This issue also takes advantage of our new, more streamlined website interface. We hope this will make future editions easier to produce, and will be working to make all back issues readily available in the new format. As always, if you have questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact the editor at kkern@uakron.edu.
Kevin Kern
Feature Article: Exhibit: Understanding Tombstones in Cleveland: Religion, Memory, Social Status, and Gender in Cemeteries
By Frank Jastrzembski
Book Reviews
By Natalie Hall-Hiles
]]>Fritsch sought to do more. His ambition covered fifteen years of research and writing, attempting to give as complete a picture as possible of the regiment’s origins, its battles, and its dissolution. Moreover, he believed it absolutely necessary to explore not only the highlights and triumphs of battle, but also the darker side of war, where desertion, flagging morale, and questions of morality always lurked.
The regiment’s soldiers came primarily from two counties in Ohio: Summit and Ashtabula, both of which were notorious hotbeds of anti-slavery sentiment and outspoken abolitionists like Joshua R. Giddings. The area was so closely associated with the abolitionist movement throughout the nation that the 29th OVI became concerned about their own safety, as they feared they would be hanged if captured by the enemy. The creation of the 29th was largely based on the disappointment they felt as part of the 19th Ohio Volunteer, where in their short time served as part of this regiment, they were not paid and were expected to enforce the Fugitive Slave laws; in effect, making proud soldiers with a history of abolitionist sentiment into slave catchers. Giddings, who largely influenced the creation of the 29th in the first place, saw their purpose not as a fight to salvage the broken Union, as so many others of his day saw the purpose of the war, but instead saw the soldier’s sacrifice as the beginning of the end for slavery. In a letter to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, he wrote that, “The first gun fired at Fort Sumter rang out the death-knell of slavery.” (p.14)
Fritsch’s account also highlights the changing attitudes with which soldiers confronted the hardness and unforgiving nature of war. In the spring of 1862, soldiers had backtracked their steps a number of miles to repair a fence that the soldiers had damaged. They did so because they did not want to offend the owner of the fence. A year later, in the summer of 1863, between the Chancellorsville and Gettysburg campaigns, the 29th was camped near Leesburg. A farmer nearby vocalized his support of the confederacy, and subsequently had his home and mill burned to the ground. The Union soldiers “let it be known that others in the neighborhood would fare the same if they did not keep shut.” (p.249)
Fritsch’s account follows soldiers through the many years of war, including their participation and action in well-known battles as Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Their largest loss of life came at a place known as Dug Gap in May of 1864, where approximately 120 men were killed or wounded. While the number of total causalities varies for the 29th, approximately 126 men were killed outright in battle, while many others died of either wounds sustained during battle, fatigue, or disease. In the SeCheverell history, 541 men were listed as killed, wounded, captured, or missing. In the beginning, their numbers were around 1,000 soldiers. As they came home at the war’s end, a parade in Cleveland showcased a mere 235 soldiers of the 29th. (p.377) War had been hard on the families and friends of Summit and Ashtabula counties.
Fritsch’s work is an honest account of the history of the 29th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. As he argues in the preface, his purpose was to give an even-handed account of the trials and tribulations of the regiment that was not strictly black and white, but rather highlighted the variety of triumphs and failures felt by these men. In this, he succeeds. His attention to detail through extensive archival research creates a description of these men that is thorough and satisfying. Although no doubt a lengthy account of the 29th through its inception, war years, and dissolution, this work reads easily. In addition to his close attention to detail, Fritsch’s narrative flows easily throughout the account, pulling the reader into this narrative he has expertly woven.
Natalie Hall-Hiles
University of Akron
]]>The author begins with a history of the death penalty both in Ohio and nationally. Throughout the nineteenth century, governors, legislators, and the public often questioned capital punishment and the ways in which it was carried out, a debate that continued into the twentieth century. Indeed, as late as 1949, the Ohio House voted 69 to 35 to repeal capital punishment. This bill died in the state senate, however.
Nevertheless, after 1963, a virtual moratorium on capital punishment developed in Ohio as a number of challenges to it wound their way through the state and federal court systems. In 1967, federal court decisions led to a national moratorium. In 1971, the Supreme Court, by a 5 to 4 vote, found in Furman v. Georgia that Georgia’s death penalty statute and by extension, statutes throughout the United States violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. This emptied death rows across the country. However, only two of the justices in the majority found the death penalty unconstitutional on its face. The other three justices in the majority found death penalty statutes unconstitutional because they resulted in uneven and unpredictable application of capital punishment. States then attempted to craft death penalty laws that would pass constitutional muster and in 1976 executions resumed after the high court approved death penalty statutes in Florida, Georgia, and Texas. In Ohio, executions only resumed in 1999 as ongoing challenges delayed executions. Since then Ohio has become, in the words of the book’s title, “One of the Country’s Busiest Death Penalty States.”
Despite rewritten laws, the unpredictable implementation of the death penalty has persisted. As the title to the book notes, this capriciousness has been largely due to “Race, Politics, and Geography.” Numerous statistical studies clearly show that the race of the killer and the victim both have powerful influences on who is executed. Killers of whites, especially African Americans, are far more likely to end up on death row than killers of blacks, regardless of race. Proponents of the death penalty agree that this may be racist, but that the cure is to prosecute killers of blacks more effectively. Opponents argue that racism is so endemic that fair imposition of the death penalty is impossible. For its part, the Supreme Court has decided that statistical evidence of the extent of racial prejudice is insufficient by itself to bar capital punishment in individual cases. Moreover, the court has argued that barring the death penalty on statistical evidence would inevitably bring into question convictions for a wide array of crimes and bog down the whole justice system in the U.S.
Welsh-Huggins also shows that geography can have a profound impact on whether a killer will face the death penalty. Prosecutors in Ohio’s three largest counties, Cuyahoga, Franklin, and Hamilton, seek the death penalty at much different rates. Hamilton County, with its ardently pro-death penalty prosecutor, has the largest number of convicts on death row. Prosecutors in the other counties seek the death penalty at lower rates. Although opponents of capital punishment cite such wide variations as an argument against it, supporters argue that differing community standards are an inherent right of local communities. Moreover, they argue that the failure of some prosecutors to consistently seek the death penalty may mean that some criminals are getting away with murder. Prosecutors, for their part, argue that where evidence is weak, plea bargains resulting in non-capital sentences may be the only way to take killers off the streets. Moreover, they point out that persuading killers to plead guilty to non-death penalty charges can protect witnesses or families of the victims from distress surrounding trials.
As controversy over the death penalty has grown, legal challenges have caused lengthy delays between sentencing and execution. Indeed, in many states and at the federal level, lawmakers, executives, and judges, responding to public pressure, have sought to shorten the appeals process by placing restrictions on it. Moreover, governors have found that granting clemency or commuting death sentences can result in political backlash to such an extent that in Ohio and many other states both Republican and Democratic governors have increasingly refused to grant commutations and then only if there is some indication that the case against the condemned is severely flawed.
Welsh-Huggins does note that recent changes in Ohio law apparently have to a decreased imposition of capital punishment. These changes permit prosecutors to obtain sentences of life without parole for capital crimes. Previously they had to choose between capital punishment and sentences with the possibility of parole.
For those wanting to explore the issue of capital punishment, Welsh-Huggins’s book provides a solid foundation. Some may want to pursue the debate more deeply in academic, legal, and research institute studies, but this book is a valuable introduction for the interested public and for secondary and post-secondary classes and its extensive notes provide additional sources for further inquiry.
Charles F. Casey-Leininger
Department of History
University of Cincinnati
]]>The authors organize the letters into five chapters that correspond to McKnight’s sojourn from military camps in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, where he spent most of the 22 months of the 3-year term he signed up for in September 1862. Maness and Combs note in their introduction that the Union army handled a remarkable 135,000 letters daily, clear evidence of how important written correspondence was to soldiers and their families. (1) The introduction provides a useful overview of the McKnight family, the Ohio Seventh Volunteer Cavalry, and the role of Ohio in the Civil War. Reproductions of letters and photographs, five appendices, and three maps round out the book. Exhaustive footnotes make sense of problems with dating and geography and provide insight into topics such as diet and battle histories. The bibliography is not exemplary. The index is thorough.
William McKnight did not fit the profile of the typical Civil War soldier: single, between the ages of 18 and 24, and native born. He was married, the father of six children, 29 years old, and born in Canada in 1832 to parents who had immigrated from Scotland to New Brunswick just two years before. In 1836 his parents moved with their five children to Meigs County in southeastern Ohio. There they had six more children that they raised in Pomeroy and Langsville, small towns near the Ohio River. William became a blacksmith and, at age 25, married Samaria Braley, whose family had moved to the area from Maine in 1816. By the time McKnight joined the Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry in September, 1862, he and Samaria had four children. Twins girls were born in the summer of 1863.
McKnight volunteered for service out of duty to country. He did not mention the issue of slavery and only used the term Negro on two occasions. (217, fn11) In the first year of correspondence Samaria’s voice is heard only as William responds, for example when he defended his decision to volunteer “against your wil.” (55) McKnight answered her: “I hope you might be Proud of me to know that I had honor and spunk enough to go defend our countryies rights.” (56)
But he was conflicted by the emotional trauma his decision brought Samaria and the children: “Oh how bad it makes me fell to think of them sweet little children of mine crying for papa and especially that dear little one… crying for me…. It is for them that I feel the most hurt for no one but God knows who wil take Care of them if their Pa falls a victim to this rebelian….” (56) Samaria’s letters often brought William to tears.(56, 58)
McKnight’s age, business skills, and literacy made him a natural officer. Appointed as a first sergeant of Company K in September 1862, he was promoted to second lieutenant in April of 1864. Killed in action two months later, he was never commissioned at this rank. He complained to his wife that promised promotions and pay raises did not come through. In December 1863 he wrote: “May [My] just Dues from the Government set to the present amounts to over $600.00 dollars & I need it & cant get a cent.” (149) In his second to last letter to Samaria, on June 3, 1864, he wrote that “it is now eleven months past since I recd any pay….” (185)
To support himself and his family McKnight traded horses, sold other goods, and borrowed. (154) He also hounded Samaria to collect fees owed from his blacksmith business. (129) Samaria collected some of the old bills, much to William’s satisfaction, but she also relied on her own and William’s families. William often suggested chores for family members and neighbors, including cutting firewood and planting corn.
McKnight comes across as needy and demanding, keeping score on his own and Samaria’s letters: “There was a mail come through for the Regmt. All the Boys got letters but me. I don’t see why that I am slited. I write every chance I get.” (135) “I have long anxiously awaited a letter from you but in vain….” (137) “I have not herd from you for a month or more & the only by Bro Johns letter…. Please write to me at least once a week & I wil write as often as I can if it is evry other day.” (157)
A major theme is news from Meigs County via old newspapers, letters, and gossip from men who have travelled home for a week or two. William asked Samaria to date her letters because they did not always arrive sequentially due to problems with transportation and the Seventh’s movements.(128) William also has news for Samaria about what has happened to men from his area, whether it is desertion or injury or death or encounters with the Confederates. (72)
William wants the correspondence to be conversational. In February 1863 he began a letter: “Oh Samaria. Samaria. Do you hear me if you do I want you to listen to me a little while….”(52) A year later he wrote: “I recd a letter from sister Mary last night. She informs me that you have red 6 letters from me lately which I am glad to hear & anxiously look for a letter from you. Then I may have something to found a letter upon.” (158) On several occasions William also asked for “likenesses” or “photographs” of his family. (3, 152) Samaria wrote to him: “Thoes Potograps cant be beat….I have one of them whare we can se it all the time….” (183)
Some of the gossip from home underscored how serving in a company of men from one’s own county limited privacy. In December of 1862, Samaria apparently wrote to William about local gossip that he had been with other women. William wrote back: “I think the folks at home must have very little to do and you dear Wife inflicted a severe wound in my Heart when you intimated that I had been unfaithful to you God bless.”(31) In the spring of 1863 McKnight wrote to Samaria that he had heard folks at home were gossiping again and tried to defend himself: “I never did run after Bad Women but even if I did there is no reason for any such report to get afloat about me.” (88) Over the next few weeks he signed off penitently: “Your absent and almost Broken Hearted William” (89) and “your unworthy Husband” (90). When Samaria did not write to him, he became nearly desperate: “Oh how I study over it think of evry thing but cant imagine why am so neglected. I know I deserve nothing better but stil I did not expect to be entirely neglected by every one…. It is a bad state of things when a soldier has to defend his caracter at home and his life abroad one at a time is enough.” (91-92)
Samaria forgave him. At least McKnight went home for two short furloughs in the summers of 1863 and 1864. And in the two letters in the collection from Samaria to William, written in the last month of his life, she wrote: “I have but one falt to find with your letters love and that is they ant long enough or you don’t write half as mutch as I like to hear.” (177) “Oh let me hear from you often. If you dont get a letter for every one you write so be a good man and I will do the best I can until then.” (184)
Samaria McKnight raised their six children by herself and never re-married. When she died, in 1905, her son asked the U.S. Pensions Agent in Columbus to direct the last two months of William McKnight’s pension to the daughter who had stayed at home to take care of Samaria. (193)
Collections of letters are not easy fare for undergraduates or even more mature readers. But Do They Miss Me at Home is in many ways more compelling than fiction or a carefully wrought historical monograph. There is William McKnight, by himself, writing to his beloved Samaria, about the most difficult situations of his life, hoping that he will be lucky enough to once again join her and the children back in Ohio.
Andrew J. Carlson
Capital University
]]>Heavenly Comfort
From approximately the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s, cemeteries in North America were a utilitarian place. They were used as a highly visible reminder of the brevity of life and the uncertainty of the afterlife.[2. Gregg G. King, et al., Historic Cemeteries Preservation Guide (Canton, MI: McNaughton and Gunn, 2004) http://www.michigan.gov/documents/hal_mhc_shpo_Cemetery_Guide_105082_7.pdf (accessed December 20, 2013), 27; Vicky M. MacLean and Joyce E. Williams, “The History of the American Cemetery and Some Reflections on the Meaning of Death,” in vol. 2 of The Handbook of Death and Dying, ed. Clifton D. Bryant (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc., 2003), 744.] They were generally located in urban areas for all passersby to contemplate mortality, rarely encouraging remembrance of the deceased.
Eighteenth century tombstones were unadorned, usually made of unattractive brown or gray slate, with little biographical evidence carved into them. Individual tombstones provided a warning to the living of the closeness of Hell through grim carvings of death’s-heads and fearful epitaphs. The tombstones reinforced the fear of premature death and eternal damnation encouraging people to live morally without sin.[3. Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 23.]
With the religious revival movements of the First (1730-1750) and Second Great Awakening (1790-1840), there was a shift away from the Calvinistic fear of definite damnation in Hell toward an increased emphasis on salvation. People began to doubt they were wicked enough to deserve perpetual pain and damnation, and began to minimize the inevitability eternal damnation.[4. Patricia Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 60.] The stern, rigid, and oppressive sensibilities of the Puritan past gave way to softer, romantic, and sentimentalized attitudes.[5. Laderman, The Sacred Remains American, 53–55; Marilyn Yalom, The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008), 15.] Grim death’s-heads carvings common on tombstones before the First Great Awakening began to be replaced by hospitable angelic faces with wings.[6. Yalom, The American Resting Place, 15.]
Neoclassicism became the vogue in Europe and North America by 1750.[7. Blanche M. G. Linden, “The Willow Tree and Urn Motif,” Markers 1 (1980): 150.] Americans paid homage to ancient cultures such as the Romans and Greeks, merging the classical and Christian worlds. The revival of past cultures influenced politics, the arts, and philosophy. Classical revival symbols taken from the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians became popular in architecture, reflecting timeless principles of past civilizations and presenting a divine logic blended with intellectual and aesthetic appeal.[8. Peggy McDowell and Richard E. Meyer, The Revival Styles in American Memorial Art (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994), 24.] Similar to the Ancient Greeks, the use of marble became popular in America. In Ohio, the developments in transportation greatly facilitated the movement and demand for marble to the Cleveland region and the rest of Ohio.[9. Andrew Bauer, et al., “Distribution in Time, Provenance, and Weathering of Gravestones in Three Northeastern Ohio Cemeteries,” The Ohio Journal of Science 102, no. 4 (2002): 93.]
As religious and intellectual views evolved as a result of the First and Second Great Awakenings and the rise of Neoclassicism, motifs and epitaphs on tombstones evolved. Historian James A. Hijiya argued these cultural changes toward death in the 1820s were the “single most important turning point in the history of mortuary art.” For New England Puritans intense bereavement was viewed as a rebellion against the will of God, and mourning was censored. In contrast, nineteenth century Americans saw an evolution toward a ritualistic grieving process that focused on expressing sadness for the loss of others. Jesus himself was rumored to have wept at the tomb of Lazarus.[10. James A. Hijiya, “American Gravestones and Attitudes Toward Death: A Brief History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 127, no. 5 (October 14, 1983): 351, 354; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 30.]
The evolution toward a ritualistic grieving process was embraced in motifs and epitaphs on tombstones. Epitaphs moved to verses of consolation rather than damnation. Motifs such as willow trees and urns bridged the transition from past Puritan religious attitudes toward death to a new Evangelical emphasis on Heaven.
The willow tree and urn motif of Greco-Roman and Christian roots were blended and adopted in cemeteries. The Romans were known to have kept the ashes of their beloved ones in urns and to have encouraged mourning. The urn came to symbolize bereavement and heavenly union with God to Christians. The willow tree peaked in popularity in the 1820s, following the report that the exiled Napoleon sat under one for daily meditation on the island of St. Helena, and asked to be buried on the sacred spot.[11. Linden, “The Willow Tree and Urn Motif,” 153.] To the Ancient Greeks, the willow tree had a dual meaning of life and death.[12. Frederick J. Simoons, Plants of Life, Plants of Death (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 294.] In Christianity, the willow tree is associated with the gospel of Christ, as the tree is said to flourish no matter how many branches are cut off.[13. Douglas Keister, Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith Publishers, 2004), 67; Hijiya, “American Gravestones and Attitudes Toward Death,” 352.]
The Erie Street Cemetery, the oldest existing cemetery in Cleveland with burials dating back to 1827, has evidence of urn and willow tree motifs, as well as sorrowful epitaphs.[14. The Erie Street Cemetery was founded in 1825.] On the slate tombstone of Horatio Nelson Flint, who died in 1832, the epitaph reads, “This stone is erected by an affectionate wife to the memory of her lamented husband.” The tombstone of the eighteen year old Elihu D. Rockwell, who died in 1823, has a single willow tree motif and an epitaph that reads, “Good friends for Jesus sake forbear, to move the dust enclosed here (Figure 1).” Bereavement was enthusiastically encouraged, progressing away from the harsh Puritan principles that shunned these sentimental attitudes.
By mid-century the urn-and-willow began to phase out, and attitudes toward death were encompassed by the belief that death was a stepping stone to eternal life. Individuals felt they would find a rendition of the same life they had on Earth in Heaven. The popular consensus was the deceased were resting in “eternal sleep.” They were comforted by promises of eternal union with God and a reunion with departed family and friends.[15. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 271; Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 2, 265.]
Motifs and epitaphs provided comfort to grieving families reiterating that the deceased family members had joined God in Heaven. In an era when literacy was less common, carvers relied on symbols to convey messages of mortality and spirituality to individuals unable to read verse.[16. Laura Suchan, “Momento Mori: Bringing the Classroom to the Cemetery,” The History Teacher 42, no. 1 (November 2008): 45.] The carver or the family of the deceased carefully chose motifs in order to convey messages about their religious attitudes. Some imagery, such as angels and crosses, are obvious indicators of the attitudes toward mortality and spirituality. Some iconography has spiritual connotations not so easily indicated.
A once popular motif in this period was a hand pointed upward, intended to convey the ascension into Heaven.[17. Keister, Stories in Stone, 108; Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, Your Guide to Cemetery Research (Cincinnati, OH: Betterway Books, 2002), 137; Loren Neslon Horton, “Messages in Stone: Symbolism in Victorian Grave Markers,” Palimpsest 70, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 66.] The tombstone of Philinta Baxter, who died in 1873 and was buried in the Beebe Town Cemetery, is one such example (Figure 2). A common indicator of gender can be determined by the sleeve of the carved hand on Frederika Fisher’s tombstone (Figure 3).[18. The sleeve of the carved hand appears to be of a female on the tombstone of Frederika Fisher, who died in 1880 of typhus, and was buried in the St. Paul Lutheran Cemetery of Berea. Fredericka Fisher Death Record, St. Paul Lutheran Parish Records, 1866-1905, St. Paul Lutheran Church, Berea, Ohio. Note: This translated version of the original records was provided by Pastor Tom Henderson and the office secretary, Rae Batig. The original 325 page book is laced in gold, and is located in the church storage area. The original is written in German. Also included in the book are records of the baptisms, constitution and list of adherent members, births, confirmations, adherents/communicants, communion to the sick, weddings, and deaths. The death records are located on pages 287-325. The records will hereafter be cited as St. Paul Lutheran Parish Records, 1866-1905.]
Two hands locked together was a representation of a heavenly welcome from God or an earthly farewell.[19. Carmack, Your Guide to Cemetery Research, 138; Keister, Stories in Stone, 108.] The obelisk of Heinrich L. Bentz, who died in 1873, is an example of an unspoiled motif of two clasped hands together (Figure 4). Mr. Bentz had been a resident of Middleburg Heights about twenty-one years before he passed away, according to the Grindstone City Advertiser.[20. Ohio Genealogical Society, Births, Marriages, and Deaths Reported in Newspapers Published at Berea, Cuyahoga County, Ohio: November 1868 – January 1879 (Strongsville, OH: Southwest Cuyahoga Chapter, 2001), 72.]
Angel motifs and carved sculptures on tombstones gave mourners a sense of religious comfort. Angels were viewed as God’s messengers and guardians as they gave guidance to souls in their journey to Heaven.[21. Carmack, Your Guide to Cemetery Research, 139.] The Lakeview Cemetery is the last resting place of many high-profile individuals from Cleveland’s history, and is a testament to some of Cleveland’s greatest sculptures and carvings of angels. Sculptures clutter the cemetery with angels tilting in grief, or triumphantly raising their hands toward Heaven (Figure 5). Woodvale Cemetery, located in Middleburg Heights, has some conspicuous evidence within its borders. On the tombstone dedicated to the memory of Mary C. McDermott (who died in 1881), and Mary Florence (who died in 1886), stands a towering marble sculpture of an angel leaning on a tree stump shaped as a cross. This sculpture is a beacon to modern drivers who pass by on Engle Road (Figure 6).
The most commonly identified symbol of faith carved and sculpted on nineteenth century tombstones is the cross. The cross is the definitive representation of the deceased’s faith in God.[22. Carmack, Your Guide to Cemetery Research, 141.] Crosses are found in a variety of shapes, styles, and sizes. Even the lowliest of society have crosses ornamenting their tombstones. A carved marble rustic cross serves as a marker in the Polish St. Adalbert Cemetery for eighteen year old Anna R. M. Kuta, who died in 1900 (Figure 7). In the Irish St. Mary’s Cemetery located in Berea, Ann Mary Sneider, who died in 1863, has a large cross carved on the back of her tombstone surrounded by a wreath of funerary flowers (Figure 8).
A sculpture of a book on a tombstone represents the Holy Bible or the book of life.[23. Carmack, Your Guide to Cemetery Research, 30.] An open book, with one or both pages blank, suggests the final acts of life have been written.[24. Horton, “Messages in Stone,” 71.] A flat open book with the words “Rest in Peace” on the left side of the book adorns the bedstead of a burial plot located in the St. Adalbert Cemetery (Figure 9). In the Woodvale Cemetery, located near a marker with the family name of Wcotter, there is a small propped book made of marble with indecipherable inscriptions inside (Figure 10).
Religious epitaphs aided in conveying messages of resurrection or eternal sleep. Julia A. Terrill died in 1840 at the age of five, and Anson Terrill died in 1827, at only twelve days old. On their simple tombstone, the epitaph reads, “They are not dead but sleep.” This is in reference to Luke 8:52 and Matthew 9:24 of the New Testament that referred to deceased Christians resting in eternal sleep until the day of resurrection (Figure 11). The tombstone of Hanna and Benjamin Strickland (both of whom died in 1889) reminds the Christian reader, “I am the resurrection and the life, he that believeth in me, tho he were dead yet shall he live,” referring to John 11:25.
