VOLUME 17 • NUMBER 3 • FALL 2017 Ohio Valley History Is a OHIO VALLEY STAFF John David Smith Gary Z

A Collaboration of The Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky, Cincinnati Museum Center, and the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio. VOLUME 17 • NUMBER 3 • FALL 2017 Ohio Valley History is a OHIO VALLEY STAFF John David Smith Gary Z. Lindgren University of North Carolina, Mitchel D. Livingston, Ph.D. collaboration of The Filson Editors Charlotte Phillip C. Long Historical Society, Louisville,

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A Journal of the History and Culture of the Ohio Valley and the Upper South, published in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky, by Cincinnati Museum Center and The Filson Historical Society. Contents

3 Ginseng, China, and the Transformation of the Ohio Valley, 1783–1840 Luke Manget

24 The Man Who Moved the Bridge Cincinnati’s Roebling Suspension Bridge and Its Inconvenient Site Anne Delano Steinert

44 “High School Girls” Women’s Higher Education at the Louisville Female High School Amy Lueck

63 Collection Essay Connections in the Collections Cincinnati Museum Center’s Enno Meyer Collection Lory Greenland

67 Collection Essay Full of Charm and Variety The Scrapbook Collection of the Filson Historical Society Kathryn Bratcher

75 Review Essay Toward a New Railroad History? Limitations and Possibilities Scott E. Randolph

79 Review Essay Race, Paternalism, and Educational Reform in the Twentieth-Century South Emily E. Senefeld

83 Book Reviews

94 Announcements

on the cover: Sheet music for Suspension Bridge Grand March celebrating the opening of Cincinnati’s suspension bridge (c. 1867). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Contributors

Amy Lueck is an assistant professor of English at Santa Clara University. She received her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Louisville in 2010. Her teaching and research focus upon histories of writing and rhetoric, spatial rhetorics, language politics, and public memory. Her manuscript, Composing the American High School, explores the history of rhetoric and writing in nineteenth-century high schools. She was recipient of a Filson Fellowship and conducted research there in 2016.

Luke Manget is a lecturer of history at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. He received his PhD from the University of Georgia in 2017. His dissertation, “Root Diggers and Herb Gatherers: The Rise and Decline of the Botanical Drug Trade in Southern Appalachia,” examines the relationship between global markets for medicinal plants and cultural dynamics in the rural Mountain South. He has published articles in Environmental History and Appalachian Journal.

Scott E. Randolph is an associate professor in the Department of Business Administration and Accounting at the University of Redlands. His current research project concerns the 1913 Federal Valuation Act and the Progressive faith in scientific regulation.

Emily Senefeld is a visiting instructor of history at Sewanee: The University of the South. Her current research project is a cultural history of the Highlander Folk School.

Anne Delano Steinert is a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati and recipient of a Filson Fellowship. Her dissertation focuses on how micro-histories illustrate the role of the built environment in the study of urban history. She is board chair of the Over-the-Rhine Museum and curator of two recent exhibi- tions on the history of Cincinnati. She is currently working on an exhibit of the Kenyon-Barr photo collection held by the Cincinnati Museum Center.

2 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Ginseng, China, and the Transformation of the Ohio Valley, 1783–1840 Luke Manget

t may have been growing among the old-growth chestnuts on the side of Little Mountain. Or perhaps it had matured under the butternut trees on the banks of Turkey Creek. Somewhere near the brand-new hamlet of Union in Ithe western Virginia backcountry in October of 1783, a Scots-Irishman named William Ewing spotted a small plant among the deep green understory. He saw the cluster of bright red berries perched atop a peduncle that protruded from the center of the twenty-inch-high herb. He counted the leaves. It had four. His heart beat a little faster. It probably had a large root. Ewing knew this root by itself could provide him with a knife, a pair of spectacles, a pound of gunpowder, a bushel of salt, or maybe a pint of rum.1

Wild ginseng (2012). OHIO DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES

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The Iroquois called itgarangtoging, or “child’s thigh.” The Cherokee named it atali-guli, “the mountain climber,” and sometimes, Yunwi Usdi, “the little man.” The Tartars, living in the northern Chinese province of Tartar, called itOrhota, or “queen of the plants,” and William Byrd of Virginia referred to it as the “plant of life.” Linnaean taxonomists would later label it Panax quinquefolius, but Ewing knew it as “sang,” a shortening of the word “ginseng,” derived from the Mandarin jen-shen. Indeed, it was a world-famous plant. East Asian peoples revered ginseng as a virtual panacea. Their belief that it could effectively treat a wide variety of ailments and imbalances and their willingness to pay a premium for it made it one of the world’s most sought-after medicinal herbs.2 Ewing had only one month before ginseng disappeared for the season. A deciduous perennial, it could grow for dozens, if not hundreds, of years, but its top— that is, everything but the root and rhizome—died back every year after the first frost. He likely knew that it grew in cool, moist deciduous forests, and although it could be found in the piedmont, it seems to have always preferred the mountains, or what one mid-eighteenth-century observer called “the hills that lie far from the sea.” As early as the 1730s, colonists recognized the plant’s tendency to grow on the “north sides of mountains and very high hills, that are shaded with trees.” Ewing also likely knew that ginseng grew in patches, sometimes so dense that a digger could haul one thousand pounds of roots out of one patch. When he found one plant, there were probably hundreds more nearby. It was like treasure-hunting.3 Ewing uprooted the full ginseng plant from the earth, cut off the leaves and stem, and placed the gnarly root in a small sack, where it joined hundreds of its kinsmen. Ewing took 186 pounds of roots to James Alexander’s trading post in Union, where he exchanged them for, among other things, one pound of gunpowder, a hat, a pint of rum, and two saddles. At the end of the season, as the weather turned bitter cold, Alexander loaded Ewing’s roots

Yearling ginseng plant in July, yearling root in October, with thousands of others and hauled and two-year-old root. Ginseng: Its Cultivation, Harvest- them in a covered wagon to Staunton ing, Marketing and Market Value, with a Short Account of Its History and Botany (Orange Judd Company, 1903). in the Shenandoah Valley. There is a FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY good chance that Dr. Robert Johnston,

4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY LUKE MANGET who had purchased some forty thousand pounds of ginseng there in the summer and fall of 1783, purchased them in Staunton, for close to four shillings a pound. If they had ended up in Johnson’s hands, they would have been taken to Philadelphia, then up the coast to New York where more than fifty thousand pounds of other ginseng roots dug from the Virginia and Pennsylvania backcountry were loaded on the Empress of China. These roots would prove crucial in the first commercial encounter between the United States and China.4

Empress of China at Mart’s Jetty, Port Pirie (1876). JOHN OKLEY LIBRARY, STATE LIBRARY OF QUEENSLAND

The trade that brought Ewing’s roots from the Virginia mountains to the Far East was made possible by a global market constructed outside the traditional purview of Atlantic World–oriented scholars. Indeed, ginseng has received little scholarly attention at all, perhaps because it was not consistently documented by any public organization until the twentieth century, and compared to other commodities, it attracted relatively little contemporary commentary. Those scholars who do mention it typically discuss it alongside wheat, cattle, and deerskins as evidence of early commercialization of the frontier. But, as this article makes clear, not all commodities were created equal. Ginseng was different than most wares from the New World. First, this commerce was driven by an imperial power far from Europe. Indeed, Chinese consumers dictated the dynamics of the trade at every level of the supply chain, from how much it sold for in Canton to how it was harvested from the ground. Despite efforts by Royal Society botanists to stimulate production and consumption in Europe, virtually every ounce of

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ginseng dug in the New World ended up in China. Second, ginseng’s commodification did not follow the same process as that of most other such goods. Instead of developing into a cash crop that could enrich planters, restructure the landscape, organize labor regimes, and generate wealth for colonial powers, ginseng remained primarily a wild-harvested product, an extractive industry rather than an agricultural one. Thus, production was dominated not by large landowners but, rather, the inhabitants of the imperial fringes of North America. Because of its unique qualities, ginseng steered ecological, social, and economic change through different channels.5 Paying closer attention to ginseng can help illuminate a critical transformation in the Ohio Valley. The first whites to inhabit the landscape, a group known as “hunters,” had come to the region in the 1750s and 1760s to hunt, fish, and generally live off the “spontaneous productions of nature.” Historian Stephen Aron has argued that these early arrivals initially shared with Native Americans a commitment to so-called rights-in-the-woods. While hunters certainly pursued private ownership of land, they held fluid notions of property and generally believed that unimproved forests, regardless of ownership, should be treated as semi- public property—a de facto commons. They struck a balance between public necessity and private prerogatives. However, by the 1790s, the world of the hunter was rapidly giving way to the world of the farmer, the merchant, and the lawyer, and the legal culture began to change with it. New landowners began to assert greater control over the resources on their land, and by the first decade of the nineteenth century, according to Aron, the rights- in-the-woods yielded to a new legal culture with a more stringent view of property.6 “Hunter and Indian” (c. 1840-1888). Ginseng helped usher in this commercial LIBRARY OF CONGRESS transition, but it did not wholly succumb to the new property regime. Like deerskins and beaver furs, it was a product of both worlds. It was a tradable commodity created by global markets that kept many of the early merchants afloat, and it helped grease the wheels of commercial development in an area that struggled for traction. Yet, it was also a commons resource, accessible to hunters and farmers alike, according to rights-in-the-woods. Over the course of the antebellum era, it eclipsed skins and furs as the most important commons commodity in the Ohio Valley. Thus, its continued importance to the region’s economy suggests that common rights did not disappear in the 1790s; rather, they persisted and evolved as the social, ecological, and economic dynamics changed around them.

6 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY LUKE MANGET

The ginseng boom in the Ohio Valley began to accelerate quickly in the early 1780s after the shackles of British mercantilism were overthrown. Eager to procure the tea that Americans had gone without for nearly a decade, merchants and financiers up and down the eastern seaboard were desperate for a commodity that could entice Chinese consumers. American trade with China prior to the Revolution had been limited and restricted by both the Chinese government and British mercantilist policies. When the Qing emperor Kangxi finally began opening up China to increased foreign trade at the end of the seventeenth century, British trade policies prevented American colonists from directly engaging in the China trade. All exports of ginseng and any other goods going to China had to pass through Britain and be loaded onto ships belonging to the East India Company. However, almost before the ink had dried on the Treaty of Paris in 1783, two groups of investors—one led by Daniel Parker of New York, the other by Robert Morris of Philadelphia—agreed to bankroll a trading venture to the “Celestial Empire.” Rather than put their faith in the hard-to-get furs from the Pacific northwest, as the adventurer/trader John Ledyard had proposed, they decided that ginseng was their best hope for enticing Chinese buyers.7

Kangxi, Emperor of the Qing dynasty Robert Morris (1734-1806). (1654-1722). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PALACE MUSEUM

As historian John Haddad has pointed out, ginseng had significant benefits to financiers eager to establish trade relationships with the Far East. First of all, the Chinese seemed to want a lot of it. North American ginseng had been sold in China since the 1730s, after Jesuit missionaries made the connection that the North American species of ginseng, Panax quinquefolius, could be substituted for

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its long-consumed Asian cousin, Panax ginseng, in the markets of Canton. This discovery stimulated a ginseng boom in Quebec that spread into the Hudson River Valley and western Pennsylvania by the 1750s. Before southern colonists could participate in the trade to any significant degree, however, the ginseng market collapsed and exports dipped in the 1760s, partly because American producers did not know how to properly prepare it. Despite the few decades of low demand since the 1760s, Parker and Morris had obtained reliable intelligence from European sources that the Chinese still wanted it badly. Second, ginseng grew wild in the backcountry and many inhabitants were knowledgeable veter- ans of the trade in northeast, so it was readily available for an immediate trade expedition. Third, it was a commodity to which European traders had very little access, as the plant did not grow in Europe. The United States’ monopoly on the root provided the nation with an advantage and, thus, a way to break into the Chinese market that had been dominated by the British.8 Rather than turn to northeastern merchants who had been involved in the midcentury ginseng boom around the edges of Iroquoia, the financiers looked to the South, perhaps realizing the relatively untapped resources there. In August 1783, Daniel Parker informed the Philadelphia company of Messrs. Turnbull, Marmie, & Co., “We are in want of 10,000 lb. Ginseng” and requested it “to procure that Quantity if to be had at your Market.” Realizing it had precious little time to fulfill the order before ginseng died back for the winter, the company hired a thirty-three- year-old Pennsylvania physician named Robert Johnston and fronted him $1,000 to travel the backcountry to procure the root. He quickly began a race against time.9 Within a week, Johnston arrived at Fort Pitt but found very little root. “After a most tiresome Journey across the Frontier of Pennsylvania,” he wrote to Turnbull and Marmie, “I have not been able to procure more than 400 weight of Ginseng.” Yet, he sounded a word of optimism. “Tomorrow I set out for Stantown [Staunton] and Augusta, where I am informed large Quantities of Ginseng has been sent from the Frontier parts.” His intelligence was accurate. Ginseng was flowing into the Shenandoah Valley from the mountains of western Virginia and Pennsylvania. That fall, German traveler and physician Johann Schoepf ran into a man leading two horses loaded with five hundred pounds of ginseng roots in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. The man declared that during the war virtually no roots were harvested and he was ready to cash in on the new bounty. George Washington also noticed loads of ginseng moving across the mountains. A few months after Schoepf, the victorious general was on a surveying trip to the Cheat River area in western Virginia when he encountered “numbers of Persons & Pack horses going in with Ginsang; & salt & other articles at the Markets below.” With the help of these collectors, who often bartered the roots for goods at country stores, Johnston procured some fourteen thousand pounds of “the best Ginseng which I have seen” and made arrangements with other storekeepers to ship further roots to Baltimore.

8 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY LUKE MANGET

By the end of December 1783, he had succeeded in accumulating an astounding fifty-seven thousand pounds of ginseng root from the mountains of Virginia and Pennsylvania. Indeed, he had purchased so much of the root for prices above market value that storekeepers complained he had shifted the price of the root throughout the backcountry.10 On a cold winter day in February 1784, laden mostly with ginseng and Spanish silver, the Empress of China weighed anchor in the icy waters of the Hudson River and set sail for the Far East. The ambitions and hopes of the young nation sailed with it. As Haddad has argued, ginseng held great symbolic value to many Americans, who viewed it through a brand-new nationalistic lens. If it could help establish a lucrative trade relationship with China independent of European inter- mediaries, the American dream of economic and political independence might become a reality. When the ship returned over a year later with news of great success, hopes for the future of ginseng and for American economic independence were high. In order to secure “permanent advantage to this rising empire,” one observer quipped, “it is only necessary to encourage the cultivation and proper curing of ginseng, to prevent its exportation to any other country than China, and that in our own vessels.” “The inhabitants of America must have tea,” wrote Samuel Shaw, the chief merchant on board the Empress and first American consul to China. “It must be pleasing to an American to know that…the otherwise use- less produce of its mountains and forests will, in a considerable degree, supply him with this elegant luxury.” Ginseng, predicted one observer from South Carolina, “may become to us, that is, the backcountry, very valuable articles of commerce.” Indeed, commercial-minded Americans had caught ginseng fever, and it quickly began to shape fortunes across the landscape.11 By the 1780s, the resettlement of the trans-Appalachian Ohio River basin had reached something of a crescendo. Following American independence, land companies such as the Greenbrier, Loyal, and Ohio companies, who had acquired vast tracts of land claimed by the Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, and other tribes, began to rapidly dispose of their lands, selling them to other nonresident speculators, as well as would-be settlers who streamed across the mountains. The passage of the Land Ordinance in 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 and American victories over Native Americans in the 1790s, initiated a new era of surveying and land settlement in the Ohio Valley. Commercial expansion proceeded with the establishment of towns like Marietta on the Ohio River, and the Mississippi River network became a commercial highway for emerging cash crops such as hemp, corn, cotton, and whiskey. The story of Col. John May, an agent for the Ohio Company and itinerant merchant from Boston, illustrates the importance of ginseng to the early commerce of the Ohio Valley.12 A member of the Massachusetts militia during the Revolution who participated in the Boston Tea Party, May was appointed agent of the Boston-based

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Ohio Company around 1786 and put in charge of purchasing land under the Land Ordinance of 1785 for company shareholders. Among his many land acqui- sitions in 1786–87 were areas along the Ohio River at the mouth of Muskingum Creek and Limestone Creek that would, within three years, become sites of the emerging commercial hubs of Marietta, Ohio, and Maysville, Kentucky. After returning to Boston in 1788, he decided on a plan to cash in on the developing frontier economy by floating five tons of goods down the Ohio River. He hoped to sell his stock of goods to arriving American settlers, but he was quickly disap- pointed. “Here week after week, with little or nothing to do, no money stirring,” May wrote in his July 3, 1789, diary entry. “I have as yet refused taking any [ginseng]. Ginseng is worse than nothing.” Having failed to unload much of his stock by the time he reached Wheeling and faced with throngs of customers who had nothing but ginseng, he made up his mind: “If we would do anything, we must take deerskins, furs, and ginseng in exchange for goods.” He had hoped that the agricultural economy of the region had evolved to the point at which cash purchases would sustain his business, but instead, he had to rely on bartering the products of the forest, which had been harvested according to the rights-in-the- woods by which hunters lived.13 At Marietta, May found a bustling economy with ten traders hawking their wares, whereas the year before there was only one. Ginseng seems to have fueled much of the boom. Referring to the merchants’ dependence on the plant, he called it “their darling Gensang” and seemed to believe that a sudden depreciation of ginseng prices threatened to derail the fledgling economy. Marietta was “filled with merchants who cannot dispose of their goods, as the dealing medium of exchange ginseng has utterly depreciated,” May wrote in his diary. “It seems to be a prevailing opinion that two thirds of the traders referred to will be ruined by this summer’s business.” The reason for this depreciation is unclear. In his study of early U.S.–Chinese trade relations, John Haddad claims that the Empress of China flooded the market, and by 1786, unbeknownst to many in the backcountry, prices for ginseng in Canton had dropped from $32 to thirty-two cents per pound. However, the performance of the ginseng market throughout the rest of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries indicates that the market was virtually impervious to glut. The depreciation in 1789 may have had more to do with the quality of the roots on board the Empress and the faith Chinese consumers had in the roots coming from America. Whatever the reason, May’s belief that such a depreciation would ruin most of the merchants in Marietta highlights the cen- trality of the root to commerce there.14 After spending a few weeks in Wheeling and Marietta, May headed inland across the mountains of Virginia. Along the way, he took in fourteen hundred pounds of deerskins and various furs and twenty-eight hundred pounds of ginseng, including seventeen hundred pounds he purchased from “a Dutchman.”

