter, Marietta, another Connecticut settlement—which still look much like
transplanted bits of New England.
A great Virginian of that day,
Thomas Jefferson, might well express the hope that America would always be an
agricultural nation, leaving the bickering of commerce and trade to whoever
cared for it. Trade to him meant scheming and sharp practice, wooden nutmegs,
and let the buyer beware. He might have held different views if he had had to
make a living in the Connecticut valley or on the rocky hillsides of Vermont.
In any case, this narrative
will point out how America came into a broader conception of trade, realized it
could not become a great industrial nation by tricking the un suspecting; could
make more money by producing things people needed and could use, that the seller
rather than the buyer must beware if he was to build up a permanent business.
Because of its location and
topography there could easily have been no Akron at all, or at best only a small
canal town which would flourish briefly with its water- borne traffic and fall
into obscurity once that passed. In the conquest of the West men by-passed other
sections no less inviting and no harder to traverse, continued on, leaving them
isolated.
But the New Englanders were
the one group in all the country to whom such a terrain would be no deterrent.
They had lived in much the
same kind of country, and finding the land not too well suited for farming, had
fallen back on their ingenuity to make a living in other ways, with the result
that New England had become the principal manufacturing section of the nation.
Such men would see
possibilities in Northern Ohio. The hills and streams meant potential water
power to them, and water power would turn mill wheels.
Historical facts as well as
topography divided Ohio into a north and south. Immediately after achieving
independence, the young republic set out on the task of settling the country
beyond the Appalachians; the millions of rich acres which the fortunes of war
had laid in its lap. The Indians had owned the country, the French had explored
and occupied it, the British had defeated the French, and now with England in
turn beaten, whatever tide there was to this area, beyond that of the real
owners, the Indians, rested with the new nation.
In organizing the Northwest
Territory, Congress ran into the fact that various British rulers had made grants
to the colonies over the years, most of them extending to the Pacific, wherever
that was. Charles II, in a generous impulse in 1662, had made the grant to
Connecticut. Some of these grants were overlapping, and in any case did not mean
too much, since they had not been made effective through settlement or
occupancy. The land granted to Connecticut was not even contiguous with the home
state.
There was considerable jealousy
among the states after the Revolution, lest some grow too powerful, and several
states which had no western holdings, notably Maryland, made quite a point of
this, demanded that the lands be ceded back to the general government before
they would join the Confederation.
Virginia and Connecticut did
so with reservations. Virginia asked for enough land to carry out her promises
to her Revolutionary soldiers, and Connecticut retained, as its “Western
Reserve,” a strip of land along Lake Erie extending 120 miles west from the
Pennsylvania line. It comprised 3,250,000 acres, including the present cities of
Ashtabula, Painesville, Kent, Ravenna, Cleveland, Lo rain, Elyria, Oberlin, and
as far south as Warren, Youngstown and Akron.
Virginia made a better
bargain. Knowing the country through the surveying and soldiering done by her ad
venturous sons, she picked the choicest section of the state, a wedge-shaped
track along the Ohio between the Scioto and Little Miami Rivers, extending north
to the watershed around Bellefontaine and St. Mary’s. It was a rolling country,
well-drained by creeks and rivers, covered with timber, wild rye, blue grass and
clover, and with game aplenty.
The land picked by Connecticut
was much less inviting. South of the divide the land lay fairly level. In fact,
six miles south of Akron at the head of navigation of the Tuscarawas, the
rainfall seemed to hesitate whether to flow north or south, and at Young’s Hotel
a stopping point for travellers for 100 years, they will still show you a point
at the canal spillway where the water flows both ways, part of it north to the
St. Lawrence and part south to the Gulf of Mexico.
But this favored section was
small in area—the Western Reserve extended south only to the 41st parallel, a
short distance from the watershed. Things were quite different to the north. The
Cuyahoga cuts through the center of Cleveland a hundred feet below Euclid Avenue
and the valleys of Rocky River and the Chagrin, bounding the city east and west,
are fully as deep and rugged.
Small wonder Connecticut was
in no great hurry to claim its inheritance and waited nearly a third of a
century; the math tide of immigration not starting until after the War of 1812.
Virginia got to its task
immediately after the Revolution. Cincinnati would be a great city before
Cleveland or Toledo were ever heard of, and Marietta was thirty- seven years old
when Akron was born.
There were reasons other than
topography why the southern part of the state was settled first. Ohio lay al
most in Virginia’s back yard. Once over the mountains, settlers would find easy
transportation by water. The Ohio River ran along the full length of the state
and had broad tributaries like the Muskingum, the Scioto and the Miami, reaching
deep into the interior. The National Highway would soon be hewed across the
state. Virginia had to battle the Indians, but
would not encounter serious physical obstacles.
The adventurous Virginians,
with land grants from the state in their saddle bags, handy with axe and rifle,
familiar with the dangers of the frontier, wasted no time. The size of the
grants varied with their Army rank. A private got 100 acres, a colonel 5,000,
and Baron Von Steuben, drill master of the Revolution, received 15,000 acres.
They could pick out their land
wherever they chose; blue grass bottom lands for farming, rolling hills and
woodland for hunting, with no remote regard for parallels of latitude and
longitude—a circumstance which would bring headaches to later surveyors,
dragging their transits and chains along meander lines which ran all over the
map, with such bench marks as a lone tree on a hilltop, a large boulder, the
junction of two streams, or a monument sunk flush with the ground.
Baron Von Steuben selected a
tract around Chillicothe, later the state capital. Colonel Alexander H.
Spottswood, Washington’s aide-dc-camp, picked a rolling stretch in Fayette
County near Washington Court House, a name symbolic of its Virginia origin. One
wealthy planter gave his grant to his daughter on condition that she take her
new husband, the stable master, off to Ohio with her, and stay there—which the
young couple did, and lived happily and prosperously ever after.