High infant and child mortality rates were common in the nineteenth century due to miscarriages and infectious diseases such as cholera, dysentery, pneumonia, and diphtheria. Children were encouraged to think about their own death, and the death of others.[25. Geoffrey Gorer, “The Pornography of Death,” Encounter (October 1955): 50.] Parents interpreted a child’s death as a test of the parents’ own relationship with God, and found consolation in the belief they rested in “eternal sleep” in Heaven.[26. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 139.] As society generally thought children who passed away had died in a state of innocence, this would then permit them to enter indisputably into Heaven. As a result, children’s tombstones had distinctly spiritual and comforting motifs and epitaphs.
The small St. Paul Lutheran Church community of Berea and Middleburg Heights from the late nineteenth century is a specimen of a small parish plagued by child fatalities. The German Pastor George Heinrich Fuehr left detailed records of the deaths in the church that began with the establishment of the cemetery in 1866. His wife, Christina Ann, died during a failed childbirth in 1870.[27. Pastor George Heinrich Fuehr noted in the church death records in regard to the death of his wife that, “It was a very hard delivery and after birth, she had gotten bed fever. She was a faithful and loyal servant of the Lord. Always held on to her faith. Fall asleep blessed.” Christina Ann Fuehr Death Record, St. Paul Lutheran Parish Records, 1866-1905.] These records continued with the church’s subsequent pastors until 1903. One prominent characteristic was the high rate of child mortality within the church community between the years of 1866-1903 (Chart 1).
Chart 1: The mortality rates include still born deaths, and deaths to infectious diseases. The recorded data displays this trend until1903. Prominent spikes can be seen from 1875, 1887, and 1893. In 1870, 1876, 1881, and 1886, there are six fatalities of children within the church community for those years. Infant and child mortality rates did not see a slow decline until the second half of the nineteenth century There is a steady decline in fatalities from 1894-1903.
It was common for a family to suffer the loss of multiple children, as evidence suggests in the St. Paul Lutheran community. Anna Augusta Carolina Eikhorst died at less than a month old in 1873. Pastor Fuehr noted in the records, “This child already is the 10th child that the Lord has taken from the parents.”[28. Anna Eikhorst Death Record, St. Paul Lutheran Parish Records, 1866-1905.] She was not the last child that Johann and Wilhelmina would lose and then bury in the small cemetery. Her older sister, Sophia Eikhorst, died of diphtheria at the age of twenty in 1875 (Figure 12). Pastor Fuehr recorded, “The daughter was the 11th child of the parents Johann and Wilhelmina that death took her from them. She was the only daughter.”[29. Sophia Eikhorst Death Record, St. Paul Lutheran Parish Records, 1866-1905.]
Evidence of high child mortality can also be found in the St. Patrick Cemetery of West Park, located adjacent to the church that bears its name. William and Martha Code had ten children, five girls and five boys. Seven of their children died within seventeen years.[30. Peggy Cavley Patton, “The Code Family of St. Patrick’s Parish,” West Park Times 17a (2001).] The tombstone of Mary Ann Code is alone standing in the cemetery as the only evidence of this family’s loss (Figure 13).
Families sought ways to cope with the grief for their deceased children on tombstones through motifs and epitaphs. The epitaphs and motifs were meant to alleviate the pain of premature death with reminders of Heaven. A message on a tombstone of a child was usually selected by the survivors to communicate their own sentiments and reflect the survivors’ needs for consolation.[31. Deborah A. Smith, “Safe in the Arms of Jesus: Consolation on Delaware Children’s Gravestones, 1840-99,” Markers 4 (1987): 85.]
Bud and seedpod motifs, which represented the fragile beginning of a life cut short, are common on tombstones of children.[32. Keister, Stories in Stone, 43; Smith, “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” 96.] The buds and seedpods can be found on numerous tombstones of the children buried in the St. Paul Lutheran Cemetery. Friedrich Heimrich Richart Sasse, who died of dysentery in 1876, has a bud carved on his tombstone (Figure 14). Carl Heinrich Poertner, who died in 1870 at the age of one month and five days of a “lung problem,” also had a bud carved on his tombstone (Figure 15).[33. Friedrich Sasse Death Record, St. Paul Lutheran Parish Records, 1866-1905; Carl H. Poertner Death Record, St. Paul Lutheran Parish Records, 1866-1905.]
The lamb was another popular motif found on children’s tombstones, since lambs represented purity, gentleness, and innocence.[34. Carmack, Your Guide to Cemetery Research, 141.] A lamb is connected with Christ as he is depicted as a shepherd, and also referred to as the Lamb of God.[35. Keister, Stories in Stone, 74.] The sisters Anna Storch, aged two, and Catharina L. Storch, aged five, died within six days of each other of dysentery in November of 1874.[36. Anna and Catharina Storch Death Records, St. Paul Lutheran Parish Records, 1866-1905.] Their tombstones are joined with the motifs of a resting lamb and seedpod (Figure 16).
The dove motif represented a winged messenger of God.[37. Horton, “Messages in Stone,” 45.] The dove also represents purity and peace.[38. Keister, Stories in Stone, 79.] Clydie Lovejoy died in 1879, aged nine months, and his sister Stella Lovejoy died in 1881, at the age of fifteen months. They share the same white bronze (zinc) tombstone marked with a dove and a lamb. The epitaph reads, “Our Darlings, Infant son and daughter of Alfred and Mary A. Lovejoy.” The dove is sometimes present as fallen or in a sleeping state, here represented on a marble tombstone dedicated to a baby in the Woodvale Cemetery (Figure 17).
The Cult of Memory
The intensifying degree of ostentation in the nineteenth century coincided with the shifting attitudes toward bereavement.[39. Philippe Aries, Western Attitudes Toward Death (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1975), 67.] The importance placed on memorializing deceased loved ones in Western society increased dramatically during the Victorian era (1837-1901), and this is commonly referred to as the rise of the “Cult of Memory.”[40. Jerry Moore, Cynthia Blaker, and Grant Smith, “Cherished Are the Dead: Changing Social Dimensions in a Kansas Cemetery,” Plains Anthropologist 36, no 133 (February 1996): 76.] Mourners sought to keep their loved ones’ memories alive as vividly as possible through portraits, drawings, photographs, busts, and death-masks.[41. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 288.] The newly-industrialized funeral industry produced a large variety of mortuary merchandise,, such as coffin and funerary hardware, which provided a way for mourners to express sentiment through the use of material products.[42. Barbara J. Little, Kim M. Lanphear, and Douglas W. Owsley, “Mortuary Display and Status in a Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Cemetery in Manassas, Virginia,” American Antiquity 57, no. 3 (July 1992): 414.]
Victorians viewed the importance of expressing sentiment through material products as a way to perpetuate the memory of loved ones. Victorian mourners sought to keep their loved one’s memory alive as vividly as possible. The Victorians believed that as long as one’s memory was kept alive by someone else’s grief, one was not entirely dead.[43. Hijiya, “American Gravestones and Attitudes Toward Death,” 354.] Victorians cherished the importance of continuing the memory of the deceased and talking about their loved ones in order to aid their consolation.[44. Pat Jalland, “Victorian Death and Its Decline: 1850-1918,” in Death in England: An Illustrated History, ed. Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 245- 246.]
Bereavement played a role in emulating respectable social stature to the Victorians. Mourning was regarded as sign of a mourner’s Christian devoutness. Weeping was believed to assist God in preparing the heart to receive divine grace. Mourning the dead had the same social connotations as exhibiting the proper dress or abiding by the principles of well-mannered social behavior. Proper mourning was viewed as an indication of a person’s upright character.[45. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 124, 130, 135.]
The importance of venerating the deceased extended into the cemetery. Visiting the graves of family members was an important source of consolation and a vital part of the process of mourning for many bereaved families.[46. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 292.] Cemeteries acted as a place of commemoration that evoked a sense of closeness to the deceased and perpetuated memory.[47. Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, “Remembering and Forgetting: The Relationship Between Memory and the Abandonment of Graves in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Greek Cemeteries,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 14, no. 2 (June 2010): 285; Jalland, “Victorian Death and Its Decline: 1850-1918,” 247.] Families carefully chose gravestone inscriptions to make sure the deceased were fittingly memorialized. Gravesites became a form of property, protected from commerce, and presumed to be owned in perpetuity.[48. Aries, Western Attitudes Toward Death, 67.]
The Victorian attachment to classical and romantic values played a role in emulating immortality and perpetual ownership in the cemetery. The Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans all built lasting monuments to their dead. The Victorians emulated huge classical monuments on a reduced scale in cemeteries in order to embody the dignity and splendor of past civilizations.[49. Michael Parker Pearson, “Mortuary Practices, Society, and Ideology: An Ethnoarchaeological Study,” in Symbolic and Structural Archeology, ed. Ian Hodder (London, Cambridge University Press, 1982), 107.] Monuments constructed to rival the architecture of ancient civilizations helped to solidify the notion of immortality.[50. Aries, Western Attitudes Toward Death, 72.]
Conditions in cemeteries remained similar to the conditions they had been in the colonial period.[51. Blanche Linden-Ward, “The Fencing Mania: The Rise and Fall of 19th Century Funerary Enclosures,” Markers 7 (1990): 39.] Tombstones toppled over and fields were left to grow wild, with little concern for upkeep. Overcrowding and cramped quarters in urban cemeteries was a common occurrence. Families were distraught to find the remains of their loved ones neglected by poor management. This mismanagement of cemeteries posed a threat to the appropriate memorial of the deceased.
Families were horrified to find the remains of their loved ones targeted by thieves. Mismanagement led body snatchers or “resurrection men” to easily gain access and raid urban cemeteries to exhume and sell corpses for dissection to medical students. Citizens were outraged when corpses disappeared from cemeteries. One incident was noted in 1851, when “the mangled remains” of a body was found in a cesspool near the Homeopathic Medical College in Cleveland.[52. Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 136.] Angry cities stormed the medical school and a riot ensued against the students.[53. The Interment Registers from the City of Cleveland, Erie Street Cemetery, No. 101.] Four anonymous burials are listed in the records as “Remains from the College at the time of the riot.” The body was viewed as sacred, and the secret removal of bodies robbed the community control of their dead triggering a call for reform.[54. Laderman, The Sacred Remains American, 82.]
By the 1830s, dilapidated and unkempt urban and church cemeteries were viewed as potential health risks to the community. The noxious fumes produced by exposed corpses and decrepit vaults, toxic gases called miasmas, were said to have escaped from seething graves and thought to cause outbreaks of dysentery and cholera in cities.[55. James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Detroit: Partridge Press, 1972), 73.] With the rise of cholera outbreaks in the 1830s and 1840s in the United States, the claim that urban cemeteries were contributing to the spread of disease was only validated in the public eye. In Ohio, a cholera epidemic struck Cleveland in the 1830s, while in Cincinnati, cholera killed roughly 7,500 residents from 1849-50.[56. Robert Anthony Wheeler, Visions of the Western Reserve: Public and Private Documents of Northeastern Ohio, 1750-1860 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 201-206; Kip Sperry, Genealogical Research in Ohio, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MA: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2003), 9.] The health risks caused by urban cemeteries combined with the movement toward thwarting the threats to perpetual memory, helped to initiate individuals to seek burial grounds outside urban cities.
These factors contributed to the rise of the visually enticing and spiritually consoling rural cemeteries, spawned in Europe. The Rural Cemetery Movement (1830-1855) had its origins in England and France, where it was influenced by the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, established in 1804. The prototypical rural cemetery in North America became Mount Auburn Cemetery, founded in 1831. Rural cemeteries consequently were established in other Eastern cities: Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, 1836; Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, 1838; Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn and Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York, 1839; and the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, 1845. Members of the Spring Grove Cemetery hired the landscape architect Adolph Strauch in 1855 in order to beautify it.[57. Elisabeth Walton Potter and Beth M. Boland, “Guidelines for Evaluating and Registering Cemeteries and Burial Places,” National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/nr/publications/bulletins/nrb41/ (accessed, April 10, 2015), 41.]
A natural and rustic setting outside of the city seemed to be an appropriate place for a cemetery, far from the horrors of unkempt urban cemeteries, body snatchers, and illnesses. Such landscapes ensured the dead would be fittingly honored. Rural cemetery gateways established a separation from the ordinary world, isolated from the confined and foul dwellings of urban cities.[58. Potter and Boland, “Guidelines for Evaluating and Registering Cemeteries and Burial Places,” 41.] Plants and trees were seen by the innovators of the rural cemetery movement, such as John Loudon, as the best means by which “mephitic vapors” from decomposition and “miasmas” could be absorbed.[59. Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death, 126.]
Rural cemeteries provided romantic and serene places for mourners visiting their deceased loved ones. The natural setting of rural cemeteries was viewed as a holy place capable of eliciting a spiritual response within the soul of the visitor.[60. Liden, “The Willow Tree and Urn Motif,” 151.] Visiting in this kind of landscape was viewed as conducive to meditation and consolation. Personal recollections of the deceased were viewed as assisting in generating morally uplifting thoughts of family, love, and Heaven.[61. Laderman, The Sacred Remains American, 72.] Memory of their loved ones would continue in these spiritual oases that had the appearance of stability, duration, and the physical qualities of Greek landscapes of immortality.[62. Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1995), 114, 117-118.]
The Lakeview Cemetery, established in 1869, was Cleveland’s first rural cemetery. The 285-acre cemetery was located on the outskirts of the city in a location known for dramatic natural landscapes enhanced by a sloping site, streams, ponds, artful plantings, and carfully designed monuments. It provided an escape from the pollution and congestion of urban Cleveland.[63. [1] Marian Morton, Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2004), 7; Joseph T. Hannibal, “Teaching with Tombstones: Geology at the Cemetery,” in Proceedings of the 40th Forum on the Geology of Industrial Minerals, May 2-7, 2004, ed. Nelson R. Shaffer and Deborah A. DeChurch (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Geological Survey Occasional Paper 67, 2007), 83.]
With the rise of the rural cemetery movement, an increase of homelike and commemorative epitaphs and motifs were carved on tombstones surrounded by beautiful landscapes. The draped urn was the most common nineteenth century funerary motif, viewed as a symbol of the veil between Earth and the Heaven.[64. Keister, Stories in Stone, 137.] An extravagantly sculpted draped urn is located on top of the tombstone of Edward and Phelina Collins, surrounded by the tranquil landscape of Lakeview Cemetery (Figure 18).
The obelisk was a popular symbol taken from Egyptian architecture, and represented a ray of sunlight to the Egyptians.[65. Keister, Stories in Stone, 16.] The obelisk symbolized the ability to withstand the test of time and eternity.[66. Hijiya, “American Gravestones and Attitudes Toward Death,” 355; Richard V. Francaviglia, “The Cemetery as an Evolving Cultural Landscape,” Annals, Association of American Geographers 61 (1971): 507.] Obelisks were carved in variations, such as the vaulted or pedestal obelisks scattered throughout cemeteries of Northeast Ohio (Figure 19).
Drapery carved on tombstones intended to give the cemetery a homelike appearance and to give the impression the gravesite was in a comfortable setting of a Victorian parlor.[67. Carmack, Your Guide to Cemetery Research, 141.] It represents the material relationship to household furniture of the Victorian era.[68. Horton, “Messages in Stone,” 68.] This style of architecture provided a comforting setting for family members of the deceased visiting the cemetery. The tombstone of Lydia Gadner Lunn who died in 1869, and William Lunn who died in 1882, has an impressive sample of an ornately draped tombstone, located in Woodvale Cemetery. The tombstone appears similarly shaped and decorated as a Victorian era armoire (Figure 20).
Those who were able to purchase their own lots with a fenced border in a particular cemetery viewed it as private property. By the nineteenth century, there was a general consensus that an individual’s burial plot should belong to oneself and one’s descendants in perpetuity. This attitude related to the modern view of private possession.[69. Paula J. Fenza, “Communities of the Dead: Tombstones as a Reflection of Social Organization,” Markers 6 (1989): 140.] This phenomenon is also related to the emerging nineteenth century attitude towards the personal identity that continued even after death.[70. Sarah Tarlow, “Landscapes of Memory: The Nineteenth-Century Garden Cemetery,” European Journal of Archaeology 3, no. 2 (2000): 229, 234.]
By the 1840s, coinciding with the Rural Cemetery Movement, family burials were separated into clearly marked plots, often complete with iron fences or stone borders, known as curbs.[71. Dethlefsen, “The Cemetery and Culture Change,” 152.] Blanche Linden-Ward refers to this popular trend as the “fencing mania.” It became popular due to advances of metallurgical technology, the rise of the cast iron industry, and mass production of ornate fences. Iron fences and stone curbs were put into place to give the physical appearance of private ownership and domestic space.[72. Linden-Ward, “The Fencing Mania: The Rise and Fall of 19th Century Funerary Enclosures,” 35, 39, 47.] Fenced plots gave families a place of coziness to gather and mourn.
Due to the rapid oxidation of these iron fences, surviving evidence of these popular enclosures is rare. These fences become expensive to the families and for cemeteries to maintain. A large majority were removed in later years. The fenced plot of the Janowicz family marker located in the St. Adalbert Cemetery, is evidence of the only surviving iron fence in all nine of the cemeteries analyzed (Figure 21).
Emulation of Wealth
Monument architecture and motifs were used by numerous individuals to represent socio-economic status, asserting they had a social identity past the point of their death.[73. Tarlow, “Landscapes of Memory,” 227.] Many middle-class individuals of the nineteenth century sought to emulate their worldly significance through the construction of museums and other temples dedicated to the arts and the sciences.[74. Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 61.] They saw it necessary to maintain the standards of one’s class in death as in life, and to even use death as a means of further social advancement.[75. John Morley, Death, Heaven, and the Victorians (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 11.]
Cemeteries of the early eighteenth century had few indicators that stressed differences in social status among individuals. Tombstones looked identical in shape and size. There was a surge in the dimensions of tombstones that began during the American Civil War, and continued until the close of the nineteenth century.[76. Randall H. McGuire, “Dialogues With the Dead: Ideology and the Cemetery,” in The Recovery of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern United States, ed. Mark P. Leone and Park P. Potter, Jr. (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 435-480; Francaviglia, “The Cemetery as an Evolving Cultural Landscape,” 505.] During this period, elegant designs were carved on tombstones, and large tombstones were erected to signify the economic success in life of an individual.
Those with the socioeconomic means left magnificent tombstones that represented success in life. Tasteful or expensive monuments were admired, and the names of the deceased and their family noted and discussed by viewers.[77. Tarlow, “Landscapes of Memory,” 229.] Lakeview Cemetery is a testament to the extravagance of tombstones during the Victorian era. Silas S. Stone (1815-1884) was a real estate dealer during the Civil War. He left a lasting impression with a gigantic sculpted statue (Figure 22). The founder of Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), left a seventy foot marker made of granite that towers over other tombstones in the cemetery (Figure 23).
Most of the deceased during the nineteenth century did not have the economic means to leave such extravagant markers. By carefully examining cemetery records complemented with cemetery architecture, the socio-economic status of a deceased individual can be determined. While famous or wealthy individuals may have had larger tombstones, a more modest family may share one average-sized tombstone.[78. Dethlefsen, “The Cemetery and Culture Change,” 139.] There are examples throughout Northeast Ohio of whole families buried with small markers surrounding one modest sized family tombstone.
Modest tombstones can be an indication of a low socio-economic class. Many of those buried in Northeast Ohio from St. Paul Lutheran, St. Mary’s, and St. Adalbert Cemeteries were immigrants from Polish, German, and Irish backgrounds who worked in the Berea sandstone quarry in the late nineteenth century. By 1873, the jobs available in the quarries brought in a steady influx of laborers, mainly of German and Polish descent. The section outside the village limits of Berea to the northwest became a large settled area of foreign families. The handling of gunpowder, operating machinery, and the inhalation of sandstone dust took a heavy toll of lives and health and left many widows with small children to support.[79. Walter F. Holzworth, Men of Grit and Greatness: A Historical Account of Middleburg Township, Berea, Brook Park and Middleburg Heights (Berea, OH: Walter F. Holzworth, 1970), 75.]
Large concentrations of immigrant burials from the nineteenth century can still be identified in the cemeteries of Berea and Middleburg Heights. A number of unadorned and badly corroded obelisks, similar in shape and style, are located in the St Paul Lutheran Cemetery. German Gottlieb Ueckert was killed by a fallen rock during dynamite blasting on April 17, 1880. He was most likely working in the quarry of Berea when he was killed. Ironically his modest tombstone is made of Berea sandstone.[80. Gottlieb Ueckert Death Record, St. Paul Lutheran Parish Records, 1866-1905.] A concentration of German and Irish burials can be found in St. Mary’s Cemetery, located next to the uninviting railroad tracks and within the poorly irrigated property.
Inequality in Death
Tombstone epitaphs allow researchers to understand the inequalities of the American society in the nineteenth century that trailed into the cemetery. The history of death in nineteenth century urban American demonstrates class divisions, racial prejudices, and gender distinctions.[81. Laderman, The Sacred Remains American, 40.] Attitudes toward gender can be identified in cemeteries when epitaphs and inscriptions are closely examined. The higher status of men was affirmed even in the cemetery.[82. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 292.] There are subtle differences in the symbolism on women’s tombstones which suggests that women occupy a secondary status relationship to that of men.[83. Fenza, “Communities of the Dead,” 152.]
In the world of mourning in the nineteenth century, women had a disproportionate function in funerary customs. Women were exposed to a harshly regulated set of proper mourning customs, which included staying at home in seclusion while their husbands could attend funeral parties.[84. Morley, Death, Heaven, and the Victorians, 63.] In the peak of the Victorian mourning customs, a widow was expected to mourn for an average of two and a half years.[85. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Random House LLC, 2009), 148.] As widows, women were blacklisted from potential suitors and subject to a permanent loss of the status as a wife. Most widows became regulated to a lower level of social hierarchy.[86. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 249.]
Maternal bias is present on tombstones in North America dating back to the eighteenth century.[87. Edwin Dethlefsen and James Deetz, “Death’s Heads, Cherubs, and Willow Trees: Experimental Archaeology in Colonial Cemeteries,” American Antiquity 31 (1966): 509.] A married women’s name on a tombstone was usually correlated to her husband. Women are almost always identified in terms of their husbands or fathers with epitaphs of “wife of,” and “daughter of” carved on tombstones. In some instances, two or more wives were buried on each side of a husband’s grave, but never were multiple husbands buried beside a wife’s grave. A study of seventeenth and eighteenth century tombstones in the Boston area revealed that more than 70 percent of kinship references were for women.[88. Yalom, The American Resting Place, 21-22.]
Even though the burials within the cemeteries studied in Northeast Ohio did not date before the nineteenth century, material bias was still customary. Some of the clearest inscriptions indicating gender inequalities are present within the borders of the cemeteries studied. The tombstone of Betsey Vaughn, who died in 1855, is one of the many tombstones representing gender inequality in Northeast Ohio (Figure 24).
The inequalities on tombstones did not disappear until after the turn of the century. With the rise of lawn park style tombstones of the modern age, epitaphs diminished. By the 1920s, most tombstones were identified with only the name of deceased, and in some cases, with only the identification of “mother” or “father.” More contemporary research may indicate these inequalities actually disappeared, or possibly the change in tombstone architecture has hidden these social inequalities.
Distancing the Dead
One major cause of the digression from the candidness of dealing with death in the second half of the nineteenth century was attributed to the decline of religious faith in individuals. The argument has been made by some scholars that the distancing from death began with the rise of monuments centered on individualism and the attempt to emulate their own earthly importance.[89. Hijiya, “American Gravestones and Attitudes Toward Death,” 357.] The growth of urbanization, industrialization, and the developments in science helped to contribute to secularism.[90. John C. Waller, Health and Wellness in 19th-Century America (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2014), 57-58.] An example of conspicuous earthly importance would be the Rockefeller Monument located in the Lakeview Cemetery. Consequently, as Christian faith declined, mourning rituals that were an essential part of a Christian’s response to death in the nineteenth century also declined.[91. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 371.]
Another cause of the shift in attitudes can be attributed to the rise of the funeral industry after the American Civil War. During the 1860s, the gradual displacement of the presence of death in daily life began. During the war, Union families sought to return the remains of their loved ones who died on Southern battlefields for proper burials in the North. Embalming preserved bodies as they were transported over long distances. A class of mediators emerged as embalmers came between the body and the family.[92. Laderman, The Sacred Remains American, 7, 157.] Funeral directors took the place between the dead and the living in the 1870s and 1880s, disconnecting the close relationship that formally existed between the ceremonies around the deceased.