10 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY LUKE MANGET

He claimed he could have had a thousand more pounds but a frost and heavy rain killed the plant tops in early October, thus shortening the harvesting season by a month. After drying the roots in the sun, he packed them up in large bags and sent them on a wagon 250 miles over the mountains to Baltimore. May’s story suggests that avoiding ginseng was virtually impossible for early frontier merchants and that it was often more important commercially than skins and furs.15 Yet, May’s experience also demonstrates that dependence on this trans-Pacific trade network brought risks as well as rewards to frontier merchants. Indeed, ginseng was the most important medium of exchange in some areas, but it was a precarious and unpredictable one, as it was subject to the vagaries of a fragile and relatively new global trade network. May seemed wary of the fluctuating ginseng markets, as well as difficulty in handling the roots. Still scarred by the Chinese rebuff earlier in the eighteenth century, many merchants were still hesitant to get involved in the trade. “It is a ticklish article to speculate in,” wrote Virginian Thomas Howard to his brother in Philadelphia in 1789, “because some part of what was sent to India [sic] was brought back, being so bad that it would not sell.” Many merchants moved away from the commodity as soon as they could find more stable sources of income. At Wheeling in 1789, May crossed paths with Dudley Woodbridge, who was on his way to Marietta to establish a mercantile business. At first, Woodbridge dabbled in ginseng, but by the second decade of the nineteenth century, the plant had virtually disappeared from his record books. As the region’s economy developed into a more mature agricultural one, it seems that Woodbridge and other merchants had no problem selling his goods for cash. However, the lure of ginseng as an early medium of exchange was irresistible. Francois Michaux, the French botanist who traveled through the region in 1802, remarked that it was the only “species of colonial produce in Kentucky…that will bear the expense of carriage by land from that state to Philadelphia.”16 Beginning in the late 1790s, ginseng became a more stable commodity, with the arrival in the backcountry of a process many referred to as “ginseng manufacturing.” In the 1780s, the ginseng handled by merchants was prepared for market through a simple process of drying in the sun, but in the 1790s, a few merchants began acquiring knowledge of how to prepare the roots in the way the Chinese preferred, a process of steaming and drying called clarification. As Michaux noted, “several persons begin even to employ the means made use of by the Chinese to make the root transparent.” Pierre Jartoux, the French Jesuit instrumental in establishing the Chinese market for American ginseng, vaguely described this process in 1713, but not until the 1790s did merchants begin to perfect it, in part, by learning the process from the Chinese. Isaac Heylin was a key figure in this transfer of knowledge. An able physician and active member of the Philadelphia medical community, sometime in the 1790s he traveled to China, where he learned about clarification, and on returning to the United States, he

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set off for the Ohio River valley. Near the upper reaches of Limestone Creek, upstream from where Daniel Boone was doing business, Heylin spent around $1,000 to build a ginseng factory, making him one of the first to clarify the roots in Kentucky. He must have done well, for in 1802, he hauled four thousand clarified pounds of the stuff on two wagonloads to Limestone Creek, where it was put on a keelboat for Pittsburgh. Michaux claimed that clarified roots sold for $6 or $7 per pound on the coast in 1802, more than ten times what simple dried ginseng fetched. If his estimate is accurate, Heylin stood to make $24,000 on the shipment. Indeed, merchants quickly realized that with a little investment, they could greatly increase their profits by making their commodity more attractive to their Chinese customers.17 Exactly what happened in these factories has remained something of a mys- tery to ginseng scholars, primarily because people rarely discussed it beyond a brief mention. But in an 1802 letter archived in the Virginia Historical Society instructing John Preston how to build a ginseng factory, one of his business asso- ciates laid out the entire process. Typically, such facilities comprised two rooms under the same roof, with a door between them. One room was used for steaming, the other for drying, and these windowless facilities contained carefully planned ventilation systems. The clarifying process began outside, where laborers, usually between three and five boys or men, washed the roots, scraped them gently with the back of a knife, and polished them first with a shoe brush and then with a toothbrush, then brought them into the steaming room, where they were placed near the top of an iron kettle at least eighteen inches in diameter on a coarse linen cloth suspended above the boiling water. After about an hour of steaming, once the roots turned a translucent whitish color, they were wrapped in the linen and plunged into cold water, where they sat for a few minutes, until cool. Then, they were transferred to the drying room, where a furnace gently warmed the air “somewhat more than heat of sun on warm summer day,” and laid out on a clapboard to dry. The process, which took the better part of a day, rendered the roots “a beautiful amber color.” Although little is known about why the Chinese preferred their ginseng prepared this way, modern scientific studies have demonstrated that the root undergoes a chemical transformation that affects its medicinal qualities. It rearranges the ratios of various ginsenosides, the active compound in the root. However, due to the complex phytochemistry of the plant and the relative lack of clinical studies, scientists do not know how this preparation affects its medical efficacy.18 Knowledge of the clarification process was a closely guarded secret on the frontier. Preston’s correspondent made it clear that Preston “will not make it known to any…without my consent” and instructed him to take care to keep the contents of the factory “well guarded from public inspection,” including the gaze of his laborers. This secrecy was a business strategy. According to Michaux,

12 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY LUKE MANGET

Kentuckians paid those with the desired knowledge $400 for instructions on clarifying roots. There appeared to be plenty of buyers. Robert Wellford, a prominent Fredericksburg physician who had once counted George Washington as a patient, constructed what was likely the first ginseng factory in Scott County, Virginia. Leaving his medical practice behind in October 1801, he headed west on the Wilderness Road to Powell Mountain, Virginia. By the time Wellford arrived, the laborers he had hired under the direction of his partner, a Dr. Carter, had constructed three cabins and were busy processing roots. He had hired another young man to haul “more Goods to assist in the purchase of Ginseng,” which suggests that he obtained his roots by bartering with local inhabitants. As this knowledge spread and factories opened from New York to North Carolina, exports increased rapidly. Total ginseng exports averaged under 30,000 pounds annually through most of the 1790s, but from 1798 to 1807 that number jumped to 281,000 pounds annually.19 So who harvested ginseng? Unfortunately, due to the secretive nature of the trade, this group has been severely underrepresented in the historical record. Many ginseng diggers were hunters who knew the forests well, had little or no agricultural business to attend, and could afford to spend days on end in the woods in September and October. Johann Schoepf claimed, “The hunters collect it incidentally in their wanderings.” Along with a rifle, a hunter was likely to carry along a sang hoe, a short-handled narrow hoe effective in unearth- ing deep roots without chopping any of them off. Around 1800, one anonymous diarist who may have been the prominent John Preston of Smithfield, Virginia, hired some sixteen hunters to join his party of surveyors in the Coal River basin in (West) Virginia. Their job was to provide food for the surveyors and to dig ginseng. Upon crossing the “high and rough ridge and mountain” between the New River and the Coal River, they discovered “plenty of root” and constructed a camp next to a small branch to serve as a base for a few days of gathering. While the diary fragment does not indicate how many roots were dug, with so much manpower, it was likely a considerable sum. He found that utilizing the labor of hunters, those men who knew the forests so well, could yield valuable ginseng harvests. Some hunters with the knowledge and skill to find and harvest the plant became specialists whose services were in much demand. May relied on a “Dutchman from Kentucky” for most of his roots and spent weeks courting his business. “I have bin playing out my best Cards to the Dutch man—have kept his skin full, and prevented his having any correspondence with the many packers who Came here to Carrey Loads, least he should Send off his Sang [to another party],” he wrote. May’s preoccupation with this man suggests that knowledge of how to find and harvest ginseng empowered knowledgeable diggers to dictate the terms of their labor.20

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Easily the most famous ginseng digger in history was Daniel Boone. In 1787, two years after he had moved his family to Maysville, at the mouth of Limestone Creek, Kentucky, and three years after he had become nationally famous by John Filson’s biography, the fifty-three-year-old Boone got caught up in ginseng fever. Son Nathan and his father frequently dug ginseng “out among the hills” near the Ohio River. But the elder Boone was more than a simple digger; he was a speculator. He hired “several hands” to dig for him and purchased more ginseng from other diggers, who, like him, roamed the nearby hills and mountains searching for the increasingly elusive plant. For two seasons, he collected ginseng this way and stored it in a warehouse before hauling it by keelboat up the Ohio. At the very least, he stood to make a few Daniel Boone (1734-1820). thousand dollars, but disaster struck when the boat FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY capsized and soaked the roots, and after drying them out and poling up to Redstone, Pennsylvania, he loaded them onto pack horses and hauled them to Philadelphia. Due to the water damage, he was paid only half of their market value. Boone’s story illustrates another dimension of the trade. Sometimes hunters became ginseng speculators, middlemen who purchased roots from other hunters and sold them to merchants on the coast.21 In addition to hunters, surveyors often found that digging ginseng along their routes could turn their expeditions into more profitable ventures. In July 1786 the Confederation Congress appointed a twenty-one-year-old Massachusetts man named John Mathews to survey the lands in what is now southeastern Ohio, which had recently been ceded by Wyandotte and Delaware Indians. Mathews’s father-in-law was Rufus Putnam, a shareholder in the Ohio Company who was instrumental in founding the town of Marietta in 1788. In September, Mathews and four others in his surveying party took advantage of a lull in their duties, camped on the headwaters of Short Creek, and found ginseng growing “in great abundance.” They spent five days wandering the nearby forests digging roots. They found that digging ginseng was the perfect commercial complement to surveying. Demonstrating a detailed knowledge of digging practices, Mathews claimed that the best diggers could dig more than forty pounds a day, a considerable amount, which could have earned him upward of £20 worth of goods at the nearest mercantile. Even as they engaged in the symbolic enclosure of the commons by delineating property boundaries

14 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY LUKE MANGET and, thus, hastening the transformation of the Ohio Valley, surveyors asserted a common right to ginseng.22 Unlike in the earlier ginseng boom in Canada and New York, Native Americans did not engage in this trade on the Virginia frontier. Following the Revolution, the middle ground that had created opportunities for cross-cultural collaboration in the trade in 1750s New York had eroded. As American settlers flowed into the Ohio Valley in the 1780s and 1790s, forcing ever greater land ces- sions from native tribes, the relationship between white Americans and Indians was at its nadir. Rather than drawing the peoples together, ginseng digging by white settlers often exacerbated the problem, as Native Americans exacted repri- sals on groups of white settlers they found on their territory. Shortly after his digging expedition in 1786, Mathews heard that another party of men “out after ginseng” was attacked by Indians. Three were killed and another taken prisoner. This led him to remark, “I feel very happy that I have reached my old quarters and will give them liberty to take my scalp if they catch me after ginseng again this year.” Similarly, May filled his diary with anxious speculation about Indian attacks. He estimated that they had killed some fifty men and women during the summer of 1789, reinforcing his suspicion that “there will be an Indian war.” Thus, on the Virginia frontier in the 1780s and 1790s, under the cloud of frontier violence, ginseng was harvested exclusively by white Americans. Such find- ings support the claim Alan Greer recently put forward, that the clash between native peoples and Euro-Americans was not an abstract contest between a system based on communal, usufruct property rights and one based on absolute, individual property rights. White frontiersmen and Native Americans initially experienced it as a fight over the commons. They fought over who could hunt, fish, run livestock, and dig ginseng and where they could engage in these activities.23 As surveyors designed towns and drew property borders, and as new human communities situated themselves on the Ohio Valley landscape, new settlers continued to use ginseng as a means of exchange to obtain the products of a rapidly advancing national economy with which they began their lives in the backcountry. One of the first Euro-American settlers in what is now Monroe County, West Virginia, twenty-two-year-old James Alexander built a farm in 1774 near a prominent intersection of two Indian paths in the Greenbrier River valley on the eastern slope of the Alleghenies and a short jaunt from the Wilderness Road. He also operated a small trading post following the Revolution, and from 1783 to 1785, he conducted 87 percent of his sales in ginseng, trading for roughly six thousand pounds, worth £643. Because ginseng was still plentiful in nearby hills, virtually all early settlers found it an easy means of procuring some quick wealth while they busied themselves with the tasks of improvement. In the fall, they would bring their ginseng in sacks and open lines of credit they would use through the winter, spring, and summer to purchase an array of goods, among these, plow

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points, scythes, knives, gunpowder, and other items that would help them begin life in the forests of western Virginia. Around 47 percent of Alexander’s customers used ginseng to pay for their entire purchases for those two years, while most of the remainder used some combination of ginseng, saltpeter, and cash.24 Alexander’s customers, most of whom were Scots-Irish, included many prominent landholders. Dozens received original land patents from 1783 to 1794 and became owners of some of the choicest property along the river bottoms. In 1783 William Blanton, for example, purchased four hundred acres along Turkey Creek from the Greenbrier Company and traded 225 pounds of ginseng for a variety of merchandise. Blanton had been appointed constable in 1773 and later purchased a lot from Alexander in the new town of Union. William Ewing, mentioned in the opening vignette, also received a Greenbrier patent for 170 acres. A majority of Alexander’s customers, including Blanton and Ewing, cast votes for electors in the presidential election of 1800, which means they met Virginia’s property and residency requirements. Thus, Alexander’s store records indicate that involvement with the ginseng economy was widespread in some Ohio Valley communities and included some of the most prominent landowners and public officials. Alexander became a large landholder after his ginseng venture, donating twenty-six acres in 1806 to construct Union, which would become the county seat of Monroe.25 As ginseng shaped individual fortunes and helped grease the wheels of the economy in an area that lacked cash, it also helped sustain the civil and legal functions of local communities. According to court records from Greenbrier County in 1785, a man named John O’Neal, the loser in a lawsuit, was ordered to pay the plaintiff twenty-two pounds of ginseng. That same year, one John Smith weighed sixty-nine pounds of ginseng due John Brown in Augusta County, presumably a reference to a verification of payment in a judgment. Thus, in the early years of Euro-American settlement, when population still numbered just a couple thousand, ginseng was deeply woven into the fabric of community life in western Virginia.26 The frontier boom’s ecological impact on ginseng populations in the Ohio Valley was noticeable. Because ginseng relies almost exclusively on gravity and rain runoff for its seed dispersal, the plant tends to grow in clumps or patches. When the Ohio Valley ginseng boom commenced in the mid-1780s, diggers found virtually untouched patches of ginseng, comprising hundreds, even thousands, of individual plants. The plant’s slow-growing nature and challenges to seed germination dictate that patches also grow very slowly. Although long-term studies of wild ginseng populations are surprisingly lacking, short-term studies have suggested that for a patch to increase from a handful of individual plants to over one thousand takes hundreds of years. And in the late eighteenth century, there were many virgin patches of such a size. Both John Mathews and Johann Schoepf, two men familiar with the practice in the mid-1780s, asserted

16 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY LUKE MANGET that experienced diggers could harvest up to sixty pounds in one day. Mathews claimed that even the medium-sized roots he dug were twenty or thirty years old, which he measured by counting the growth rings on the rhizome. Even if these roots were generally older and, therefore, larger than those dug later in the century, such a remarkable sum meant that a digger could harvest at least two hundred plants in one day. Never again would anyone make such a claim. Just a short two decades later, Francois Michaux claimed that “a man cannot pull up above eight or nine pounds of fresh roots per day.” He was able to collect only half an ounce, “which was a great deal, considering the difficulty there is in procuring them.” Even if all observers exaggerated slightly, these kinds of reports suggest that overharvesting began to take its toll in much of the plant’s range within two decades of the boom.27 Over the course of the early nineteenth century, as the trade blossomed, ginseng continued to show a remarkable propensity to disappear around areas of dense settlement. Consequently, the ginseng frontier expanded south and east into inaccessible and more sparsely populated areas. Some merchants began looking south, believing the southern reaches of the Appalachians still contained virgin ginseng patches waiting for the sang hoe. Perhaps reflecting this optimism, Michaux noted that the plant “grows chiefly in the mountain regions of the Alleghenies, and is by far more abundant as the chain of these mountains incline south west.” The trade escalated quickly between the 1790s and 1820s. American settlers pouring into the region found it plentiful, and itinerant merchants like James Patton found it a very useful medium of exchange with early settlers.28 The trade also expanded into the mountainous interior of Virginia and Kentucky. As part of the 1840 census, federal enumerators recorded the only county-level statistics of ginseng production from the nineteenth century. They surveyed local merchants in every county, inquiring into the value of the ginseng roots they handled, and they found that ginseng production had moved away from the Ohio River and further into the mountainous headwaters of the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. In Kentucky, the leading ginseng counties were Perry, Lawrence, Breathitt, Pike, Harlan, Clay, and Knox, all clustered in the far eastern portion of the state. In western Virginia, large amounts of ginseng came from Logan, Cabell, and Jackson Counties, on the eastern bank of the Tug Fork. However, Virginia’s top producers were further east, in Fayette, Pocahontas, Randolph, and Greenbrier, which contained the highest mountains and the lowest population densities in the state. Perhaps not surprisingly, western Virginia’s leading ginseng counties in 1840 were among the region’s least economically developed. Counties that produced significant quantities of ginseng in 1840 (more than $1,000), on average, produced some 13 percent less cattle, 14 percent less corn, and 70 percent less wheat than counties that did not export ginseng. This has much to do with the fact that major ginseng

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producing counties contained, on average, 40 percent fewer people than counties that did not produce ginseng, and they contained some of the least productive farmland. Thus, there was a strong correlation between population, terrain, economic development, and ginseng production. In the mountainous interior of western Virginia and eastern Kentucky, where agriculture lagged, the ginseng trade continued strong.29

U.S. Ginseng Production in Appalachia, 1840 (2016). COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Landownership patterns contributed to these dynamics. In 1810, according to Wilma Dunaway, absentee owners held title to some 93 percent of the land in what is now West Virginia, a pattern that would continue for two centuries. Dunaway and Barbara Rasmussen have persuasively argued that absentee landownership stunted investment in the region and its agricultural development, but another important impact of this trend was that it contributed to the persistence of use rights well into the nineteenth century, a point that historian Kathryn Newfont made in her recent book, Blue Ridge Commons. Because absen- tees owned most of the forested hillsides, tenant farmers and smallholders continued to treat these lands as de facto commons for a variety of purposes, including

18 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY LUKE MANGET hunting, fishing, foraging, and running livestock. Thus, the strengthening of private property regimes did not destroy rights-in-the-woods, as they were in the more accessible parts of the Ohio Valley. Customs regarding undeveloped land evolved into common rights that local mountain people regularly exercised as part of their subsistence patterns. Medicinal plants like ginseng were widely considered the property of the harvester rather than of the landowner. Digging roots in unimproved forest, as one mountain resident explained in the 1890s, “has always been the custom of our country.”30 While rural people drew heavily on many resources from the forest commons, ginseng had the highest market value. John Sutton, who grew up in antebellum Braxton County in what would become West Virginia, claimed, “The value of wild ginseng has been many times greater in a commercial sense to the inhabitants of central West Virginia than all the magnificent timber that has stood as stately sentinels in the forest for a thousand years. Ginseng was the greatest source of income the common people had for a half century after the settlement of the country.” Digging $10 worth of roots might take five days to gather, whereas it took the sale of a three-year-old steer or ten large walnut trees to bring in the same amount. Ginseng was simply easier to obtain and required little to no over- head investment. Thus, the commons was a vital part of the local economy, and ginseng was the most crucial. Significantly, by 1840, ginseng had replaced skins and furs in these two states as the most valuable forest products. In Kentucky, the hunters’ paradise of Daniel Boone’s generation, rural residents now traded nearly twice as much ginseng as skins and furs.31 However, not everyone in mountain communities dug ginseng in the 1840s. Perhaps the best set of sources with which to assess the changing role of ginseng on a community level is the country store records of Ely Butcher, a merchant in Randolph County, Virginia (now West Virginia). In a sampling of one calendar year, from the spring of 1840 to the spring of 1841, some 64 percent of his revenues came from cash transactions, and 10 percent from bartering for farm products such as bacon, corn, and wheat. The remainder (26 percent) came from bartering products from the forest commons, including ginseng (9 percent), skins and furs (4 percent), maple sugar (4 percent), and chestnuts (3 percent). Of his 305 customers, roughly one-third paid him in ginseng. Of those 105 customers, some 45 percent owned no land, and of the 55 percent that did own land, just 15 percent owned more than $2,000 in real estate, which placed them in the top wealthiest quarter of landowners. Most of Butcher’s ginseng customers were young heads of household, twenty to thirty years old, with either no children or very young children, who owned less than $500 worth of land, if any at all. Butcher’s records suggest that while ginseng continued to be an important source of revenue, a smaller subsection of the local community participated in the trade when compared to the store records of James Alexander in Monroe

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County fifty-seven years earlier. The county’s small and landless farmers created lives that integrated the forests into their seasonal agrarian routines, and ginseng was the pillar of their forest economy. Yet, as the agricultural economy diversi- fied, many people with greater means avoided the trade altogether. Reliance on the forest economy became increasingly determined by class. This trend would intensify after the Civil War.32 Ginseng was an important ingredient in the early commercialization and Euro-American occupation of the Ohio Valley because it was extracted exclusively from its natural forest habitat. As such, it was readily available to anyone with the right ecological knowledge. Hunters, surveyors, farmers, and other landholders used the plant to access the emerging commercial economy along the Ohio River, increasingly so after beaver and deer began to grow scarce. It kept some from starv- ing and enabled many to purchase needed equipment and supplies that helped them establish homes in a new land. All of this was made possible by a market created centuries earlier in East Asia and that served to establish a trade relationship between the new United States and China in 1783. As Euro-American settlement progressed and overharvesting and habitat destruction proceeded apace, the trade moved deeper into the mountainous interior, where it was woven into the fabric of rural life and into the seasonal routines of the region’s smallholding and tenant farmers. With the persistence of absentee landownership in the region, ginseng became a means for those with precious few other resources to maintain their independence. It was the most lucrative forest commodity, and it shaped the social contours of the de facto commons, ensuring that rights-in-the-woods did not disappear with the eighteenth century but, rather, continued to serve the financial interests of the poorer classes well into the nineteenth and beyond.

