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Peculiarities of American Cities. Glazier Willard W.
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Автор произведения Glazier Willard W.
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The breaking up of the ice in the river, in the spring, is also a time of great peril to property. There is usually more or less rise in the river at that period, with a swifter current, and the floating blocks sometimes drag boats away from their moorings, and crush them to either partial or utter destruction. The Ohio River, known to the French as La Belle Riviere, so called because of its high and picturesque banks, is, like the Mississippi, a capricious stream, and neither life nor property is always safe upon its bosom or along its shores.
The pride of Cincinnati is Spring Grove Cemetery, five miles northwest of the city, which is one of the most beautiful in the West. It is in the valley of Mill Creek, and is approached by a handsome avenue, one hundred feet wide. It contains six hundred acres, well wooded, and so laid out as to present the appearance of a park. The boundaries of the lots are indicated by sunken stone posts at each corner, there being neither railing, fence, nor hedge within the cemetery, to define these lots. The graves are leveled off, even with the ground, and the monuments are remarkable, for their variety and good taste. The Dexter mausoleum, which represents a Gothic chapel, will attract special attention; while one of the principal objects in the cemetery is the bronze statue of a soldier, cast in Munich, and erected in 1864, to the memory of the Ohio volunteer soldiers who died during the War.
In spite of many changes for the better since the war, Cincinnati still retains her distinctive character. She has taken long strides in the direction of intellectual development, and has now numerous and extensive public libraries, of which any city might be proud. The theatres and other places of amusement, which, not long since, were represented by shaky buildings, third-rate talent and a general dearth of attractions, and patronized more largely by the river men than by any other single class, have risen to take rank among the best in the country. But she is still a city noted for her wealth; for her solid business enterprises and scrupulous honesty, rather than for that spirit of speculation in which, in other cities, fortunes are quickly made, and even more quickly lost. Her prosperity has a solid foundation in her factories, her foundries, her mills and engine shops. A man, to be successful in Cincinnati, must know how to make and to do, as well as how to buy and sell. Men have risen from the humblest ranks by dint of industry and energy alone, while they were yet young, to be the masters of princely fortunes. Even a newspaper publisher in that city, a few years since, estimated his property at five millions of dollars, an instance which, probably, has not a parallel in the civilized world. Nicholas Longworth died worth twelve millions of dollars, and her living millionaires are to be counted by hundreds.
Cincinnati stands in the front rank of the manufacturing cities of America, and the secret of her financial success is that she has made what the people of Ohio and other States needed and were sure to buy. Receiving their products in return, and turning these to account, her merchants have made a double profit. As long as the Ohio River sweeps by the city's front, and as long as the smoke of her factories and her foundries ascends to heaven and obscures the fair face thereof, and corn, transformed into pork, is sent away in such quantities to the Eastern cities and to Europe; so long as the cotton of the South, the hay of the blue grass region, and the grain of the North and West, find a market on her shores, her prosperity is secure; and the Queen City of the West, as she proudly styles herself, will go on increasing in population and in prosperity.
CHAPTER VIII.
CLEVELAND
The "Western Reserve." – Character of Early Settlers. – Fairport. – Richmond. – Early History of Cleveland. – Indians. – Opening of Ohio and Portsmouth Canal. – Commerce in 1845. – Cleveland in 1850 – First Railroad. – Manufacturing Interests. – Cuyahoga "Flats" at Night. – The "Forest City." – Streets and Avenues. – Monumental Park. – Public Buildings and Churches. – Union Depot. – Water Rents. – Educational Institutions. – Rocky River. – Approach to the City. – Freshet of 1883. – Funeral of President Garfield. – Lake Side Cemetery. – Site of the Garfield Monument.
In early colonial times, out of utter ignorance of the boundless territory extending westward, the first American Colonies were chartered by the Kings of England with permission to extend westward indefinitely. After the close of the Revolutionary War, while negotiations were in progress in regard to the final treaty of peace with the United States, which was ultimately signed at Paris on November thirtieth, 1782, Mr. Oswald, the British Commissioner, proposed the Ohio River as the western boundary of the young nation, and had it not been for the firmness and persistence of John Adams, one of the American Commissioners, who insisted upon the right of the United Colonies to the territory as far westward as the Mississippi, it is probable that the rich section of country between these two rivers would still have formed a portion of the British dominions, or have been the source of subsequent contention and expense. When the Colonies had become independent States, many of them claimed the right of soil and jurisdiction over large portions of western unappropriated land originally embraced in their charters. Congress urged upon these States to cede these lands to the general government, for the benefit of all. They all yielded to this request, except Connecticut, who retained a small tract of land in the northeastern portion of the present State of Ohio, which was subsequently divided up five counties in length along the lake, with an average width of two counties. The lower boundary of this tract of land was 40° 22´ north latitude, and it extended from the Pennsylvania line on the east, one hundred and twenty miles westward, to a line running north and south, a little west of the present location of Sandusky City. This tract of land was called the "Western Reserve of Connecticut."
In 1801 Connecticut ceded all her jurisdictional claims over the territory, but it continues to be known, to this day, as the "Connecticut Reserve," the "Western Reserve," or simply as the "Reserve." This "Western Reserve" is like a little piece of New England in a mosaic, representing many sections and many peoples. It is a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon race, that in emigrating it usually moves along parallels of latitude, and rarely diverges much either northward or southward. We find to the eastward of Ohio, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia, and all of these States have contributed to her population. Thus, below the Reserve, the people are largely from Pennsylvania; still further south, from Maryland and Virginia; and the lower section of the State is allied more by kindred and sympathy with the South than with the North. But on the Western Reserve, the cosmopolitan character of the inhabitants is at once lost. It is New England in descent and ideas. The little white meeting house, and the little red school house not far off, both as bare and homely as a stern Puritan race could conceive of, were everywhere met in the early days of its settlement, after the log cabin epoch had passed away. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont furnished the principal immigrants, and they built their neat and thrifty little New England towns over again, and maintained their New England sturdiness and simplicity.
The inhabitants of the Reserve have been, and are still, noted for their thrift, their intelligence and their superior culture. That section has furnished many distinguished public men, and one President, to the country. It was, in the old slavery days, spoken of contemptuously as "the hotbed of abolitionism," and gave both Giddings and Wade to fight the battle against Southern dominion in the United States Congress. Here Garfield was born, and here he is buried. Howells, the novelist, was a native of the Reserve, and passed his life until early manhood in its northeasternmost county.
The northern shores of the Reserve are washed by Lake Erie, one of the shallowest, most treacherous and least picturesque of the chain of lakes which form our northern boundary. It embraces the "Great Divide" between the north and the south, its waters flowing to the sea by both the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi. Summit and Portage counties, by their names, indicate the locality of this Divide.
Very early in the present century, the sturdy New England pioneers, looking for a suitable harbor upon the lake, discovered the mouth of Grand River, about thirty-five miles northeast of the Cuyahoga River; and in 1803, two miles up this river, the first warehouse on the lake was built.
In 1812 the town of Fairport, at the mouth of this river, was laid out, and was destined by its founders to be the future great lake city of Ohio. It had one of the best harbors on