The improved standard of living and public health practices contributed greatly to the rise in life expectancy following the American Civil War. The advances in medicine and science helped to improve the chances of recovery.[93. Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers, Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, 3rd ed. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 4-5.] The improved standard of living (diet, nutrition, and shelter) had an even greater influence on improving life expectancy. These included advances in public health reforms such as water and sewer lines, vaccinations, and cleaning up of urban areas.[94. Vicki L. Lamb, “Historical and Epidemiological Trends in Mortality in the United States,” in vol. 2 of The Handbook of Death and Dying, ed. Clifton D. Bryant (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc., 2003), 189.] The pioneering research conducted by microbiologists, such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, identified the specific causes leading to deadly diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera.
These influences contributed to death becoming credited to a specific disease rather than divine intervention.[95. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 6.] Individuals no longer had the same fear of death. Instead of accepting death as God’s will, people began work toward recovery and survival.
The trauma of World War I (1914-1918) played a large role in destroying mourning customs.[96. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 6; Martha Pike, “In Memory Of: Artifacts Relating to Mourning in Nineteenth Century America,” The Journal of American Culture 3, no. 4 (June 2004): 658.] In total, 116,516 American soldiers died during World War I.[97. Anne Leland and Mari-Jana Oboroceanu, “American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics,” Congressional Research Service (February 26, 2010): 5.] Many soldiers died far away from home or went missing in action. The government decided against bringing home the bodies of deceased soldiers.[98. Michael Parker-Pearson, “Mortuary Practices, Society and Ideology: An Ethnoarchaeological Study,” in Symbolic and Structural Archeology, ed. Ian Hopper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982): 109.] People did not know how to react to the massive volume of deceased soldiers who would never provide a body for proper burial. Two major wars (the U.S. Civil War and World War I) shifted the social attitudes toward death within fifty three years.
These combined factors facilitated the attitudes that initiated the resignation toward death in the twentieth century. The dead are now disposed in a quick manner with a funeral staff now handling the deceased. Cremation has become one of the most popular forms of disposal of the dead and is continuing to rise.[99. Parker-Pearson, “Mortuary Practices, Society and Ideology,” 108.] The loss in the meaning of death has also been a loss in the meaning of human life, a cultural problem which post-Christian societies are still trying to solve.[100. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 357.] The attitude toward death has become more distant and fuller of tension.[101. Aries, Western Attitudes Toward Death, 106.] Society will continue to struggle on how to cope with death as the old approaches to dealing with it have faded away.
Modern tombstones bear testament to the digression from death in the twentieth century. By the 1920s, most modern tombstones had little or no religious symbolism. Most have limited epitaphs and motifs. Modern tombstones are often flat to the earth in the lawn park style (Figure 25). With inclination to use flat tombstones, the elegant architecture found in the cemeteries has disappeared. Ironically, tombstones of the modern era have become so uniform and simplified that they possess some of the same characteristics as tombstones of the eighteenth century.
In conclusion, the cemetery motifs, epitaphs, and architecture of the nine cemeteries examined from Northeast Ohio embody the changing social and cultural attitudes towards death in the nineteenth century. Cemeteries are museums, and individual tombstones are relics of the past. They are delicate remnants of the past that must be well maintained to provide further research for future generations. When passing a neglected and overgrown cemetery, take into consideration the historical significance and aesthetic beauty of the open-air museum.
]]>This edition of the Northeast Ohio Journal of History features two articles focusing on nineteenth-century Ohio.
Andrew Preston’s “Finding the French Connection: Elizabeth Duncan and the Naming of Massillon, Ohio” challenges the conventional wisdom concerning how Massillon received its name, presenting a plausible alternative that centers on the life and experience of the town founder’s wife through the lens of scholarship on republican womanhood.
“Farmers, Woodland, Conservation Consciousness: The Lower Cuyahoga River Watershed, Ohio, 1865-1885” by John Henris is a case study of the shift in woodland management by Ohio farmers in the late 1800s. These changes defy practices expected from the mostly New-England-derived farming communities due to changes in technology and economics.
With this issue we are also introducing a new, more streamlined website. We hope this will make future editions easier to produce, and will be working to make all back issues readily available in the new format. As always, if you have questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact the editor at kkern @ uakron. edu.
Kevin Kern
Feature Articles:
Finding the French Connection: Elizabeth Duncan and the Naming of Massillon, Ohio
By: Andrew Preston
Farmers, Woodland, Conservation Consciousness: The Lower Cuyahoga River Watershed, Ohio, 1865-1885
By: John Henris
On September 1, 1715, Jean-Baptiste Massillon delivered a heart-stopping eulogy for the late king of France, Louis XIV. He began with a simple declaration: “God alone is great my brethren.” Legend has it that as these words echoed through the basilica of Saint Denis, Massillon’s audience jumped to their feet in disbelief. The sheer audacity of a preacher who would diminish the king’s majesty at his own funeral compelled their unanimous rise. Or so the story goes. Such a man had risen from mediocre beginnings in France’s Provence region to become a preacher of wide renown at the turn of the eighteenth century. Two years after his famous funeral oration, Massillon was made the Bishop of Clermont. He was esteemed for his style, which was both eloquent and rational, and his delivery, which stirred the soul and “spoke to the heart.”[1. I am grateful to the Massillon Public Library and Stark County Library Genealogy Department for their superb assistance and willingness to suffer my questions and requests. The Massillon Museum and its supporters funded and guided the research that I conducted for this essay, which is an adaptation of a work for a book scheduled to be published in June 2013 by the museum. I owe them a particular debt of gratitude. Elizabeth Mancke at the University of Akron and Thomas Blantz at the University of Notre Dame gave me thoughtful and gracious feedback. So too did Jacci Welling, Jay Case, Greg Miller, and Scott Waalkes at Malone University. For the quotation, see “Literary Intelligence of Europe,” Star (London, England) Issue 187 (6 December 1788).] Not one to pull his punches, Massillon’s sermons mainly dealt with issues of personal morality and social responsibility. Yet the preacher’s rhetorical genius and humble manner often enabled him to convey his piquant messages in ways that moved his listeners deeply without offending them.[2. I am indebted to Katina Hazimihalis and her biography on Jean-Baptiste Massillon (soon to be published by the Massillon Museum) for the information presented in the preceding paragraph. Few substantial biographies of Massillon exist in English. For a short yet serviceable encyclopedia entry on his life and work, see “Massillon, Jean Baptiste,” New Catholic Encyclopedia 2nd ed., ed. Bernard L. Marthaler, et al. (Farmington Hills, MI: Thompson Gale, 2003), 9:313-314.]
It is a curious matter of fact that on another continent about a century after his death Massillon’s name would come to signify a burgeoning canal town in Northeast Ohio.[3. The founders of this town were the first (though not the only) Americans to choose “Massillon” as their town name. A few decades later, settlers in Iowa allegedly copied this name from their Ohio counterparts.] Arguably while many authors have discussed how this small town adopted the name of a French preacher as its own, no one has demonstrated exactly why this happened. This essay has a straightforward purpose. It offers a hypothesis concerning why Elizabeth (“Eliza”) Vilet Duncan chose to name her husband James Duncan’s settlement “Massillon” when the opportunity came to her in 1826.[4. Throughout this essay, I employ what Eliza’s descendants indicate was her favored format and spelling of her name. See Mary Ely MIller and Margaret Duncan Ely Morse, “James Duncan,” March 1916, Massillon Museum Archives (hereafter MMA), Massillon, Ohio.] I emphasize that what I offer in this essay can only be a hypothesis given the paucity of evidence related to this specific query. In order to establish my proposition, I consider the history of the town’s founding and some potential local influences on Eliza Duncan’s decision; I analyze Eliza’s family heritage, which some have taken as the impetus for her decision to select “Massillon;” and I explore Eliza’s early republican milieu, investigating whether issues of class, education, gender, or other explanatory factors influenced her choice. In the end, I offer a tentative explanation for Eliza Duncan’s decision—that the most likely reason she chose Bishop Massillon’s name to represent her husband’s town lies within a genteel education, which was conditioned by the bonds of womanhood, Franco-American relations, and religious fervor that existed during the early republic. In the process of coming to this conclusion, this essay illuminates the experiences of some of Ohio’s first settlers—including a “pioneer” woman whose “voice” is almost irrecoverable, save for a name that she committed to the incorporation records of a small town in the northeast. Her story entails a perspective that is often under-represented in the history of Ohio’s early statehood.
I.
In order to consider why Eliza Duncan named her husband’s town for a Frenchman, we first have to understand how Eliza came to live in Ohio. In some ways, her odyssey into the northwest quarter of the Buckeye State owes itself to the circuitous wanderings of her husband, James Duncan. James was born in Concord, New Hampshire, on May 2, 1789, to parents of English and Irish descent.[5. “Ancestor Chart for Ms. Sandra N. Wanamaker,” Connecticut Society of Genealogists, Inc. No. 10,072-4504 September 1987, MMA; Jean Atkins, “6 Generation Pedigree Box Chart for James and Eliza Duncan,” 2009, Massillon Library Reference Archives (hereafter MLRA), Massillon, Ohio.] At an early age, he ran away from home and became a cabin boy on a merchant ship. In the first years of the nineteenth century, James made first mate on a trading vessel that sank off the coast of Denmark during the Napoleonic wars. According to his granddaughter, Duncan recalled reaching Copenhagen “with nothing but his watch and his life belt” at the end of the affair.[6. Miller and Morse.] He departed the seafaring life about the time of the War of 1812, when the shipping industry slowed under the Embargo and Non-Importation Acts. Thereafter, he set out to explore the West. In 1815, Duncan met with friends in Wheeling, Virginia, and the group began “a sort of horseback adventure” destined for an Ohio settlement populated by families from New England.[7. Quoted in Robert H. Folger, “Chapter XII,” History of Stark County, Ohio (1881), 381; For paragraph see Folger, “Chapter XII,” 381; Margy Vogt, Towpath to Towpath: Massillon Ohio (Massillon, OH: Bates, 2002), 18; “Died (James Duncan’s Obituary Notice”,” The Ohio Repository (1 April 1863).]
A short while later, the men arrived in the village of Kendal. An ardent Quaker and enterprising New Englander of seafaring stock named Thomas Rotch had established this small settlement in 1812, naming it after a market town in northern England known for its woolen manufactures. Following its incorporation, Rotch endeavored to make Kendal a kind of locus for wool production in its own right. He began by raising a flock of 400 Spanish merino sheep. By the time that Duncan and his friends visited the settlement, Rotch had erected his own wool factory on the bank of a local creek and had convinced two others to do the same. Edward Heald claims that Rotch’s efforts earned Kendal the distinction of being the “greatest Spanish merino sheep raising district in the United States” during the 1820s.[8. Edward T. Heald, The Stark County Story, (Canton, OH: 1949), 1: 34, 38; Folger, “Chapter XII,” 373-375.]
Duncan’s experiences at the “Rotch Settlement” led him to purchase a few tracts of land in the vicinity, including part of one on the east bank of the Tuscarawas River and another on “the Plains” south of town.[9. Duncan made the latter purchase in conjunction with his traveling companions, though he later bought out their shares of land. See “Died.”] With a piece of the West now in his pocket, Duncan returned to Virginia. There he married a wealthy heiress, Eliza Vilet of Brooke County, in 1816. A short while later, the couple made their way to Duncan’s land in Ohio, eventually moving into a farm cottage on the Plains.
Ironically, the same impetus that curtailed James Duncan’s New England shipping career probably led him to launch a new one in Ohio’s manufacturing sector. By stifling transatlantic trade and boosting the price of foreign commodities, the War of 1812 prompted Americans to redirect their capital into domestic production and manufacturing. So during the final years of the 1810s, the market’s “invisible hand” impelled Duncan to build a flourmill, sawmill, and tannery on his plat abutting the Tuscarawas.[10. Sippo Creek, a rivulet that flows south into the Tuscarawas River, powered Duncan’s flourmill.] Unfortunately, when the aftermath of the war unleashed an agricultural glut, a panic in 1819, and a depression in the years that followed, Duncan’s endeavors left him with more goods than he was able to sell. In 1821, he floated a flatboat that Eliza named the “Walk-in-the-Water” to Cincinnati with a cargo of whiskey, bacon, potatoes, and flour, selling these surplus staples for a hefty profit. Then he walked home. Robert Folger writes that Duncan’s self-made success in Cincinnati would be “followed with other and similar efforts, none of which, however, were near so successful.”[11. Quote from Folger, “Chapter XII,” 382; see also Vogt, 18; “Died;” Heald, 1:34-35.]
Americans started to build new roads and waterways after the hostilities surrounding the War of 1812 stimulated the emergence of a market economy. This impulse was particularly felt in Ohio, where speculation began over the construction of a canal between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. When New York laborers began excavating a waterway of their own between Lake Erie and the Hudson River in 1817, the promise of New York City markets hardened the state’s resolve. In 1822, the Ohio Board of Canal Commissioners was established, and during the next three years, it surveyed the region’s possible canal routes. The commissioners’ work led the Ohio legislature to authorize in 1825 the construction of a canal that would follow the Scioto Valley north to Columbus, then east to Tuscarawas County, and north again, at last spilling through the Cuyahoga River into Lake Erie.[12. George Kneper, Ohio and Its People, 3rd ed. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003), 144-145.] Folger records that, upon hearing about this act, Mr. Duncan “commenced and never ceased his labors” to ensure that the Ohio and Erie Canal would run through his land on the east bank of the Tuscarawas. He financed this ambition with Eliza’s money.[13. Quote from Folger, “Chapter XII,” 383; see also Heald, 1:139. Eliza Duncan is listed as a signatory next to her husband on a series of indentures for the sale of her inherited lands in Virginia and Pennsylvania between 1817 and 1827. The Duncans received considerable sums of money for these lands, which undoubtedly helped to financially sustain James Duncan’s enterprises in Kendal and Massillon. “Indenture,” 24 June 1817, Deed Book #6, 419, BCCA; “Indenture,” 1822, Deed Book #7, 190, BCCA; “Indenture,” 1818, Deed Book #8, 338, BCCA; “Indenture,” 1827, Deed Book #9, 331, BCCA.]
Duncan competed over the canal with his neighbor, William Henry, who owned land on the Tuscarawas River’s west bank and wished to route it there. After lobbying the state government for several months, Duncan defeated Henry and secured the board’s promise to use his eastern holdings. After the route was established, he used his wife’s money to buy most of the land around his own and began plotting his new village. According to Folger, when the question of the town’s name arose at a meeting in Duncan’s brick house in Kendal, it was referred to Eliza, who suggested “Massillon” after the French preacher.[14. Robert H. Folger, “Massillon,” recorded by C. Cole in Early History, Organization, and Growth of the City of Massillon, (Massillon, Ohio: S. and J.J. Hoover, 1880), MLRA. There is strong evidence to prove that Eliza was the one who proposed the name “Massillon” in honor of Jean-Baptiste. The overwhelming majority of the sources corroborate this notion. See Robert H. Folger’s “Chapter XII,” 383; “Died;” “Story of Massillon,” The City Item 1.101 (18 December 1897); “Left Massillon Fifty Years Ago,” The Evening Independent 21.59 (27 July 1908); “Reminiscences,” The Massillon Independent 38.35 (29 November 1899). Also see Margy Vogt, 23-24. For one disparate view, see “(?) Residents Should Study Its History, He Says,” The Massillon Independent (21 November 1907).] Starting on March 22, 1826, James Duncan began advertising lots for sale “in the new Town of MASSILON, situated on the Ohio Canal” via a regional newspaper.[15. “Town of MASSILLON,” Ohio Repository 7.1 (18 May 1826; For this paragraph, see Heald, 1:139; Folger, “Chapter XII,” 383; Vogt, 23-24.]
It is difficult to determine whether Eliza Duncan’s personal experiences or relationships during her first decade in Ohio had any degree of influence on her decision to name her husband’s city “Massillon.” The voluminous stash of papers left behind by Thomas Rotch and his business partner, Arvine Wales—a group of writings that constitutes the best primary source collection available for this location and era—offer virtually no insight into Eliza’s life in the Kendal community. Her name, in fact, is wholly absent from these documents. Moreover, the nineteenth-century newspaper articles and other historical entries that do mention Eliza offer little information about her life in Kendal beyond a brief recognition of her role in the naming of Massillon.
The nature and quality of Eliza’s husband’s connection to the people within the vicinity is only a few shades less enigmatic. A man of enterprise, James acquired a variety of business partners during his stay in Kendal and Massillon, particularly after his relocation to the Plains in 1816 and before he lost his shirt in the Panic of 1837. In his early years there, Duncan formed a friendship with Thomas Rotch, which ended badly after a falling out over financial matters.[16. The nature of this falling out is hard to tell. See James Duncan to Thomas Rotch, “22 May? 1817,” MLRA #A-149-1; available from http://www.ohiomemory.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15005coll39/id/6157/rec/23 (18 March 2013) for a possible clue.] Subsequently he partnered with C. K. Skinner, another of the early members of the Kendal community whose father, Alexander, had also recently dissolved his business relationship with Rotch “by mutual consent.”[17. “Take Notice,” The Ohio Repository 2.72 (8 August 1816.] Duncan and the younger Skinner established the “Free Bridge Woolen Factory” in the early 1820s—around the same time that the Duncans also moved into one of C.K. Skinner’s properties in Kendal.[18. Folger, “Chapter XII,” 382.]
In the years before the incorporation of Massillon, relations between the Duncans and the Rotchs stayed sour. In 1819, Thomas Rotch registered a petition with the Stark County Commissioners against a road granted to Duncan and his associates, which ran through his and other properties to their “great detriment and damage.”[19. Thomas Rotch to the Stark County Commissioners, 7 May? 1819, MLRA #A-29-37; available from http://www.ohiomemory.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15005coll39/id/1155/rec/6 (18 March 2013).] Two years after Thomas’s death in 1823, his nephew Francis Rotch attempted to mend old family wounds with a letter to James Duncan that insisted upon joining their lands to attract the canal builders’ attention.[20. Francis Rotch to James Duncan, 19 July 1825, MLRA #C-14-1; available from http://www.ohiomemory.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15005coll39/id/3995/rec/3 (18 March 2013).] Duncan declined the offer. He later bought Rotch’s Kendal property outright as the town began to swell during the 1830s.[21. Vogt, 29.] In these ways, James—and, by extension, Eliza—Duncan’s relationships with the people of Kendal were undoubtedly complicated. Their Presbyterian affinities, affiliation with the Skinners, and rift with the Rotchs likely placed the family within a limited friendship network in Kendal. Nonetheless, how this setting affected Eliza’s affinity for the figure of Jean-Baptiste Massillon remains a subject wholly up for speculation.
II.
There are other potential explanations for Eliza Duncan’s decision to name her husband’s town “Massillon.” One involves the circumstances of her ancestry. It is possible that Eliza had French forbearers and that she selected the bishop’s name on the basis of that connection. Many historians of Massillon, Ohio, favor this interpretation, drawing special attention to the putative “French” spellings of her father’s surname that appear in some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources. While Eliza insisted on styling herself a “Vilet,” several other renderings of this name appear in newspaper articles and other historical documents, including the French-sounding monikers “Vilette” and “Villette.” So in her 1989 The Better Halves: The Story of Massillon’s Women, Ruth Kane posits that “Eliza Tillinghast Villette Duncan” was the “gently reared daughter of French immigrants.”[22. Ruth Kane, The Better Halves: The Story of Massillon’s Women (Massillon, OH: 1989), 17. “Tillinghast” was the surname of Eliza’s mother.] R. Paul and Virginia Hildebrand note that “Eliza Villette Duncan” was “of French origin.”[23. R. Paul Hildebrand and Virginia Hildebrand, Footprints: Presbyterianism in Massillon, Ohio (Alliance, OH: Jarman, 1976), 17.] Barton E. Smith claims that “Eliza Tillinghast Vilette” was James Duncan’s “French wife.”[24. Barton E. Smith, Upon These Hills: Massillon’s Beginnings and Early Days (Massillon, OH: 1962), 31-35.] And Margy Vogt writes that “Eliza T. Vilette” was the “daughter of French immigrants who had settled in Wheeling.”[25. Vogt, 18.] Arguably, each author accentuates a “French” rendition of Eliza’s father’s surname to construct a certain vision of Mrs. Duncan’s ancestral heritage and thereby infer at least part of her reason for naming the town.[26. Notably, Kane and Vogt draw attention to Eliza Duncan’s education as well as her reputed French ancestry when considering why Eliza chose “Massillon.” The Hildebrands and Barton Smith, however, mention nothing of Mrs. Duncan’s education, acknowledging only her French heritage.] Yet each fails to look beyond the name for evidence of her French descent.
As it stands, they may have a point in emphasizing these particular spellings of Eliza’s last name. Birth, marriage, and death records available from Europe between 1700 and 1800 indicate that the names “Villette” and “Vilette” (as well as “Villet” and “Vilet,” two further spellings of Eliza’s father’s surname present within some primary documents) overwhelmingly denote individuals of French record. Nevertheless, other important documents related to John Vilet, Eliza’s seafaring father, list further variants of his name. In the Rhode Island port records of his Atlantic voyages and in his final estate assessment, for example, John’s name is styled either “Vilett” or “Villett.”[27. Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 263-269; Final inventory of the estate of Captain John Vilett, Newport, RI, d. 1797, Probate Book 1796-18??, 54; Newport City Clerk Records, Newport, Rhode Island.] These names are most common to English, Welsh, or Scottish registers.[28. These claims are based on an exact name search of the limited collection of birth, marriage, and death records between the years 1700 and 1800 available through ancestry.com. The specific findings are as follows: for the name “Villette” – 2,175 hits: 98% were found within the records of French-speaking nations (primarily France but also Belgium, 2% within English or Scottish records. For the name “Vilette” – 790 hits: 99.5% of French record; .05% of English or Welsh record. For the name “Villett” – 11 hits: 100% of English or Welsh record. For the name “Villet” – 861 hits: 99% of French record; .6% of English record. For the name “Vilett” – 68 hits: 100% of English or Welsh record. For the name “Vilet” – 162 hits: 90% of French record; 7% of English or Welsh or Scottish reord; Ancestrylibrary.com (2010); available from www.search.ancestrylibrary.com (12 November 2010).]
Overall, the mutability of this moniker renders it an insufficient piece of evidence to substantiate any claim about Eliza’s French heritage. During her time period, personal names often took a variety of spellings depending on different factors and circumstances. Therefore it is not enough to invoke Eliza’s French ancestry with a nod to her surname. To more accurately determine whether Mrs. Duncan had her roots in French soil, a little genealogy is in order.
After digging into the records of her ancestors, it becomes apparent that Eliza Duncan was the daughter of “American” parents, and it is likely that she did not come to admire the French minister through her heritage. Eliza’s immediate family lived in New England for at least fifty years before her birth. Her maternal line of descent is traceable to the shores of England. A recent study by the Connecticut Society of Genealogists indicates that Elizabeth Vilet—born about 1796, in Newport, Rhode Island—was, on her mother’s side, a descendent of Pardon Tillinghast, born of Seven Cliffs, Sussex, England, on January 2, 1622.[29. “Ancestor Chart for Ms. Sandra N. Wanamaker;” See also David Benedict, A General History of the Baptist Denomination in America and Other Parts of the World (Boston: Lincoln and Edmands, 1813), 1:438; see also John Osborne Austin, The Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island: Comprising Three Generations of Settlers Who Came Before 1690 (With Many Families Carried to the Fourth Generation) (1887; reprinted Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2008), 202. As a point of interest, the Seven Sisters are a series of chalk cliffs on Britain’s northern shore.] Pardon traveled from Alfriston, England, to America in 1643. He died in Providence, Rhode Island, during the winter of 1718. Near the middle of the eighteenth century, Pardon’s progeny relocated to Newport, Rhode Island, where the family remained until Patience Taylor Tillinghast, Eliza’s mother, was born in 1774.[30. “Ancestor Chart for Ms. Sandra N. Wanamaker;” Atkins.]
While the roots of Eliza Duncan’s maternal ancestry are well documented, comparatively little information is available regarding her paternal line of descent. Her father John was born in Newport, Rhode Island, about 1760.[31. Atkins.] He captained slave-trading vessels and died at St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, approximately a year after disembarking from his home state on June 14, 1796. During the September before his final voyage, John wed Patience Tillinghast in Newport.[32. “Ancestor Chart for Ms. Sandra N. Wanamaker;” Atkins; Regarding John Vilet’s participation in the triangle trade, see Coughtry, 263-269.] In 1754, moreover, John’s father, Stephen Vilet, also married in Newport to one Sarah Luscomb. Prior to Stephen’s 1754 marriage, there seems to be no further documentation regarding his ancestry. With the present information, then, Eliza’s grandfather’s origins remain an enigma. Still, the timeline that these documents offer renders a clue about Eliza’s connection to her father’s family.