1 Unidentified private account book, 1783–85, microfilm, 3 James Adair, History of the American Indians; Particularly Monroe County Court Records, West Virginia History Those Nations Adjoining to the Mississippi, East and Center, West Virginia University, Morgantown [hereafter West Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, and WVHC]. Virginia (London: Edward & Charles Dilly, 1775), 362; William Byrd to William Mayo, Aug. 26, 1731, in 2 Pehr Kalm and Adolph B. Benson, Peter Kalm’s William Byrd, William Byrd II, and William Byrd III, Travels in North America: The English Version of 1770 The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, (New York: Dover, 1987), 435; James Mooney, Virginia, 1684–1776, ed. Marion Tining (Richmond: James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas Virginia Historical Society, 1977); James B. McGraw of the Cherokees: Containing the Full Texts of Myths et al., “Ecology and Conservation of Ginseng (Panax of the Cherokee (1900) and The Sacred Formulas quinquefolius) in a Changing World,” Annals of the New of the Cherokees (1891) as Published by the Bureau York Academy of Sciences 1286 (2013): 80. of American Ethnology: With a New Biographical Introduction, (Asheville, NC: Historical Images, 1992), 4 Philip Chadwick Foster Smith, The Empress of China 425; William Byrd, “Letters of William Byrd II, and (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Maritime Museum, 1984), Sir Hans Sloane Relative to Plants and Minerals of 41–42. Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 2d ser., 1 (July 1921): 199; Stephen Fulder, The Tao of Medicine: 5 Since the 1990s, historians of science have greatly Ginseng, Oriental Remedies, and the Pharmacology of enhanced our understanding of botany and bioprospect- Harmony (New York: Destiny, 1982), 88–89. ing in the Atlantic World and how these fields shaped

20 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY LUKE MANGET

and were shaped by European empire-building, but Early U.S.–China Relations, Global Connections, ed. their scholarship has largely focused on the transfer- Kendall Johnson (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University ence and transformation of knowledge and ideas in the Press, 2012), 40–43. For more evidence that the ginseng colonial era rather than the process of commodification. trade was negligible in the southern colonies prior to the See Londa L. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Revolution, see Adair, History of the American Indians, Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: 362. The lack of trade in the southern colonies can be Harvard University Press, 2004); Kavita Philip, “Imperial partly attributed to a collapse of Chinese demand in the Science Rescues a Tree: Global Botanic Networks, Local mid-eighteenth century, just as the trade in Canada and Knowledge, and the Transcontinental Transplantation the northern colonies was picking up. of Cinchona,” Environment and History 1 (June 1995): 173–200; John M. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and the 9 Smith, Empress of China, 31. Natural World (New York: Manchester University Press, Travels in the Confederation, 1783–1784, 1990); Christopher Parsons, “The Natural History of 10 Johann Schoepf, Colonial Science: Joseph-Francois Lafitau’s Discovery of ed. Alfred Morrison, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: William J. Ginseng and Its Afterlives,” William and Mary Quarterly Campbell, 1911), 1: 236; Donald Jackson and Dorothy The Papers of George Washington: Diaries 73 (January 2016): 37–72; Londa L. Schiebinger and Twohig, eds., , 6 Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), Empress of China, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: 4: 20; Smith, 40, 42. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). For more on 11 Haddad, America’s First Adventure in China, 11–14; ginseng and the pioneer economy, see A. W. Schorger, Columbia Herald (Columbia, SC), Jan. 19, 1786; “Ginseng: A Pioneer Resource,” Wisconsin Academy of Samuel Shaw, “Remarks on the Commerce of America Sciences, Arts, and Letters 57 (1969): 65–74; Wilma with China,” Charleston City Gazette (Charleston, SC), A. Dunaway, The First American Frontier: Transition to June 30, 1790; [Repubesco], Charleston City Gazette Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860 (Chapel (Charleston, SC) Dec. 20, 1797. Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 46, 185– 86; Robert D. Mitchell, Shenandoah Valley Historical 12 Quoted in Aron, How the West Was Lost, 15, see also Institute, and American Frontier Culture Foundation, 60–63. From 1763 to 1776, as Wilma Dunaway has eds., Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, and found, these companies acquired titles to roughly 5 Development in the Preindustrial Era (Lexington: million acres of Indian lands in the trans-Appalachian University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 159, 223; Robert region. Dunaway, First American Frontier, 52; Barbara D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on Rasmussen, Absentee Landowning and Exploitation in the Early Shenandoah Valley (Charlottesville: University West Virginia, 1760–1920 (Lexington: University Press of Press of Virginia, 1977). The ginseng trade has received Kentucky, 1994), 29–31. growing attention in recent years, specifically its colonial origins. See Kristin Johannsen, Ginseng Dreams: The 13 Dwight Smith, introduction to The Western Journals of Secret World of America’s Most Valuable Plant (Lexington: John May, Ohio Company Agent and Business Adventurer University Press of Kentucky, 2006); David A. Taylor, (Cincinnati: Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, Ginseng, the Divine Root (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin 1961), 3–5; John May, June 25, July 3, Aug. 13, 1789, Books, 2006); John Appleby, “Ginseng and the Royal entries, in “Journal of Col. John May, of Boston, Relative to a Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London Journey to the Ohio Country, 1789,” Pennsylvania Magazine 37 (March 1983): 121–45. of History and Biography 45 (1921): 131, 133, 145.

6 Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation 14 Sept. 10, 1789, entry, in Western Journals of John May, of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: 139; Sept. 10, 1789, entry, in “Journal of Col. John May,” Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 102–23. Allan 153; Haddad, America’s First Adventure in China, 26–27. Greer has made a similar argument in “Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America,” 15 His diary is unclear regarding the relative success of his American Historical Review 117 (April 2012): 365–86. venture. He seems to have been happy with the money he received for his shipment. Nov. 5, Dec. 1, 1789, entry, in 7 Smith, Empress of China, 9–12, 28–34. “Journal of Col. John May,” 169, 177.

8 John Rogers Haddad, America’s First Adventure in China: 16 Thomas Howard to C. P. Howard, August 21, 1789, Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation (Philadelphia: Grinnell Letters, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond Temple University Press, 2013), 11–13; Kendall Johnson, [hereafter VHS]. Howard refers to India, but this was “A Question of Character: The Romance of Early Sino- almost certainly a misconception. All ginseng was sold American Commerce in The Journals of Major Samuel to China; see, for example, folders 67–90, Woodbridge Shaw, the First American Consul at Canton (1847),” Mercantile Company Records, WVHC; Michaux’s Travels in Narratives of Free Trade: The Commercial Cultures of to the West of the Alleghany Mountains, 204.

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17 “Ginseng,” Wilmington Daily Herald, March 6, 1860. 22 Andrew Clayton, “Marietta and the Ohio Company,” This article asserts that Heylin traveled to China but in Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, and places the date at 1807, which does not make sense, Development in the Preindustrial Era, ed. Robert Mitchell given his involvement with the trade at an earlier date. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 187; See George Hunter, “The Western Journals of Dr. George Joseph Buell and John Mathews, “The Journals of Joseph Hunter, 1796–1805,” ed. John Francis McDermott, Buell and John Mathews,” in Pioneer History: Being an Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Account of the First Examinations of the Ohio Valley, and Series, 53 (1963): 42; Michaux’s Travels to the West of the the Early Settlement of the Northwest Territory, Chiefly from Alleghany Mountains, 233. Original Manuscripts, ed. Samuel P. Hildreth (Cincinnati: H. W. Derby & Co., 1848), 187. 18 John Rhea to John Preston, September 1802, Box e8-422, Preston Family Papers, 1769–1864, VHS; 23 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, Lian-Wen Qi, Chong-Zhi Wang, and Chun-Su Yuan, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 “Ginsenosides from American Ginseng: Chemical and (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); James Pharmacological Diversity,” Phytochemistry 72 (June H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the 2011): 693. Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: Norton, 2000); Sept. 29, 1787, entry, in “Journals of Joseph Buell and John 19 Michaux’s Travels to the West of the Alleghany Mountains, Mathews,” 188; May 31, 1789, entry, in “Journal of Col. 233; Robert Wellford Diary, June 3–Oct. 14, 1801, John May,” 119; Greer, “Commons and Enclosure in the VHS; John Rhea to John Preston; this statistic was Colonization of North America.” Further south, however, compiled using export statistics from letters from the it seems the Cherokee did engage in the trade, but the Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton to the House extent of this trade is unclear. For more on the Cherokees of Representatives, American State Papers: Commerce and the ginseng trade, see Luke Manget, “Sanging in and Navigation 1: 147–723. the Mountains: The Ginseng Economy of the Southern Appalachians, 1865–1900,” Appalachian Journal 40 Travels in the Confederation 20 Schoepf, , 1:236; Oct. 7–8, (Fall–Winter 2013): 28–55. 1789, entry, in Western Journals of John May, 149; Undated, anonymous diary, undated folder, John Preston 24 Oren Frederic Morton, A History of Monroe County, West Papers, VHS. John Preston, who owned a store in Virginia (Dayton, VA: Ruebush-Elkins, 1916), 191–94; Abingdon, Virginia, became a leading ginseng trader in Unidentified private account book, 1783–85, WVHC. subsequent decades. For one season in 1826, for instance, he sold 147 barrels of ginseng, totaling more than 25 List of voters and patentees are found in Morton, History thirteen thousand pounds, to a Philadelphia merchant. of Monroe County, West Virginia, 80–101, 191–93, “Invoice for 147 barrells of ginseng,” Robert A. Taylor 472–73. Business Papers, Special Collections, Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, Virginia. 26 Kenneth D. Swope, “Ginseng,” Journal of the Greenbrier Historical Society 4 (1982): 107. 21 There has been some scholarly debate about how much ginseng Boone hauled. Nathan Boone told Lyman Draper 27 Walter H. Lewis and Vincent E. Zenger, “Population that they had collected some “twelve or fifteen tons,” but Dynamics of the American Ginseng Panax quinquefolius recent scholars have challenged this. Believing there was (Araliaceae),” American Journal of Botany 69 (October no way he could have collected and transported thirty 1982): 1483–90; Sept. 29, 1787, entry in “Journals of thousand pounds of roots upriver, Robert Morgan argues Joseph Buell and John Mathews,” 187; Schoepf, Travels in that Boone used the term “tuns,” or barrels, instead of the Confederation, 1:236–37; Michaux’s Travels to the West “tons,” as Draper recorded. While this is a definite possi- of the Alleghany Mountains, 231. bility, there is also a chance that with skilled help, Boone could have collected that amount over two seasons. At a 28 Like John May, itinerant merchant James Patton relied on time when largely untouched populations of ginseng still ginseng to sustain his business in the early years of com- covered the ground, two 1780s observers estimated that mercial development. According to an autobiographical a good digger could harvest sixty pounds in a day. Given letter he left for his children, Patton spent the early 1790s 120 days to harvest over a two-year period and assuming traveling around the mountains purchasing ginseng, furs, that eight diggers averaged around twenty-five pounds a beeswax, and snakeroot. See Tyler Blethen and Curtis day, they could have reached twelve tons. Nathan Boone Wood, “A Trader on the Carolina Frontier,” in Mitchell, Appalachian Frontiers, and Lyman Draper, My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper 150–65. Interviews with Nathan Boone (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 81–83; Robert Morgan, Boone: A Biography (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2008), 37, 366–68, 370, 375.

22 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY LUKE MANGET

29 U.S. Census Office, Compendium of the Enumeration of U.S. Census Office,Compendium of the Enumeration of the Inhabitants of the United States of the Sixth Census, the Inhabitants of the United States, 1840. In the fifty- 1840 (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Allen, 1841), 38, 74, two counties of western Virginia (now West Virginia), 167-70, 263-66. $35,000 worth of ginseng was sold in 1841, whereas only $22,000 of skins and furs were sold in the same 30 Dunaway, First American Frontier, 57; Rasmussen, year. Moreover, exports from 1790 to 1820, as conveyed Absentee Landowning and Exploitation in West Virginia, in letters from the treasury secretary to the House of 1760–1920; Kathryn Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons: Representatives in the American State Papers indicates a Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western steady decline in skins and furs. North Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Matthew Walpole, “The Closing of the Open 32 Ely Butcher Store Account Books, Randolph County, Range in Watauga County, NC,” Appalachian Journal 16 1841–83, West Virginia State Archives, Charleston. For (Summer 1989): 327. more on this topic, see my dissertation, “Root Diggers and Herb Gatherers: The Rise and Fall of the Botanical 31 John Davison Sutton, History of Braxton County and Drug Industry in Southern Appalachia” (PhD diss., Central West Virginia (Sutton, WV: N.p., 1919), 213; University of Georgia, 2017).

FALL 2017 23 The Man Who Moved the Bridge Cincinnati’s Roebling Suspension Bridge and Its Inconvenient Site

Anne Delano Steinert

ith the recent redesign of Cincinnati’s waterfront and the creation of Smale Waterfront Park, Cincinnatians are now more closely connected to the water’s edge and the John A. Roebling Bridge than they haveW been in decades. As the bridge, which celebrates its 150th birthday this year, has been knit back into the city’s pedestrian experience, visitors are reminded of its inconvenient location. To access it requires a series of turns off the main north-south streets and then another series of turns to get back onto them on the other side. The bridge’s engineer, the world-famous John A. Roebling, described the less-than-ideal location in his 1867 final report to the bridge company. He wrote, “As it is, both approaches are abruptly terminated by cross streets; all the immense traffic has to turn sharp corners, and nobody can discover the hidden entrance until it is reached, or perhaps passed.” He further bemoaned the situation: “A work of such magnitude and appearance, as to be without rival on either side of the Atlantic, if located in the line of either of those streets, would have converted them into the finest and most magnificent avenues on the continent.” Visitors today look at the bridge as a monument to the engineering genius of John Roebling, but what is harder to see is that it also stands as a testament to the power of the transportation system it replaced. The bridge stands where it does because of the Cincinnati & Covington Ferry Company and its owner, Cincinnati financier Samuel Wiggins.1

John A. Roebling Bridge (1868). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

24 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNE DELANO STEINERT

Wiggins had a great deal to lose if a bridge usurped his ferry business. In just one week of April 1856, 29,511 foot passengers, 230 omnibuses, and 3,268 other vehicles crossed the river on one of several ferries during just the daylight hours. With fares set by the Cincinnati City Council ranging from three cents per pedestrian to thirty cents per four-horse wagon, the ferry was a very profitable investment. In just this one week, pedestrian fares alone would have brought in $885.33, or about $24,390 in 2017 dollars. It is no wonder that the owner of this ferry would be reluctant to see his monopoly broken by the coming of a bridge. Wiggins and his partner, John Garniss, fought the bridge at every step, and when its construction became inevitable, made sure that it, then known as the Covington–Cincinnati Bridge, would sit in an annoyingly inconvenient location.2 Focusing on the placement of the bridge as a starting point generates new understandings of the history of Cincinnati and the urban Midwest. Most work on the Covington–Cincinnati Bridge focuses on the great men associated with its construction—specifically father and son John and Washington Roebling, who engineered and built the bridge, and Amos Shinkle, who led the bridge company to triumph—or on its engineering wonder. Asking why it was sited between streets rather than on them gives primacy to space and place. Historians Dolores Hayden and John Stilgoe each note that this approach to historical inquiry is underutilized both as an entry point for scholars and as a vehicle to connect everyday citizens to the past. Hayden pushes historians to help their fellow citizens “find their own social history preserved in the public landscapes of their own neigh- borhoods and cities” and notes that “social historians often have not had much visual training and are not always well equipped to evaluate…visual evidence.” Stilgoe explains: “Unlike so many historians entranced by great political, economic, and social movements, I emphasize that the built environment is a sort of palimpsest, a document in which one layer of writing has been scraped off and another one applied.” Here, a focus on the John A. Roebling (1806-1869). built environment helps to reveal Samuel Wiggins’s CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER impact on the urban landscape.3 When officials from the City of Covington, Kentucky, laid out its street grid in 1815, they plotted the streets to align directly with Cincinnati’s, across the river. Yet, rather than making use of this advantageous alignment, John Roebling offset the bridge between Vine and Walnut Streets in Cincinnati and Scott and Greenup Streets in Covington. He had imagined the vista created by the joining of two grand streets through the arches of the bridge as one to which “no avenue

FALL 2017 25 THE MAN WHO MOVED THE BRIDGE

in any of the magnificent capitals of Europe could now compare” but noted that the actual location would “remain a standing reproach to those short-sighted property holders who have fought us during the last twenty years.” These property holders were the owners of the Cincinnati & Covington Ferry Company; thus, it was Roebling who first saw the bridge and its placement as a physical reminder of the clash between new and old transportation technologies, between progress and stasis, and between the public good and the ferry company’s profits. Today the bridge stands if not as a reproach then as a testament to those who fought against it. The strongest of these opponents was Samuel Wiggins.4

Map of Cincinnati (1869). SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Detail of the locations of the Roebling Bridge and the Cincinnati & Covington Ferry. Map of Cincinnati (1869). SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

26 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNE DELANO STEINERT

Though Wiggins was one of Cincinnati’s most powerful men in the mid- nineteenth century, few remember him today. Some might remember his name attached to the Wiggins Block at the southeast corner of Fifth and Vine Streets, built by his heirs in 1880. This upscale office block stood overlooking Fountain Square until its demolition to make way for the Westin Hotel in 1977. Some may remember the much-loved Wiggins Restaurant the building housed. A few might know that one of the earthen Civil War defenses overlooking the Licking River in Campbell County, Kentucky, was named Wiggins Battery after Samuel Wiggins. No one would think of his name in conjunction with the John A. Roebling Bridge, but it is actually the site of his most lasting impact on his adopted home.5 Samuel Wiggins was one of Cincinnati’s wealthiest citizens. In 1880, sixteen years after his death, the New York Times valued his estate at over $2 million (or about $45 million in today’s dollars). He was litigious and exploitative in his business dealings, constantly looking for ways to maximize and safeguard his investments. His long history of cunning business dealings prepared him well for a showdown against the desires of the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company.6 Wiggins was born about 1786 in Newburgh, New York, to Stephen Wiggins Jr. and Phebe Berrien of Yonkers. Wiggins’s father “died a comparatively young man, leaving a large fortune.” It was this fortune passed down to Samuel that allowed him to begin investing in the ferry business, first in Saint Louis.7 Wiggins first traveled to Saint Louis in 1818, the same year Samuel Berrian wrote to New York from Saint Louis, “The people of the Atlantic states have no conception of the extreme fertility of the land West of the Mts. and the facil- ity of amassing immense wealth with moderate means.” Before Wiggins’s arrival in Illinoistown, now East Saint Louis, Illinois, ferries there were skiffs or keel boats, dangerous and difficult to steer. In November 1816, five people died in a ferry accident, motivating the Illinois state legislature to look for someone to run a safer ferry. On his arrival from New York, Wiggins, “a man of some financial means,” bought out the owners of the existing ferry right. On March 2, 1819, the Illinois legislature passed “An Act to Authorize Samuel Wiggins to Establish a Ferry Upon the Waters of the Mississippi,” obligating him to oper- ate only boats “propelled by steam, horses, oxen, or other four footed animal.” In exchange, Illinois granted Wiggins a perpetual, exclusive ferry right between Illinoistown and St. Louis.8 With a monopoly over the ferry, Wiggins worked to achieve vertical integration by controlling every aspect of frontier life and travel, just as he would later seek to control all aspects of Cincinnati’s waterfront. In 1821 the legislature of Illinois passed an act allowing Wiggins to set up a toll road in Illinoistown, to feed directly to his ferry landing. This allowed Wiggins to charge both for the

FALL 2017 27 THE MAN WHO MOVED THE BRIDGE

ferry and the road to get to it. He quickly amassed a great deal of property in Illinoistown and nearby Bloody Island. His businesses flourished in Saint Louis, and by 1828 he had four ferries, three horse-powered and one steam-propelled, which he operated himself at least some of the time. Besides managing the ferry, Wiggins also founded the town of Washington, Illinois, “consisting of a hotel and three or four houses,” where he ran a tavern that housed his ferry workers. Early Saint Louis historian J. Thomas Scharf remembered him as “a thrifty and progressive citizen.” While some lauded Wiggins and his ferries: “The great public ability of this mode of conveying persons & property across the Mississippi needs no comment, but gives the enterprising owner of them, a high claim to the patronage of his fellow-citizens,” as time wore on, some were less complimentary. By the 1830s, one state legislator referred to the Wiggins Ferry as “an unavoidable monopoly…merciless in its extortionate charges.”9 Perhaps sensing the changing tide, on August 1, 1831, Wiggins sold his ferry, along with “eight or nine hundred acres,” to a group of investors, including his brother William. After selling for “a large sum of money,” Samuel Wiggins sought new business ventures. He began investing in Cincinnati’s banks, ferries, and real estate, purchased land in Springfield, Illinois, and made a huge loan to the state of Illinois. In 1831, as a result of changing monetary policy, the State Bank of Illinois lost its charter; to shut the bank down, the state needed an infusion of cash to buy out the bank’s circulating specie. In September 1831, just one month after Wiggins sold his Saint Louis ferry right, the state legislature authorized the governor to borrow $100,000 (about 2.7 million in today’s dollars) at 6 percent interest to be repaid in nineteen years. Described as the “capitalist of Cincinnati and St. Louis,” Samuel Wiggins promptly stepped forward to make the loan. He made the loan even more profitable “by furnishing some of it in depreciated State Bank notes that the state accepted at full face value and that the state had to repay to Wiggins in specie equivalent of the face value.” The Wiggins loan was referred to as a millstone around the necks of the people of Illinois; “public reaction was fierce.… ‘The Wiggins loan was long a by-word in the mouths of the people. Many affected to believe that Wiggins had purchased the whole State, that the inhabitants for generations to come had been made over to him like cattle.’” This would not be the last time Samuel Wiggins would put his own profit above the public good.10 While all this excitement was going on in Illinois, Wiggins was also settling in to a new life in Cincinnati. In the 1830s, Cincinnati was, with Pittsburgh, one of the two most important manufacturing centers in the west. In 1839, eight years after Wiggins’s arrival, writer James Hall reported that from the workshops of these two cities “the vast regions which include a dozen states, are supplied with wagons, carts, plows, harness, and all farming implements—with chairs and cabinetwork of every description—with tinware—with printing presses and

28 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNE DELANO STEINERT type—with saddlery, shoes, and hats—with a large amount of books—and with a variety of other articles.” Hall further observed that Saint Louis had “no man- ufactures worthy of being mentioned in comparison with those of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.” The differences between Cincinnati and Saint Louis would have been striking. The 1830 federal census recorded Cincinnati’s population at 24,831, making it the eighth largest city in the country, and Saint Louis’s at just 4,977, the fifty-seventh highest in the nation. In 1831, in addition to its lure of commerce, Cincinnati’s larger size and broad range of cultural institutions would have made it an appealing place to bring his wife and raise his five children.11

The Public Landing (1835). Painting by John Caspar Wild. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

Wiggins arrived in Cincinnati for good in 1831 and immediately transacted real estate deals to secure an exclusive ferry right to the Ohio River. By October 1831 Wiggins and his partner, John Garniss of New York, owned the entire Cincinnati riverfront from Broadway to Western Row and two ferry rights. There are at least 154 identified land sales (to say nothing of leases) involving Samuel Wiggins between 1831 and 1864 on record at the Hamilton County Recorder’s office. The Cincinnati City Council regulated ferry rates and schedules balancing the public necessity of providing a ferry with the reality that no one would oper- ate a ferry unless it was profitable. In 1838, the Cincinnati City Council negotiated a deal with Wiggins and Garniss in which they agreed to move the ferry from the crowded Public Landing to land they owned at the foot of Walnut Street in exchange for exclusive rights to “the revenues arising from the termination of