Connecticut found Ohio much
less accessible. It called for a 600-mile pilgrimage across the whole state of
New York, which men must make on foot or horseback, or toilsomely by ox team,
through unsettled country, with few highways and few settlements along the way.
Some early settlers built boats at the head of Lake Ontario, paddled along the
shore to Niagara, detoured around the falls, built new boats at Buffalo, and
continued on along Lake Erie to their destination.
When the Western Reserve was
awarded to Connecticut, the legislature was somewhat of a loss to know what to
do with it. Finally it decided to sell off the whole tract to a syndicate of
sixty men, the Connecticut Land Company, and let them struggle with the job of
settling the country. The price was thirty-five cents an acre; the money going
into the state school fund.
In meticulous New England
fashion, the land company surveyed the land in a checkerboard pattern, quite
different from Virginia’s plan. Sections called ranges were laid out a mile
square, and thirty-six of these ranges, six miles each way, constituted a
township. Then it held a drawing among its stockholders. Whether they drew good
land or bad was a matter of chance.
But it was one thing to own a
great tract of distant land and quite another to get people to live on it.
Connecticut men were no timid stay-at-homes, as their exploration of the seven
seas bears witness. But they were seafaring and commercial folk.
A few came out fairly early to
the more accessible sections. Moses Cleaveland of Hartford (1754-1806), Yale
graduate and one of the original stockholders of the land company, drew a broad
stretch of land along Lake Erie just where the Cuyahoga River breaks the shore
line to create a harbor. Being a surveyor, like many men of his day, including
George Washington, he realized the value of the property.
Cleaveland organized a group
of fifty-two men, followed the two lakes by boat until on July 4, 1796, he came
to a river he assumed was the Cuyahoga, and went ashore to celebrate. He
discovered a few days later that he had stopped at the wrong river, the Cuyahoga
lying twenty miles further west. Naming the first river the Chagrin, in
acknowledgment of his mistake, he went on to lay the foundation of the town
which bears his name today. That done, he went back to Connecticut, and never
lived in his town.
The legend is that a printer
on an early newspaper changed the name of the town. It was one letter too long
to fit a headline, so he left out the first “a”, which he thought was not
necessary anyhow—and everyone decided that it was a good idea, so Cleaveland
became Cleveland.
Ohio’s first city grew slowly.
It was incorporated in 1814, but did not break into the census figures until
1830, when it showed a population of 1,076 people. John Young started the town
of Youngstown in 1799, but it did not amount to anything until the first rolling
mill and blast furnace was started in 1845-46. An Indian stockade was built on
the site of Toledo in 1800 and a townsite laid out in 1807, but the town was not
incorporated until 1843. By contrast, Dayton was incorporated in 1805, and
Columbus became the state capital in 1812.
A few people went inland from
Cleveland, picking out the better sections. Deacon David Hudson came out from
Bradford, Connecticut, in 1799 to start the town of Hudson; Colonel Benjamin
Talimadge from Litchifeld in 1806 to start the town bearing his name, and
Jonathan Hale from Glastonbury in 1810 to start the town of Bath.
The oddly-named town of
Twinsburg, just north of Hudson, honors Moses and Aaron Wilcox, (1771-1828), of
Killingsworth, Connecticut, who were not only identical twins, but married
sisters, had the same number of children, owned their property in common, fell
ill of the same disease, died on the same day, and were buried in the same
grave.
These twins were among several
proprietors of the Twinsburg area, and when they came west in 1823, at the age
of fifty-two, they found a little settlement already started. The first comer
had named it Millsville, for him self. Moses and Aaron donated six acres of land
for the town square which every Akron-Cleveland traveller remembers, and spent
twenty dollars in cash to improve it, on condition that the settlement change
its name.
Nobody came to Akron, though
Captain Joseph Hart, a Revolutionary soldier, took up a tract in 1807 at
Middlebury on the Little Cuyahoga two miles east, and Major Miner Spicer joined
him three years later, took up a 260- acre section in the woods where Buchtel
College was built afterwards. There were a few Indians still around, but they
made no trouble and disappeared after the War of 1812. Using their New England
training, the settlers built dams across the Cuyahoga River at Peninsula, Bath
and one at Middlebury.
There were enough settlers
around to rally to the colors during the second war with England. Legend has it
that three of the vessels for Perry’s squadron, the Portage, the Porcupine and
the Hornet, were built at Bath and floated down the Cuyahoga River to the lake.
When Sam Lane came to town in 1835 he found many people who claimed they heard
the cannonading in the battle of Lake Erie, and Bath would celebrate the
anniversary of that engagement for many years.
Warren, near the Pennsylvania
line, was an important town. It was the county seat of Trumbull County which
comprised the entire Reserve, and was named for Governor Jonathan of
Connecticut. Warren is of interest to Akron because it was there that Simon
Perkins, a young surveyor from Litchfield, Connecticut, came in 1798 with his
bride and stayed on as agent for the land company.
An aggressive personality, who
won the rank of brigadier general in the War of 1812 with special commendation
from William Henry Harrison for leadership and courage, Simon Perkins bought a
considerable tract of land near Warren in 1804, and three years later picked up
a thousand aces, fifty miles to the west, which was being sold for taxes.
General Perkins knew this
tract because he had surveyed it. It was uneven, rough, swampy in places, and
was crossed by two valleys. He had no special use for it, but the taxes amounted
to only a little more than four dollars a year; something one could buy and
forget about.
He would not know for another
eighteen years how good a buy he had made.
It has been said that the
easiest way to make money is to have your grandfather buy a farm in what later
will be the business center of an important city. General Perkins did just this.
The property picked up for taxes is today the heart of downtown Akron.
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