Regardless of John Vilet’s origins, his daughter was at least half a century removed from his ancestral roots, considering the date of Stephen Vilet’s marriage. More importantly still, Eliza’s father had departed to Africa before her birth on a voyage that would claim his life. This fact alone potentially diminishes the overall importance of Eliza’s paternal heritage. Yet whether Patience Tillinghast and her daughter encountered French culture via contact with her husband’s surviving family—assuming there was family to survive him and that this family was French—is a question for further consideration.
Most scholars suggest that New Englanders lived in nuclear families during the late colonial era and early republic—mother, father, and children residing together sometimes with servants or apprentices. One of the father’s widowed parents may have stayed with the family as well. It was common, even, for a son to inherit his family’s home after his father’s death while his mother maintained use of a portion of the house, usually one or two rooms.[33. Nancy F. Cott, “Eighteenth-Century Family and Social Life Revealed in Massachusetts Divorce Records,” A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, eds. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 107; Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart, eds, “The Law of Domestic Relations: Marriage, Divorce, Dower,” Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 55-58.] While a parent may have occupied Patience’s husband’s household during and after his death, Patience herself would probably not have retained the entire charge of her husband’s estate following his demise. On paper, at least, wives of this era were legally and economically subservient to their husbands. As a result they were often denied the inheritance of the majority of their husband’s wealth. By law, a woman could count on receiving only a “widow’s third” of these assets.[34. Kerber and De Hart, eds. 57-58; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (New York: Cornell, 1996), 137-138.]
One looks with interest, then, at the provisions contained within the final will and testament of Nicholas P. Tillinghast, Patience’s father, dated June 1809. In this document, Nicholas conveyed to his granddaughter, Eliza Vilet, “part of her father Captain John Villette[’s] estate of which I had the management.”[35. Final will and testament of Nicholas P. Tillinghast, recorded by a John Connell, July 1809, Will Book No. 2, 1-3, BCCA.] It is probable that Nicholas presided over Patience’s part of her husband’s sizeable estate until his death.[36. This claim finds support in the final inventory of the estate of Captain John Vilet. Along with his daughter, Nicholas P. Tillinghast was a cosigner on this document that records the allocation of Patience’s portion of John Vilet’s holdings.] Given that, at this time, women were often deemed unfit for the world of business and, moreover, were often legally excluded from it, this was probably a conventional arrangement.[37. There are many exceptions to this norm, yet most women in the early United States did remain separate from the world of business and all were legally dependent upon men under the doctrine of feme covert. For further discussion regarding the women’s sphere and coverture, see: Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 63-100; Linda K. Kerber, “The Republican Mother and the Woman Citizen: Contradictions and Choices in Revolutionary America,” Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 6th ed. eds. Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 119-127; Norton, 131-137.]
Because Nicholas Tillinghast oversaw his daughter’s inheritance, it is likely that she returned to his household after the death of her husband. Nicholas moved from Newport, Rhode Island, to Virginia in 1798. Probate records involving John Vilet’s estate indicate that Patience was present there with him in 1801.[38. “Ancestor Chart for Ms. Sandra N. Wanamaker;” Final inventory of the estate of Captain John Vilett.] Hence it is feasible that Patience and her daughter returned to her father’s house after John Vilet’s death and stayed there for the remainder of Eliza’s youth. This timeline offers scant room for substantial contact between Patience and her in-laws (whatever their ancestry) following the end of her marriage contract with their deceased son. In light of this and despite the manifold possibilities of this family arrangement, one may suppose that Eliza Vilet’s dubious family heritage was not the source of her affinity for the figure of Jean-Baptiste Massillon.
III.
Eliza may have come across the French preacher by other means. A few turn-of-the-twentieth-century newspaper articles offer a clue about an alternate link between the lady and the bishop. In 1908, Massillon, Ohio’s Evening Independent printed an article in which the grandniece of James Duncan, Fannie Harris Clift, recalls a “‘common impression’” that Eliza, who “‘named the city after the French priest […] Massillon,’” was a “‘great student of French.’”[39. “Left Massillon Fifty Years Ago.” The full quote by Mrs. Clift reads: “The common impression prevails that (Eliza Duncan) was a great student of French, but she was not the learned mother my grandmother, Mehitable Duncan McClary, James Duncan’s sister, was.” It seems that such a statement was not meant to dispute the fact that Mrs. Duncan could read and adequately understand French – just that she was not as “great” a French scholar as Mrs. Clift’s mother, who was a “linguist, a highly educated, and a highly cultured woman.”] An 1897 item for Massillon’s City Article entitled “Story of Massillon” indicates that Mrs. Duncan named the town after a “favorite author,” the celebrated French preacher.[40. “Story of Massillon,” 2.] A contemporary of the Duncans offers further proof of Eliza’s academic connection to Massillon’s writings as well as her general interest in the humanities. In an 1880 document, Robert H. Folger claims that Mrs. Duncan selected “Massillon” on the basis of her “familiarity with the French language, French history, and the classics,” which was “acknowledged by her large circle of friends.”[41. Folger, “Massillon.”] He furthermore writes in 1881 that she “was a fine French scholar” and “a woman of rare education and social qualities.”[42. Folger, “Chapter XII,” 383.] None of these authors mentions Eliza’s ancestry—be it French, English, or otherwise—as an explanation for her connection to the French bishop. Instead, they cite education and reading preference as the source of this link. Still more curious is the fact that any reference to Eliza’s “old-world” heritage appears much later in documents written within the past four decades.
Massillon’s books were certainly available to North American readers during the early republic. In 1805, a Raleigh, North Carolina, bookseller advertised a two-volume edition of the French divine’s sermons for sale alongside other “divinity” selections like the works of Scottish Presbyterian Hugh Blair and John Brown’s Dictionary of the Bible.[43. “Valuable Books,” Raleigh Register and North Carolina Weekly Advertiser, Issue 321 (18 November 1805). Brown was another “Scottish divine.”] In the following year, a Pittsburgh bookman touted the “Sermons of Bishop Massillon (the celebrated French Pulpit Orator) translated […and] complete in 2 vols.”[44. David McKeehan, Pittsburgh Gazette, Issue 1054 (2 December 1806); Interestingly, it seems to take at least another two decades for printers to feel confident enough to advertise Massillon’s works under headings that emphasize their “Frenchness;” Some examples include: “Valuable French and Italian Books,” Boston Courier Issue 1548 (14 February 1839); “French Books” Boston Courier Issue 509 (11 November 1830).] Both booksellers were undoubtedly hawking an English translation of Massillon’s sermons by William Dickson. This edition was first published in England in the late-eighteenth century. Yet in 1803, a Brooklyn, New York, printing firm began reproducing the work directly for American audiences. Two years later, a Harford, Massachusetts, publisher also started churning out copies of another single-volume edition of sermons by Massillon and an additional French divine, Lewis Bordaloue. These publications represent the first efforts by American printers to offer an English translation of Massillon’s sermons.[45. See the Online Computer Library Center, “WorldCat;” available from http://www.worldcat.org/ (28 February 2012).]
These English-language editions were not the only works by Jean-Baptiste Massillon for sale in the United States. The preacher had found his way into French print long before his appearance in English. In Europe after 1745 Jean-Baptiste Massillon’s sermons enjoyed nearly annual reprints in the French language until the nineteenth century. Some of these books found their way overseas. In his study of French books imported to Philadelphia between 1750 and 1800, Howard Mumford Jones notes that, while advertisements for French-language editions of Massillon’s sermons were rare, they nevertheless did appear in the city’s newspapers from time to time.[46. Howard Mumford Jones, “The Importation of French Books in Philadelphia, 1750-1800,” Modern Philology 32.2 (Nov. 1934), 162.] Thus Eliza Duncan had the potential to access Massillon’s printed sermons in their native French before her husband asked her to name his burgeoning canal town in 1826. Yet why the daughter of American citizens would have the French language in her lexicon is a question that deserves further consideration.
By 1801, Nicholas Tillinghast of Virginia was managing his daughter Patience’s part of her late husband’s estate. Some seven years later, this conventional arrangement came to its inevitable conclusion when Nicholas himself succumbed with no surviving male heir. In his will, he gave much of what he owned and managed to his oldest surviving daughter and granddaughter. These were considerable means.[47. Final will and testament of Nicholas P. Tillinghast: “To my Daughter Patience Villette the farm I purchased from Alexander Wells on Cross Creek in Washington County State of Pennsylvania, with the saw mill and other appertenances whereunto belonging, also a lott of parcel of ground of about 19 acres joining said farm which I bought from Robert Welsh, also 20 acres joining the parcel last mentioned purchased from David Templeton; also a tract of land in Washington County aforesaid; near Isaac Manchester’s farm, which I purchased from said Manchester; also my dwelling house in Charlestown aforesaid the new Brick building thereunto adjoining and the lott and piece or parcel of ground thereunto belonging; also all my other houses and lotts and parts of lotts in said town also three lots in the town of Smithfield in the State of Ohio, laid out by James Carr (…) I moreover give and bequeath to the said Patience all my household furniture all my part of the store goods which shall be on hand at the time of my decease, likewise all the debts which shall be due to me or the firm of Nicholas P. Tillinghast and Co. (…) also all my Interest in the Brigg Recovery now in the harbour of New York.”] Furthermore, sometime before Eliza Vilet’s marriage to James Duncan in 1816, Patience died. As a result, Eliza became the primary heir to her mother’s portion of her husband’s and father’s estates.
Eliza Vilet came of age under the auspices of a rather generous inheritance. Her relative wealth likely combined with other personal, social, and cultural factors to condition her life experiences during her adolescent years in Virginia. Undoubtedly, the normative gender constructs of Eliza’s era comprised another factor that influenced her upbringing. Nancy F. Cott argues that marriage and motherhood were the central components of early republican womanhood.[48. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 63-100; NOrton, 295; Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New York: Oxford, 2009), 500-507.] This gender construct is manifest within a variety of primary sources; Cott avers that, despite their differing approaches, a host of “essays, sermons, novels, poems, and manuals” directed at those who would be Eliza’s contemporaries echoed a “single cannon—of domesticity” for women.[49. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 63-64.] Hence in the early American republic, a woman appeared most “womanly” within the walls of her husband’s house. Within those walls, she performed her gender best by filling a number of roles suited to her “particular” disposition, which was deemed to be gentle, sensitive, nurturing, diffident, chaste, passionless, and obsequious. The “true woman” was a caregiver, who derived her greatest pleasure through rearing the next generation of American citizens; she was the family’s spiritual anchor and was responsible for her children’s salvation; she set the standard of behavior and etiquette within her household; she was the self-abnegating purveyor of her husband’s welfare.[50. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 63-100; Gerda Lerner, “The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson, 1800-1840,” A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, eds. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 190-193.] Though this list may not be comprehensive, such were the bonds of womanhood in Eliza’s milieu.
Many of Eliza’s contemporaries spent much of their single life in anticipation of marriage and what followed. To this end, a rising number of socially conscious parents from middle- and upper-class backgrounds sent their daughters to female academies during the late-eighteenth century. Female academies offered “ornamental” education in subjects like embroidery, dancing, and needlework—a curriculum that aimed to improve one’s chances within the marriage market and thereafter to embellish a future husband’s household and social life.[51. Mary Kelly, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 36.]
While ornamental instruction was prevalent within female academies at this time, a women’s educational experience was nonetheless undergoing a few important changes. Though in the years before the rise of the republic, many deemed it unnecessary for women to study subjects that had no practical application at home, some political and social thinkers started to argue for a more liberal approach to female scholarship following the American Revolution. Benjamin Rush, one of the foremost of these, proposed that women be given a formal education that emphasized instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic. According to Rush, men’s many “avocations” carried them away from the home, and consequently, “a principle share of the instruction of children naturally devolves upon the women.”[52. Benjamin Rush, Essays, Literary, Moral, and Philosophical, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Thomas and William Bradford, 1806), 76.] For this reason women needed to be properly schooled in order to give their sons an education that would help them to become intelligent and moral citizens. In classical thought, which was highly influential during this period, the maintenance of a new republic depended upon this type of citizenry. Thus mothers came to be viewed as the guardians of their newborn republic’s sacred flame and their education became a means to preserve that light.
These newfound attitudes toward women’s education nevertheless stayed in tension with those already in existence. In diverting the young ladies of prosperous families away from the art of fashion, needlework, and dancing, early republican thinkers offered them the chance to become formally-educated citizens, but knowledge of ornamentals remained an attractive and distinguishing asset. Because ornamental education retained much of its original currency for those wishing to marry well, female schools continued to offer this type of education in addition to more formal subjects.[53. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 115-118.]
Within this context, knowledge of the French language increasingly became another ornamental accomplishment for polite American women. Howard Mumford Jones argues that the late-eighteenth century saw a rise in the “social prestige” of French culture, partially as a result of more amenable Franco-American relations following the Seven Years War.[54. Howard Mumford Jones, America and French Culture (1927, reprinted Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1973), 185.] Consequently before 1800 there was a marked increase in the instruction of French—the “language of diplomacy and social intercourse”—on American soil.[55. Ibid., 199.] French books and teachers proliferated in the United States, and the socially conscious sought them out. To illustrate, Cott reproduces a 1791 advertisement which she deems typical: “‘Mrs. Woodbury announces that she will open a boarding school for young ladies at her house on Market St. where instruction will be given in the French and English languages, drawing, embroidery, etc.’”[56. Quoted in Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 115.] It is true that during Eliza’s formative years, some Americans’ interest in French culture diminished due to the increasing violence of the French revolution, the XYZ affair, and the Napoleonic Wars. Regardless, Jones rightly reminds us that “it is probably too much to say” that bourgeois interest in French language and culture simply disappeared “for twenty years” after the 1790s. He avers furthermore, “The social prestige of French as a language, though it might suffer an eclipse, could not be destroyed.”[57. Jones, America and French Culture, 199, 200.]
Eliza Vilet had sufficient motive and means to learn the French language and gain access to the writings of the Sun King’s eulogist in early republican America. Still it is curious that a Roman Catholic minister would find an advocate in a Presbyterian pioneer woman from Virginia. This potential non-sequitur is more feasible in light of the popular evangelical revivals that were sweeping the nation in the early-nineteenth century. Among other things, these revivals espoused a “cult of feeling that was, within its limits, far more receptive to aesthetic experience than Calvinisim and the more Spartan forms of republicanism had been.”[58. John H. Murrin, et al., eds. Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People (Belmont, California: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006), 388.] The writings of Jean-Baptiste Massillon were well suited to such an emotive religious culture. According to one early-nineteenth-century Congregationalist minister from Hartford, Connecticut, the prelate had “much knowledge both of the world and of the human heart; he is pathetic and persuasive; and upon the whole, is perhaps the most eloquent writer of sermons which modern times have produced.”[59. Abel Flint, “Preface,” Sermons of John Baptiste Massillon and Lewis Bourdaloue, Two Celebrated French Preachers, (Hartford, Connecticut: Lincoln and Gleason, 1805), iii.] In 1788, a writer for a London newspaper proposed that Massillon was “the first preacher who spoke to the heart.”[60. “Literary intelligence of Europe.] A third admirer declared in 1797 that Massillon gave the gospel “all the charms of sensibility.”[61. M. DeQuatremere, “On Religious Festivals,” Oracle and Public Advertiser (London, England) 19.535 (28 January 1797).] According to this cloud of witnesses, Massillon’s writings evince an aesthetical appeal well suited to the context of the Second Great Awakening.
Arguably, Massillon’s Roman Catholic affiliations were less important to Americans than his eloquent message of God’s election and the narrow road to salvation. William Dickson, Massillon’s early translator, writes that the Frenchman’s works were “an acceptable present to Christians of every denomination,” given that their content was “unconnected with local or temporary events in France.”[62. William Dickson, “Preface,” Sermons by J.B. Massillon To Which is Prefixed a Life of the Author, end ed. Vol. I, trans. and ed. by William Dickson, (Philadelphia: Carey and Son, 1818), iii.] This statement is geared to sell books no doubt, but it might not be far from the mark. In addition, Jones notes that even though many Americans during the early-nineteenth century nursed suspicions about the Papacy, some were nevertheless willing to accept “evidences of French Catholic ‘modernity’ with joy.”[63. Jones, America and French Culture, 439.] Massillon, who had Jansenist proclivities, was tolerable on this account. And seventeenth-century Catholic writers “were not, so to speak, so dangerous.”[64. Ibid., 441.] In these ways, the writings of Jean-Baptiste Massillon were palatable to a broad spectrum of Christians.
With this information in mind (and in light of the paucity of sources that discuss Eliza’s upbringing), I can offer a speculative review of how Eliza Vilet might have come to admire Massillon’s printed work. During her adolescence, Eliza may have spent a great deal of time preparing for marriage and domestic life. She probably received an education befitting her affluent status—one that prepared her to become both a useful and an ornamental spouse and a competent mother of American citizens. Such an education might have included instruction in the French language, given that French was a fashionable accomplishment at this time. Considering the religious expectations placed on early republican women and the widespread Christian revivalism of her time, it would not be surprising to find that Eliza’s fluency in French served to cultivate her spirituality. While growing up, Eliza could have accessed French (or English) editions of Jean-Baptiste Massillon’s writings from American booksellers. And it would not have been abnormal for her to do so, given Massillon’s appeal to “Christians of every denomination.”
The preceding lines are purely hypothetical. In truth it is doubtful that we will ever know with certainty why Eliza Vilet Duncan chose to name her husband’s town “Massillon.” In the end, perhaps the act of asking this question is more significant than its answer. This inquiry has drawn attention to the fluidity of local memory regarding a notable figure within the history of the settlement of Northeast Ohio. Most of the histories of this area have tended to subsume this figure’s actions and words—save but a few—within those of her husband, who is often cited as Massillon’s founding father. I think that this version of the story leaves something to be desired. Despite the faintness of her voice within the historical record, it is clear that Eliza Vilet Duncan influenced her husband’s financial wherewithal to pursue ambitious business ventures in Ohio, that she gained an honored reputation of her own within the local community, and that she applied a culturally-conditioned intellect to the task of naming a new town in the newly-minted state of Ohio. These instances of female agency are important components of Ohio’s history. Without them, we lose sight of the incredible dimension of the pioneer experience in the northeast quarter of the Buckeye State.
]]>In the fall of 1878 John Kemery appropriated a portable steam sawmill to cut wood on the western uplands of the Cuyahoga Valley midway between the growing manufacturing cities of Akron and Cleveland, Ohio. Kemery was not a lumberman but a farmer by occupation who formed a corporation with the Bombgardner brothers, John and Israel, for the cutting of timber. Though farmers traditionally cut woodlots for supplemental income, the work of these three Richfield Township men struck a discordant tone. By 1879 the farm woodlots of large sections of the Cuyahoga Valley were disappearing as the pasturelands of the factory dairy system expanded in equal measure. The woodland they cut on this day was not theirs but consisted of fifty-five acres belonging to a Richfield Township dairy farmer named E.D. Hancock. The contract for the cutting of Hart’s woodlot originated with a third party, Ellis and Mack. Even the agricultural seasons were turned upside down, for farmers usually worked their woodlands during the winter months following fall harvests in September and October. John Kemery, it appeared, appropriated new technologies for the reduction of local woodlands in ways that increasingly distanced him from more traditional perceptions of land stewardship, sustainability, and the natural cadences of rural labor.[1. The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 30 October 1878.]
The experience of John Kemery similarly speaks to discordant themes in the narratives of both the history of conservation and the history of the Western Reserve. Recent environmental histories such as Robert McCullough’s The Landscape of Community and Richard Judd’s Common Lands, Common People place farmers and their rural communities at the forefront of the emergent conservation movement within nineteenth-century New England. Similarly, Robert Wheeler in “The Literature of the Western Reserve” has pointed out that a new generation of scholarship has revealed the complex cultural, political, and economic differences hidden beneath the cultural ties between New Connecticut and New England. Still, for many writers, the pastoral middle ground of the nineteenth-century Western Reserve validates an environmental and cultural homogeneity with New England. The meandering valley of the lower Cuyahoga, for example, was a mosaic of dairy farms, village commons, and patchwork woodlots by which the region might just as easily have been mistaken for the upper reaches of the Connecticut River. This study examines the confluence between agriculture, technology, and timber speculation in the Cuyahoga Valley and elucidates why farmers within the Western Reserve largely abandoned an ethic of woodland stewardship even as the state of Ohio was influential in the forestry movement and as their New England brethren were at the forefront of woodland conservation during the last decades of the nineteenth century.[2. For woodland and conservation consciousness during the nineteenth-century change see, Robert McCullough, The Landscape of Community: A History of Communal Forests in New England, (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995); Richard Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). For forests and the Holland Land Purchase of Western New York see, Charles Brooks, “Overrun With Bushes: Frontier Land Development and the Forest History of the Holland Purchase, 1800-1850,” Forest & Conservation History 39 (January 1995): 17-18, 21-22; Charles Brooks, Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution: The Holland Land Purchase (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 14 -17, 50-53; For woodland in nineteenth-century Ohio see, Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 361-368. For the historiography of the Connecticut Western Reserve see, Robert Wheeler, “The Literature of the Western Reserve,” Ohio History 100 (Summer – Autumn 1991): 101 – 128.]
The roots of woodland conservation in Ohio began during the first decades of the nineteenth century with state legislation for the protection of timber resources on public lands. Even prior to statehood in 1803 territorial representative William Henry Harrison, for example, brought to the attention of Congress woodland destruction attributed to itinerant squatters and salt-makers on land comprising the Scioto Salt Reserve. In response, a Congressional resolution called for long-term leasing of the saline deposits to negate such damage and protect timber from itinerate salt-makers stating, “that these persons by a destructive waste of timber in the neighborhood of the springs are daily diminishing their value.”[3. Quoted in, Eugene Willard ed., A Standard History of the Hanging Rock Iron Region of Ohio, Vol. 1, (The Lewis Publishing Company, 1916), 372.] When control of the Scioto Salt Reserve passed to Ohio’s jurisdiction in 1803 some of the earliest legislation provided for state oversight and protection of timber resources on public lands.[4. For protection of private woodlands and compensation for theft or destruction see, Salmon P. Chase, ed., The Statutes of Ohio and of the Northwest Territory, Adopted or Enacted From 1788 to 1833 Inclusive, Vol. 2, (Cincinnati, OH: Corey & Fairbank, 1835), 856, 861, 1204, 1347.] The Ohio legislature called for the agent at the Scioto works to “reserve any sugar trees or timber that may be necessary for the future uses of the state”[5. Chase, The Statutes of Ohio and of the Northwest Territory, Vol. 2, 830.] and fined any lessee “a sum not exceeding one hundred dollars” for cutting timber beyond the boundaries of assigned tracts or using timber for purposes other than the production of salt.[6. Salmon P. Chase, ed., The Statutes of Ohio and of the Northwest Territory, Adopted or Enacted From 1788 to 1833 Inclusive, Vol. 3, (Cincinnati, OH: Corey & Fairbank, 1835), 1948.] Similarly, the legislature recognized the need to protect woodland resources on state public lands set aside for the support of religion or for education by the Land Ordinance of 1785.[7. The Land Ordinance of 1785 set aside school lands while ministerial lands were stipulated in the sale of large private land tracts for the Ohio Company of Associates in 1787 and the Symmes Purchase in 1788. School Lands totaled 704,204 acres while ministerial lands constituted 43,525 acres.]
The Ohio legislature, for example, passed an act that called for any lessee to “be bound not to waste or destroy sugar trees or other timber” on township school lands.[8. Ohio General Assembly, Acts of the State of Ohio, Vol. 29, (1821), 492.] Other acts stipulated a fine “not exceeding thirty dollars” for any individual who shall “cut, fell, bore or destroy any living tree standing or growing on any of the public school or ministerial lands in this state, not having first obtained license from the proper authority to do so.”[9. Chase, The Statutes of Ohio and of the Northwest Territory, Vol. 2, 896.] While the Ohio legislature invoked punitive fines for the protection of woodlands on public domains such as salt reserve, school, or ministerial lands, they also recognized that long-term leasing was the best means for managing forest resources. Though the Ohio legislature drafted much of what might be interpreted as early conservation law for public lands in Ohio, Western Reserve farmers were similarly aware of the potential for the abuse of woodlands and cognizant of the potential for future regional timber scarcity during the first half of the nineteenth century.