FALL 2017 29 THE MAN WHO MOVED THE BRIDGE

Walnut street and Vine street,” a provision that would later make its way into the bridge company’s charter. Though subject to city regulation, the ferry was as lucrative business for Samuel Wiggins in Cincinnati as it had been in Saint Louis. In 1858, one citizen wrote to a local paper alleging that the ferry owners made $100,000 a year. The ferry owners promptly defended themselves against this claim in the Enquirer, declaring income of just $39,600 and expenses including “the present boats…about $35,000, and the three ‘floats,’ say about $2,000, plus the value of the ferry right.” Whatever the specific numbers, this was big business and Wiggins was, as the Enquirer reported in 1850, “receiving large profits from the ferry, and determined to stop the building of the bridge if possible.”12 Beyond the ferry business, Samuel Wiggins controlled an immense amount of land in Cincinnati and was involved in a constant shell game of buying and selling his lots, providing mortgages for new buyers on which he would be paid interest, and leasing out buildings on his land. His real estate holdings included a row of brick buildings along Water Street, Wiggins and Garniss Row, which he built in 1836. When they burned down in February 1854, the tenants were “poor Irish families,” most likely waterfront laborers. He also owned a property on the southeast corner of Plum and Water Streets, described as uninsured “frame bar- racks,” which fire destroyed in November 1862. The location of these buildings near the busy waterfront made them less than ideal lodging, but for many poor families, the Irish among them, there were few choices. As the city’s population boomed through the 1830s and 1840s, Cincinnati’s housing market was unable to keep up, leading to extreme housing shortages and a persistence of substan- dard lodgings like those offered by Mr. Wiggins.13 City directories described Wiggins as a “banker” rather than ferry owner. With steady income from the ferry, he helped to establish the Franklin Bank in 1834. He also served as a director of the Lafayette Bank, and he was a member of the finance committee of the Jefferson Life Insurance Company of Cincinnati. Due, in part, to Wiggins’s commitment to business and his extreme wealth, these were some of the most secure financial institutions in town. Though commit- ted to his business interests, Wiggins made time to serve on the vestry of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and a few other civic boards, including that of Spring Grove Cemetery. His family was also involved in charitable works, and his wife, Cornelia Bartow Wiggins, was remembered, together with her sister, as “in person and character, and in benevolent work…the most lovely I ever knew.” Through his business, religious, familial, and civic engagements, Wiggins was intimately interconnected with many of Cincinnati’s other wealthy elites. At the same time, he continued to pursue business interests elsewhere.14 Even after moving to Cincinnati, Wiggins invested heavily in the Second State Bank of Illinois. These investments illustrate the sometimes unscrupulous nature of Wiggins’s business dealings. When the bank’s stock was oversubscribed,

30 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNE DELANO STEINERT

“a handful of Cincinnati capitalists wound up dominating the bank. They included Samuel Wiggins of Wiggins loan infamy.” When a committee investigated wrongdoing by the Second Bank of Illinois in 1839, it found that “the bank loaned Cincinnati resident Samuel Wiggins, so ubiquitous in Illinois finance, $108,000. As collateral, he pledged capital stock he owned in the bank, but which he hadn’t yet paid for.” Wiggins then used the loan money to pay his bank debt. The committee further noted, “No net financial gain came to the bank, but the transaction allowed it to claim its working capital had been increased by Wiggins—allowing further issuance of bank notes which, however, were ultimately based on his promises rather than on specie.”15 Another example of Wiggins’s dubious business practices was his 1859 suit against his Cincinnati ferry partner John Good, who had joined him when John Garniss returned to the East. Good owned a portion of the ferry right, but he did not own the waterfront real estate. When he refused to help pay for the resurfac- ing of the ferry landing Wiggins owned, Wiggins sued Good for the money. In the process, he also gave notice to the city of Cincinnati that he would forfeit his ferry right (thus rendering Good’s investment in said ferry right worthless) and block the ferry landing with barges so that Good would be unable to land the boats. This maneuver led to a contempt of court charge, but Wiggins feigned innocence and got off. The paper reported that his intention was to “make it a new ferry company, to eschew the Garniss ferry right, and thereby oust Mr. Good. He has for some time had two new boats lying in dock for this purpose.” It’s no wonder that with this type of aggressive business acumen, Wiggins was willing to fight the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company at every turn.16 The Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company was originally created by a group of wealthy businessmen from the Kentucky side of the river. After an initial nudge from Lexingtonians looking to establish a route to market from their landlocked hamlet, a group of Covington’s business leaders coalesced to seek charters for a bridge company in Kentucky and Ohio. The Kentucky state legislature granted the company a charter on February 5, 1846. This charter named nine Kentuckians and six Ohioans officers of the bridge company, but it took these men four more years to secure a charter in Ohio. Samuel Wiggins and other Ohio property owners obstructed their progress at every opportunity.17 In Ohio, a bill to charter the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company first passed the house 30 to 27 on February 26, 1846, but was held up in the senate. State senator Alfred Kelley of Cleveland recommended postponing the bill for a year. He reported that “the completion of such a work as the one proposed, will, to some extent at least, have the effect to make Cincinnati, Covington, and Newport, for most business purpose, one city” and that some of the “wealth and population of Cincinnati…will be transferred to the opposite side of the river.” Kelley worried that Cincinnati real estate would become less valuable as

FALL 2017 31 THE MAN WHO MOVED THE BRIDGE

businesses and residents could easily relocate to less expensive property across the river. As an additional strike against the charter, on February 27 the senate was presented with, “a remonstrance of 47 ship builders and other citizens of Cincinnati, against granting an act of incorporation to construct a bridge over the Ohio River” which focused on worries that a bridge would affect navigation.18 As a part of its campaign for a charter from the state of Ohio, the bridge company invited John A. Roebling to submit a proposal in late 1846. Roebling devoted several pages of his report to debunking the concern that a bridge would negatively affect river navigation. Roebling’s initial design spanned from Main Street in Cincinnati to Garrard Street in Covington, indicating that his first instinct was to link directly two existing thoroughfares, but he was careful to note that the company had not yet chosen a final site for the bridge. He wrote, “It may be observed here, that a bridge is perfectly practicable at any point in the city. The general wants of the city will have to be duly considered in the choice of a site.” And later in the same report he added, “As the charter granted by the legislature of Kentucky leaves the location of the bridge entirely at the option of the Company, it is very important that the same liberal provision should be inserted in the charter to be obtained from the legislature of Ohio.” We know that Samuel Wiggins’s partner John Garniss traveled to Columbus to lobby against the bill, and it is likely that Wiggins accompanied him. When the bill was finally postponed, John Garniss’s son-in-law, Salmon P. Chase, wrote in his journal on March 3, 1846, “dined at Mr. Garniss’s who just returned from Columbus rejoicing in defeat of Bridge Bill.”19 The bridge bill was reintroduced the following year, but it failed in the senate by a vote of 25 to 8 on January 26, 1847. Cincinnati’s wharf master, Capt. Joseph Pierce, published an eighteen-page rebuttal to Roebling’s plan, specifically regarding navigation and river travel. Pierce worried that if the bridge were sited on Main Street, the clearance for steamboats on the Public Landing, which ran from Main to Sycamore Streets, would be compromised. This concern at least partially accounts for the bridge’s eventual move west of Walnut Street. Clearly, defeat by a such a wide margin so early in the legislative session, which extended through March, shows the bill had little hope of passage. Regardless, it did stir up quite a debate about the Cincinnati & Covington Ferry Company.20 Citizens saw clearly that the ferry was a problem that needed to be rectified. A letter in the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer three weeks before the defeat raged, “The proprietors of the Ferry and a few gentlemen who have large tracts of land in the Mill Creek and Deer Creek bottoms, and along the slopes of the hills adjacent to our city, are most violently opposed to this measure.… Do they really believe it would interfere with free navigation of the Ohio River? Nothing of all this!” They speculated, “The said ferry nets its proprietors, it is said, the snug little sum of twenty thousand dollars per annum,” which would be over $560,000 today.

32 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNE DELANO STEINERT

With these reliable profits, it’s no wonder Wiggins and Garniss fought the bridge. TheEnquirer continued, “They fear that if a bridge were built, the Ferry would be entirely superseded. These gentlemen have accumulated vast fortunes. With the lapse of years and the increase of wealth, their avarice has kept equal pace,” clearly setting the interests of the ferry company against those of the people. The story went on, “But shall a monopoly so gross as the Ferry, which seeks the emolu- ment of its proprietors regardless of the comfort and convenience, and the interests, and the wishes, of almost the whole community, be continued and a charter for the Bridge be withheld.” The paper also called out hilltop property owners who were against the bridge because it would allow residents to settle conveniently in Covington rather than in the areas of their investments. The paper urged Wiggins, Garniss, and other landowners: “Your private pecuniary interests must yield, in this instance, to the great public interest and convenience,” but Wiggins and Garniss were not yet ready to yield.21 Though the bridge bill was defeated, concern over the state of ferry service and the exclusive right held by Wiggins and Garniss led the state senate on December 29, 1847, to direct Attorney General Henry Stanbery to investi- gate ferry rates and regulation, and to determine whether additional ferries could be licensed to cross the Ohio. Stanbery wrote to Wiggins and Garniss through their lawyer Salmon Chase requesting “all the material facts connected with the steam ferry running between Cincinnati and Covington.” Wiggins and Garniss returned a brief business statement, and though Stanbery found that the state did have the right to regulate ferry tolls and that it could charter additional ferries, no action was taken. It seems Stanbery’s halfhearted investigation was a concession to placate those who had decried the ferry monopoly in support of the bridge, rather than a vehicle for actual change.22 Finally, on January 15, 1849, the bridge company enlisted engineer Charles Ellet, designer of the new suspension bridge over the Ohio at Wheeling, to help its cause. In his testimony to the legislature, which included “maps and pro- files,” he specifically spoke out against Wiggins’s monopoly. He wrote, “the plan here proposed, will distribute valuable benefits to society, while it rears itself in the way of no existing right:—for the protection of a present and lucrative ferry monopoly, of which the proceeds are not based on the advance of any capital or the assumption of any risk.” Wiggins would have disagreed with Ellet’s assessment, as he had reported to Henry Stanbery $53,703 in capital expenditures and expenses during the first eleven years of ferry operation, but the tide had now turned against the ferry.23 On February 22, 1849, the Cincinnati Daily Chronicle listed the city’s ferries individually and used their productivity as evidence of the need for a bridge. “The two central ferries are understood to have tapped gold mines far more productive than the placers of California…no one will contest that a permanent bridge, safely

FALL 2017 33 THE MAN WHO MOVED THE BRIDGE

constructed, is infinitely preferable, as a means of crossing a river, to any description of movable watercraft.” It’s no wonder the ferry companies were “most hostile to the construction of a bridge”; they had a fortune to lose and an inferior product. A March 4 Enquirer editorial in support of the bridge addressed the trouble with the ferries most directly: “The present Ferry is too close to a monopoly—and like all monopolies, too tyrannical and grasping in its demands to suit our views or to please the public…we hope that some action will be taken in the premises which will at least frighten the Ferry proprietors into a more accommodating spirit; or, failing that, will break up the exclusive monopoly they now enjoy.”24

The Roebling bridge under construction. The busy public landing is to the right of the bridge and the Cincinnati & Covington Ferry is shown just to the left of the bridge (c. 1865). CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

While the ferry’s owners made a profit, those who relied on the ferry for their transportation needs often suffered. Ferry riders were often inconvenienced by irregular service, especially at night, or suspended service due to high water, ice, or fog. Yet, no matter how they were inconvenienced, citizens were dependent on these boats. When the ferry boat suspended service due to ice in the winter of 1860, ten people attempted to cross the river on their own, resulting in at least one death. Steam ferries were subject to fire, and other accidents were not uncommon. For example, while the bridge was under construction, a nearly new Newport ferryboat burned to the water, causing its owner, Captain Air, an estimated loss of $10,000. In 1864 Thomas Godfrey, a member of Company G, 2d Kentucky, Heavy Artillery, caught his foot between the boat and the float, leaving his leg “shockingly mangled.” In 1864 Wiggins and Good were sued for neg- ligence when a passenger fell from the ferry float and broke his leg in two places, and the company paid $4,000 in damages to another man who was crushed between the boat and the float. In 1842, a carriage was thrown off the Newport ferry, resulting in the death of the fifteen-year-old occupant, and in November 1864, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported both someone falling off the ferry and drowning and someone else having both legs crushed between the ferry and the dock. In 1866 one of the ferries operating from Scott Street to Vine exploded in her dock on the Kentucky side, creating a “terrible spectacle,” and in 1866 a steamboat struck a Cincinnati ferry, leaving “several presumed drowned.”25

34 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNE DELANO STEINERT

There is no way to know whether the monopolistic overreaching of the ferry’s owners eventually turned the political tide against them, but a pamphlet published in celebration of the bridge’s completion in 1867 noted that “much opposition had to be overcome before a charter was obtained from the Legislature of Ohio. Courtesy, flattery, champagne and other ‘delicacies of the season’ were dis- tributed AD LIBITUM [presumably by the bridge company] before the thing was accomplished.” The state of Ohio chartered the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company on March 12, 1849. The charter included no mention of the bridge’s future site.26 No one will be surprised to learn the bridge company’s charter did not mark the end of Mr. Samuel Wiggins. According to the Ohio State Journal, “the lands upon both sides of the river, where the bridge was to be founded, have been purchased by wealthy individuals, the proprietors of the ferry in the vicinity, for the purpose of preventing the construction of the bridge.” Wiggins and Garniss owned the city’s Covington-facing waterfront—and they were not selling it. Without the land there could be no bridge.27 Perhaps Wiggins’s greatest triumph in the battle for the bridge was the language of the 1850 amendment to the bridge’s charter. A year after receiving the charter, the bridge company returned to the legislature, seeking the power to con- fiscate land for the bridge. Significant restrictions were placed on the company’s freedom to select a site; specifically, the amendment required that the bridge be built between Walnut Street and Western Row (now Central Avenue) and for- bade the use of the street termini. By limiting the bridge’s site, the legislature eliminated the possibility of obstructing the public landing, but it also guaran- teed that land for the bridge would have to be bought from Samuel Wiggins, who owned the entire waterfront between these streets. By restricting the bridge from the north–south thoroughfares, the amendment preserved the street termini as landing points for ferries and other watercraft, privileging boats. Wiggins and the bridge company would be forced to agree on a price, and Wiggins had no intention of selling his land to the competition without a significant incentive. Wiggins had put himself in a place to extort a significant payment from the bridge company, because it was its only hope of purchasing the land for the Ohio tower. TheCincinnati Enquirer wrote, “Without the [amended] law, the bridge cannot be built and it will be in the power of individuals [Wiggins] to put a stop to the progress of an enterprise of great public importance. The business of ferrying is now nearly a monopoly in the hands of the proprietors of the land.” Pushing further, the paper believed the bridge would at least improve ferry service: “The effect [of the ferry monopoly] is that the public are poorly accom- modated at high prices. A bridge would force upon the owners of the ferries the necessity of furnishing decent boats, and of reducing prices to a reasonable rate in proportion to the amount of business done.” The Covington and Cincinnati

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Bridge Company’s charter was amended on March 28, 1850, and the bridge’s site was forever contorted as a concession to Samuel Wiggins and his Cincinnati & Covington Ferry Company. Now all the bridge company had to do was select a site and purchase it from Samuel Wiggins.28 For six years, the company worked to raise the necessary funds to begin work on the bridge, and finally in 1856 it hired an engineer, purchased land, and broke ground. In April 1856, engineer John Roebling wrote, “Any one site, between Covington and Cincinnati, is practicable; and that no one point presents very superior advantages over another, as far as the structure itself is concerned. The Charter provides that the location shall be below Walnut Street. How far below, remains for the Board to decide.”29 Though we now think of John Roebling as the mastermind of the Brooklyn Bridge, at the time of his work in Cincinnati, both his acclaim as an engineer and the success of suspension bridge technology were limited. Before the Cincinnati bridge, Roebling had constructed small suspension bridges in Pittsburgh and a high railroad bridge over Niagara Falls that he took over from rival engineer Charles Ellet, who got into a spat with the bridge’s owners. The state of suspension bridge technology was similarly nascent. Ellet’s suspension bridge at Wheeling had partially failed two years earlier, and a suspension bridge built over the Licking River between Newport and Covington Kentucky had collapsed in January of the same year after less than a month in service. John Roebling came to Cincinnati as the best in a small and uncertain field of suspension bridge engineering to build a bridge larger than any ever before attempted. Indeed, even Roebling’s son Washington was overwhelmed by the bridge’s scale. Shortly after his arrival in the Queen City, on March 16, 1865, Washington wrote to his wife, Emily, “Our bridge here is an immense thing, it far surpasses my expectations, and any idea I had formed of it previously.”30

Railroad suspension bridge near Niagara Falls (1856). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

36 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNE DELANO STEINERT

While it is unknown exactly when and how the final bridge site was selected, John Roebling’s notebooks fill in some of the story. A small, leather-bound Roebling sketchbook dated 1856 in the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s collection includes the only known notes Roebling made about the selection of the bridge’s site. An initial map illustrates Roebling’s attempt to understand the Cincinnati waterfront’s layout. The simple ink drawing includes the Ohio River, Rat Row, Water, Front, Second, Race, Vine, and Walnut Streets on the Cincinnati side and Scott and Madison Streets on the Covington side. A few pages later, another hand-drawn map shows the bridge’s site as selected. This map shows the blocks between Walnut and Vine Streets between Rat Row and Front Street in greater detail, with measurements and directional information. The map is drawn in ink, but the Cincinnati anchorage footprint is added in pencil. Assuming the notebook’s pages were used in order, in the space of a few pages, the bridge’s site had been chosen.31 In an accompanying notebook, a note reads simply, “Best location between Walnut and Vine, through Rat Row, crossing Water Street,” accompanied by a series of measurements. Beyond these measurements, it is impossible to know what factors played into Roebling’s choice. Was it topography or some political or economic necessity? Whatever the reason, he recommended the bridge’s site, and the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company set out to purchase it from Wiggins.32 Back in 1847, when the state legislature was considering the bridge and Attorney General Henry Stanbery investigated the ferry monopoly, Stanbery requested that Wiggins and Garniss submit “all the material facts” about their ferry operation. Although not fully compliant, the pair provided an estimate of their revenues and expenses to prove they were not making a significant profit from the public good of providing the ferry. Under these circumstances, one can assume that the ferry owners would underreport their revenue and exagger- ate their costs to minimize their reported profit. Wiggins and Garniss claimed that in eleven years and eight months they had each earned only $1,616 per year. They further claimed, “We cannot state with precision, the capital investment” but went on to value the “land necessary for ferry purposes” at $10,000 and the steamboat and wharf at $6,000. Because they were trying to minimize the appearance of profit, we can assume that when the ferry owners estimated the value of the land at $10,000, this was the highest value they could reasonably claim. Though the bridge company would not be buying the exact plot of land on which the ferry ran, when it approached Wiggins nine years later to purchase in- lot 459, it was negotiating for a plot of land nearly identical to the one Wiggins had valued at $10,000 in 1847.33 A $10,000 purchase price would have been well within the budget of the bridge company whose charter initially allowed it to sell $300,000 in stock to pay for the bridge. However, the bridge company ultimately paid Wiggins much

FALL 2017 37 THE MAN WHO MOVED THE BRIDGE

more for in-lot 459. On Monday, June 28, 1856, three officers of the bridge company were authorized to offer Samuel Wiggins $28,000 for a 60-x-100–foot plot of land on the Ohio riverfront. When bridge company president Richard Ransom reported back on July 30, he informed the board that he had called on Mr. Wiggins but “deemed it inexpedient to make the offer from intimations he had received that satisfied him Mr. Wiggins would not accept of it.” It had quickly become clear to the emissaries from the bridge company that Wiggins would not accept their offer. Ransom further reported that shortly after this became clear, “the President and the Committee…were discharged from having anything to do with the premises.” Wiggins kicked them out of his office.34 Eventually, the two parties agreed to a $50,000 ninety-nine-year lease, for which the bridge company would pay $10,000 up front with additional quarterly payments of $800 and the right to buy out the lease for an additional $40,000. In today’s money, this is about $1.4 million, possibly greater than the same plot of land might cost today. Knowing that the bridge would significantly curtail his ferry business, Wiggins extracted from the bridge company one sixth of its original capitalization for just one lot on one side of the river, and he was not done harassing his competitor. 35 The execution of the lease between Wiggins and the bridge company illustrates how little goodwill existed between them. An August 1 preliminary agreement stipulated that the company could take possession immediately, but “there being tenants on the premises, which it is agreed not to be necessary to disturb immediately,” Wiggins was to continue to collect rent from his tenants and apply it to the company’s rent payments. This agreement also stipulated that no ferry rights accompanied the lease and that the land was to be used to construct a bridge. While this sounds perfectly civil, the parties ended up having to settle differences over the lease in court.36 The company’s November 1856 board minutes reflect coming trouble: “It appears that some difficulty has arisen between Samuel Wiggins and the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company in reference to ground purchased by the later of the former,” prefacing discussion about how it “greatly desired…that this contract with Mr. Wiggins shall be executed amicably and without litiga- tion.” At the same meeting, the board empowered its president Richard Ransom to sue Wiggins if necessary.37 Samuel Wiggins failed to evict his tenants from the site, so the bridge company stopped paying rent. The ever-litigious Wiggins refused to accept the $10,000 lump payment and took the company to court. It is unclear whether this was Wiggins’s last attempt to thwart the bridge or whether he was just being a cautious businessman. Either way, the court ruled in Wiggins’s favor regarding the unpaid rent (minus the rent collected from the tenants). The company paid, and finally the bridge went up.38

38 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNE DELANO STEINERT

While in the end, the bridge did get built, it was done no thanks to Wiggins. He threw every obstacle he could in front of it, and in many ways, he was the vic- tor. When Cincinnatians think of wealthy antebellum forbearers we tend to think of Nicholas Longworth, Salmon Chase, or Judge Jacob Burnet. No one remem- bers Samuel Wiggins—and yet he had such a significant impact on the physical city, manipulating the placement of one of Cincinnati’s most iconic landmarks. The Covington–Cincinnati Bridge opened to vehicles on New Year’s Day 1867. A lavish procession of plumed express coaches and omnibuses paraded through town and then over the bridge. Cincinnati’s proud new landmark “did not sway in the least” as a crowd estimated above fifty thousand crossed back and forth on that first day. This bridge was the last John Roebling would live to see, due to his untimely death in 1869 while planning the East River Bridge (today the Brooklyn Bridge). Heralded as “a monument of human ingenuity and skill, and the perfection of modern art,” the bridge forever linked Covington and Cincinnati and created an iconic symbol of the cities’ prosperity and growth, dominating the Cincinnati skyline to this day. Samuel Wiggins did not live to see the bridge, but one hopes that even he would have been awed to stand high over the Ohio River and look out at his adopted home. Roebling wrote in 1867 that the site of the bridge had been “confined by adverse legislation, now generally regretted, even by those who classed themselves among our most consistent opponents.” Perhaps Samuel Wiggins would have been one of these.39

Stereoscope of the bridge as John A. Roebling would have seen it (1867). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

FALL 2017 39 THE MAN WHO MOVED THE BRIDGE

The most detailed remembrance of Samuel Wiggins appeared in aCincinnati Commercial obituary. It described him as “distinguished for quick perceptions and superior judgment as to matters of business…largely interested in investments…with marked individuality of character…relying largely on his own judgment and possessed of a comprehensive mind…[who] rarely failed in his business enterprises.” The paper noted that “he, in a great measure, kept his operations within his own control, under his own supervision, and gradually con- centrated his means so as to have them more easily controlled.” While many may have perceived Wiggins as an unscrupulous financier, this memorial cast his negative traits in a more sympathetic light: “He was necessarily, a man of strong, earnest, convictions with that sort of experience and intuition that enabled him to quickly take men for what they were worth, and to measure events by a standard of cool, dispassionate judgment.” As a man of extreme wealth, Wiggins was free to live by his own rules: “With so much individuality as he possessed, he was, in a great measure, indifferent to the common opinion of men, and pursued, in his relations with them, a course of rare independence.” As a result, “those who were but slightly acquainted with him were liable to make an unfair estimate of his true feelings of his impulses to action. Under this peculiar temperament, his kindly disposition of the courtesies of life and the extent of his private chari- ties failed to be generally known.” Wiggins died while vacationing in Newport, Rhode Island, “suddenly and from disease of the heart.” The most complimentary part of the Cincinnati Enquirer’s death notice was that he possessed “inde- fatigable and untiring devotion to business.” 40 In the end, the bridge did bring about the end of Wiggins’s ferry. While Samuel Wiggins had to face the obsolescence of a technology to which he had devoted his life, he did so in a manner that put his mark on the work that replaced it. The Covington–Cincinnati Bridge stands today as a landmark of innovation, an icon of civic growth, and a testimony to Wiggins’s Cincinnati ferry—a corporate monopoly so large and politically connected that 150 years later we still feel its impact in all those turns we take to get across the bridge. 41

40 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNE DELANO STEINERT

1 “Report of John A. Roebling, Civil Engineer to the County, Illinois with Illustrations Descriptive of Its Scenery President and Board of Directors of the Covington and Biological Sketches of Some of Its Most Prominent and Cincinnati Bridge Company: April 1st, 1867,” Men and Pioneers (Philadelphia: Brink, McDonough & Annual Report of the President and Board of Directors to Company, 1881) 301; Charles Gilman, Reports and Cases the Stockholders of the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of the State Company for the Year Ending Feb. 28th, 1867 (Trenton, of Illinois, 5 vols. (1844–49; rep. St. Louis, MO: W. J. NJ: Murphy & Bechtel, Steam Book and Job Printer, Gilbert, 1869), 2: 196–215. 1867), 16–17. 9 S. H. Church, comp., “The Wiggins Ferry Company: 2 “Covington News,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Mar. 6, An Act of Incorporation,” Corporate History of the 1859; William G. Williams, comp., Laws and General Pennsylvania Lines West of Pittsburgh Comprising Charters, Ordinances of the City of Cincinnati…Published by the Mortgages, Decrees, Deeds, Leases, Agreements, Ordinances, Order of City Council, May 1853 (Cincinnati: Press of the and Other Papers with Descriptive Text: Containing the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, 1853), 100–101. Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis and its Subsidiary Corporations…, 15 vols. (Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania Railroad, 3 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as 1905), 10: 651–56; A.W. Moore, “Illinois Town—Early Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 47; History,” Reports of the Federal Writers Project, 1937, avail- John R. Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and able online at Historical Archives, Illinois State Museum Awareness in Everyday Places (New York: Walker, 1998), 6. Website, http://www.museum.state.il.us/RiverWeb/ landings/Ambot/Archives/fwp/Bloody_20Island.html; 4 Joseph S. Stern Jr., “The Suspension Bridge: They Said It John A. Paxton, The St. Louis Directory and Register (St. Bulletin of the Cincinnati Historical Couldn’t Be Built,” Louis: John A. Paxton, 1821); John W. Bond, The East Society 23 (October 1965): 211–28; John H. White St. Louis Waterfront: Historical Background (Washington, Jr., “Let Us Cross the River: Cincinnati’s Ferryboats,” D.C.: National Park Service, Division of History, Office Timeline 23 (January–March 2006): 44–57; D. B. of Archeology and Historic Preservation, 1969), 11–12; The Builders of the Bridge: The Story of John Steinman, William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Roebling and His Son (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), Fugitive Slave Written by Himself (Boston: Anti-Slavery 227; “Report of John A. Roebling,” 17. Office, 1847), 73; Walter Barlow Stevens,St. Louis, The Fourth City: 1864–1909, 3 vols. (St. Louis, Mo.: S. J. 5 “Another New Block,” Cincinnati Enquirer, Jan. 29, Clarke, 1909), 1: 347; Scharf, History of St. Louis City and 1879; Chester Geaslen, Our Moment of Glory in the Civil County, 2: 1070; John Francis Snyder, Adam W. Snyder and War: When Cincinnati Was Defended from the Hills of His Period in Illinois History 1817–1842 (Virginia, IL: E. Northern Kentucky (Newport, KY: Otto Printing, 1972), Needham Bookseller & Stationer, 1906), 107. The town 43. of Washington has since been consumed by the Mississippi 6 “Cincinnati’s Rich Men: Some of Its Citizens Who Are River; see “History,” Report of the Federal Writer’s Project, Credited with the Possession of Millions,” New York 1937, Documents from the Illinois State Historical Library Times, Dec. 10, 1880. TheCincinnati Daily Enquirer Manuscripts Collection, Illinois State Museum Website, includes many notices of Wiggins suing and being sued http://www.museum.state.il.us/RiverWeb/landings/Ambot/ on all sorts of land use matters. See “Superior Court,” and Archives/fwp/EarlyHistory.html. “Law Report,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, July 28, 1863, 10 Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County, 2: 1070; Dec. 20, 1861. Gilman, Reports and Cases, 2: 215, 217; George William 7 Charles F. Limberg, “History of the Wiggins Family Dowrie, The Development of Banking in Illinois 1817– Mullikin Family Berrien Family in St. Louis, Mo,” 1978, 1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1913), 49–50; “X. MSS, VF 3596, Cincinnati Museum Center; William Y & Z,” Illinois Advocate (Edwardsville, IL), Feb. 3, 1832; Pope Anderson, Anderson Family Records (Cincinnati: W. Thomas Ford, A History of Illinois from its Commencement F. Schaefer & Co., 1936), 156. as a State in 1818 to 1847, ed. Milo Quaife, 2 vols. (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1945–46), 1: 150; Roy P. 8 Anderson, Anderson Family Records, 156; Samuel G Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln,9 Berrian to I. M. Francis, Mar. 25, 1818, Berrian Archive, vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, Illinois State Museum, accessed August 15, 2017, avail- 1953–55), 1: 69. Note that the Second Bank of Illinois able online at http://www.museum.state.il.us/RiverWeb/ had taken over repayment of the Wiggins loan; it would landings/Ambot/Archives/Berrian/index.html; John later be relieved of this responsibility by the legislature, Thomas Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County from which would finally pay off the loan. SeeReports Made the Earliest Period to the Present Day Including Biographical to the Seventeenth General Assembly of the State of Illinois Sketches of Representative Men, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Louis Convened January 6, 1851 (Springfield, IL: Lanphier & H. Everts & Company, 1883), 2:1070; History of St. Clair Walker Printers, 1851).

FALL 2017 41 THE MAN WHO MOVED THE BRIDGE

11 James Hall, Statistics of the West at the Close of the Year City of Cincinnati,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Jan. 4, 1836 (Cincinnati: J. A. James & Company, 1836), 265– 1862; Reprint of Ohio Cases, 318–20; “Law Report,” 67; Anderson, Anderson Family Records, 156; U.S. Bureau Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Feb. 16, 1862; “Law Report: of the Census, “Population of the 90 Urban Places: 1830,” Superior Court—General Term,” Cincinnati Daily available online at the U.S. Census Website, accessed Enquirer, May 2, 1862; “Meeting at Metropolitan Hall,” August 15, 2017, https://www.census.gov/population/ Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Feb. 11, 1862. Wiggins sold www/documentation/twps0027/tab06.txt. these new boats to the federal government for use as gunboats during the Civil War. See “Covington News,” 12 Deed Records of the Hamilton County Recorder, Series 1, Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Feb. 22, 1863. 1831-64, Office of the Hamilton County Recorder, Cincinnati, OH. Prior to coming to Cincinnati, John 17 The initial committee of northern Kentucky business- Garniss ran a ferry at Weehawken, New Jersey, and sub- men chosen to meet with legislators in Kentucky and mitted a petition to the Common Council of New York Ohio were Covington councilmen John Finley and on Jan. 17, 1825, requesting the right to “establish…a Charles Withers; Henry Brown, editor of the Licking ferry therefrom by Steam and Team boats to the City Valley Register; lawyers John W. Menzies, and Herman of New York.” See Minutes of the Common Council of J. Groesbeck. See Harry R. Stevens, The Ohio Bridge the City of New York, 1784–1831, 19 vols. (New York: (Cincinnati: Ruter Press, 1939), 33. City of New York, 1917), 14: 260; Eleanor S. Williams Deed to Wiggins and Garniss, Aug. 24, 1831, Book 18 Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio 39, p. 491, and Joel Williams Deed to Wiggins and Being the First Session of the Forty Fourth General Assembly Garniss, Aug.31, 1831, Book 28, p. 287, both in Deed Held in the City of Columbus Commencing on December 1, Records of the Hamilton County Recorder; Messages and 1845 (Columbus: C. Scott & Company Printers, 1846), Other Communications Made to the Forty-Fifth General 689–90, 696, 731; “Bridge Across the Ohio,” Cincinnati Assembly of the State of Ohio Ordered to Be Printed in a Daily Enquirer, Feb. 24, 1846. Separate Volume by Act Passed December 16, 1836, 20 Report and Plan for a Wire Suspension vols. (Columbus: C. Scott’s Steam Press, 1847), 11, pt. 1: 19 John A. Roebling, Bridge Proposed to Be Erected Over the Ohio River at 524–28; Reprint of Ohio Cases Published in the Weekly Law Gazette, Law and Bank Bulletin, American Law Register, Cincinnati (Cincinnati: J. A. & U. P. James, 1846), 6–10; The Salmon P. Chase Papers, Ohio Law Journal (Norwalk: Laning Printing Company, John Niven, ed., 5 vols. 1897), 318–20; William Disney, comp., Laws and (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993), 1: 180. General Ordinances of the City of Cincinnati…(Cincinnati: 20 “The Legislative Proceedings,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Robert Clark & Co., 1866), 463–67; “Covington Items,” Dec. 28, 1846; “The Bridge,” Licking Valley Register Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Feb. 12, 1858; “Saturday, (Covington, KY), Jan. 30, 1847; “Remarks upon Mr. March 9, 1850: House of Representatives,” Ohio State Roebling’s ‘Plan and Report for a Wire Suspension Journal (Columbus, OH), Mar. 12, 1850. Bridge, Proposed to Be Erected Over the Ohio River, 13 “Advertisements,” Daily Cincinnati Enquirer, June 16, at Cincinnati,’” Unpublished, undated document, RB 1841; Charles Theodore Greve,Centennial History of pamphlet 624.55 R384, Cincinnati Museum Center. Cincinnati and Representative Citizens, 2 vols. (Chicago: 21 “To the Public,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Jan. 6, 1847. Biographical Publishing Company, 1904), 1: 548; “Disastrous Fire,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Feb., 14, 22 Ibid.; Henry Stanbery to Wiggins and Garniss, Dec. 29, 1854; “Fires,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Nov. 8, 1862; 1846, Box 5, Salmon P. Chase Papers, Library of Charles Cist, Cincinnati in 1841: Its Early Annals and Congress, Washington, D.C.; Documents Including Future Prospects (Cincinnati: Charles Cist, 1841), 40. Messages and Other Communications Made to the Forty- Fifth General Assembly, vol. 11, pt. 1: 525. 14 White, “Let Us Cross Over the River,” 48–49; “Jefferson Life Insurance Company of Cincinnati,” Cincinnati Daily 23 “From Columbus,” Cincinnati Daily Chronicle, Feb. Enquirer, Mar. 21, 1854; Greve, Centennial History of 16, 1849; Charles Ellet Jr., Letter on the Proposed Bridge Cincinnati, 1:741–42, 919. Cornelia Bartow Williams, across the Ohio River at Cincinnati with a Single Span of comp., Ancestry of Lawrence Williams (Chicago: Privately 1400 Feet and an Elevation of 112 Feet above Low Water printed, 1915), 205–6. (Columbus: J. H. Riley & Co., Printers, 1849), 16.

15 Richard L. Miller, Lincoln and His World: Prairie 24 “Cincinnati and Covington Bridge,” Cincinnati Daily Politician, 1834–1842 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Chronicle, Feb. 22, 1849; “Suspension Bridge,” Cincinnati Books, 2008), 63, 356–57. Daily Enquirer, Mar. 4, 1849.

16 “The Landing Contracted For,” Cincinnati Daily 25 “Newport News,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Oct. 2, Enquirer, Apr. 10, 1859; “To the City Council of the 1861; “Fatal Accident on the Delaware—Burning of a

42 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNE DELANO STEINERT

Ferry-Boat—Loss of Life,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Mar. 31 John A. Roebling, Notes on Foundations, 1856, John A. 20, 1856; “Covington,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Apr. Roebling, Bridge Projects, Notebooks, Box 4, Item 92, 1, 1870; “Newport,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Feb. 4, Roebling Manuscript Collection, RPI. 1868; “Great Excitement—A Ferry Boat and Its Crew in Imminent Peril,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Feb. 3, 1855; 32 John A. Roebling, Cincinnati Bridge, April 1856, John A. “Thrilling Incident at the River—A Skiff Containing Roebling Bridge Projects, Notebooks, Box 7, Item 128, Ten Persons Swept Away by Floating Ice—Rescue of Roebling Manuscript Collection, RPI. Nine of the Party—Probable Melancholy Fate for the Documents Including Messages and Other Communications Other,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Jan. 4, 1860; “Fire this 33 Made to the Forty-Fifth General Assembly, Morning—A Newport Ferry Boat Destroyed—Probable vol. 11, pt. 1, Loss Ten Thousand Dollars,”Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 524–28. Oct., 23, 1857; “Covington News: Shocking Accident,” 34 Annual Report of the President and Board of Directors, Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Feb. 27, 1864; “Law Report,” 99; Record Book, 1856–83, Transportation: District Six Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Mar. 29, 1864; “Covington: History, Book 70, Kentucky Department of Libraries and Heavy Damages,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Sept. 20, Archives, Frankfort, KY [hereafter KDLA]. 1867; “Fatal Accident—Noble Example of Courage in Two Young Men,” Daily Cincinnati Enquirer, July 5, 1842; 35 99 Year Lease Renewable Forever, South Side of Water “Covington News,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Nov. 26, Street to Low Water Mark of Ohio River, Cin’ti, O.: 100’ 1864; “Explosion of Ferry-boat Covington No. 2: Probable x 400’: In lot #459: Former Owner Samuel Wiggins, Loss of Life: Terrible Conflagration: Scenes of Excitement Transportation: District Six History, Box 1, KDLA. in the City: Its Providential Aspects,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Mar. 14, 1866. 36 William Disney, Report of Cases Adjudged in the Superior Court of Cincinnati at Special and General Terms from 26 Historical Sketch of the Great Suspension Bridge Connecting October, 1854 to January, 1858 (Cincinnati: Robert Covington and Cincinnati Together with Reliable Details Clarke & Co., 1867), 573–78. and Full Descriptions of All its Parts Compiled from Official Sources (Cincinnati: T. J. Smith & Co., 1867), 3; “Ohio 37 Record Book, 1856–83, Transportation: District Six Legislature,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Mar. 10, 1849. History, Book 70, KDLA.

27 “Saturday, March 9, 1850: House of Representatives,” 38 Ibid.; Disney, Report of Cases Adjudged in the Superior Ohio State Journal (Columbus, OH), Mar. 12, 1850; Court of Cincinnati, 573–78. It should be noted that the Deed Records of the Hamilton County Recorder, Series bridge was subject to delays, now typical of Cincinnati’s 1, 1831–64. large transportation projects, resulting from the financial panic of 1857 and the Civil War. 28 Ohio State Journal (Columbus, OH), Mar. 12, 1850; Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio Being the 39 “Opening of the Cincinnati and Covington Suspension First Session of the Forty Eighth General Assembly Held in the Bridge to Wagons, Carriages, &c.” Cincinnati Daily City of Columbus Commencing on Monday, December 3, 1849 Enquirer, Jan. 2, 1867; I. W. Riley, ed., “The Covington (Columbus: S. Medary Printer, 1850), 205. and Cincinnati Suspension Bridge,” Ladies Repository: A Monthly Periodical Devoted to Literature and Religion 27 29 Covington & Cincinnati Bridge Company: Circular (1867): 121; Roebling, “Report of John A. Roebling,”16. Address of the Board of Directors, John A. Roebling, Bridge Projects, Roebling Manuscript Collection, Box 5, 40 “Death of Samuel Wiggins, Esq.” Cincinnati Commercial, Folder 21, Special Collections and University Archives, Aug. 2, 1864; Greve, Centennial History of Cincinnati, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY [hereafter RPI]. 2:628.

30 Washington Roebling’s Father: A Memoir of John Roebling, 41 White, “Let Us Cross Over the River,” 49. ed. Donald Sayenga (Reston, VA: American Society of Civil Engineers Press, 2009), 243–46; David McCullough, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972) 77, 80–81; “Fall of a Suspension Bridge- Fire- Navigation of Ohio,” New York Daily Times, Jan. 18, 1854; Washington A. Roebling to Emily Roebling, March 16, 1865, “Some Roebling Letters (1821–1927) and Incidental Matters,” vol. 2, Transcript Book 36, Roebling Family Collection, 1824-1971, Rutgers University Special Collections, New Brunswick, N.J.