In 1837, for example, farmer M. Linley of Euclid, Ohio, wrote home to friends in New England that, “I have lived in this part of the country for 10 years, and from my own observation, and from information of those who have been here for thirty years or more, I am positive that when our forests are cut away, they do not sprout as they do in New England.” He continued, “We have no mountains, nor what may be called really poor land; it is all fit for grazing or the plough; consequently in a few years, wood and timber will become scarce.”[10. New England Farmer and Horticultural Register (Hereafter NEF&HR) 15 (17 May 1837): 358; NEF&HR 15 (February 1837): 246.] The editor of New England Farmer felt the issue of the sustainability of the propagation of woodland in Northeast Ohio serious. He cautioned, however, that Mr. Linley’s observations might be a “consequence of some incorrect management in the mode of cutting the primitive trees, native of the soil, when their reproduction is a desirable object,” rather than an indication of a more long-term trend toward the decline of Ohio woodlots.[11. NEF&HR 15 (24 May 1837): 366.]
The emergence of a local agricultural press in Ohio, with the publication of the Ohio Cultivator in Columbus in 1845 and the Ohio Farmer in Cleveland in 1856, placed farmers at the forefront of emergent issues of woodland conservation in the state during the antebellum period. Through the medium of these new print journals farmers debated the best seasons for cutting hardwoods for differing utilizations of the timber, the protection of woodland from livestock, woodland clearing, and the long-term management and sustainability of farm woodlots. In 1852, for example, one Muskingum County farmer confided, “the present generation has been engaged in one unceasing warfare upon the forests,” and “our prodigality will cause us great inconvenience, and result in serious evils to coming generations.”[12. Ohio Cultivator 8 (1 February 1852): 38.] In 1866, a year before Hosea Paul warned of the impending ecological crisis threatening Cuyahoga Valley woodlands, another Ohio farmer cautioned “the wood lot diminishes in size and not infrequently disappears altogether from the farm.” He proposed that fifteen acres was the minimum woodlot that would be self-sustaining, and then, only through “a system of regular cutting” and careful management.[13. For discussions of seasonal timber cutting see, Ohio Cultivator 6 (1 May 1852): 133; Ohio Cultivator 13 (15 February 1857): 51. For methods of clearing timberland see, Ohio Cultivator 15 (1 January 1857): 1; Ohio Cultivator 15 (15 February 1859): 54. For woodlot management see, Ohio Cultivator 22 (11, November 1866): 331.]
Ohioans took a formative role in the national discussion over the emergent field of forestry during the second half of the nineteenth century. John Aston Warder, founder of the American Forestry Association, developed his theories on timber conservation and woodland sustainability by putting them into practice on his North Bend, Ohio, farm during the 1860s. Warder and his contemporary, George Perkins Marsh, are considered founders of the modern conservation and forestry movement in America. During this period the Cleveland-based agricultural journal the Ohio Farmer similarly took an active role in promoting forestry and preservation of woodlands. Articles appeared only sparingly during the late 1860s and 1870s but became so prominent during the 1880s that the Ohio Farmer encountered pushback from rural people who resented both the condescending tone toward common farmers and the legislative actions called for by many of the journal’s contributors. Agitation for a cohesive forest policy in Ohio, however, culminated with the First Annual Report of the Ohio State Forest Bureau in 1885, a sweeping document that examined soil erosion, drought, and decline in timber quality as associated with the reduction of Ohio woodlands and identified tax rates, industrialization, dairy specialization, and growing railroad infrastructure as placing new pressures on woodland sustainability. The report concluded that woodland in the Western Reserve of northeastern Ohio alone decreased at an astonishing rate from 40.3 percent of land area in 1853 to only 13.8 percent by 1883.[14. McCullough, The Landscape of Community, 98-99; Shaul Cohen, Planting Nature: Trees and the Manipulation of Environmental Stewardship in America, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 39; Harold Steen, The U.S. Forest Service: A History, (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, Centennial Edition, 2004), 9. First Annual Report of the Ohio State Forest Bureau, to the Governor of the State of Ohio, For the Year 1885 (Columbus, OH: The Westbote Co., State Printers, 1886), 68.]
In response, participants in agricultural societies and farmers’ clubs, as well as writers for agricultural journals, encouraged individual solutions to timber scarcity in Ohio. Some advocated for grassroots efforts, absent the backing of state legislation, and usually invoked a call for civic duty or reciprocity on the part of the farmer or, more pragmatically, elucidated the sound fiscal benefits of careful woodland management. Others under the direction of such men as John Warder looked toward legislation for the protection of Ohio woodlands. One survey in the First Annual Report of the Ohio State Forest Bureau, for example, specifically addressed the issue of taxation encouraging the destruction of woodland. Opponents argued that taxes on woodland were so high in many counties, and that wood was in such demand, that it practically forced farmers to cut down their trees. Ohioans adopted other legislative measures to conserve timber or encourage the propagation of hardwoods during this period; in 1883, new legislation called for a reduction of the road tax if individuals planted certain types of hardwoods along public roads. Proposed legislation on fencing was similarly designed to encourage timber conservation by encouraging farmers to transition from rail to plank fencing or even to adopt wire instead. In no region of Ohio in the decades following the Civil War, however, was anxiety about timber scarcity more resonant than in the Western Reserve.[15. Ohio Farmer 63 (24 February 1883): 135; Ohio Farmer 63 (10 March 1883): 170; Ohio Farmer 61 (27 May 1882): 358; First Annual Report of the Ohio State Forest Bureau, to the Governor of the State of Ohio, 279.]
The increasing tempo of woodland reduction in the dairy region of northeastern Ohio known as the Western Reserve particularly troubled farmers and foresters in the decades following the Civil War. Western Reserve forests were especially vulnerable to abuse on account of the region’s agricultural and industrial transitions. The demand for hardwoods for industry, construction, and domestic use increased exponentially as the population of the cities of Akron and Youngstown increased five fold from 1860 to 1880 and Cleveland added over 115,000 citizens during the same period. In the agricultural hinterlands of the Western Reserve, Geauga County farmers introduced the factory cheese system in 1862 from New York State, encouraging a new kind of agricultural specialization that placed additional pressures upon the woodland in the region on account of pasture expansion and the continued practice of woodland grazing. Concurrently, woodland conservation took on new import in the counties of Geauga, Portage, and Summit as farmers began specializing in maple sugar and syrup. Land elevations in that section of the Western Reserve coupled with the influence of Lake Erie created a maple-sugaring region rivaled only by the output of farmers in the state of Vermont, and Garrettsville, in Portage County, became the center of production by the early 1880s. During this period Cuyahoga Valley farmers faced the same pressures on local woodlands encountered by agriculturists across the Western Reserve.[16. For population statistics for Western Reserve cities of Cleveland, Akron, and Youngstown see, George Knepper, Ohio and Its People, (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003), 494. For the introduction of the factory dairy system and an overview of Maple Sugaring in Western Reserve see, Robert Jones, History of Agriculture in Ohio to 1880, (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983), 198 – 201, 244.]
In 1878, for example, one Boston Township resident confided, “the special ‘institution’ of Peninsula may be said to be lumbering, sawing, grinding, cheese-box making, [and] quarrying.” This observer of rural transformation, however, was not writing of the clear-cutting of the ancient white pine forests of the Michigan Peninsula or the native yellow pine barrens of the Georgia bottomlands. Rather, the timber fever that gripped the Cuyahoga River and it tributaries during the 1870s and 1880s was representative instead of the wholesale reduction of farm woodlots throughout northeastern Ohio. After the Civil War new technologies allowed local farmers to participate in the emergent timber economy of the region while simultaneously abandoning the more sustainable woodland practices of their fathers. Not all residents were comfortable with these transitions, and in 1867 Hosea Paul wrote of the emergent rural speculation in the timber economy of the Cuyahoga River Valley that, “the people of Northampton and Boston even are beginning to find out that their timber is not inexhaustible.”[17. The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 6 February 1878; Hosea Paul Jr., “The Agriculture of Summit County,” in Twenty-Second Annual Report of the Ohio State Board of Agriculture, With an Abstract of the Proceedings of the County Agricultural Societies: To the General Assembly of Ohio, For the Year 1867 (Columbus, OH: L.D. Myers & Bro., State Printers, 1868), Part II, 70-71.] After the Civil War the increasing voraciousness of the timber economy of the Western Reserve prompted contemporary concerns among farmers such as Hosea Paul and foresters such as John Warder that the current rate of deforestation in the region was unsustainable. Hosea Paul’s concerns, however, were not new in 1867 and Ohioans were cognizant of the finitude of timber resources while the region was still part of the Northwest Territory.
The anxiety expressed over the sustainability of local woodlands by Paul in 1867 transcended township, county, or regional boundaries and became part of a national discussion concerning unprecedented deforestation and fears of a crisis in woodland sustainability during the 1870s. Across the northeastern states, in particular, critics from Massachusetts to Illinois decried the accelerating rate of woodland destruction attributed to the growth of cities, industry, railroad expansion, and demand for building materials for the settlement of the treeless Great Plains. Latent anxiety resulting from deforestation and questions of long-term woodland sustainability called farmers, foresters, and community leaders to action. Their work provided one of the foundational underpinnings for the conservation movement and resulted in the convening of forest congresses to address such issues as well as the organization of the first national forestry association in 1875.[18. Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 228-230.]
Located approximately halfway between Cleveland and Akron, the townships of Richfield and Boston in the lower Cuyahoga Valley provide an excellent location for examining farmers, conservation consciousness, and the woodland economy of the region between 1865 and 1885. Both townships experienced reductions in woodland as the factory dairy system expanded, while their central location between two urban centers and the construction of the Valley Railway encouraged timber speculation among farmers. During the nineteenth century the forest complexes of Boston and Richfield townships were more diverse than in other districts of the Western Reserve. On first and second bottoms along the Cuyahoga River, steep slopes and shaded washes encouraged a wide range of forest habitat. Eastern Boston Township forests consisted largely of Beech-Maple complexes and were more typical of the Western Reserve. Forests west of the Cuyahoga River Valley were more varied, consisting of mixed oak and beech maple stands. The eastern portion of Richfield Township was covered almost exclusively in oak, while the northern and western portions were covered with heavy tracts of maple, beech, ash, hickory, black and white walnut, and large oaks. Along the Cuyahoga River small stands of hemlock occupied sheltered ravines below bedrock ledges, though not in sufficient quantities to encourage a local tanning industry. The valley also contained a few stands of white pine along the river in Northfield Township in the aptly-named Pinery Narrows, just north of the Boston Township line and in Bath Township on the high hills bordering Yellow Creek.[19. Paul Sears, “The Natural Vegetation of Ohio,” The Ohio Journal of Science 25 (May 1925): 142-143; Jane Forsyth, “A Geologist Looks at the Natural Vegetation Map of Ohio,” The Ohio Journal of Science 70 (May 1970): 185; William Perrin, History of Summit County, With an Outline Sketch of Ohio, (Chicago, IL: Basken and Battey, 1881), 609; Barbara Manner and Robert Corbett, Environmental Atlas of the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area, (Monroeville, PA: Surprise Valley Publications, 1980), 54, 69; Paul, “The Agriculture of Summit County,” 70 – 71.]
On the surface, at least, Boston and Richfield farmers maintained traditional woodland strategies after the Civil War even as timber acreage decreased substantially across the Western Reserve. In total number of acres Richfield and Boston farm woodlots remained remarkably stable during this period decreasing in size, on average, a single acre from 48.5 acres in 1850 to 47.5 acres in 1870. The percentage of farmland in wood, however, decreased nearly twenty five percent over the same period and declined by nearly fifty percent comparative to total farm acreage between 1870 and 1885. This disparity between the seeming stability in woodlot acreage and the decline in percentage of farmland can be accounted for by the increase in farm size as farmers embraced the new factory dairy system after 1867. In 1885 circular responses from Summit County in the First Annual Report of the Ohio State Forest Bureau similarly pointed to the agricultural and industrial economy of the region for the decline in timber, reporting that the most common causes for the reduction of woodland were “clearing for agricultural purposes,” “cutting for timber,” and “injuries by cattle and sheep.”[20. First Annual Report of the Ohio State Forest Bureau, to the Governor of the State of Ohio, For the Year 1885, 94; Williams found that, across Ohio, farmers reported that agricultural expansion was the cause of woodland reduction in 90 percent of counties statewide. See, Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 364.](See Table 1)
Between 1850 and 1870 Cuyahoga Valley farmers produced supplementary income from their woodland by a number of methods. In 1870, for example, 24 farmers reported incomes averaging $313.95 from the sale of forest products. Fewer farmers produced maple sugar from their sugar bushes in 1870 than in 1850, though production increased from 199 pounds to over 261 pounds over the same period. Other farmers partook in the woodland economy of the region in ways unrecorded by census enumerators. Peninsula resident Frank Lander manufactured 175 sap buckets for the sugar season in 1878, while the Wilkinson family gathered round bolts of base wood and black maple for the production of toothpicks and cigar lighters in Cleveland. T.W. Francisco purchased hoop-poles from Richfield farmers, transporting them on the Ohio and Erie Canal to coopers in Cleveland and Akron. Woodland among Western Reserve farmers continued to be utilized as pasture, though many acknowledged the detrimental consequences from grazing ever-smaller woodlots. Overall, it appeared the local agricultural economy in 1870 produced surplus from woodland in the form of maple sugar, barrel staves, planks, and cordwood in much the same ways as it had in 1850.[21. The Summit County Beacon (Akron) 28 February 1878; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 29 May 1878; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 30 October 1878; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 31 December 1879.]
The experience of Boston resident George Stanford offers much insight into how Cuyahoga Valley farmers managed their woodlands between 1850 and 1870. Stanford reduced his woodland from 200 acres in 1850 to only 84 acres in 1870 but maintained traditional practices of timber gathering, woodland grazing while increasing his maple sugar production nearly fourfold on this decreasing acreage. In 1872 Stanford went to the woods with his team collecting logs for market and in May utilized the same area for woodland pasture. Stanford owned a broom-making machine supplementing the dairy and general agricultural income of his Boston farm as broomcorn grew particularly well on the alluvial Cuyahoga River bottoms of his lower till fields. The handles, however, were undoubtedly produced locally from wood gathered from his home woodlot. Stanford’s farm journal for 1872 presents a picture of increasingly intensive woodland use where more production was gleaned from fewer acres of timberlands that too often doubled as woodland pasture.[22. The Diaries of George Stanford, Peninsula Library and Historical Society, Peninsula, Ohio, (Hereafter Stanford Diaries PLHS), 11 January 1872, 24 May 1872; Non-Population Census Schedules for Ohio: Agricultural Returns for Boston Township, Summit County 1850, MF T1159 Roll 9; Non-Population Census Schedules for Ohio: Agricultural Returns for Boston Township, Summit County 1870, MF T1159 Roll 40.]
The pace of woodland decline on Stanford’s farm – and in the Cuyahoga Valley more generally – was largely tied to the emergence of the factory cheese system in the region during the 1860s. Expansion in meadow and pasture came almost exclusively through the clearing of woodlands. Stanford’s woodland strategies were representative of other valley farmers as the grass culture of the Western Reserve profoundly shaped the forests of the Cuyahoga Valley between 1840 and 1880. Critics could point to the connection between timber speculation for new urban markets and woodland decline; however, the grass culture of the Western Reserve exacerbated woodland reduction as well. During the pioneer period woodland grazing complemented the opening of new farmlands on the reserve. Farmers had access to timber that vastly exceeded their needs and livestock did well subsisting on the under-story of unimproved lands. After 1870 the continued practice of woodland grazing posed the most serious threat to the long-term sustainability of remaining woodlots on Western Reserve farms. Woodland grazing damaged the bark of young trees while cattle devoured young saplings essential for the natural reproduction of local woodlots. Even as the rate of deforestation stabilized by 1900, woodland grazing remained an important agricultural and ecological issue among Western Reserve farmers into the mid-decades of the twentieth century.[23. For persistence of woodland grazing in the Western Reserve see, Ohio Farmer 108 (23 September 1905): 221; Charles Dambach, “A Ten-Year Ecological Study of Adjoining Grazed and Ungrazed Woodlands in Northeastern Ohio,” Ecological Monographs, Vol. 14, No. 3, (July 1944), 258 – 260, 269 – 270; Stephen LaMar noted that, even in 1940, at least two thirds of woodland in the neighboring Western Reserve county of Portage was utilized as pasture. See, Stephen Le Mar, “An Agricultural Survey of Portage County,” Economic Geography, Vol. 19, No. 2, (April 1943): 158 – 159.]
Evidence suggesting that local farmers were faced with challenges brought about by woodland scarcity in the 1870s was not difficult to find. In 1867 Hosea Paul reported, for example, that large tracts of oak had recently resided in neighboring Portage Township but that “the barrel factory has disposed of most of it.” George Standard recorded in his personal journal that the wood needed for planking his new cow barn could not be found in his eighty-acre woodlot; he was forced to purchase the planking in Cleveland and have it delivered via the Ohio and Erie Canal in 1872. A few years later, speculation in valley woodland was so rampant that the demand for hardwoods led to more overt acts of destruction as when The Summit County Beacon reported that, “Some persons went into James Lockard Sr.’s woods and ‘girdled 14 of his best oak trees’” in February of 1880.[24. Paul, “The Agriculture of Summit County;” Stanford Diaries, PLHS, 2-3 July 1872. The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 11 February 1880.]
Farmers were not the only architects of the transformation of the woodlands of the Cuyahoga Valley in the decades following the Civil War. A number of companies in the townships of Richfield and Boston harvested local woodlots for the production of staves, hoops, board lumber, cheese boxes, and square timber for local consumption or for extra-local markets in Akron, Cleveland, and beyond. During the winter of 1873-1874, for example, the firm of Wood & McNeil produced 725,000 feet of lumber, 25,000 railroad ties, and 5,000 fence posts. Another Peninsula based firm, C.L. Newell & Co., owned a large mill along the Ohio and Erie Canal and operated portable sawmills in woodlands as needed. C.L. Newell & Co. employed more than twelve teams and fifty men to bring timber out of woodlots in Boston and Richfield Township, using the Ohio and Erie Canal to ship 1-2 boatloads of lumber to market in Cleveland each day, and began sending lumber to Cleveland via the Valley Railway after it opened in 1880.[25. The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 14 January 1875; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 6 February 1878; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 5 November 1879; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 4 February 1880.]
In 1879 the Cleveland Rolling Mills awarded Wood & McNeil a contract to provide 500,000 feet of oak plank. Wood & McNeil hoped to honor the contract by clearing woodlands throughout the townships of Boston, Richfield, and Bath during the winter of 1879-1880. If filled, this one contract alone would require more local timber than the entire production of Boston Township mills a decade earlier, and twice the average amount of wood annually consumed in the township’s three canal boatyards during the past ten years. Wood and McNeil operated a number of portable sawmills moving them from farm to farm in Richfield and Boston Township. To complete the Cleveland Rolling Mills contract, for example, Wood and McNeil moved their portable sawmills from Isiah Humphrey’s Richfield farm to John Congers’ “west woods” in neighboring Boston Township during the winter of 1879 and 1880. [26. The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 5 November 1879; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 12 November 1879; Paul, “The Agriculture of Summit County,” 70; Non-Population Census Schedules for Ohio: Industry Returns for Boston Township, Summit County 1870, MF T1159 Roll 48.]
The clearing of Farnum’s Wood, however, was perhaps the most palpable expression of the new timber economy that emerged along the Cuyahoga River during the 1870s and 1880s. Everett Farnum, one of the early settlers of Richfield Township, accrued an estate of 2,200 acres north and east of the township center during the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1870 census enumerators listed 700 of Farnum’s 2,500-acre estate as woodland. One Richfield resident described Farnum’s woodlot as a place “were reigned primeval solitude tenanted only by the squirrel and raccoon the woodpecker and the owl, but which today is a living hive of industry, resounding with the sound of the axe and the saw, varied by the crash of the falling monarchs of the forest.”[27. The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 26 June 1878.] In 1874 an ice storm heavily damaged Farnum’s wood and the downed trees fueled the rapidly growing timber economy of the region into the 1880s. A number of timber interests, including C.L. Newell & Co., were awarded contracts for clearing over seven hundred acres of Farnum’s woodland between 1878 and 1880. By 1879 the scale of activities in Farnum’s Wood reached such a fevered pitch that several portable mills were erected and a temporary lumber camp established for both woodsmen and their teams. Nearly 1,500 cords of wood accumulated over the winter of 1878-1879, and one company acquired a canal boat for the exclusive purpose of daily transporting timber from Farnum’s wood to Cleveland.[28. Non-Population Census Schedules for Ohio: Agricultural Returns for Richfield Township, Summit County 1870, MF T1159 Roll 40; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 8 March 1876; The Summit County Beacon, (Akron), 28 June 1878; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 29 January 1879.]
A number of factors independent of the local agricultural economy accelerated the growth of a timber economy, represented by the clearing of Farnum’s Wood, in the Cuyahoga River Valley between 1865 and 1880. Hosea Paul noted, for example, that the forests of the Western Reserve diminished after the Civil War as Summit County farmers, local industry, and communities turned to regional coal reserves to fuel businesses and for domestic use. Concurrently, new technologies such as portable steam sawmills made it easier for timber speculators to turn marginalized farm woodlots into cordwood, shingles, planking, and barrel staves for regional industry in Cleveland and Akron. Finally, the long anticipated completion of the Valley Railway through the Cuyahoga River Valley in 1879-1880 required massive localized production of railroad ties, driving timber speculation to a fevered pitch in 1880.[29. Paul, “The Agriculture of Summit County,” 70; Sam Tamburro, “The History of the Ohio & Erie Canal,” in Lynn Metzger and Peg Bobel eds, Canal Fever: The Ohio and Erie Canal, From Waterway to Canalway, (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press), 13–15.]
The timber-cutting of Farnum’s Wood was one of the more spectacular examples of lumbering along in Cuyahoga River Valley; however, the same technologies allowed local farmers to become more direct agents of timber speculation and woodland decline on the Western Reserve. According to The Summit County Beacon, Richfield farmer J. Underhill Esquire appropriated this new technology and “caught the timber fever which is raging in our midst, and has gone into it quite lively, and expects to have a portable sawmill erected in his woods this week.”[30. The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 6 February 1878; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 29 January 1879; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 21 January 1880.] Portable steam sawmills were first available during the late 1830s, and Ohio agricultural journals began advertising portable steam engines for agricultural purposes and timber cutting during the 1850s. They were a ubiquitous part of the Cuyahoga Valley landscape by the 1870s. This new technology saved time and labor by bringing the sawmill to the woodlot, allowing fewer men to process more timber on site. This same technology, however, dramatically increased the traditional tempo of woodland reduction and changed the composition of woodlands as species that sprouted from remaining stumps had an advantage over other species. New technology, coupled with traditional kinship or neighborhood ties cultivated in the local agricultural economy, allowed Boston and Richfield farmers to join together to profit from the exploitation of their own woodlands. [31. Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 146; for sawmill advertisements see, for example, Page’s Portable Steam Sawmill in, Ohio Cultivator 9 (15 December 1853): 377; McCullough, The Landscape of Community, 96.]
Take for example the incorporation of the firm of Kemery and Bombgardner in Richfield Township. John Kemery and the Bomgardner brothers, Israel and John, reported their primary occupation as farmers in the 1880 census and all owned acreage exceeding eighty acres. They collectively purchased a portable steam sawmill on shares in the summer of 1878. This firm purchased standing timber from neighboring farms, or contracted to do the cutting on their neighbors’ timber purchases, moving from woodlot to woodlot throughout the year. During the summer and autumn months, they worked tracts of timber on the respective farms of John Colman and E.D. Hancock. After October they acquired contracts for work on William Hancock’s, A. Hershey’s, and Hiram Hart’s lands. The following year in June of 1879 John Bomgardner left the firm, purchasing a share in another portable sawmill with a farmer named Campbell who was already contracted for a job on Kit Lightfoot’s woodland. Kemery and Isaac Bomgardner finally dissolved the partnership and sold their sawmill to Lyman Post, a Boston Township farmer, in November of 1879.[32. The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 12 June 1878; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 3 July 1878; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 30 October 1878; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 13 November 1878; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 12 February 1879; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 21 May 1879; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 11 June 1879; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 5 November 1879; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 24 December 1879.]