FALL 2017 43 “High School Girls” Women’s Higher Education at the Louisville Female High School

Amy Lueck

In our city, at least, the importance of female education is fully realized. All classes of our citizens look with a degree of pardonable pride upon this school, which is unexcelled by any similar institution in this or any other country. Girls are there given equal advantages with the boys, and fully qualify themselves to adorn any sphere of life, whether it be of the light graces of cultivated literature, or in that more solid learning which fits them to battle with adver- sity or to reason away unfounded and pernicious prejudices. —Louisville Annual School Board Report 1872

s late as 1905, Emma Woerner (who would become the first principal of Louisville’s J. M. Atherton High School for girls in 1924) was able to enter University of Kentucky as a junior based on her academic accom- plishmentsA at Louisville’s Female High School; her high school and college curriculums overlapped significantly. And her case was not an aberration. Instead, Woerner’s experience is residual from the nineteenth-century legacy of her school, when what a “high school” was and did was not yet obvious or consistent in the United States, and high schools like Louisville’s overlapped politically and peda- gogically with the work of U.S. colleges. In fact, when in 1872 the superintendent purported that Female High School provided an education “unexcelled by any institution in this or any other country,” he would have included women’s colleges among their ranks, as the distinctions between different institutions of higher education remained unclear until at least the 1880s and ’90s. As late as 1903, Edwin Cornelius Broome of Columbia University explained, “the joints in our educational system, because of the unique position of the college and the public high school, have become dove-tailed.” Broome went on to argue, “Secondary education, per se, however, stops the moment specialization begins; and that time may be, as it usually is, about the middle of the college course; or it may be, as it really should, at the close of the high school course,” but his distinction between what “may be” and “usually is” versus what “should” be the distinction between secondary school and college is telling, revealing that the strict divide between high school and college was as yet a proposal rather than a widely accepted reality.1

44 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY AMY LUECK

Because of this institutional fluidity, nineteenth-century women gained access to significant higher education opportunities under the auspices of the urban, public high school (as well as at seminaries, academies, normal schools, and other vari- ously named institutions) even when they did not matriculate into colleges proper. Women made great strides in all forms of higher education in the last half of the nineteenth century, but particularly in high schools and academies; while remaining underrepresented in colleges until 1978, women constituted a majority of graduates from high schools as early as 1870. This trend held true both nationally and in the local context of Louisville, where women outpaced men in high school graduation numbers eight to four in 1861 and by forty-two to twenty-nine by 1895. Still representing only a small minority of white women in the city, these early women high school graduates were envoys into higher education on behalf of their gender. Their high rates of matriculation and graduation were due at least in part to the impressive academic and professional opportunities granted to them at a time when other avenues to academic and professional advancement remained limited.2 Opened in 1856, Female High School was posited as a parallel institution to Male High School (still in operation today, now as a coeducational school), which served as the University of Louisville’s “academical department”—akin to a college of arts and sciences—until some time in the late nineteenth century. In both the 1851 city charter and a report of the school board from that same year, these high schools were described as comprising the final, or highest, stage of the public education system: each ward would have one school, divided into male and female departments, and also into primary, secondary, and grammar departments. When qualified, students would be promoted through the system to the grammar departments, where “they can remain until prepared to enter, the boys the academical department of the University, and the girls the Female High School.” In this way, the “academical department” of the university was proposed as an equivalent opportunity to Female High School for young men and women, respec- tively, to pursue a complete higher education from within the common school system. 3 The connection between Male High School and the University of Louisville made the graduates of the former into de facto graduates of the latter throughout this period. Receiving a college charter in 1860, Male High School. Report of the Male High School, Louisville, KY. For the School Year 1907- Male High School also conferred its own 08, (The Kentucky Print Shop, 1908). Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees until 1911. FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Meanwhile, the Female High School (later changed to Girls High School and then merged under the auspices of DuPont Manual High School in 1950), conferred diplomas rather than academic degrees and was always separated from the idea of a college or university. When female students sought access to the university even after high school graduation, they were granted enroll- ment only in select, limited courses and did not graduate from that institution Louisville Female High School (c. 1876). until the twentieth century.4 FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY While collegiate degrees were understood to confer more value and prestige than diplomas, an academic degree was still seldom if ever a requirement for professions or even for advanced study, and Male’s degrees and Female’s diplomas both served as privileged teaching credentials for the city’s public schools at many points in the century (though a diploma or degree was not required to teach throughout much of the century either). Male conferred honorary MA degrees to those who taught in the city’s schools for three years after graduation, and Female effectively served as the city’s normal (or teacher-training) school until a proper normal school was established in 1871. Thus, both Male High School and Female High School complicate our accepted notions of the secondary/post-secondary divide because of their uncertain and even hybrid institutional statuses as “high” schools.5 As historian William J. Reese points out, “high” was a relative term, such that the “high school” indicated whatever was above the “lower schools,” but it was not at first clear what relation this new echelon of public schools had in relation to colleges or other existing educational forms. Women’s urban public high schools prospered in the nineteenth-century because of this relative and unclear status, as well as their relation to the existing “common schools.”6 Beginning in the 1820s, U.S. education reformers in New England, such as Horace Mann, famously took on the project of expanding basic educational access through the establishment of these “common schools,” free and open to the public, initiating what became known as the common school movement. The trend spread as cities across the North and East began establishing funds and organizing systems to provide free public education to their cities’ (white) youths. An early convert of this movement, Louisville, Kentucky, established its first free public schools for white children in 1829, nearly a century before much of the rest of the state. However, these early schools were what were called “lower schools,” offering a basic education to only about an eighth-grade level. After that stage, students desiring more formal education would need to attend private academies, seminaries, or colleges to further their studies.7

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Horace Mann (1796-1859). Page from Common-School Primer: Introductory to S.G. Goodrich’s LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Series of Comprehensive Readers (Morton and Griswold, 1841). FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

This division of publicly provisioned education at the lower level and privately provisioned education at the higher levels speaks to the differences imagined between the purpose and audience conceived for education at each level— that is, “higher” schooling (which included seminaries and colleges in particular) was understood to serve a different purpose than the common education of the lower schools. Whereas the common schools provided basic literacy and numer- acy to develop students as citizens and efficient workers, and were therefore framed as a public good, this higher schooling was generally conceived of as an individual good, leading to personal accomplishments and professional opportunities for the student him- or herself. Putting a finer point on the distinction between early higher education and the common schools, James Berlin explains that the purpose of colleges “was to train aristocrats, a class of men whose education was intentionally made to be unrelated to the affairs of the larger society, resting instead on eternal principles.” Paid academies, subscription schools, and a robust network of Catholic and other religiously sponsored schools provided this higher education for individuals in Louisville at midcentury. But while the city already boasted a wide array of private academies and seminaries, Louisville citizens began to advocate for public “higher” schools as well. 8 The idea of public high schools (along with the later development of land- grant colleges) challenged and changed the sense that higher education was to be selective and for private advancement. The notion of publicly funded schooling was persuasively tied to republican ideals asserting that it was both a national interest and a democratic responsibility to provide universal access to the highest levels of education for all white children. In this way, the public high school

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extended the public value of education into the previously private realm of higher education, shifting their focus from the individual gains of traditional liberal education for “the professions” (law, clergy, and medicine) to the public gains of intelligent workers and, particularly, teachers. As an article in the Daily Courier explained, “We rejoice in the prosperity of private schools: the more good schools we have the better for our city.” But, it continued, “in our opinion there are no schools so thoroughly republican, none which minister so directly to the mental growth of the community, as public schools.… These are emphatically the people’s seminaries, and as such they commend themselves to the regard of all frends [sic] of education.” Supporters commonly used terms like “people’s seminaries” and “people’s colleges” to describe the nation’s public schools, particularly the higher schools. This language served as an implicit critique of private seminaries and colleges (framed as more exclusionary or elite) while simultaneously raising the status of the newly emerging high schools to the level of these more traditional institutions of higher education. Framing supporters of the schools as “friend[s] of ingenuous and aspiring youth”—thereby casting the students not as college men and women but still school boys and girls needful of such patrons and friends—the supporters tied this higher education to the existing democratic appeal of the common schools.9

Advertisement for Atkinson High School, an institution for “young Ladies.” Louisville Daily Courier, October 15, 1855

But a crucial perspective in advocating for public high schools was provided by the common schools of which they were an extension: they needed teachers. In this way, the high schools stood to benefit not only the student or even some broader sense of the “public” but also the school system itself, through the direct provision of teachers for the lower schools. John Heywood of the Committee on Examination and Control was among those who drove that point home, by appealing not only

48 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY AMY LUECK to democratic ideals of access and benefit but also to real economic and practical needs to be served by higher schools: “It is a matter of great importance,” he explained, “to place, as soon as possible, the advantages of the High School within reach of pupils…to whom we may hereafter confidently look for thoroughly educated men and women…to keep the teacher’s ranks constantly supplied with intelligent and accomplished instructors.” As he makes clear, a major function of the high schools would be to produce teachers for the rapidly expanding school system, which embraced eight schools in 1855 and eleven ward schools and two high schools by 1860, each with ever-growing classes of students.10 Combining appeals to both “advanced studies” and teacher preparation, the Daily Courier asserted, “The good influence of such an institution, combining in itself the advantages of a high and a normal school, will be incalculable. It will be felt in every department of our school system.” Hence, the mission of the high schools was from their earliest beginnings wrapped up in the work and traditions not only of the college, and of the common schools, but also of the normal, or teacher training, school. As Superintendent George Anderson explained, the schools’ purpose was to make the school system as excellent as it could be, which required that “we must have not only educated men, but we must have educated teachers; men, I mean (I include women also), who have been taught the art of teaching, the most important and highest of all other arts.”11 The need for teachers brought the women’s high school to center stage, as women were taking on a majority of the teaching posts already by this time. By 1855, there were twenty-six male teachers in the schools, compared to fifty-six female teachers, which grew to thirty-five male and sixty-four female in 1860. The cause of this pattern in Louisville as elsewhere was the low salary paid for teaching. As Superintendent George H. Tingley explained, the average salary for a principal teacher, $1,500, “will not obtain the services of the very best talent, because men of ability can earn more in business, or in other professions.”12 While few male students went into education, all nine of the first graduates of Female became teachers after graduation, as did a great majority in the decades following. As early as 1859, Principal Holyoke had experimented with offering a formalized normal (or teacher training) course of study, with explicit instruction about how to teach for all students. By 1863, teacher training was firmly established at Female (though it does not always appear in curriculum lists). When the separate Normal Training School was established in 1871, nearly half of the graduates of Female matriculated into it as well.13 Thus, the central role teacher credentialing played in the mission of the high school is clear, although at times it fit uneasily with the school’s academic mission. While Female’s Principal Holyoke celebrated the “advancement of [Female’s] course of study” in 1860, his successor, Principal Chase, was demonstrably anxious throughout his own annual report about the extended time and intensity of study

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Female required when he took over in 1863. While both Holyoke and Chase consistently advocated for teacher training as part of the project of Female High School, and teacher training remained part of the general academic curriculum until the establishment of a separate normal program in 1871, the location of teacher preparation in the curriculum changed. While Principal Holyoke marked the highest class of students as the “normal,” or teacher training, class, Principal Chase made the change to designate the first two years of high school, or lowest classes, as the teaching track. His explanation for this change reminds us of how exceptional a full high school education was at this time, far exceeding that necessary to teach in the schools. He stated, “It is hardly to be expected that the majority of those who seek the benefit of the School, in order to qualify themselves for teachers, will remain for a longer period than one or two years; it, therefore, seems desirable that the studies of that period should be those of a Normal School, especially for the benefit of such pupils.” Chase also determined that “the course of study hitherto pursued is too heavy for the period allotted for its completion” and proposed changes to the curriculum that included a condensing of rhetoric to only the second year of study and addressing subjects like history and literature largely through weekly lectures. The tension, as Superintendent Tingley put it in 1868, was the belief that “the ability to manage a school and skill to teach, with average scholarship, are more desirable than the highest literary attainments, without a knowledge of the practical methods to be pursued in the school-room.” The school continued to maintain this balance at least until the establishment of the normal school in 1871.14 Producing teachers for their own schools was a powerful appeal to many citizens partly because, in Louisville and across the South, educational advocates were suspicious of northern educators. Aware of the claims made for literacy and higher education as shapers of morality and political ideology, administrators sought to control that process locally. State Superintendent of Education J. D. Matthews underscored this local focus, along with a regional distrust that went with it, when he wrote of the importance of forming “early associations and the most enduring attachments of youthful training” in “institutions of learning, founded in their midst, and with their own treasure, and for their accommodation.” Particularly in the years leading up to the Civil War, regional distrust was an important factor in establishing local public schools in Kentucky, especially public high and normal schools that would feed back into the public school system. After the war, too, the interest in providing local teachers to fill vacancies in the ever-expanding school system persisted. With public schools for African Americans, opened in 1871, the city established higher classes and eventually a full high school course at coeducational Central Colored High School (now Central High School), with the explicit goal of providing black teachers for the resolutely segregated common schools. With their clear professional and public goals, these high schools were challenging and changing the face of higher education in their communities.15

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But not all high schools were created equal, of course, particularly across racial and gender lines. Due partly to its more explicit role in preparing teachers and partly to other gendered strictures on women’s education, the Female High School of Louisville was unarguably less academically rigorous than its male counterpart, which featured a full classical curriculum akin to that of the best men’s colleges of the time. The schools were unequal in other ways as well. For example, the faculty at Male tended to have more advanced degrees, received higher salaries, and were referred to as professors, while the faculty at Female were most often referred to as teachers. In addition, the cost per pupil at Female was consistently lower than at Male: in 1861, for example, it was $51.32 (with 94 students), compared to $69.19 at Male (with 114 students).16

Louisville Female High School teachers. From class of 1876 photo album compiled by Mamie J. McKnight, a member of the class. FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

However, even if not often recognized or valued as such, the students at Female and the curriculum they studied were comparable to those at many colleges, particularly southern women’s colleges. For starters, the students at Female were as old as twenty-one in 1860, while nineteenth-century colleges often enrolled students as young as fourteen years of age. According to a report of the Association of American Universities, the average age at matriculation of eighteen years reflects the fact that students into their thirties were entering alongside those in their very early teens.17

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Like many colleges of the time, Female’s requirements for admission were basic, with a brief test in grammar, arithmetic, and geography. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, institutions of higher education could not afford to have stringent admission requirements, as the prolifera- tion of colleges and high schools meant that schools were competing for students and, hence, were often forced to accept students with only minimal preparation and from a range of age cohorts. While representing a frequent concern and complaint among school leaders, the minimal requirements can also be understood as ensuring greater access to students with various levels of preparation and perpetuating the uncertain boundaries between high schools and colleges.18 The flexible boundaries between institution types also meant that high school curricula overlapped significantly with that of colleges, even if not reaching full equivalence. Thus, students in the intermediate, or preparatory, department of Female High School in 1860 were already studying some books used in colleges, alongside others of a more distinctly secondary or preparatory nature. In English, for instance, they studied George P. Quackenbos’s Advanced Course of Rhetoric, a textbook popular in colleges across the country, and Samuel S. Green’s English Analysis—in use at colleges like Michigan’s Hillsdale College the same year—which focused on sentence building and analysis of full sentences and identified as the “progenitor of the modern idea of discipline through grammar and of language books,” in place of the tradition of foster- ing “mental discipline” through ancient languages, which was a concept key to nineteenth-century colleges. Other textbooks from this preparatory year even more obviously blurred the lines between high schools and colleges in their marketing. For example, their geography textbook is advertised for “advanced classes, and is well adapted to the use of Colleges, Academies, Seminaries, and High Schools.” All of these texts suggest in their titles and in their uses an uncertain divide between these institutions, which was further blurred by the existence at both high schools and colleges of preparatory departments that often far outsized the regular academic classes.19 Building on these texts and studies from the preparatory year, the ensuing three-year high school course emphasized the study of Latin and French languages, reaching into ever more distinctly collegiate branches. Students studied Andrews and Stoddard’s Latin Grammar, which was “for the use of schools and colleges” and listed as the Latin grammar in use at Brown University in its 1838 catalogue; Andrew’s Latin Reader, used in the preparatory department at Oberlin in 1857, Missouri’s Westminster College, and other colleges; and Noel and Chapsal’s New System of French Grammar, also a text used in the senior year at William and Mary in 1874, to name just a few examples.20

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Louisville Female High School teachers. From class of 1876 photo album compiled by Mamie J. McKnight, a member of the class. FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The study of Latin, especially, was a marker of higher education common across high schools, colleges, higher academies, and seminaries. However, students at Female High School did not have the chance to study Greek. Without the opportunity for a full classical education (defined by the inclusion of Greek), Female High School would seem to fall outside of the definition of a college for its time. Importantly, though, while college had for a long time been defined by the study of Greek, Latin, and higher mathematics, this tradition was changing in both men’s and women’s colleges across the country as students came to campus

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with varying levels of preparation and interests in careers outside of “the professions.” In response, colleges developed parallel and partial courses beyond the classical course. The English or Scientific course offered at many if not most colleges by the third quarter of the century usually embraced the study of Latin but not Greek, often with an increased emphasis on the sciences and modern languages. It was this curriculum, or a parallel offering of classical and English courses, that pre- vailed in both colleges and high schools. As Christie Anne Farnham observes, the classics, “although highly valued, were not the sine qua non of a college.” Instead, many students across the country graduated an English program without Greek. Thus, the English curriculum and textbooks studied at Female were in line with some of the best colleges of their time.21

Young women in a science laboratory in Eastern High School, Washington, D.C. (c. 1899). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

While it is of course true that the rigor of these collegiate studies cannot be determined solely from the use of a particular textbook, the significant overlap between high school and college that emerges here is documented elsewhere as well, particularly in the frequent reports complaining about it in the final decades of the century. At the least, the first two years of college very often overlapped with the last two of high school. Particularly insofar as persistence and graduation rates at colleges remained low, students at Female High School studied a course comparable to that of a great many students in American colleges, revealing a tradition of scholarly achievement often overlooked in histories of higher education. As educational historian Karen Graves argues, speaking of the St. Louis public

54 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY AMY LUECK high schools, the “female scholar” flourished in high schools during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The perspectives of the students and teachers at these schools helps us better understand the academic culture of the early women’s high school as well. 22

Senior class from the Annual Register of the Louisville Female High School for the Year Commencing September 5th 1870 and Ending June 1871, volume 2 of the Louisville Female High School Records. FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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One significant perspective to look toward for insights into the school is that of the principal, the academic and moral leader of the nineteenth-century high school. For its first several years, Female High School operated under the direction of Edward Augustus Holyoke, who served as principal and professor of rhetoric and English literature until 1861, just before his death, and his vision was said to have had a lasting influence on the work of the school. Born in Massachusetts, Holyoke was a descendant on his mother’s side of the ninth president of Harvard College and a line of noted Boston physicians. At least two of his brothers were Harvard graduates, though it is unclear whether Edward attended. According to one genealogical record (compiled by a descendant), he was instead trained at an art academy in New York City, after which he took a position at Munro Collegiate Institute in Elbridge, New York, before moving to Louisville.23 Holyoke may not have been the recognized scholar that many in his family were, but, from all accounts, he led the school with great vision and inspired his students toward greatness. As one writer explained in the Louisville Journal, “As a mere teacher of facts in literature and principles in science, the lamented Holyoke no doubt had many equals;” but the author continues, “there was a peculiar force in his character, a nobility surrounding his every-day life, and a charm in his manner, which fitted him more than ordinary men as the moulder of the female life and the educator of the female mind.” In fact, he was “truly Napoleonic” in this regard, “for he inspired all about him with an appreciating sense of their own worth—of the grandeur of the achievements which they were themselves capable of making.” Reminiscences of one of his first graduates, from the Class of 1858, support this characterization of “a man of marvelous resources and influence. He established the success of the school: and his touch on the lives of his pupils was a call to earnest and untiring endeavor. It was an inspiring two years’ work that the first Senior Class accomplished with him.… He said that so small a class ought to make up in work what it lacked in time; and so we entered very enthusiastically into the spirit of the forty-eight hour day.” 24 A founding member of the Kentucky Association of Teachers, which he served as secretary, Holyoke was a serious academic professional dedicated to improving teaching and learning in his area. He established and edited the Kentucky Family Journal in 1859 and also gave a series of public lectures on various artistic and literary topics meant to bridge the academic-community divide.25 Under Holyoke, the school began its practice of hard study, particularly in Latin and writing. As one of his students explained, “Each day the hour of Latin prose was followed by an hour of English impromptu composition. The strenuous season of writing was not pleasant at first, but we lived to be grateful for the relentless enforce- ment of good spelling and correct style.” The impromptu compositions, in particular, came to be a hallmark of the school and a feature of the annual commencement ceremonies, at which students composed and read them. In a time when even women at progressive coeducational Oberlin College were barred from reading their

56 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY AMY LUECK essays at graduation, it is notable that high school students in Louisville were being trained in rhetoric and elocution, reciting their own original compositions at graduation in front of mixed-gender public audiences from 1858.26 Describing the goals of his curriculum and management, Holyoke said the school aimed to make “honorable, intelligent, high-minded women” with common sense, accurate reasoning, knowledge of the world, and an ability to commu- nicate the knowledge they gained. Likely in response to frequent criticisms of the “superficiality” of women’s higher education, the school aspired to “thoroughness.” “Above all this, however,” Holyoke notes, “we labor to make them independent of thought and action. We endeavor to cultivate the individual character of each and not bring all down to one dead level.”27 Female High School graduate Marie Radcliffe further supported this independence of thought and action in her commencement speech of 1860. Picking up on the criticism of superficial attainments and other criticisms of women’s education, Radcliffe traced differences in men’s and women’s intellectual accomplishments to discrepancies in their education, using this insight as an avenue to extend not only educational but also professional opportunities for women. She argued, “If woman’s mind and talents were thus cultivated and developed” as men’s have been, with collegiate studies, “then we should have fewer aimless dreamers, and more active, brave, and earnest women; and if in their ranks were seen a physician, a lecturer, a writer, an artist, it cannot be unfeminine, it cannot be wrong, for God gave them their talents, and he doeth all things well.” Expressing a sentiment just short of radical for her time, Radcliffe’s speech made clear that Female High School fos- tered Holyoke’s “independent thought and action,” providing a context for students to write and speak publicly about their lives and their positions in society in the second half of the nineteenth century—a privilege not often conferred (or conferred with great anxiety) on northern women at the time. Radcliffe continued to stir up local controversy around women’s rights by speaking at public religious events on behalf of her reverend husband. She also continued to hone her literary skills, which eventually resulted in the posthumous publication of a collection of her prose and poetry in 1884.28 These opportunities for a culturally valued academic curriculum, rhetorical opportunities, and professionalization are somewhat of an anomaly in histories of women’s higher education. As Farnham explains in Educating the Southern Belle, female academies and colleges at the time were not often offering both advanced classical education and public speaking opportunities and professionalization for teaching careers. In particular, classical rhetorical instruction was offered as cultural training detached from the idea of professionalization (largely in the South), and teacher training was offered with a distinctly “practical” bent that did not include classical subjects, rhetorical instruction, and opportunities for public performance (largely in the Northeast), but rarely were the two combined.29

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And yet, at Female students were learning the classics while simultaneously preparing to enter the workforce. Celebrating the pragmatic labor considerations alongside the academic opportunities of the school, the superintendent noted approvingly of Female High School, “All classes now seek its benefits for their children. Young ladies educated in within its walls leave them prepared to meet and struggle with every chance and change of this mortal life.” A newspaper report from 1864 similarly opined that the course of study was “of such a character as to fit a female for any position of life—imparting the mind with the strength of a practical education and the grace of elegant accomplishments.”30 As a southern city imbued with the aristocratic social structure of the slavery system but also with economic and cultural ties to the North, Louisville may have been well-positioned to combine educational traditions and goals in this hybrid manner. But this educational innovation also seems informed by the high school’s particular institutional position as well, especially insofar as it is reflected in the experience of other western cities, such as Cincinnati and St. Louis. The evidence of rhetorical opportunities and advanced classical curricula at other high schools suggests that the story of Louisville Female High School constitutes not an exception but instead what proponents of microhistory call an “exceptional normal” in the history of higher education. As such, Female High School’s historical value “lies not in its uniqueness, but in its exemplariness.” It is a seemingly exceptional case that gestures to an overlooked trend—a case that makes us reconsider what “normal” is. The new normal that emerges here is the educational rigor and significance of early women’s high schools in the landscape of higher education, challenging our tacit acceptance of the distinction between historical high schools and colleges.31 With their uncertain position in the academic landscape, their Janus-faced mission, and their ties to the common schools, high schools like Female proved to be an exception to the presumed limitation of women’s higher education and professional training in the nineteenth century. The pattern of academic rigor and opportunity among other midwestern and even some northern high schools suggests that the scrutiny of “high schools girls” may have differed from that of “college women.” Being part of the common school system meant that students were “our children” or “our girls,” as they were often referred to, even though they were as old as twenty- one years. The discourse of girlhood serves to contain these students and their rhetorical activities within a safe and wholesome frame, far from the specter of culturally disruptive “college women.” Overall, the rendering of students as either girls or future teachers, both benign figures in the social imaginary, that dominated the discursive landscape extended the rhetorical, educational, and professional opportunities of students at Female High School. Because of their indeterminate name and their rhetorical association with the common schools, the high schools could offer women an advanced curriculum and professional training without public cen- sure and, indeed, with public support. 32

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Thus, though historians have observed that some high schools had advanced curriculums in spite of being “merely” high schools, “high school girls” also enjoyed an advanced curriculum because of the high school’s particular position at the upper reaches of the common school system. That is, the status of such schools as “high schools” (or academies and seminaries) and not “colleges” was consequential to rendering women’s access to higher education unobjectionable, because it was indeterminate. Nonetheless, this status has simultaneously withheld the most valued forms of educational certification from these students, both in their own time and in subsequent historical discussions of them. This exclusion serves to suppress the value of the high school over time, particularly as the high school came to be positioned as preparatory and subordinate to the college by the end of the century. And our continued adherence to these distinctions in historical discussions of higher education perpetuates the devaluation of these young women’s educational achievements. Overall, if our lack of attention to high schools in the history of higher education in this country has seemed obvious and rational from the perspective of the present, microhistories of high schools challenge this omission. This is not to say that there are no differences between high schools and colleges but that we have overemphasized the differences and obscured the reality of internal variation within each category. It is important to take stock of both this internal inconsistency and variety and those boundaries that remained largely impermeable, particularly for women. High schools are not colleges, but the ways they differ from colleges are not consistent and, in the case of high schools obtaining college charters, seem to be based as much on gender as on other curricular criteria. While most major urban school systems contemplated extending their high schools into colleges around midcentury, in the case of gender-segregated high schools it was not uncommon for a city’s men’s high school to actively challenge the boundaries between high schools and colleges through such charters, while their women’s high schools did not. For example, schools such as Baltimore’s Central High School (later Baltimore City College) merged with or became colleges, while others, like Philadelphia’s Central High School, remained marked as high schools but conferred bachelor’s degrees on graduates (a privilege that school retains to this day). In each case, the corollary women’s high schools in these cities remained as high schools, neither obtaining charters to convert to colleges nor granting academic degrees. In Baltimore, school leaders assured citizens that, by confining to the English branches of study, the female high schools would not be equivalent to the men’s, which was unequivocally “the highest school of our system.” In Philadelphia, by a similar turn, the Central High School for men conferred bachelor’s degrees while young women until 1860 had recourse only to a normal school, the purpose of which was expressly “not to give an extended course of instruction to all the pupils of the Female Grammar Schools” but only to train teachers for the public schools.33

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While women have been consistently barred from the most valuable forms of educational capital, they nonetheless have a long history of academic achievement in the spaces to which they gained access. Students and teachers have found space for advanced learning in a variety of curricular and extracurricular sites, particularly in the ill-defined nineteenth-century high school. We will have a better sense of the history of higher education and rhetorical opportunity for young women when we take into consideration the work of the nineteenth-century women’s high school and other spaces that have seemed, from our common institutional assumptions, to fall outside of “higher education.” And, particularly in a time of increasingly blurred institutional divides today, we can use our enriched sense of higher education’s past to inform our visions of its present and future.

1 “History,” Atherton High School, Jefferson County Public points out, high schools had very much in common with Schools, accessed March 15, 2015, http://schools.jef- academies as a curricular tradition (Reese, Origins of the ferson.kyschools.us/high/atherton/history.html; Report American High School, 92). Nonetheless, the popularity of the Board of Trustees of the Public Schools of Louisville and influence of public high schools grew significantly (Louisville, KY: Bradley & Gilbert, 1872), 63; Edwin in the second half of the century, particularly after 1880. Cornelius Broome, A Historical and Critical Discussion of African American women and men would experience College Admission Requirements (New York: Macmillan, this same expansion when Central Colored High School 1903), 111. For more on the uncertain divide between opened in 1882. high schools, colleges, and academies, see: John Franklin Brown, The American High School (New York: Macmillan, 3 Public School Laws of the City of Louisville, A Compilation 1915), 30; William Reese, The Origins of the American of the Acts of the Legislature and Laws Establishing and High School (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), Governing the Male High School, the Female High School 34, 17; David Tyack, Turning Points in American and the Public Schools of the City of Louisville, Ky. from Educational History (Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell, 1967), the Year 1828 to the Year 1882, prepared by Randolph 354; Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High H. Blain (1882), 20–21, microfilm, Jefferson County School 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Public Schools Archives, Louisville, KY; “Proceedings Press, 1969), 3, 7; Karen Graves, Girls’ Schooling during of the Board of Trustees,” Louisville Daily Courier, May the Progressive Era: From Female Scholar to Domesticated 15, 1851. For more on the early connections between Citizen. (New York: Garland, 1998), 107; R. D. Gidney Male and University of Louisville, see Sam Adkins and W. Millar, Inventing Secondary Education: The Rise of and M. R. Holtzman, The First Hundred Years: The the High School in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal: History of Louisville Male High School (Louisville, KY: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1990), 254; Marc A. Administration and Alumni of Louisville Male High VanOverbeke, The Standardization of American Schooling: School, 1991); Kentucky Writers’ Project of the Work Linking Secondary and Higher Education, 1870–1910 Projects Administration, A Centennial History of the (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 18, 27; Christie University of Louisville (Louisville, KY: University of Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Louisville, 1939). Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 4 “300 Male High Grads Become U. of L. Alumni,” Alumni Bulletin (July 1998): n.p., University of Louisville 2 Margery W. Davies, Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter Archives and Special Collections, Louisville, KY; Public (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 57; School Laws, 43; “Du Pont Manual High School,” Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Male High Encyclopedia of Louisville, ed. John E. Kleber (Lexington: School, Female High School, and Public Schools of Louisville University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 260. The first (Louisville, KY: Bradley & Gilbert, 1861), 37–38; Reports known female University of Louisville graduate finished of the Louisville School Board (Louisville, KY: Bradley in 1903, from the medical school. Women were admitted & Gilbert, 1895), 55, 85–86. Undoubtedly, additional to the new School of Arts and Sciences in 1907, and young women were receiving formal and informal higher comprised ten of the eighteen graduates in 1908 (“Firsts education at a range of private and public institutions, for Women at the University of Louisville,” Women’s though this data is not available in city records. As Reese Center News 13 [Spring 2006], 6).

60 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY AMY LUECK

5 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Male High Archives and Special Collections, Louisville, KY; Principal School, Female High School, and Public Schools of Louisville Grant noted in 1860 that “nearly all” female graduates to (Louisville, KY: Bradley & Gilbert, 1860), 16; Annual date had been hired as teachers (Annual Report 1860, 10). Report of the Board of Trustees of the Male High School, In the 1864 annual report, Principal Chase noted that ten Female High School, and Public Schools of Louisville of twelve students had expressed interest in teaching, and (Louisville, KY: Bradley & Gilbert, 1868), 15–18. four had already secured positions in the public schools by the time of his writing (Annual Report of the Board of 6 Reese, Origins of the American High School, 34. On the Trustees of the University and Public Schools to the General relativity of high schools, see also Tyack, Turning Points in Council of the City of Louisville. [Louisville, KY: Bradley American Educational History, 354. & Gilbert, 1864], 72). In 1865, he noted that fourteen of nineteen expected to engage in teaching (Annual Report 7 Tyack, Turning Points in American Educational History; of the Board of Trustees of the University and Public Schools Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Male High to the General Council of the City of Louisville [Louisville, School, Female High School, and Public Schools of Louisville, KY: Bradley & Gilbert, 1865], 68), and Superintendent to the General Council of the City of Louisville, for the George Tingley used the fact that “three-fourths of those Scholastic Year of 1859-’60 (Louisville, KY: Bradley & who graduate desire to engage in teaching” to argue for the Gilbert), 8. establishment of a distinct normal class in 1866, as well as a training school (Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of 8 James Berlin, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century the University and Public Schools to the General Council of American Colleges (Carbondale: Southern Illinois the City of Louisville, [Louisville, KY: Bradley & Gilbert, University Press, 1984), 41. For examples of private high 1866], 19). schools available, see a notice for a “Female High School” Louisville run by Mr. and Mrs. Atkinson circulated in the 14 Annual Report 1860, 10; Annual Report 1863, 99; Annual Morning Courier of 1849, inviting Louisville’s public to Report 1868, 18. “entrust to their care a large number of lassies, from the bounding and graceful age of ten, and younger to ‘sweet 15 J. D. Matthews, “History of Education in Kentucky,” sixteen,’ and twenty” (“From Tampa Bay,” Louisville Bulletin of Kentucky Department of Education 7 (July 1914): Morning Courier, September 7, 1849). Similarly, the clas- 84; Ruby Doyle, Recalling the Record: A Documentary sified ads of an 1855 issue of theDaily Courier, the year History of the African-American Experience within the before Louisville’s public high schools opened, feature no Louisville Public School System of Kentucky (1870–1975) fewer than eight schools, institutes, seminaries, and even (Chapel Hill, NC: Professional Press, 2005), 193. a “regularly chartered college” for young women, not to mention the opportunities for young men (“Classified 16 Annual Report 1860, 2; Annual Report 1861, 49. Ad 5—No Title,” Louisville Daily Courier, August 27, 1855). As is clear here, “high school” is not about age 17 For a discussion of average college admission and gradua- but level of study, and there was little sense at the time tion ages, see Association of American Universities, Journal of a certain age for high school students beyond the fact of Proceedings and Addresses of the Tenth Annual Conference that they were typically at least fourteen, as many colleges (Chicago: Association of American Universities, 1909), designated as well. Eventually, free high school tuition in 35–36. As one example, 1860 graduate Marie B. Radcliffe Louisville was limited to those under twenty-five years was born in 1839, a fact reported in the introduction to of age. Also see Janet Eldred and Peter Mortensen on her published volume of prose and poetry in 1884 (Poetry Kentucky’s Science Hill Female Academy (Imagining and Prose of Marie Radcliffe Butler,ed. Thomas D. Butler, Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States [Cincinnati: Standard Publishing Company, 1884], viii). [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002]). 18 VanOverbeke, Standardization of American Schooling. 9 “Annual Report on the Public Schools,” Louisville Daily Annual Report Seventh Annual Catalogue of Courier, Aug. 5, 1854; Annual Report 1855, 22. 19 1860, 3–4; Officers and Students of Hillsdale College (Toledo: Pelton 10 Annual Report 1855, 23; Annual Report 1860, 10. & Waggoner, 1862), 28; “Formal English Grammar as a Discipline,” Teacher’s College Record 14 (September 1913): 11 “Annual Report,” 2; Annual Report 1860, 32. 5; David M. Warren, A System of Physical Geography (Philadelphia: H. Cowperthwait & Co., 1863), 2. 12 Annual Report 1855, 23; Annual Report 1860, 2–5; Students are reported to be studying one of Noble Annual Report 1868, 18. Butler’s grammar textbooks, though the annual report does not designate which one was in use. Butler, a notable Report of the Board of Trustees of the Public Schools of 13 local educator, published his textbooks in Louisville with Louisville (Louisville, KY: Bradley & Gilbert, 1873), 70; Morton & Griswold, and several of his works were used “History of the Louisville Normal School,” Louisville Girls throughout the schools. High School Collection, folder 3, University of Louisville

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20 Annual Report 1860, 3–4; Catalogue of the Officers and 27 Annual Report 1860, 10, 12. Students of Brown University 1838–9 (Providence: Knowles, Vose & Company, 1838), 13; Annual Catalogue of the 28 Ibid., 27. For more on Radcliffe and other student com- Officers and Students of Oberlin College, for the College Year mencement addresses, see Amy J. Lueck, “‘A Maturity 1857–58 (Oberlin, OH: James M. Fitch, 1857), 41; The of Thought Very Rare in Young Girls’: Women’s Public College of William and Mary, from Its Foundation, 1660– Engagement in Nineteenth-Century High School 1874 (Richmond: J. W. Randolph & English, 1874), 171; Commencement Essays,” Rhetoric Review 34 (2015): M. M. Fisher, History of Westminster College 1851–1903 129–46. (Columbia, MO: E. W. Stephens, 1903), 12. 29 Farnham, Education of the Southern Belle, 32. 21 Reese, Origins of the American High School, 92; Farnham, Annual Report Louisville Journal, Education of the Southern Belle, 23. 30 1860, 27; quoted in Annual Report 1864, 76. 22 Tyack, Turning Points in American Educational History; Graves, Girls’ Schooling. 31 Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American 23 Memorial of the Harvard Class of 1856, 145; “Edward History 88 (2001): 133. Augustus Holyoke III,” Holyoke Family Genealogy— Person Sheet, Larry Holyoke’s Web Site, accessed Feb. 12, 32 Lueck, “Maturity of Thought Very Rare in Young Girls”; Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon 2017, http://ynotamac.org/geneaolgy/database/ps02/ Lindal Buchanan, and Antebellum Women Rhetors ps02_415.html. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). 24 Annual Report 1864, 75; Elizabeth H. Woodbury, “The Thirty-Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners Class of 1858,” Record (school yearbook), n.p., Filson 33 of Public Schools to the Mayor and City Council of Historical Society, Louisville, KY. Baltimore (Baltimore: James Young, 1863), 21–22; Thirty- 25 Amos Kendall, “Educational Conventions and Ninth Annual Report of the Controllers of the Public Schools Associations. Kentucky,” American Journal of Education of the First School District of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: 16 (1866): 355–56. Board of Controllers, 1858), 162.

26 Woodbury, “Class of 1858”; Farnham, Education of the Southern Belle; David Gold, Rhetoric at the Margins (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008); Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 28–29.

62 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Collection Essay Connections in the Collections Cincinnati Museum Center’s Enno Meyer Collection

incinnati Museum Center’s Enno Meyer Collection was donated to the Ethnology Department of the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History (now part of Cincinnati Museum Center) in the 1980s and comprises Coriginal photographic prints and glass negatives of American Indians, an assortment of American Indian artifacts, a handful of letters and some miscellaneous papers. Although small, this collection illuminates an interesting episode in a multifaceted Cincinnatian’s young life and in Cincinnati’s history. The collection and the story behind it are thoroughly described elsewhere, but a brief retelling is necessary here.1 Enno Meyer (1874–1947) began his photography career when he was a boy by working in his father’s photography studio in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. He also pursued a career in art, graduating from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1897. While still a student, he began to focus his artistic talent on his interest in animals. To this end, he became involved with the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens, providing animal photographs for the zoo while he satisfied his own desire to study and draw a wide variety of live animals. Eventually, he combined his photographic skill, artistic talent, and interest in animals in his career as a painter specializing in portraits of well-bred dogs and horses and as a nationally known and respected dog breeder and show judge.2 Young Enno Meyer’s unexpected connection with American Indians began in June 1895 when over a hundred Cree men, women, and children from Montana were abandoned by a failing Wild West show and ended up stranded in Bellevue, Kentucky, just south of the Ohio River near Cincinnati. After much debate about what to do with this destitute group, help came from an unexpected quarter. The Cincinnati Zoo stepped forward and invited the band of Cree to set up their camp on the zoo’s wooded grounds. There they would have a secure living area, food, and an opportunity to earn their train fare back to their home near Havre, Montana, about fifteen hundred miles away. They performed their own Wild West shows at the zoo, similar to what they had been doing before their aban- donment. The Cree visitors were a big hit with Cincinnati area residents, and the zoo had record attendance that summer. Twenty-one-year-old Enno Meyer, pho- tographer, art student, and minor employee of the zoo, was no doubt delighted by the chance to photograph some of these visitors. Fortunately, the Cree earned enough money to travel back to Montana in July. The zoo hoped to repeat this lucrative event, so it arranged to bring a group of Sicangu Lakota Sioux from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota to Cincinnati for the next summer.

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In June 1896, eighty-nine Sicangu Sioux men, women, and children arrived in Cincinnati by train, along with their horses, tipis, and belongings. They set up their village on the zoo’s grounds and then proceeded to charm the people of Cincinnati. Like the Cree visitors of the year before, they performed in Wild West–type shows. They also welcomed zoo visitors into their village, and, in spite of a language barrier, they made friends with some of their Cincinnati guests. Some of the Sicangu had their hospitality returned and were invited to visit the homes of their new friends and were taken on sightseeing and shopping trips. One Cincinnatian who eagerly visited and made friends was Enno Meyer; he obviously won their friendship and trust, for his photographs show the Sicangu relaxed and pleased to pose for him. They valued his photographs so highly that after they had returned to their reservation, some wrote letters asking him to send them more of his photographs of their friends and relatives. In return, Meyer acquired a small collection of artifacts from the Sicangu.

Sicangu Sioux woman (on right) wearing blanket Sicangu Sioux man (on left) wearing blanket decorated with beaded strip. Enno Meyer photo decorated with beaded strip. Enno Meyer photo taken at Cincinnati Zoo in 1896. taken at Cincinnati Zoo in 1896. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

64 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY LORY GREENLAND

Nearly a hundred years later, in January1994, the executor of an estate brought what he guessed was an American Indian wampum belt to the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, now part of Cincinnati Museum Center, to be identified for the settling of the estate. The curator of anthropology and several staff members watched as the executor unrolled a long, beaded leather strip onto a table. The curator immediately saw that it was not a wampum belt but a Plains Indian blanket strip. Plains Indians traditionally made blankets from bison hides. The huge hide was first cut in half to make the arduous tanning process easier. Afterward, the halves were sewn back together and the seam hidden by an applied strip of leather decorated with porcupine quill or trade bead embroidery. After the bison herds were destroyed in the nineteenth century, Plains Indians had to use wool blankets given or sold to them, but they made these blankets uniquely their own by sewing a decorative strip down the center, reminiscent of the old buffalo blanket. To help explain this, the curator asked for some photographs to be brought from the ethnology collections. Conveniently at hand was a binder of copy prints of Enno Meyer’s 1896 photos of the Sicangu Sioux at the Cincinnati Zoo. As the curator and group pored over photos, the chatter gradually subsided and magni- fying glasses appeared for serious examinations. There was a stunned silence, and then noise broke out anew. To everyone’s astonishment and delight, this was not just a similar beaded blanket strip, but the very blanket strip shown in a couple of Meyer’s photos. Not only was the beaded pattern distinctive, but magnification of one photo revealed the oddly shaped patches of missing beads shared by the real strip on the table. To everyone’s further delight, the estate then donated the blanket strip to the museum. The only information given was that the blanket strip had once belonged to the estate of the decedent’s father, Julius Thomson, who had been a local tent and awning maker at the time of the Sicangu visit. There were no surviving close family members to tell how Julius acquired the blanket strip, but the museum was allowed to make a copy of his old handwritten workbook of measurements and diagrams for canvas tents, awnings, tarpaulins, et cetera. It named local business clients as well as circuses and a Wild West show, though there was no mention of the zoo. Julius may have been just a casual visitor to the zoo that summer, or he may have supplied tents or canvas backdrops for the Sicangu’s shows. Perhaps he wanted to satisfy his professional curiosity by examining authentic Plains tipis. Whatever his reasons, he acquired a wonderful souvenir, and Cincinnati Museum Center eventually acquired a remarkable addition to its collections.