The operations of Kemery and Bombgardner mirrored the disparate negotiations between farmers, portable sawmill owners, and timber speculators in the Cuyahoga Valley during the 1870s. In October of 1878, for example, the timber cutting on E.D. Hancock’s farm was actually contracted by a third party, Ellis and Mack, who bought the woodland off Hancock to produce railroad ties for the Valley Railway. Kemery and Bombgardner’s work on Hiram Hart’s farm in February and March 1879 was for another group, Linderman and Carter, who purchased the standing wood from Hart. Linderman, in turn, had previously purchased eight or ten acres of woodland from Miles Oviatt in November 1878 for the production of cordwood and railroad ties. Such men exchanged timber, access to portable sawmills, and labor like interchangeable commodities across the townships of Richfield, Bath, and Boston. In 1879 the already booming Cuyahoga Valley timber trade reached its fever pitch as thousands of additional feet of oak ties were required for the construction of the Valley Railway. One resident noted that that the flow of timber to the valley floor only declined for a few weeks in late summer when farmers used their teams and limited labor resources to bring in their English grains. Though the scale of local exchanges was modest compared with the operations of C.L. Newell & Co., firms like Kemery and Bombgardner were more influential than traditional sawmilling firms in changing farmers’ relationships with their woodlots in the Western Reserve after the Civil War. Farmers became more active agents in the denuding of Western Reserve woodlands after the Civil War and appropriated new technologies that encouraged short-term economic profit from local woodlands at the expense of long-term sustainability.[33. The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 30 October 1878; The Summit County Beacon (Akron), 12 February 1879.]
Cuyahoga Valley farmers such as John Kemery and Israel Bombgardner abandoned the woodland practices and conservation consciousness of their fathers because local markets, agricultural specialization, and new technology effaced the traditional boundaries of season and labor in the decades following the American Civil War. The emergence of the factory dairy system brought farm consolidation while the rapid expansion of pastureland and access to coal for heating encouraged the widespread reduction of woodlands. More significantly, the introduction of portable steam sawmills allowed local farmers such as Kemery and Bombgardner to become personally engaged in timber speculation for the booming Akron and Cleveland markets while providing them with a technology that allowed for the reduction of woodland to railroad ties, board lumber, and cordwood at a rate many times that of the 1-2 cord averages of their fathers’ day.[34. R. Douglas Hurt placed the average amount of cordwood that could traditionally be cut by farmers or woodcutters at 1-2 acres per day while Donald Parkerson concluded that it would be difficult for a healthy man to maintain a rate of one cord a day. See, R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of a Nation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 243; Donald Parkerson, The Agricultural Transition in New York State: Markets and Migration in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America, (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press), 1995, 70.]
In New England’s growing urban cities, the introduction of new technologies and regional specialization in factory dairying might well have introduced similar impediments toward the continuation of a strong local ethic of woodland stewardship. However, land utilization within the upland townships of Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, and New Hampshire differed from townships within the Western Reserve in two fundamental ways. In rural New England there remained a tradition – harking back to the commons of the colonial period – of setting aside community woodlands for the support of public institutions such as education, libraries, poor houses, and churches. At the same time, nearly eight decades of emigration out of rural New England resulted in a reforestation of the region that only accelerated with the abandonment of marginal farmlands. In rural townships the church and the meetinghouse became the social and political institutions for strengthening local conceptions of woodland conservation ethic as townships debated how best to manage existing public lands and considered expanding township woodlands through the appropriation of abandoned farms.[35. For the decline of nineteenth-century rural New England see, Harold Wilson, The Hill Country of Northern New England: Its Social and Economic History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Montpelier, VT: Vermont Historical Society, 1947), 97 – 139. For the development of municipal and township forestry in rural New England see, McCullough, The Landscape of Community, 47 – 168.]
In the rural townships of the Western Reserve, however, there was no similar tradition of setting aside township lands for the support of public institutions. Even within the most carefully planned townships, such as Tallmadge and Hudson, there is little evidence that Western Reserve communities continued the New England traditions of setting aside local pasture and woodlots for the support of public institutions like churches, schools, or libraries. More significantly, the factory dairy system – which significantly out-produced similar institutions in New England – coupled with the rapid growth of Cleveland and Akron, meant that rural populations in the Western Reserve were largely stable. There was little abandoned land for rural communities to discuss turning into township forests, even had there been such traditions in the region in the first instance. The rural communities of the Western Reserve replicated the prerequisite political institutions – the same township and religious and meetinghouses that encouraged participation in educational reform and abolition during the antebellum period – but lacked the physical biological infrastructure (township lands and abandoned farms) to inspire an emergent local ethic of woodland stewardship during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Whereas township forests built upon the foundations of older traditions of public land use were ubiquitous throughout hundreds of communities in rural New England by the turn of the twentieth century, the Western Reserve founded just two municipal forests, at Oberlin in 1902 and in Poland Township in 1916.[36. Congress granted Western Reserve townships lands for the support of public schools totaling 93,724.16 acres in the counties of Holmes, Tuscarawas, Williams, Defiance, Paulding, Putnam, Henry, and Van Wert. However, these lands were well outside the boundaries of the Western Reserve and townships residents would have developed little interaction with them. See, George Knepper, The Official Ohio Lands Book (Columbus: OH, Auditor of the State, 2002), 57. For municipal forestry in the Western Reserve see, J.W. Toumey, “County, City, Town and School Forests,” American Forestry 22 (July 1916): 429; Robert Zorn, Images of America: Poland (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2012), 85.]
For Cuyahoga Valley farmers, technology and speculation similarly reshaped the traditional seasonal cadences of labor and local attitudes toward long-term sustainability of woodlots during the late 1870s and early 1880s. As the acquisition of portable steam sawmills encouraged rural entrepreneurship and the demand for hardwoods made lumbering as profitable as farming, the traditional seasonal labor boundaries between woodland work and farming began to dissipate. Small lumbering operations west of the Cuyahoga River, such as Kemery and Bombgardner, began working through the spring and summer months. Technology and speculation effaced the traditional seasonal boundaries separating agriculture from woodland labor and threatened an ethic of woodland conservation among farmers that came out of Connecticut and Massachusetts during the 1820s and spread, with New England settlement, to the Western Reserve.
]]>Although deceptively quite disparate in nature, this issue’s articles share the common theme of social and economic development in the early statehood period. From libraries in small Western Reserve settlements to the intrusion of the canal system into Columbiana County, both articles describe phenomena exemplifying the changes that came to Northeast Ohio as it moved from a frontier outpost to an area integrated into the larger national culture and economy.
Stuart Stiffler’s piece on social libraries examines the cultural dimensions of early Ohio settlement through the lens of the founding and expansion of small libraries throughout the Western Reserve in the early- to mid-1800s. Reflective not only of the attitudes and goals of the people who founded them, these libraries also trace changes in the population, culture, and society of the area as the century wore on.
Charles Mastran’s contribution is an archaeological field study of Lock 24 of the Sandy and Beaver Canal of the mid-1800s. Framed as a descriptive site report of a nearly-forgotten architectural artifact of Ohio’s canal era, this research also contextualizes it in the economic and technological milieus of the period. By explaining standard historical archaeological terminology and abundantly illustrating his research with maps and photographs, Mastran endeavors to make the often-technical nature of a scientific archaeological report more accessible to the lay reader.
These pieces continue the Northeast Ohio Journal of History’s tradition of bringing high-quality research in the history of this area to a broader audience.
Kevin F. Kern
Feature Articles:
Small Settlement Ohio Social Libraries on the Connecticut Western Reserve, 1800 – 1900
By: Stuart A. Stiffler
An Archaeo-Architectural Examination of Lock 24, Elkton, Ohio
By: A. Charles Mastran
Book Reviews:
Reviewer:
Arthur E. DeMatteo
Author:
Frank P. Vazzano: Politician Extraordinaire: The Tempestuous Life and Times of Martin L. Davey
Contributors:
Stuart A. Stiffler is a retired director of college libraries in four states. An educator and historian of Ohio’s Western Reserve social libraries, he has published articles in Collection Management, College and Research Libraries and other journals.
Charles Mastran received his B.A. in Anthropology and his M.A. in history from Youngstown State University. He has more than thirty years of experience in archaeology, participating in excavations in a number of states as well as France, Cyprus, and Australia. More recently, he has focused on excavating early blast furnaces in Eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, publishing some of this work in Ohio Archaeologist.
]]>The founding and evolution of numerous stock and subscription libraries on the Nineteenth Century Connecticut Western Reserve in Ohio, draws attention to the contributing role of these earnest enterprises in the transplantation of New England culture onto the Ohio frontier. At a minimum the collections, supplying representative instructional and general literature, supported social mobility and provided educational opportunity and diversion to isolated farms and towns. At least since de Tocqueville’s observations in the 1830s, it has been perceived that when, in the absence of governmental initiatives, a pressing public need should surface, there often followed a compensatory version of American voluntarism. Yet as transitional institutions the social libraries, unlike the common schools and churches, have attracted limited notice in scholarship on the Western Reserve and deserve to be more clearly situated in the Reserve’s nascent cultural life.[1. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite, Nor only do they have commercial and industrial associations, but they have a thousand other kinds…Americans use associations…to distribute books…” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated, edited and with an introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 89; David L. Sills, “Voluntary Associations–Sociological Aspects,” in Sills and Robert King Merton, eds., The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1991), 16:372-374; for background on the Western Reserve and social libraries: Robert C. Wheeler, “The Literature of the Western Reserve,” Ohio History 100 (1991), 101-128; Kenneth Lottich, “The Western Reserve and the Frontier Thesis,” Ohio History 7 (1971), 45-50; Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, eds., A History of the Book in America: An Extensive Republic, Print Society and Culture in the New Nation, 1790-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); L.K. Yankaskas, “Borrowing Culture: Social Libraries and American Civic Life, 1731-1854,” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1995); Jesse Shera, Foundations of the Public Library movement in New England, 1790-1855 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 226-230; L.K.M. Rosenberry, The Expansion of New England (New York: Octagon, 1965), 178-194; A.O. Craven, Sources of Culture in the Middle West (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934), 39-71; Johann N. Neehm, “Creating Social Capital in the Early Republic: the View From Connecticut,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34:4 (Spring 2009), 471-495.]
In a spirit of optimism and renewal the town-founders and itinerant missionaries of the New Connecticut projected the virgin landscapes of their new Reserve homes as sites for a replicated spatial and moral order. The elements of this vision included plantations set upon rectangular survey templates, architectonic town planning and building design, and a natural and moral environment viewed through the lens and within the didactic outlines of an overarching theology. A redemptive communal experience, they believed, must thus coalesce in austere simplicity.[2. Amy DeRogatis, Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 14-34.]
I argue, however, that, in the instance of the libraries, almost from the beginning there developed a tension between the founder-managers’ schematic and intellectualized transplantation agenda and the immediate quotidian preoccupations of Reserve settlers. Four of these private membership libraries were prematurely designated “public” at founding and others were soon defunct or qualified as “quasi-public” when founders opened them, as a matter of survival, to non-members on an inexpensive subscription basis. In 1842 the hard-pressed Sandusky Philomathesian Society, a persistent successor of which later offered shares at fifty dollars each, announced that anyone contributing fifty cents might have trial access to their collection for three months. By 1851 the Twinsburgh Public Library had done likewise.
Against the gradual eclipse of a founding elite the romantic individualism of an aspiring middle class became coincident with declining focus upon a cohesive theocratic community and its supporting devotional literature. The demographics of in-migration, improved transportation and an incipient national organization of the book trade contributed to both a liberal expansion of book collections and to a democratic leveling and secularization of taste. The direction of this movement was typified by the drift from provision of titles in the category of the Twinsburgh Library Association’s Sabbath Manual and fifteen-volume Family Evangelical Library, 1851, to the Sandusky Ladies Library Association’s post-war acquisition of exotic travel literature and the plentiful formulaic offerings of favored woman fictionists.
Many authors of the antebellum libraries inventory invoked standard reading themes, often dependent upon the doctrine of sola scriptura, personal applicability of infallible scripture. These themes were subsumed in narrative literature, appearing primarily in the guise of stereotypical heroic motifs detached from explicit theological reference. Library fare promoting the dream of success was commonly evidenced in the post-bellum by proscriptive etiquette and life-conduct guidelines. These identified with a imperative of striving and exercise of inflexible will as necessary agency in the courting, before the community, of republican distinction.
In this context, I endeavor to show, the new reading appealed to a broader spectrum of settlers, as, for example, at the Mentor Library Company, Lake County, and introduced or reinforced mundane themes related to daily living, to piquant curiosities stirred by extended social horizons, to an expanding and prideful nationalism, and to a voluminous literature of compensatory adventure and escapism. Somehow at least peripheral attention to a cultural heritage of classic stimulation survived.
In the process a cohesive mentalité was thus both encouraged and then gradually dissipated by a flood of programmed exhortation in pamphlet-books, newssheets, circulars, reports, almanacs, periodicals and broadsides that in turn served as directed vehicles of more centrifugal popular orientations. There followed, I will indicate, an altered character in the evolving inventories of five representative Western Reserve social libraries.
The Wider Context
Out of the ferment of the times the social libraries sprang up on the Ohio frontier with apparent spontaneity in company with a variety of parallel private associations. Thematic interests of the latter specialized societies typically overlapped with those of the social libraries general literature. Many were supporting collections adjunct to churches, Sunday Schools, Young Men’s Associations, college and college literary societies (eighteen in the Nineteenth Century Reserve settlements), commercial circulating libraries, and lyceums.
Beginning mostly in the mid-1820s and up to 1850 Ohio citizens organized sixty-four lyceums, primarily lecture-sponsoring and other programming initiatives. The lyceums occasionally maintained small collections or merged with social libraries, as at Litchfield, Medina County, 1837, Sandusky, Erie County, 1837 and Painesville, Lake County, 1835, in the Western Reserve. In these localities the libraries then became service addenda to the lyceums and the latter could offer the immediacy of platform presentation to the selective reading of texts.[3. “ALB Database Before 1876,” 2004 http://www.princeton.eduadavpro/ accessed April 10, 2010; C. David Meade, Yankee Eloquence in the Midwest: The Ohio Lyceum, 1850-1870 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1956), 239-269.]
In addition there appeared collections, lesser in number, allied with an array of group interests. Representative of these were the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ashtabula County, 1831-34; the Oberlin Agricultural and Horticultural Society, 1836- ; the Oberlin Theological Seminary, 1835-1884; the German Methodist Orphan Asylum, Berea, 1866-75; the Firelands Historical Society, Norwalk, 1875- ; the Chardon Progress Women’s Club, 1898- , the Claridon Farmer’s Club, 1860-1867; and the Ottawa County Law Library, 1841-1875.
Another small peripheral group included a number of mercantile and mechanics collections, appealing mostly to enclaves of young clerks and mechanics in Cleveland and the larger Reserve settlements–excepting foundations at Aurora, Portage County, and Chagrin Falls, Cuyahoga County. These were themselves social libraries in their emphases upon fellowship and the supply of popular rather than technical literature.
Social library members designated half of their antebellum libraries simply libraries, social or public libraries (fee-for-service), reading rooms, library-reading rooms, societies, companies or associations. The other half adopted broader designations including young man’s, ladies’ or female reading societies, village or Franklin libraries, together with a stray cooperative library, reading and literary society, natural history and library association, temperance subscription library, study club, moral library, free discussion library, circulating library society (non-commercial), city institution and, at Kent, a railroad reading room. As they evolved, some altered names, using combinations of nomenclature or adding designations of localities or founders. Although their inventories and memberships developed separately, their basic character was more comparable than names suggest.[4. George Jones, “Materials Relating to the Development of Public Libraries in the Western Reserve,” MA thesis, Kent State University, 1957, 11; Haynes McMullen, “ALB 1876 Database”; Stuart Stiffler, “Books and Reading in the Western Reserve: the Small Settlement Social Library, 1800-1860,” Libraries and the Cultural Record 46, number 4, (2011), 388-411.]
By Mid-Century the U.S. Census estimated only one and one-half percent of Reserve citizens illiterate, two and one-half percent lower than the remainder of the Ohio population. Even as family reading aloud was common in the early settlements, a few of the libraries, operating as literary or debating societies supported fulfillment and, rather than serve as limited repositories, were distinctly social in character. They could combine spirited discussion and socializing with related reading from their collections. Business and anecdotal chat of domestic and occupational affairs might mix with spirited forays into literary texts and current public issues.[5. J.D.B. DeBowe, U.S. Census Office 7th Census, 1850, The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1851), 810-811, 860; Kenneth Carpenter, “Libraries,” Encyclopedia of American Culture and Intellectual History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001), III, 370.]
Social Reading Stations
As Eastern migration onto the Reserve increased, by the 1840s abandoned farmsteads were reported as dotting the Connecticut countryside. With this influx of settlers more social libraries per capita emerged in the Midwest than in other areas of the United States. By the 1850s new libraries were appearing at four times the rate of Ohio population growth and the multiplication of Western Reserve publication product exceeded the increase of population by more than ten times. Reserve inhabitants, ninety-six percent rural, had increased by a third between 1830 and 1840, destined to be the largest decennial percentage increase on the Nineteenth Century Reserve. It followed that during the decennial of the 1840s the aggregate of students enrolled in the Reserve common schools increased 150%. Against this tableau the 1830s witnessed the appearance of forty-five social libraries and the 1840s and 1850s added an additional twenty-four, accounting for 107 in the antebellum. A population base of about twenty per square mile had become receptive to a marked increase in collection numbers.Clearly we see emerging a compelling minority thirst in the settlements for the stimulus of print resources (Table I).[6. DeBowe, U.S., Seventh Census, 810-811; Haynes McMullen, American Libraries before 1876 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000); Jarvis Means Morse, A Neglected Period of Connecticut’s History, 1818-1850 (New Haven: Yalen University Press, London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1933); E.A. Miller, “History of Educational Legislation in Ohio, 1803-1850,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 27 (1914), 198-207; U.S. Department of the Interior. Bureau of Education. Public Libraries in the United States, Their History, Condition and Management, Special Report, Pt. 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1876), 186; D.V. Martin, “A History of the Library Movement in Ohio,” MA thesis, The Ohio State University, 1934.]
The priority attending these early print repositories on the Western Reserve is underlined by a comparison with the neighboring Pennsylvania experience. Excluding thirty libraries in the heavily settled Philadelphia area, half of newly established collections awaited population densities of at least ninety per square mile. Acknowledging fully the longevity and distinction of a few like Benjamin Franklin’s path-breaking Philadelphia Library Company, 1731, we can note that there were 173 social libraries organized in Pennsylvania from 1731 to 1875, measured against some 330 in Nineteenth Century Ohio, nearly half on the Western Reserve. Further, the high tide of Ohio library foundation anticipated by some twenty years that of the earlier settled Keystone State.[7. Haynes McMullen, “Founding of Social Libraries in Pennsylvania, 1731-1876,” Pennsylvania History 31 (1975), 13-52.]
The antebellum Reserve libraries–notably excepting those at Tallmadge, Wadsworth and Hudson– mostly deferred to patriarchal leadership. By the Eighties and Nineties, however, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and an upsurge of women’s literary clubs had assumed a significant contributing role in both initiating their own small libraries and promoting the founding of a growing number of social and free public collections. Most of the former contained selections from a menu of temperance fare in the style of Timothy Shay Arthur’s cautionary Temperance Tales or Samuel Hastings’ populist confrontations, The People versus Liquor Traffic. Typical of the times, in May 1883, organizers held a special meeting of the Jefferson, Ashtabula County W.C.T.U. in the Town Hall for the purpose of starting a library association. Prior to 1897 the Lorain W.C.T.U. sponsored a subscription library of “a few hundred volumes.” In October 1900 a Library and Reading Room operated briefly before the advent of the Lorain Public Library. By 1904 the National Federation of Women’s Clubs was claiming the organization of 474 American public libraries.[8. Untitled document, (Special Meeting Minutes, Jefferson, Ohio W.C.T.U., May 24 1882), archives of the Henderson Memorial Library, Ashtabula, Ohio; Margaret Deming, “History of the Lorain Public Library, Aug. 18, 1903,” http://lorain.oh.us/content.aspx?PID=91? accessed Jan. 20, 2010; Ruth Bordin, “The Baptism of Power and Liberty, the Women’s Crusade of 1873,” Ohio History (Autumn 1975), 303-304.]
Some 568 libraries were founded in Ohio up to 1900 and, of these, 253, or forty-five percent, were located in fourteen Western Reserve counties, or partial counties, which comprised, however, only about thirteen percent of Ohio counties and land area. Further, 128 were social libraries in the smaller communities (excluding Cleveland, Akron, Warren, and Youngstown, which deserve separate attention). Through 1900 Ashtabula County alone, nearest incoming migration, accounted for twenty-three settlement collections.
In contrast to Ashtabula’s libraries, in the three Ohio Counties immediately south and west of the Eastern counties of the Reserve, an area with many more German farmers than New England settlers, a minimal eight social libraries appeared during the Nineteenth Century. Overall more collections are recorded in the Western Reserve than in the combined whole of Indiana and Illinois and more in Ashtabula County alone than in all of Michigan. Moreover, the compulsive contagion of precedent during the period was such that citizens in seventeen Western Reserve towns sponsored two or more societies, occasionally coexisting; seven, three or more; and Sandusky, seven.
In five Pennsylvania counties on the eastern border of Ashtabula County six libraries appeared up to 1876. Between 1820 and 1880 the foundation of small settlement collections in seven eastern counties of the Reserve multiplied fivefold and well in advance of population.
For newly settled country it appears, then, that there was a remarkable stirring of literary interest in certain areas of the Reserve. William Dean Howells, whose father operated a print shop in the 1830s at Jefferson, Ashtabula County, later recalled that “village folk were in a degree I still think extraordinary, literary. Old and young they talked about books . . . Any American author who made an effect in the East became promptly known in that small village of the Western Reserve.”[9. William Dean Howells, Years of My Youth and Three Essays (Bloomington, Indiana and London: Indiana University Press, 1990), 92.]
Conjecture that the sum of social library foundations in the West were reliably dependent upon levels of settlement prosperity rather than upon cultural factors—religion, education, ethnic composition of population, towns, political context, social psychology—must be carefully qualified. In 1860 and 1870, for example, combined average real estate wealth was 64% higher in the three Ohio counties mentioned above, with many fewer collections, than the estate wealth of the Reserve’s adjacent Ashtabula County with its twenty-three foundations. Although there were many fewer social libraries founded in the Reserve after 1860, the valuation of real and personal estates increased by eighty-seven percent in the decennial of the 1860s.[10. “ALB Database, 1876,” University of Virginia Historical Census Browser, “Valuation of Real Estate, County Level Results,” 1860 and 1870, Ashtabula County and average for Columbiana, Stark (including city of Canton), and Wayne Counties, Ohio, http://mapservice.lib.virginia/edu/php, accessed March 20, 2010.]
The stock and subscription (social) libraries were much the most numerous of some forty library type-categories in Ohio identified by social libraries historian Haynes McMullen, followed, prior to 1876, by college and college literary societies and by about ten authentic public institutions. Two-thirds of the Reserve libraries originated in the antebellum when the impulse to social construction of the moral self increasingly began to flourish and antecedent to the constrictive diversion of war mobilization and the burgeoning materialism of the Gilded Age.[11. “ALB Database, 1876”; Stiffler, “Books and Reading.”]
In the latter half of the Century a more limited twenty-four societies ranged from the Painesville Library Association, 1867, and the Mentor Library Association, 1875, to the Young Men’s Reading Room at Lorain, 1900. Although libraries at Mentor and Ashtabula each persevered for some thirty years, I have found the documented life span of fourteen Reserve collections to average fourteen years. It is probable that the life span of the totality, however, extended on average to fewer than three or four years.
Joining and Gathering
Participation in the libraries fluctuated but membership corresponded roughly to that of New England foundations at comparable stages of development. As population increased, the four antebellum libraries, ranging from seven to eighty, averaged forty members. Single memberships often extended borrowing privileges to families, and complimentary service could sometimes be offered, as at Cuyahoga Falls, to a few non-members. Membership of four documented post-bellum small settlement libraries, 1865-1900, ranged from 49 to 400, averaging 181. And yet in 1850 Reserve rural membership in all the libraries probably stood at but two to three percent of the citizenry.[12. DeBowe, Seventh Census, 860; J.F. Low, “A History of the Cuyahoga Falls Library and the Taylor Memorial Association,” MSLS thesis, Western Reserve University, 1955.]
A comprehensive socio-economic profile of Reserve social library patrons remains beyond reach but that of the 1825 and 1834 Mentor Library memberships is advisory. Comparison of samples of tax duplicates of Mentor members for these years with random sampling of other residents of Geauga County indicate that the median valuation of membership wealth–land and personal property–was over twice that of other sampled county residents. This was presumably related to education levels and available leisure. Nonetheless, by the Mid-Thirties the span of property valuation within the membership group had decreased markedly. (The narrowing of wealth distribution in both the membership and random County groups reflected largely the subdivision of original estate holdings). Overall both an expansion of scope and a reductive leveling in the quality of collections seems to indicate a middle-class alteration of reading habits on the Reserve and is subsequently reflected, as I will indicate, in library inventories.[13. Edward Stevens, “Relationship of Social Library Membership, Wealth and Literary Culture in Early Ohio,” Journal of Library History 16 (Fall 1981), 571-591 and Stevens, “Books and Wealth on the Frontier,” Social Science History 5 (Fall 1981), 434.]
Volume counts in the majority of the Reserve collections are also uncertain but the modest but persistent growth of several of the libraries suggests an active disposition to reading (Table II). When initial enthusiasms waned, patronage could fall off sharply, as at Norwalk, Huron County and Wellington, Lorain County. In the decade after the Wellington Library Association’s opening in 1874 the collection increased by 31% to 1812 volumes while annual circulation dropped by half to 4584. Numbers of volumes for twenty Reserve collections recorded at various points in their life-spans indicate average holdings of 286 for eight antebellum collections and 1,580 for twelve post-bellum libraries. In comparison, 172 antecedent Connecticut social libraries had averaged, in 1819, with one larger collection excepted, 165 volumes.[14. “ALB Database, 1876”; Yankansas, “Borrowing Culture,” 6, 17; “Wellington Library Association Meeting Notes,” Sept., Oct. 1873, May 1874, May 1885, and Wellington Enterprise, Feb. 17, 1886, quoted in Tracie Marie Dalton, “The Herrick Memorial Library: A Historical Study,” Masters Research Paper, Kent, Ohio: Kent State University, 1998, 13-14, Educational Information Research Center, ED $424864; Stiffler, “Books and Reading.”]
As a matter of survival a number of the social library officers designated their collections “public” indicating that they had been made accessible to all on a fee-for-service basis, this typically distinguishing them from the more elite urban Eastern clubs and athanaea.
Shaping and Striving
An accurate and complete account of the social libraries, descended from English institutions dating to the early Eighteenth Century, is rather obscured by the scarcity of documentation. Acts of the Ohio General Assembly of 1817, 1831 and 1839 were intended to loosely regulate literary and other educational societies and, incidentally, to affix the corporate legal model onto the private sector.
An Ohio law of 1845 further provided that societies and other “benevolent associations” were to elect not fewer than three of their members as trustees and one as clerk. Library constitutions thereafter generally specified election of a president, vice president, treasurer, and, as clerk, a secretary or a secretary-treasurer. A librarian, at whose home meetings were often held, was also designated by memberships. He/she functioned mainly as caretaker-manager. At Norwalk the office was dubbed “janitor-librarian.” At Cuyahoga Falls the position was endowed at $12 a quarter and eventually, in 1883, at a “very liberal” annual $100 for eight hours a week.[15. First Catalogue of the Young Men’s Library and Reading Room of Norwalk, Ohio, Established 1866, Norwalk, Ohio, Firelands Historical Society; J.F. Low, “A History of the Cuyahoga Falls Library and the Taylor Memorial Association.”]
Organizational meetings mandated by-laws to supplement and interpret new constitutions. These generally scheduled periodic meetings–typically annual or quarterly–or provided for special meetings at which times members voted upon issues presented by trustees or executive committees and collections might be briefly opened for borrowing. Scarcity of book stock in the early days was such that at some locations, such as the Jefferson Public Library, Ashtabula County, members in turn placed bids upon volumes until each had rented a book.
The town libraries and reading rooms were often situated, as at Mrs. Plummer’s Wadsworth, Medina County, millinery shop, in a store on the main street or in professional or government offices. At Medina for a decade after 1877 a series of store owners were offered $10 to $25 a year for library-hosting duties. In three instances–in Ashtabula, Lorain, and Huron Counties–multiple town or township mini-regions cooperated in supporting a single collection, a procedure which, had it been more widely followed, might have provided a more stable financial base for the collections.
Rather than chosen by consensus, books were selected by patriarchal trustees, executive or book committees or by an especially esteemed member. Article III of the Constitution of the Jefferson Public Library declared that “the Trustees shall determine what books are to be added into the library either by purchase, donation or otherwise.” Article eight of the By-Laws of the Circulating Library Society of Willoughby (a social library), 1871, specified an annual election of three members to a Library Committee charged with quarterly reporting on books selected for the collection. Frequently gift volumes were solicited which tended to diffusion of content but might on occasion be credited as membership dues.
Even as in the elite Eastern clubs, constitutions could prescribe multiple voting based upon numbers or value of stock subscribed. Shares of this transferable stock were offered, usually at $2 or $3 each, with annual subscription fees typically set at $.25 to $1. A special prestige may have attached to membership in the Sandusky Ladies Library Association, which, in 1874, projected a capital stock of 2000 shares at $50 each. Something of the intense spirit that could attend planning of these fledgling enterprises is evident in the Norwalk Young Men’s Library By-Laws specification that “a permanent fund shall be established and securely invested in securities of the United States … or in real estate, for the use of the association.”
Occasionally members levied special assessments for book stock, cataloging or expensive furnishings. In later years a number of the Reserve’s social libraries–Norwalk, Sandusky, Lorain, Cuyahoga Falls, Kinsman and probably others–were beneficiaries of a developing American tradition, the volunteer charitable fund-raiser. Evolving with panache, these lively spectacles became spirited endeavors encompassing lecture series, bake-sales, musicals, exhibitions, plays, ice-cream socials, suppers, “excursions,” “illustrated song concerts” and, possibly the apogee of the kind, the Sandusky Ladies Library Association’s memorable variety shows, expansively-styled Grand International Jubilee, 1874 and Grand Cosmorama, 1891.[16. Eleanor Ilse, ed., Wadsworth, Center to City (Wadsworth High School Class of 1938), 154; Circulating Library Society of Willoughby, “By Laws,” ohiomemory.org, accessed Dec. 27, 2010; Willoughby Herald, Aug. 6, 1909; Untitled Document, (Prospectus and Articles of the Ladies Library Association, Dec. 1874), Sandusky, Ohio, Sandusky Library and Archives Center, Sandusky, Ohio: Sandusky Register, Jan. 13, 1874; Sandusky Daily Register, April 3, 1891; Sandusky Star, April 3, 1891, quoted in F.G.B. Moss, “The Evolution of the Sandusky Public Library,” Firelands Pioneer 13 (Dec. 1900), 657-658; Mentor Library Company, “Record Book, 1819,” 9-11; John R. Pankratz, “New Englanders, the Written Word and the Errand into Ohio,” Ph.D diss., Cornell University, 1988, 225-237; John Galbreath, Sketches of Ohio Libraries (Columbus: F.J. Herr, 1902), 228-230.]
The libraries adopted a schedule of service fees and explicitly proscriptive circulation rules (thus, for example, a fine of three cents for folding a corner or creasing a page and six and one-quarter cents for “doubling” the page). Regular accessibility to collections might be established at a few hours a week– six hours weekly at Cuyahoga Falls, and afternoons at Geneva. Daily and evening hours, except Sundays, were announced at Twinsburg, 1851 and, at Norwalk, 1865. The Wellington Library, organized in 1874, also opened in the afternoons, except Sunday, “no smoking, spitting or loud conversation allowed.”[17. Low, “Cuyahoga Falls”; “Kinsman Library Website,” http://kinsmanlibrary.org/content.cfm?Id=223, accessed Dec. 10, 2009; Geneva Library print catalog, 1894, cited in Jones, “Materials,” 48; First Catalogue of Norwalk Library, 1877; Twinsburgh Library Catalogue, 1851 (Cleveland: D. Smeed, 1851); “Wellington Meeting Notes,” April, May 1873, quoted in Dalton, “Herrick Library,” 18-20.]
The Evolving Scene
Reserve settlers organized the first small settlement library at Hudson in 1800. Arriving from Connecticut in June, David Hudson brought with him $100 worth of books reputedly selected by Yale President Timothy Dwight. Memberships were sold in shares and, it was reported, nearly every family in Hudson and neighboring Aurora and Mantua, Portage County, bought one or more. The volumes were located in Hudson’s house in 1807 where a later observer judged them “very useful in forming the morals and enlightening the minds of the youth of these settlements.” In 1805 the Reverend David Bacon somehow imported 651 religious works to the Reserve from Connecticut. When early founder Elizur Wright arrived in 1808 he contributed to the Library a Bible, Solomon Stoddard’s Safety Appearing to the Righteousness of Christ, Samuel Wright’s Treatise on Being Born Again and Thomas Shepard’s Sound Believer. In 1803 itinerant missionary-warrior Joseph Badger, on a mission in Ashtabula County to preach and distribute Connecticut Missionary Society literature out of his saddlebags, found himself treed overnight by a bear. He persevered in later years in scattering a blizzard of tracts over the Reserve, opened a short-lived bookstore at Ashtabula, and was responsible for organizing a social library in southern Ohio.
In Orangeville, near the Pennsylvania border in Ashtabula County, settler Elam Jones, having transported a few volumes from Connecticut in 1805, organized a collection and served for some years as librarian. Little sagas of the perilous missionary delivery of books (symbolic culture) from the East in wagon or ox-cart, as also at Olmsted and Hudson, could linger in the manner of recurring tropes of “errand into the wilderness.”
Members founded a library at Poland, now Mahoning County, in 1807 and a reading room followed in 1826. Tallmadge, now Summit County, established a township library of seventy volumes in 1813, three years after the first school. Two years later a “Society of Women for Literacy,” possibly the first women’s organization on the Western Reserve, appeared. At Hudson founder Elizur Wright’s daughter, Clarissa, gathered in 1828 an unusually sizeable Sunday school library of 300 volumes. The Tallmadge Library Association finally incorporated a society in 1845.[18. Joseph Badger, A Memoir of the Rev. Joseph Badger (Hudson, Ohio: Sawyer Ingersoll Co., 1851), 23, 55, 57; Charles Cook Bronson, The Bronson Book: account of the establishment of the early Connecticut Western Reserve (Stowe?, Ohio: 1954), quoted in Jones, “Materials,” 5; J.F. Waring, Books and Reading in Hudson, 1800-1954 (Hudson, Ohio: Hudson Library and Historical Society, 1954), 8-10; American Quarterly Register, 1841, 13: 325-326; W.W. Williams, A History of Ashtabula County (Philadelphia: Williams Bros., 1878), I, 89; John Hall, “A History of the Township of Ashtabula, 1856,” 612, mss #64, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio; E.O. Randall, “Tallmadge Township,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 27 (1929), 299; Pankratz, “New Englanders,” 183-184.]
The Mentor Library Company was organized in February 1819. Capital stock was limited to twenty-five hundred shares at $2.50 each and a share enabled the holder to one vote at the election of officers. Eventually the Company distributed fifty-nine shares totaling $159.50 for a start-up collection, in the range of $2,200 today. The membership reached fifty in 1839 and sixty-seven at its demise in about 1852. Borrowers could withdraw one book at a time for each share held. In addition each was assessed twenty-five cents annually. The original shareholders also came from Willoughby, Kirtland, Chester and Painesville and indicate how the service areas of collections sometimes included neighboring communities.[19. Mentor Library Company, “Record Book”; “ALB Database, 1876”; Stiffler, “Books and Reading.”]
The intermittent career of many of these sporadic endeavors appears at Painesville, Lake County, where the Painesville Telegraph advertised early in 1822 that books were for sale at its office. At the end of the year a notice appeared of a sale of unsold titles. Two years later, the first library, the Library Company of Painesville was organized. This establishment too seemingly self-destructed within the year and the Telegraph announced that about forty books were to be auctioned. Two short-lived commercial circulating libraries followed before 1841. In 1848 Aristarchus Champeon, philanthropist and temperance crusader, opened a large building in Chagrin Falls which he designated Library Hall and stocked with 800 volumes. A Literary Association, founded in 1842, added their collection but Champeon sold his building to the Board of Education in 1849 and removed his books.[20. Painesville Telegraph, June 11, 1823; Sept. 7, 1824; March 4, 1844; Cleveland Whig, Sept. 1 1847; Painesville Lyceum and Library Society, Incorporation, Ohio Laws, 33, 197 (1835); Jones, “Materials,” 61-62; Crisfield Johnson, History of Cuyahoga County (Cleveland: D.W. Ensign and Co., 1879), 430; Stiffler, “Books and Reading.”]
The abode of the libraries often migrated short distances subject to space availability, continuity of interest and financial support. Members of the Kinsman Library, Trumbull County, and the Milan Township Library, Erie County, each transported their collections to five different sites prior to the advent of their public libraries. At Kinsman in 1885 organizational publicity, couched in a boostering rhetoric and an ethos of progressive advance, proclaimed a Village Improvement Association.
The Kinsman library enrolled a remarkable 161 members, each assessed dues of $1 a year. In 1885 a back room in the original post office building served as housing. Soon the collection moved to “an upstairs room in the Henry Building at the corner of East and Main St.,” and, subsequently, to the Grand Army of the Republic Building, also known as the Science Hill Academy. At the library’s demise in 1893 library-supporter Frank Banning packed books into storage, presumably in anticipation of a possible resurrection. In 1903 a library room traveled to the Centralized School basement where it remained until 1910, when it was transferred to the Kinsman Spencer High School Building.
Continuity in the motivational drive underlying early collection building is suggested by assertions of anticipated “improvement,” “profitable” progress and social utility introduced into the charters and constitutions of two of the earliest New England libraries and later copied into those of several projected Reserve collections. The “Articles of the Book Company of Durham October 30, 1737 (Connecticut)” and the “Covenant of the Philogromatic Society of Lebanon Connecticut, 1739” summoned members’ attention to “occupying our leisure hours in employing our minds in useful and profitable knowledge by reading” and by subscriber’s accumulation of the “useful and profitable books [ of a ] “Common Library” for [ Coventor’s ] use and improvement.”[21. Shera, Foundations, Appendices I and II, 248, 251; “Kinsman Library Website,” http://kinsmanlibrary.org/content.cfm?Id+223, accessed April 10, 2010; Catalog of Books Belonging to the Milan Township Library of Milan, Ohio (Milan, Ohio: Milan Ledger Print, 1894); Jones, “Materials,” 8; Untitled, (“Constitution of the Jefferson Library, 1817”), Article III, Sec. 3rd; Circulating Library of Willoughby, “By-Laws”; Northridge Literary Society. “Catalog of Books, Rocky River, Ohio, 1877.” http://ohiomemory.org.cdm4/docien.php?c150root=/p.26, accessed Dec. 11, 2010.]
It followed that the preamble to the Reserve’s Jefferson Public Library Association’s Constitution, 1817, stated a desire “to obtain that information for ourselves and others which would be of our mutual advantage and improvement” and Article Five of its Constitution, specifies that “books to be purchased for the library shall be at least two-thirds of them historical and that novels or obscene books shall not be admitted.” The post-bellum Reserve societies apparently relaxed similar provisions but in 1877 the Rocky River Library Society still thought it advisable to specify that “nothing but the cleanest and most wholesome books” might be considered for acquisition–and nationally the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1883 established a last stance “Department for the Suppression of Impure Literature.”
The 1885 Constitution of the Kinsman Village Improvement and Library Association specified its avowed mission “to exact an elevating and refining influence upon the village members and community“–that is, to promote civility and civic integration through cultivation of “character.” Founding members charged an elected three-member Library Committee of the Willoughby Circulating Library with inquiring into and clearly reporting upon the evaluated moral status of applicants for membership; further, fully a three-fourths vote of members was then demanded for admittance.
Committed individuals or small coteries of the civic-minded and culturally informed, commonly but little known outside their local orbits, initiated libraries in a number of communities. Such valued neighbors were instrumental in organizing collections at Painesville, Milan, Kingsville, Kent, Lorain, and probably at other settlements. An exception to the “little known” tag was the self-effacing American poet-educator, Edward Rowland Sill, organizer of the Cuyahoga Falls Library Association. A trace of the estimable elan of the early pioneers is captured in Sill’s plaintive comment that “I’m getting up a village aid society–awful weather for poor people without even potatoes or blankets…Also making a new campaign for my struggling village library.”[22. Undated letter (about 1866), quoted in William Belmont Parker, Edward Rowland Sill, His Life and Work (Boston and New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1915), 301; Jones, “Materials,” 11; Circulating Library Society of Willoughby, “By-Laws”; Kinsman Library Website; Untitled, (“Constitution of the Jefferson Library”); Northridge Library Society, Rocky River, Catalog.]
Vehicles of Intelligence and Dispersal
The Puritan stress upon functional literacy for Bible and devotional reading and the example of the Connecticut newspapers in monitoring the fortunes of Reserve settlement encouraged newspaper subscription. Some 150 papers were established in Ohio before 1850. As a result only two States, New York and Massachusetts, had by this date more weekly papers.
In thirteen library settlement towns in seven eastern Reserve counties between 1820 and 1900 country publishers or editors commenced at least sixty-five pioneer weekly papers. In the eastern Reserve there were one or more papers in each of the settlement library towns, (in 1850 for an average of about one for every 9,000 persons), in half of the eighty years between 1820 and 1900 and these numbers increased in the latter of this period. The coverage of local weeklies could also be extended by importing the newssheets of neighboring towns.
The printing press came to Cleveland by 1818 and paper-manufacture by 1850. After the 1850s the advance of printing technology, the subsidization of postage rates, an incipient organization of the national book trade and the advent of rail transportation into Ohio began to broaden the scope and improve access to Eastern publication. By 1878 the newspapers of the Norwalk Young Men’s Library numbered ten dailies from six cities stretching from Cleveland, Toledo and Terre Haute to New York City.
In mobilizing opinion this raw frontier journalism, circumscribed as it was, did not so much report local affairs as it promoted citizen’s visions of wider imagined horizons through snippets of regional, national and even much-delayed foreign news. The papers could combine expressive typography with folksy vernacular advertisements and considerable partisan and miscellaneous exchange materials. In addition they might on occasion initiate community literacy campaigns before the wider spread of the common schools. Blanketing the Western Reserve from east to west, in reading rooms and in isolated households, taverns and print shops, frequently with little other reading matter at hand, there might be found a few tattered copies of the Conneaut Reporter,the Burton Geauga Leader, the Ravenna Star, the Chagrin Falls Farmers and Mechanics Journal, the Wadsworth Enterprise, the Elyria Constitution, the Milan Advertiser, the Norwalk Reflector, the Sandusky Commercial Register and a mosaic of comparable newssheets.
In the antebellum period an inundation of nationally published almanacs surfaced including about fifty titles of these eccentric and catch-all “weekday Bibles” issued on the Reserve itself. These latter were in the style of the Christian Almanac for the Western Reserve, Ohio, 1837 (Cleveland, 1836); The Western Reserve Almanac . . . for Northern Ohio and the Lake Country Generally (Cleveland, 1844); and E. L. Gibbs’ The Farmer’s Western Reserve Almanac (Cleveland, 1850). Further, from 1790 to 1850 more than 170 broadsides and 300 books flowed directly to readers out of at least 101 print shops active at some time during this period in the Reserve small settlement library towns. Accordingly, for a recently settled area an amazing plenitude of books, newspapers, magazines, broadsides and ephemera found their way into rural cabins, churches and libraries. An 1835 emigrant’s guide noted of the Reserve that already “temperance reports, tracts, almanacs and newspapers are everywhere and resistance seems to be dying.”[23. Morgan Library of Ohio Imprints and Richard Parker Morgan, 1999 Ohio Imprints, 1796-1850 (Ohio: Morgan Library of Ohio Imprints), morganlibrary.com, accessed Dec. 10, 2010; Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750-1990 (Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 45-47; D. Griffiths, Jr., Two Years in the New Settlements of Ohio with Directions to the Emigrant (London: Wesley and Davis, 1835), 130; Frederick Jackson Turner, The United States, 1830-1850 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1935, 1963), 343-344; Pankratz, “New Englanders,” 24.]
Settlers established small settlement reading rooms, sometimes antecedent to expanded libraries and limited at first to magazines and newspapers, at Painesville, Sandusky, Wadsworth, Kent, Poland, Kingsville, and Orville and possibly at other locations. These rooms existed as small lounge areas in homes or businesses with a few seats, tables and limited amenities. The early reading room at Poland, 1826, looking outward, subscribed to the Pittsburgh Gazette, the Cleveland Herald, the American Farm, the National Journal and the New-York Advertiser. The Painesville Library Society began its collection in 1841 with twenty-five periodicals; the Sandusky Ladies Library Association subscribed to twenty-nine magazines in 1871 and, by 1868, the Norwalk Young Men’s Library was claiming “over sixty” newspapers and periodicals. The Norwalk subscriptions encompassed religion, temperance, science and opinion magazines, British reviews, ladies’ and children’s magazines and, for public and practical affairs, the National Prohibitionist, the American Whig Review, 1852-54, and the progressive agricultural and craft magazine, Plow, Loom and Anvil, 1852-54. The Norwalk library, in fact, held nearly twice the number of journal files as did, nine years later, the Cleveland Library Association, 1865, with overall twice Norwalk’s print resources.[24. First Catalogue of Norwalk Library, 1877; Cleveland Library Association Catalogue, 1865; “Minutes of a Meeting held in the village of Poland for the purpose of establishing a reading room, 1826,” Western Reserve Historical Society, WRHS Doc. #2126, quoted in Jones, “Materials, 32-33; Sandusky Ladies Library Association, Catalogue, 1877, Sandusky Library and Archives Center, Sandusky, Ohio.]
From surviving intelligence it appears consensus on suitable magazines for a pioneer social library was not reached in these early years. The eminent clergyman and educator Alonzo Potter’s competent selection guide, Handbook for Readers and Students intended as a help . . . to associations . . . in the selection of reading, (Harpers, 1843), acquired by the Twinsburg Library, listed twenty-five magazine titles Potter considered indispensable ranging from the Edinburgh Review and the Niles Register to Blackwood’s Magazine. But only the venerable North American Review and the compendious American Almanac appear on the collective subscription lists of Twinsburg, Sandusky and Norwalk.
In his Handbook Potter further introduced a number of controlling “Principles of Selection,” the first of which specified gruffly that “works of mere fiction should be excluded”; that is, those which “excite and arouse rather than improve taste, enlarge knowledge or strengthen virtuous principle. It is believed that this is the case with a very large percentage of what are usually called novels” and in his magisterial handbook, Books and Reading, concurring Yale President Noah Porter stiffly agreed that “the reading of novels is the chief occupation of a certain class of persons who are exempt from the usual claims of business or study…”[25. Potter, Handbook for Readers, 125; Noah Porter, Books and Reading: or, Which Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them, 4th ed., (New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1877), 220.]
Nevertheless the widespread debut of intoxicating serial fiction in a number of general magazines, such as the popular New York Ledger, Harpers, and Peterson’s Magazine, began to rival in readership the already abundant fictional offerings in conventional book format. Charles Dickens’ imported All the Year Around led with long serial fiction and Porter’s Spirit of the Times, in the Norwalk library, added sports reporting and humor. Although they were known, there is finally little evidence that Potter’s Handbook, Porter’s Books and Reading or Harvard librarian Thaddeus M. Harris’ seminal Select Catalog of Some of the Most Esteemed Publications in the English Language Proper to form a Social Library, 1793, were ever adopted as qualitative controls in the assembling of collections.[26. Patricia Okken, Social Stories: the Magazine Novel in Nineteenth Century America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.]
Directions of Reading and Thinking
J. R. Pankratz, Western Reserve reading and print culture scholar, has assessed the general context of a postulated early Western Reserve reading psychology. He characterizes the Reserve reader’s approach to print as personally applicable in the Puritan tradition, and further conditioned by the separation of backwoods isolation, by inclination to narcissistic introspection and by reproduced identifications, in a communal setting, of socially approved moral behaviors. The content of the literature in six antebellum and five post-bellum print book catalogs, analyzed below within this conceptualization, thus both helped to shape and to mirror aspects of the evolving mental world of an influential minority of Reserve citizens.[27. Pankratz, “New Englanders,” 225-237; Barbara Sicherman, “Ideologies and Practices of Reading,” in Scott E. Casper et al., eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 3, The Industrial Book, 1840-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 279-302.]
Of titles published in Ohio before 1820, about one-third treated religion and one-tenth literature and the arts. Supplemented by Eastern books and imports from England, subject distribution in the Reserve collections was gradually distinguished by a concentration upon history/biography/religion, travel and, increasingly, upon popular fiction. There was limited attention to science and the fine arts and little representation of the ancient classics or the European literary canon. An approximation of antebellum subject distribution in six libraries became: one-third, history and biography; one-quarter, religion, theology and conduct-of-life titles; one-fifth-plus, belles-lettres, fiction and miscellaneous; one-tenth, travel and adventure; and one-tenth, science and natural history (Table III).
Illustrative of this general distribution pattern is that of the Mentor Library Company, 1819. A rough categorization of the Mentor collection evolved as: history, 13%; biography, 14%; science, travel, natural history and medicine, 12%; religion, 24%; belles-lettres and novels, 31%; legal moral and philosophical titles, 6%. Loan records for the library date from 1820 to 1852, a period nearly equivalent to the average life of the antebellum New England libraries, was approximately as follows: history titles, 39%; biography, 20%; science, 12%; religion, 13%; belles-lettres and novels, 8%; and legal, moral, and philosophical titles, 8%. Perhaps the most pertinent observation based upon this comparison of collection holdings with loans is the relatively intense borrowing of history and biography and the lower appeal of a considerably larger religion collection.
The distribution pattern of smaller Eastern Colonial libraries like that of Salem, Massachusetts and Burlington, New Jersey may have been roughly similar. Their collections both in 1759 and thirty years later centered upon narrative genres in history, travel, and fiction with limited attention to fine arts, professional and scholarly books.[28. Mentor Library Company, “Record Book,” 9-11, 13; Yankaskas, “Borrowing Culture,” 28-34.]
In the post-bellum social conduct literature and etiquette manuals were published in a starchy form of stylized handbooks intended for an upwardly-mobile middle-class. Women writers such as Sarah Josepha Hale, venerable editor of the Ladies Magazine and Godey’s Ladies Book, supplied many of these guidebooks. They commonly advised nurturance and family support roles for women and warned of the impropriety of reflexive intellectual pretension. Concern with politics, economics and public affairs were typically thought of as alien to female minds. In this popular genre Mrs. Hale’s Keeping House and House Keeping, in the offerings of the Twinsburg Library, was especially prominent.
There was a limited sampling of these home-type conduct guides in the collections, but the Sandusky Ladies Library held Margaret Conkling’s American Gentleman’s Guide to Politeness and that epitome of the type, Harriet O. Ward’s Etiquette of the Best Society. In the midst of backwoods disorder and confusion the latter declared “the laws of social life, which, like the laws of the universe, prevent all things from returning to chaos.” [p. 52]. The Norwalk collection offered How to Be a Lady and Twinsburg followed with Louisa Tuthill’s popular affirmation, I Will Be a Lady, an accessible fictionalized guide, eventually appearing in at least ten editions.
After the mid-century and into the post-bellum years an expanding market economy and more rapid segmentation of the Western Reserve population was accompanied by an intensified national and secular focus in cultural life. Although core New Englanders were always a primary leadership coterie of the Reserve citizenry it has been estimated that by 1840 only about one-fourth were Yankees. The population of the eastern six of the Western Reserve counties grew by one-third from 1850 to 1880. Agriculture was sustained and the value of manufactures in Ashtabula County alone increased almost eight times during this period from just over a half to over four million dollars.
Into this milieu at least 144 book-length non-fiction success manuals were potentially available up to 1910. While about twenty of these are found in our sample of Reserve libraries, this was not inconsiderable in that these books, not prime choices for libraries, were often sold directly to families by traveling subscription agents. Representative titles recorded in Reserve print catalogs include Bostonian E. P. Whipple’s Success and its Conditions, Chicago rhetoric professor William Matthews’ influential Getting On in the World; or Hints on Success in Life which appeared as a series of articles in the Chicago Tribune and eventually sold 70,000 copies in book format. Also highly esteemed were the omnipresent Horatio Alger’sStrive and Succeed, and theologian and educator Bela Bates Edwards’ two volume collection of short sketches of Self-Taught Men who always, it was asserted, resisting criticism and metaphysics, “devoted themselves to some practical object.”
Samuel Smiles classic manuals, Character and Self-Help, the latter a Reserve library book, in which he alleges the negligible supporting value of libraries compared to the manly practice of unmediated self-instruction. By the late Century the indefatigable publicist Orison Swett Marden, whose literary progress approximated to a sort of prolonged staccato stutter from which eventually issued nearly 150 repetitive “road-to-success” effusions, perhaps epitomized his message to the Country and the Reserve in his celebrations of Rising in the World, Pushing to the Front and Character, the Grandest Thing of All.
Whether targeted to natural ambitions or intended as compensatory balance for masculine anxieties in an ever more complex order, the success literature focused upon the posited agency of sovereign will. Exercise of such resolute concentration inevitably would culminate, it was hoped, in requisite “character,” rather than depend upon communal or structural determinants of personal fortune. Thus we begin to see new parameters forming for a reformulation of reading habits on the Reserve.[29. Twinsburgh Library Catalogue, 1851; Untitled, (“Prospectus and Catalog of the Ladies Library Association, Dec 1874”), Sandusky Library and Archives Center, Sandusky, Ohio; K.F. Geiser, “New England and the Western Reserve,” Mississippi Valley Historical Society Proceedings 66 (1912-1913), 64; in judging a person the apotheosis of constructed “character” appeared unbounded. Lyle Wright’s digitized American Fiction, 1850-1875 reports that the word (in its several senses) appears an average of sixteen times in some 2800 period novels. The continuing vitality of “success” literature in the Midwest is further suggested by the “Records of the Muncie (Indiana) Public Library, 1890-1902,” which indicate six Horatio Alger novels alone accounted during this period for 27% of the circulations of the twenty most popular titles. “What Middletown Read, 1891-1902,” http://whatmiddletownread.wordpress.com, accessed Nov. 30, 2011. See also Susan Schulten, “Success,” in Encyclopedia of American Culture and Intellectual History, III, 3-10; Judy Hilkey, Character is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press), 126-141, 195-202; James B. Salazar, Bodies of Reform: the Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 10, 88-98; and Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America (New Brunswick, New Jersey: 1954), Chapter 3; Calculated from University of Virginia Historical Census Browser, “Total Population and Manufacturing Product, 1850-1880,” Ashtabula County, Ohio, http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/php, accessed March 20, 2010; “ALB Database, 1876”; Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge, 45-47; Morgan Library, Ohio Imprints, 1796-1850.]
Accordingly, to the extent that these distributions are representative, the classifiable titles in five post-bellum Western Reserve small settlement collections as compared to six antebellum collections inventories fell from an average of fifty percent history/biography/religion to thirty-six percent. The fiction allotment increased from ten percent to thirty-four percent and might have been higher save for the continuing reluctance of some library managers to acquire what they generally viewed as unacceptably lurid fare (Tables II, III). This early hesitation was evident in a few towns like Chagrin Falls and Painesville, where commercial circulating libraries briefly appeared in response, chiefly as supply depots for high-demand fiction.[30. Painesville Telegraph, Jan. 4, 1833; Feb. 18, 1841; David Kaser, A Book for Sixpence: the Circulating Library in America (Pittsburgh: Beta Phi Mu, 1980), 116-126, 173-176; Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the U.S. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 83-84; Stiffler, “Books and Reading.”]
The prolific ‘literary domestic” novelist Mary Jane Holmes, one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “damn scribbling women,” is represented by seventeen fiction titles in the Sandusky Ladies Library collection. Some of her thirty-seven novels are said to have gone through seven editions with libraries sometimes obliged to acquire twenty copies. Sandusky also held sixteen of the twenty-five titles of the ill-starred British fictionist Margaret Oliphant’s nuanced explorations of the dimensions of grief. Stocked in addition was the romantic novelist Marion Harland’s popular title Alone, produced as a teenager, in which the heroine, having drifted innocently into feminism, is at last rescued by matrimony and avows that “submission is a pleasure, not a duty.” Harland later followed with her clinching non-fiction summation, Common Sense in the Household.
Also tailored to aspirant Reserve settlers was the empathetic mode of the immensely popular English writer, Dinah Mulock, who wrote engagingly of British middle-class life and of whom it was said that “the practical womanhood of ordinary life has never had a more sufficient representative.” Mulock offered Sandusky ladies Young Mrs. Jardine wherein Roderick Jardine succumbs to a Victorian paragon– appropriately named “Silence,” The Sandusky collection was further enhanced by an additional fifteen Mulock titles and by nineteen at Norwalk. Indeed, each of the top nine of Sandusky’s fictionists averaged thirteen titles and themselves claimed collectively four percent of the entire Sandusky Ladies Library. By 1892 the Medina Public Library evidenced the extremities of a post-bellum distribution pattern. The fiction and literature collection comprised 62% of total inventory, history, biography and religion, 29%, and travel and science together stood at but 4%. Sub-literary fiction persisted but also present were Tolstoy and Turgenev, Eliot and Thackeray and religion titles now tended a bit more to the character of A. J. F. Behrend’s Socialism and Christianity and Richard Ely’s Social Aspects of Christianity.[31. Untitled, (“Prospectus and Articles of the Ladies Library Association, Sandusky, Ohio, 1874”); Richard Garnett, “Dinah Maria Mulock, 1826-1887,” in Sidney Lee, ed., The Dictionary of National Biography (London: Smith, Elder and Son, 1909), XII, 1177-1178; First Catalogue of Young Men’s Library, Norwalk, 1866; Circulating Library Society of Medina, Catalogue of the Medina Public Library (Medina, Ohio: Sentinel Print, 1892); Carol L. Urness, “Holmes Mary Jane Hawes,” in Edward T. James, et al., eds., Notable American Women: a Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971,) II, 208-209; Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage, Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.]
Travel literature, encompassing the Holy Lands, the Arctic and Antarctica, the South Seas and the intriguing forays of Henry M. Stanley into “darkest” Africa, captured rapt attention in the post-bellum. Perhaps fulfilling a yearning for exotic imagery beyond foreshortened Reserve horizons, the Norwalk Library held Mrs. S. R. Urbino’s diverting An American Woman in Europe and the Sandusky Ladies Library members discovered Adeline Trefont’s An American Girl Abroad, George Kennan’s classic Tent Life in Siberia, Richard and John Landers’ Travels into the Interior of Africa, and a sprinkling of like volumes. Of 310 classifiable travel titles in the Sandusky and Norwalk libraries, these locales each accounted for at least ten entries: the United States, “world countries,” England and Scotland, Africa (except Egypt), Egypt, the Middle East and Bible lands, Russia, China and Italy, especially Rome and Venice.
There is a minimal average six and one-half percent provision of science and natural history titles in the five post-bellum libraries with print catalogs. The segment of post- bellum religion and science titles in the Sandusky Ladies Library, 1877 and the Medina Public Library, 1892 apportioned to Darwinian evolution, experimental science and social gospel literature, leveled at twenty-nine volumes, including multiple works of Darwin and Huxley and single titles of Fiske, Drummond, Draper and Gray, comprising altogether a quarter of these sub-collections. Suggestive of ambivalence in balancing coverage in the Sandusky holdings is the entry of Princeton President James McCosh’s mediating Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation in both scientific and theological classifications.
Fine arts reading through the late Century had yet barely touched the rural Reserve. Art titles at Sandusky numbered thirty-five, less than one-percent of inventory. The Norwalk catalog lists nine art volumes. On music and the theater the eleven libraries with print catalogs altogether indicate holdings of about a dozen volumes. The Norwalk Young Men’s Library copy of pastor William Howard Van Doren’s Mercantile Morals; Thoughts for Young Men Entering Mercantile Life presents incisive contemplation upon the perceived temptations of wealth. His solemn counsel is accompanied by obsessive cautions against ubiquitous “skepticism, novels and the theater,” the latter extended to a full seventy titles doggedly offered as documenting the looming pitfalls of the stage. These libraries could claim fine arts titles at an average of below three percent for the entire period.
Economic and trade literature appears at first over-shadowed by the Reserve library managers’ appointed mission of traditional cultural replication. In a country in which farming was the principal occupation, nine libraries held a total of thirty-four agriculture titles, less than one-half of one percent of inventory. Nonetheless a literature of practical guidance requisite to a market economy was beginning to surface.
Book collections for children were few before the 1890s but the Norwalk library included some 500 children’s volumes, twelve percent of inventory. This literature for the young seems mostly to mirror at a rather more simplistic rhetorical level standard themes of the adult books with few of what are now thought of as older classics. These titles and tracts spanned history, travel/adventure, elementary science and natural history, primers, exemplary strive-and-succeed literature in the manner of Seek and Find, and Winning His Spurs together with exceptionalist volumes in that of Revolt of the Colonies and Daring Deeds of our Forefathers. The Norwalk Library included eight volumes of Our Young Folks, one of the better children’s magazines, but, before the official recognition of “adolescence,” specifically designed young adult literature was limited. The South Amherst Library stocked Tom Brown at Oxford and P. T. Trowbridge’s popular Civil War and other adventure tales for boys.
Biography extensively embraced didactic themes and charismatic military, political, and explorer-adventurer figures with little attention to the biography of science and the humanities. Half of Norwalk’s 153 biographies and memoirs are of this category with education and fine arts accounting for six percent of the total. Curiously, the extension to notable Americans from other nationalities as subjects in the collections at Ashtabula, 1836, Norwalk, 1870 and Sandusky, 1870 remained unrealized and held steady at nineteen percent across this time period.
The social libraries seem not to have commonly maintained non-circulating reference collections. Multi-volume sets of Federal and Ohio public documents appear at Sandusky, South Amherst and Norwalk. There are also formidable sets of epitomized history and biographical literature including Jared Sparks’ sixty-biography, Library of American Biography, available at Twinsburg, together with a few subject dictionaries, cyclopedias and sprawling collections of marginal miscellany. Perhaps the major reference set, held and Twinsburg, Ashtabula, and Sandusky, was the thirteen volume first edition with volume fourteen supplement, 1846, of the Americana Encyclopedia along with the Encyclopedia Britannica, on the shelfat Medina. (Table III)[32. Untitled, (“Articles of Ladies Library Association, Sandusky”); Catalogue of the Young Men’s Library, Norwalk; Catalogue of the South Amherst Library, Organized 1865 (South Amherst, Ohio, 1875); Ashtabula Social Library Association, Catalog, title holdings listed in Jones, “Materials,” 25-29; Circulating Library Society of Medina, Catalogue: Catalogue of the South Amherst Library, 1865.]
Neighborhood founts of print erupted and spread over the Western Reserve during much of the Nineteenth Century, the little resource nodes being one response to natural thirsts, to separation anxieties, to earnest self-help voluntarism, and to the romantic meliorism of the American frontier. This conjuncture accompanied circumstances more especially native to the Reserve itself. The Connecticut Land Company and civil authorities had established an isolated settlement plan with little deployment of supporting infrastructure. This pattern originally consisted of dispersed settlement households only tentatively connected but, upon a darkly broken landscape, half-forested as late as the 1850s, infused with a cohering ideology of literacy and of New England tradition. The libraries supplied an immediate cultural resource together with the beginnings of an institutional foundation that might survive and assist in refocusing the fragmentation of oncoming expansion and diversification.
The mushrooming of public libraries in the United States after the mid-1870s also occurred in a phase of public expansion of government services into a gradually diminishing private sector. The extension of policing, health and other protective and enabling functions began to be accompanied by some tax-supported provision of allied and supporting print resources.
Because of the proximity of eastern migration routes and the immediacy of the Puritan implantation errand, Ashtabula and the other northeastern Ohio Western Reserve counties (along with Cincinnati) remained for a time the cynosure of social library incursion into the New West. It developed that Ohio’s Western Reserve served, in the hyper-kinetic example of up-state New York, as a kind of hothouse, an exemplary testing ground for reform activity and the pursuit of social perfection against the prevailing survival currents of Ohio settlement. Nonetheless, the library collections included a limited presence of issue-oriented literature which was supplied primarily through missionary and special agenda associations’ distribution of low-cost or free tracts, also found in a few Sunday school and church libraries.
Twenty of twenty-two general Ohio libraries founded in the eighteen nineties were public tax-supported. In 1890 some fifty social libraries could still be found broadcast over the Reserve. Thirteen years later only a remaining five survived. For collections in New England, many dating to the Eighteenth Century, the twilight of the smaller libraries had descended earlier. In Massachusetts eighty-four social libraries ceased between 1840 and 1890. Although nationally most of the remainder of these American collections were destined to expire rapidly in the new Century, with a striking persistence there were still extant in 1900, rather contrary to the Western Reserve experience, a near equality of some 950 each of social and public collections.[33. Yankaskas, “Borrowing Culture,” 31; “ALB Database, 1876”; Stiffler, “Books and Reading”; U.S. Department of the Interior. Bureau of Education. Report of the Commissioner, 1899-1900 (Washington, D.C., 1901), 946, 1165.]
If the conservatively programmed early collections had originally presented themselves as refreshing little oases to parched Reserve intellects, in later years their fluid sustenance must have begun to register as brackish to some popular tastes, perhaps less captivating than soporific. Still modest increases in memberships and new thematic interests registered in a number of locations. By aiming at barely submerged appetites the morally instructive heroism and villainy in popular narratives– historical, biographical and fictional–while dramatically appealing, might merge approved identifications with the cautions of negative example. Enlightenment, practical instruction and character enhancement could thereby superimpose upon diversion and escape in promoting a modicum of social control. On the other hand, expanded content including gifts gathered by dutiful volunteers could dissolve to an extent into random miscellany. A resultant dilution of message might therefore contribute to the attenuation of mentalité and thus tend to diminished impact.
Overall in the late antebellum, then, a demand for an enlarged reading agenda in the rural Reserve sought to include more popular fiction. As expanding curiosities surfaced, an extended narrative biography and history literature was assembled together with an appealing travel-adventure inventory and a core selection of conduct-of-life and success manuals responsive to the ardent ambitions of the times. The popularity of this literature was maintained by new publication, and extended into the post-bellum years. Attention to “practical” or useful information for farm and town began to appear.
In sum, to the connection of print access with introspective surveillance was added in the post-bellum, in what has been called the ”village enlightenment,” a perspective on reading as instrumental to the pursuit of personal competence and differentiating prestige in an expanding order. This heightened awareness of solitary agency thus began to supplement or supersede stress upon literacy as mainly targeted to the quest of divine preferment, or the confirmation of civil authority and neighborhood mores. Eventually it followed that, with a fragmenting population, appeal to a restricted portion of potential patrons could not sustain the rural settlement libraries.[34. William Gilmore-Lehne, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1785-1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 263.]
A comprehensive profile of the Nineteenth Century Western Reserve’s 140 some small-settlement collection holdings and their subject distributions will never be known but, with title duplication and when added to the inventories of the four Reserve cities’ social libraries, total volume count probably settled in advance of fifty thousand. Roughly similar selection from a relatively circumscribed publication product at first filled Reserve library shelves. It is presumed that the libraries originally exhibited comparable memberships in an Ohio cultural enclave shaped by a New England heritage. Widely spread holdings equivalent in totality to a small Twentieth Century public library were gathered over this period. In more recent years networking reciprocity began to extend access to still inadequate rural depots as regional public libraries embraced progressively enlarged service objectives.
This nascent integration was assisted by a developing infrastructure and by the pioneering initiatives of a few enterprising national publishers. These efforts included the presentation and marketing on the Reserve of pre-selected collection packages–as in the prime example of the eventual 187 non-fiction volumes of Harper’s popular Family Library. This and other initial promotions introduced print themes targeted to scattered social and school libraries. Although responding to local interests, these publishers independently shaped a rather more selectively informed and uniform library content. In this manner the semi-public structure of the Reserve’s hybrid social libraries had already begun to establish a working base for new public collections.
Conclusion
With indigenous responses to felt needs, implemented partly through accommodation of New England precedents, miniature print collections supported by volunteer enterprise emerged in the American West and on the Connecticut Western Reserve. Increasingly in the last quarter of the Century the legacy of the New England and Western Reserve social libraries was manifest in the carry over and utilization of their animating spirit and some of their structural forms in the establishment of more dependable public sponsorships. In this transition the expression of prior formative experience in new quasi-public (or quasi-social) organizational models no doubt hastened the spread of free public libraries in the United States. Even as late as the 1930s about 17% of libraries in U.S. cities over 30,000 and 500 collections in smaller towns had retained an amalgam of volunteer private and public governance.[35. Wayne Wiegand, Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 173-186, 220; Carlton Joeckel, The Government of the American Public Library (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1935), 24, 79; Michael Kevane and William S. Sunstrom, “From Quasi-Private to Quasi-Public: the Development of the Public Library in the United States, 1870-1930,” 7, 8, http://ssm.com/abstract+1104043, accessed March 10, 2010.]
Interestingly enough it appears in retrospect that some segment of Western Reserve pioneers had always been driven not alone by Puritan conscience, rational calculation, or pressing desperation of circumstance. Also present in admixture was an elemental impulse to restless mobility—insistent motivation to lateral movement in geo-space and to ascension in social space. The energized affirmations of Self-Help,Pushing Ahead, Outward Bound, Work and Win, Bound to Rise, Planting the Wilderness, Westward, a Tale of Immigrant Life, and a plethora of like tracts in the libraries helped both to nurture and to reflect an adventuring spirit and to reconcile adjustment to backwoods privation.
Tax support of Reserve public libraries began to spread more widely in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. Both an expansion of purview and a net decline in quality of collections was perhaps inevitable. It therefore became helpful that, apart from the objective content of assembled print, something of the early library managers’ esoteric commitment could survive as compensatory leavening to an incursive leveling. Rather paradoxically, quality in religious and general literature could persist as evidenced, for example, by the presence in the holdings of the Medina Public Library, 1892, of some eighty commonly respected authors listed in F. A. Archibald’s disarmingly cosmopolitan bibliography, Methodism and Literature: Catalogue of Select Books for the Libraries of the Church and Sunday School, 1883.
As high cultural uniformity and continuity on the antebellum Reserve grew overshadowed by diversity and complexity, something of the legacy of the early Reserve social libraries could be preserved in the comforting recollection of a unitary vision. Their inspirational potential survived disproportionate to an improvised record of parochial coverage, limited membership and ad-hoc organization. Springing from commitment to a stubborn transcendence of routine and habitual survival in a rude environment, the little collections finally discovered ample motivation and established valuable precedent.
Despite a notable extension, then, the libraries frequent shallowness revealed some excrescence of ephemeral preoccupation and unfocused accumulation. Nonetheless there underlay the transfer of private energy and artifact into the public domain an integrity of motivation that promised potential for rewarding growth. Finally, perhaps the essence of the social library saga on the Western Reserve was more that of a hard won heritage of community aspiration and struggle than the evidence of a scatter of material foundations. Ultimately the Reserve’s record of small settlement reading stations, succumbing to manifest inadequacy, yielded to a more cosmopolitan social construction–to skillfully expanded and delineated collections, to the beginnings of trained administration, to a sustaining financial base in a new age and in the wake of the American public library movement.[36. Haynes McMullen, “The Very Slow Decline of the Social Library,” Library Quarterly 55 (1985), 221-223; Patrick M. Valentine, “America’s Antebellum Social Libraries: A Reappraisal in Institutional Development,” Library and Information History 27 (March 2011), 32-51; W.I. Fletcher, “The Proprietary Library in Relation to the Public Library Movement,” Library Journal 31 (1906), 208-210; Abigail Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 131; Shera, Foundations, 54-126; Pankratz, “New Englanders,” 1-31; Jones, “Materials,” 13, 61; Stiffler, “Books and Reading.”]
Table I – Connecticut Western Reserve Small Settlement Social Libraries, N = 107; Founding Dates, 1800-1900; By Ohio Counties; and By Five-Year Periods
Sources: Stiffler, “Antecedents”‘ H. McMullen, “AJB Database, 1876”; E.H. Miller, “Educational Legislation in Ohio, 1803-1850.”
Table II – Nineteenth Century Western Reserve Social Libraries with Print or Manuscript Catalogs
*Not analyzed for subject distribution or collection
M: Manuscript Catalog; P: Print Catalog
Table III – Percentage Subject Distributions, Classified Titles, Antebellum and Postbellum Western Reserve Small Settlement Social Library Collections, 1800-1900
Sources: McMullen, “ALB 1876 Database”; U.S. Bureau of Education, “1876 Report”; Stiffler, “Books and Reading.”
Appendix
Name, Date of Founding and Volume Holdings of Small Settlement Social Libraries in the Seven Eastern Ohio Counties of the Connecticut Western Reserve, Antebellum and Postbellum, 1800-1900