Beaded blanket strip—61.5 inches long. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

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Detail of blanket strip showing patches of missing beads. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

Detail of Enno Meyer photo of Sicangu Sioux man taken at Cincinnati Zoo in 1896. Hand is near the patches of missing beads. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

In 1986, collectors R. Howard and Janet C. Melvin, and Monte P. and Mary Louise Melvin donated Enno Meyer’s album of original prints, plus artifacts, letters, papers, and other Meyer belongings. In 1989, Mr. and Mrs. Robert H. Wessel donated Meyer’s glass negatives. Robert Wessel was the son of Bessie Hoover Wessel (1889-1973), a Cincinnati artist who acquired some of Enno Meyer’s glass negatives from his widow and used them as models for her oil paintings. The Estate of Franklin H. Thomson of Fort Thomas, Kentucky donated the blanket strip in 1994. Lory Greenland Adjunct Curatorial Assistant in Ethnology Cincinnati Museum Center

1 Susan Labry Meyn, “Mutual Infatuation: Rosebud Sioux and Cincinnatians,” Queen City Heritage: Journal of the Cincinnati Historical Society 52 (Spring–Summer 1994): 30–48.

2 Susan Labry Meyn, “Enno Meyer: A Biography,” 1987, unpublished typescript, Enno Meyer files, Cincinnati Museum Center Ethnology Department.

66 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Collection Essay Full of Charm and Variety The Scrapbook Collection of the Filson Historical Society

crapbooking is not a recent phenomenon; the history of turning a book into an album filled with ephemera dates back to the Middle Ages, when it was quite common for well-educated people to keep diaries or journals Sthat recorded their thoughts on life’s activities and events around them. Perhaps the earliest known surviving journal is the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris (The diary of a bourgeois from Paris.) Written by an anonymous French priest sometime between 1409 and 1449, this personal account of fifteenth-century life in France is a treasure trove for historians.1 During the nineteenth century, the emergence and increased accessibility of printed material sparked a new trend. People began filling blank, bound books— previously used for journals or artwork—with clippings, cards, and printed memorabilia. The books could be used to house a mix of personal journal entries, hand-drawn sketches, and watercolors, along with various scraps of printed material, such as calling cards. These books were literally books of scraps. Throughout the nineteenth century, scrapbooks that more closely resemble what we think of as scrapbooks today began to emerge. Several technological changes, including the development of the industrial printing press, drove this evolution, creating the basis for the art form still practiced today. There is a wide variety of topics in the Filson Historical Society’s large scrapbook collection; church histories and registers, recipe books, school memory books, family keepsakes, et cetera. One of the most common themes for scrapbooks is ephemera from social activities. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, elaborately printed greeting cards, calling cards, postcards, prayer cards, advertising trading cards, and other materials began to be viewed as novelty keepsakes. The scrapbook of Virginia and Louis Bryant includesfamily correspondence from relatives in Danville, Kentucky; scattered material on Centre College; literature on Kerry cattle; and liquor bottle labels, with some from Kentucky dis- tilleries. The scrapbook also contains memorabilia, correspondence, arrangements, menus, and receipts from a 1923 tour the couple took to Europe and the Mediterranean, and a 1924 tour of Canada and Algeria. A scrapbook that Miss Marion Amis Green (1886–1963) donated to the Filson has pages dedicated to a grand tour of Europe in 1880. The tour started at Liverpool, a major port for steamships crossing the Atlantic, and proceeded

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through England, France, Italy, Germany, and Scotland before concluding back at Liverpool. The scrapbook’s creator pasted staionery letterhead and illustrations of the hotels in the book and added the dates of her party’s stay at the hotels to give a wonderful visual timeline.

Italian hotel letterhead. Marian Green Scrapbook English hotel letterhead. Marian Green Scrapbook (c. 1880). (c. 1880). FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Cologne hotel letterhead. Marian Green Scrapbook (c. 1880). FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

68 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY CASSIE BRATCHER

Another scrapbook contains advertisements and events held at the Fontaine Ferry Amusement Park of Louisville, Kentucky, in 1923. Charles Wilson, the creator of this album, managed the park in the early 1920s. Articles discuss picnics held by various Louisville organizations and the entertainment troupes that performed at the park. De Wolf Hopper and his opera company performed there for six weeks, presenting Iolanthe, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado.

Newspaper clipping for the opening of DeWolf Hopper’s “Mikado”. Charles Wilson Scrapbook (1923). FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Ad for Double T Bread Day at Fontaine Ferry Ad for the opening of the Fontaine Ferry Swimming Pool. Park. Charles Wilson Scrapbook (1923). Charles Wilson Scrapbook (1923). FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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In 1889, Otto Deatrick (1878–1961) used a blank Civil War clothing ledger as a notebook to write out school lessons and make pastel drawings. Deatrick’s drawings consist of maps, whimsical characters, birds, and floats from the brochure of the 1888 Satellites of Mercury parade. His drawings of birds are from an 1889 collection of cigarette cards which are included in the scrapbook, and his other drawings were probably made from similar advertisements. There are a few other items in the scrapbook, including a page of family photographs pasted onto the back of a map showing Deatrick properties on Louisville’s Main Street.

Float no. 18, drawn by Otto Deatrick from an 1888 brochure of The Satellites of Mecury parade. Otto Deatrick Scrapbook (c. 1889). FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Anna Bertrand collected greeting cards for many years, from holidays such as Valentine’s Day, Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Most of the cards are from the early twentieth century and use sentiments no longer common such as “winsome.” Someone did a wonderful job of organizing this album but made the unfortunate choice of pasting the cards onto the black, acidic paper that is common in older albums. A Filson volunteer placed each card from the album in a protective Mylar sleeve. One of my favorites from this collection is Otto S. Deatrick at 10 years old. a Thanksgiving card with a turkey couple riding in Otto Deatrick Scrapbook (c. 1889). a corncob car. FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Valentine. Anna Bertrand Scrapbook. Thanksgiving postcard. Anna Bertrand Scrapbook. FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Miss Carrie Harting collected newspaper clippings, dance cards, invitations, photographs, admission tickets, wedding announcements, menus, ribbons, and drawings. The items in her scrapbook document the activities of a young socialite from Lexington, Kentucky, during the 1890s. Carrie married Dr. William Irvin Abell in 1907, and they moved to Louisville, where he had a successful medical practice and they raised four sons.

Miss Carrie Harting of Lexington about 1896. Carrie Harting Scrapbook (1890’s). FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Dance card from the Winchester, Kentucky Social Club about 1896, Carrie Harting Scrapbook (1890’s). FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Newspapers went into widespread circulation during the nineteenth century, and readers clipped everything from family mentions to recipes to historic news stories. The Horace Gooch scrapbook of 1853–1874 contains clippings of local and national news events, such as the marriage of Tom Thumb to Lavinia Warren, the Episcopal Church split of 1873, and a fire at Louisville’s Galt House. Many of our scrapbooks also contain clippings and ephemera concerning various wars. The Civil War is the most prominent, but the Spanish–American and both World Wars are also featured. By the mid-nineteenth century, many Bible publishers started including pre- printed pages to facilitate family recordkeeping. Spaces to record births, deaths, and wedding dates inspired people to store newspaper clippings and important documents between the pages of their family Bibles—essentially using them as scrapbooks. Filson volunteer Paul Olliges recently went through our Bible collection and photocopied all documents he found inside. He then wrapped the Bibles in acid-free paper, and placed the photocopies in our Family File collection so researchers can easily access them. The Filson holds several multi-volume scrapbook collections. Lula Kenner Dudley, wife of Charles E. Dudley and mother of Louisville artist Carrie Douglas Dudley Ewen, filled seven volumes with clippings, documents, and photographs of the family, news clippings from the Louisville Herald written by her

72 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY CASSIE BRATCHER son Bruce Dudley, and clippings on Fleming County, Kentucky history. Edward J. McDermott (1852–1926) managed to fill twenty-two albums with clippings on a wide variety of topics, including the death in Florence of famous Kentucky sculptor Joel T. Hart; a burial notice for John Cable Breckinridge (1821– 1875) a lawyer, politician, and soldier from Lexington, Kentucky, who repre- sented Kentucky in both houses of Congress and became the 14th and youngest- ever Vice President of the United States, serving from 1857 to 1861; and Richard H. Collins’s “Lecture on Kentucky.” A copy of Theodore O’Hara’s poem “Bivouac of the Dead” and a notice of the funeral for Susan Preston Hepburn, sister of Confederate general and congressman William Preston, and founder of the Women’s auxiliary of the Preston Masonic Lodge that raised some of the funds to build Louisville’s Masonic Home, appear in volume nine. Marginalia in a printed book can give the volume a kind of scrapbook status. An edition of The Quatrains of Omar Khayyaam of Nishapur, translated from Persian to English by Eban Francis Thompson, has wonderful art in the margins of many pages. The book belonged to Dr. John G. Clem (1879–1945), a member of the Filson, and was given to the library by his nephew Dudley Ashton in 1989. The pen-and-ink drawings were done by Paul Plaschke (1880–1954), a native of Germany, who achieved recognition as a political cartoonist through his work at the Evening Post, Louisville Times, and Courier-Journal newspapers in Louisville during the 1920s and at Chicago’s Herald Examiner in the 1930s.2

Two Illustrated pages from the Filson’s copy of The Quatrains of Omar Khayyam with illustrations by Paul Plaschke. FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Whether it is a formal album neatly filled and organized or something as simple as a published book full of someone’s doodles, the popularity of making and archiving scrapbooks continues. These works may not be of any great monetary value, but family members and historians may consider the information contained within them priceless. Kathryn Bratcher The Filson Historical Society Librarian

1 Nancy Nally, “The Fascinating History of Scrapbooking,”Scrapbook.com, n.d. https://www.scrapbook.com/articles/history-of-scrapbooking.

2 “Paul Albert Plaschke, 1880–1954,” askART.com, http://www.askart.com/artist/Paul_Albert_ Plaschke/10202/Paul_Albert_Plaschke.aspx#

74 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Review Essay Toward a New Railroad History? Limitations and Possibilities

he role of the railroad in the development of nineteenth-century America was so vast as to defy comprehensive understanding, yet most academic historians no longer give railroads much consideration. One Tcan fill a local historical society meeting with a lecture entitled “The Railroads in this Town,” and the Transcontinental Railroad is still ubiquitous in college textbooks and lectures. The same can be said, albeit diminishing by the year, of the tumultuous connection between the railroads and the Progressive Era (moment, movement, period—take your pick). As a consequence, both the nitty-gritty detail and the epic stories of success and failure have faded from the conscious- ness of the general public, the recent television series Hell on Wheels notwith- standing. The romance of the rails still clings to the American conception of self, but ever more distant from the historical reality. Despite apparent disdain from the academy there are scholars, public historians, and amateurs still toiling away at traditional railroad history, and these two volumes are fair representations of that ongoing work. In many ways the genre has not advanced since its emergence in the middle of the previous century. And it is that issue which should concern us. Simon Cordery’s The Iron Road in the Prairie State is a traditional, institutional railroad history. If there is a state that was made by the railroads, it is Illinois. Chicago remains the railroad capital of North America, and the state’s railroads formed a critical infrastructure linking the farming and ranching economies of the Great Plains, the industry and mining of the Midwest, the timber and international trade of the Pacific Northwest, and the cotton and timber of the South with the markets, specialty manufacturing, ports, and capital of the Northeast during the emergence of American industrial capitalism. Simon Cordery. The Iron Road in the Prairie State: The book provides an overview from the The Story of Illinois Railroading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. 240 pp. 66 b/w illus. industry’s infancy in the 1830s to the pres- 6 Maps. ISBN: 9780253019066 ent, with an emphasis on the years prior to (cloth), $60.00.

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1945. Cordery takes fourteen of his eighteen chapters to get to the end of the 1920s. While the older history of railroading is fascinating, it is a story that has been told many times. The field needs more work on the period after 1945, as a once-mighty industry nearly collapsed and would only be resuscitated by jetti- soning much of the structure and process that had characterized its golden years. While uneven in terms of chronology, Cordery’s coverage is comprehensive in both geography and scale. He does not neglect the state’s many interurban railways and smaller carriers, and devotes ample space to the largest railways that provided the majority of Illinois’s rail service. The railroads of the state are set in a tight parallel to the national development and evolution of the industry. His Illinois is both central to that story and utterly normal in its telling. This is a richly detailed, well-documented, and nicely illustrated volume, fully in keeping with the high standards set by series editors George M. Smerk and H. Roger Grant. Cordery has a particular talent for unraveling the financial and organizational histories of the railroads that served the state. His discussion of the infamous Reid-Moore Syndicate’s notoriously complex early twentieth century financial manipulations of the Rock Island Lines is a marvel of clarity. Cordery provides one of the clearest explanations yet on how that episode hampered the company in ways that would eventually contribute to its collapse after World War II. Likewise, his careful discussion of the decay of passenger service in the state is both detailed and unsparing including a tightly-written section on the development and consequences of the Good Roads Movement. However, the book bears some of the limitations typical of the genre. The intended readership for this book and the series within which it is published is the non-scholarly railroad buff. The genre rarely advances the historiography, avoids contemporary work outside of the field, and has a generally nostalgic air. Traditional railroad histories focus on financial, engineering, and operational matters, paying little attention to the social history of the industry. The experiences of railroad workers are contained largely within a single chapter devoted mostly to the nineteenth century, aside from a discussion of the 1922 Shopmen’s Strike that is generally sympathetic to the viewpoint of management. The political power wielded in the state by the railway brotherhoods in the early twentieth century, especially around World War I, is not discussed. In Cordery’s otherwise excellent discussion of the decline of passenger service there is little discussion of the workers who lost their jobs, or of the concerns of small-town residents who saw that service as evidence that they lived somewhere important. It is to small towns and bigger cities that Arthur Olson turns his attention. Forging the Bee Line explores the development of a continuous rail line between Cleveland, Ohio, and St. Louis, Missouri, stitched together by the efforts of two competing groups of boosters, one centered in Indiana, and the

76 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY SCOTT E. RANDOLPH other in Cleveland. This straight line, which in time would form the spine of the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis Railway, better known as the “Big Four,” provides Olson with a taut canvas on which to explore the history of Midwestern nineteenth-century railroad development. While its life as an independent carrier was brief with the expanding New York Central system taking stock control in 1906, the “Big Four” was one of the great and largely forgotten railroad combinations of the late nineteenth century. The carrier linked most of the major cities and important industrial communities of Ohio, Indiana, southern Michigan, and Illinois at its formation by merger in 1889, helping to tie together the industrial Midwest. The history of early railroad development is confusing at best, and often almost indecipherable at worst. Early efforts often suffered dearly from the consequences of insufficient resources, planning, honesty, and vision. The Bee Line story begins in the 1840s, at the dawn of the railroad age, with two local roads, the Indianapolis and Bellefontaine Railroad, building east from the Indiana state capital to the Ohio state line at Union, and the contemporaneous Bellefontaine and Indiana Railroad, constructed initially to run west from Galion, Ohio, to the state line. Each sought to control its own destiny and the interests of its region by being the funnel for the traffic of the east coast to the west via Indianapolis and eventually St. Louis. As locally conceived and funded ventures they began with local control, but as the economy and the industry hurtled forward over the next forty years that control faded. The “Hoosier Partisans” as Olson calls them, Arthur Andrew Olson III. Forging the Bee Line had success initially, but the dynamic rail- Railroad, 1848-1889: The Rise and Fall of the Hoosier Partisans and the Cleveland Clique. road landscape of the mid-nineteenth cen- Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2017. tury eventually forced them to seek alli- 268 pp. 20 b/w illus. ISBN: 9781606352823 (cloth), $44.95. ances with the Ohio investors and builders he calls the “Cleveland Clique.” Olson’s sympathies lie with the Hoosier Partisans, but in their efforts to expand and attract traffic they were forced to make financial and operational accommodations that slowly, but inexorably, reduced their control until it disappeared altogether. Rather than charting an independent course, the Bee Line eventually came to be one of many minor actors in the larger plans of some of the era’s more infamous railroad financiers and developers, from the

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Vanderbilt family to Jay Gould. In that role, and capably narrated by Olson, it contributed to one of the many bankruptcies that plagued the Erie Railroad throughout its existence. While Olson declaims any intent to engage in the “evaluative critique of current scholarship and the formulation of a premise or theory,” the work as a whole would benefit from engaging the excellent scholarship that has appeared in the last thirty years on the very subject of his work (xvii). Several scholars, most notably John L. Larson, have illustrated how and why local promotion and management of railways succumbed to financial coercion and control from Boston and New York. Likewise, after the 1860s, it was global finance relationships that dictated the rules of entrance and expansion in the industry, and that was predicated on control by the financiers, not the desires of local builders and boosters that had characterized railroad development in its earliest permutations. Where Olson shines is in his detailed narrative of the complexities of local politics, and the self-dealing, free-wheeling, and boisterous booster ethos of the era. This is not a story to mine for tales of moral action, but rather illustrates what the old Progressive historiographic tradition of writers like Matthew Josephson has always told us: the railroad business was a dirty one. Vast fortunes could be made overnight, often on the basis of outrageous chicanery and deceit; corporate capitalization was a figment of imagination, and the concerns of the trading public were of little interest to those who founded and ran these early enterprises. Looking perhaps to a wider audience, Olson includes a series of detailed and readable maps, an essential compendium of railroad corporate names, their chro- nologies, and developmental flowcharts, and an appendix of brief biographies of the principle characters. This is a commendable practice, and one other authors and presses would be wise to follow. Traditional railroad history has fallen out of favor in the mainstream of academic historical work largely because its focus remains parochial and often does not engage the wider historiography. Both railroad history and the wider field of American history would benefit from that deeper engagement. Railroads were a prime mover of the American economy for nearly a century—they were embedded in nearly every aspect of society, culture, economics, and politics. It is time that railroad history casts aside the insularity that has come to characterize the field. Reviews can often sound dismissive, and that is not the intent here. These are both enjoyable reads, deeply-researched, well-written, well-illustrated, and typeset with an eye for beauty (a rare commodity in these days of ever-thinner margins in the publishing business). Both volumes should be well-received by interested lay readers, and by local and regional historians of the Midwest and Ohio Valley. Scott E. Randolph University of Redlands

78 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Review Essay Race, Paternalism, and Educational Reform in the Twentieth-Century South

wo new historical works from the University Press of Kentucky, Sam F. Stack Jr.’s The Arthurdale Community School: Education and Reform in Depression Era Appalachia and Andrew McNeill Canady’s Willis Duke TWeatherford: Race, Religion, and Reform in the American South, examine the efforts of reforming individuals and institutions to alleviate poverty in the South and southern Appalachia from the Progressive Era through the modern civil rights movement. Stack explores the history of the Arthurdale school, a New Deal–era program designed to aid West Virginia miners affected by the decline of the coal industry, while Canady uses the biography of Willis Duke Weatherford (1875– 1970) to trace the evolution of southern liberalism through Weatherford’s leadership in institutions such as the YMCA’s Blue Ridge Association for Christian Conferences and Training, Fisk University, and Berea College. Each author illuminates a history that may not be widely known outside the field and, through careful research and critical analysis, provides fresh insights into the broader history of progressive movements in the South. In The Arthurdale Community School: Education and Reform in Depression Era Appalachia, Stack recounts the history of the homesteading community of Arthurdale, West Virginia, championed by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Stack explains how the school built on the educational philosophy of adviser John Dewey, who contended that the social and economic transformations in American society at the turn of the twentieth century had created a sense of individual “alienation” (5). He therefore viewed the creation of “community” as a central Sam F. Stack Jr. The Arthurdale Com- goal to creating a more democratic society, and he munity School: Education and Reform saw education as the vehicle for this social change. in Depression Era Appalachia. Lexing- ton: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. In following with Dewey’s philosophy, Arthurdale’s 218 pp. 20 b/w illus. planners intended it to “restore community life, ISBN: 9780813166889 (cloth), $50.00.

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community itself forming the basis of democracy and the democratic way of life” (1). The school’s first director, Elsie Ripley Clapp (1879–1965), a former student of Dewey’s, sought to instill in students a “sense of identity and place” and used Appalachian folklore, handicrafts, and history to promote this sense of community pride. The Arthurdale homesteading experiment may have been short-lived (lasting from roughly 1933 to 1947), but through the history of the school, Stack explores an important historical issue—how American reformers sought to use education to ameliorate the negative impacts of the nation’s rapid modernization and, specifically, the upheaval of the Great Depression. A scholar of education, Stack contends that the Arthurdale school’s curriculum evolved in response to the community’s needs and that this community- based approach is the very component missing from education today. He notes, “The current focus of educational reform, driven by economic interests over democratic ones, is the antithesis of a community-centered approach and has been largely detrimental to both the urban and the rural poor and certainly the poor in Appalachia” (2). The book thus presents an opportunity for contemporary students and scholars in the field of education to evaluate the effectiveness of progressive education by examining closely the successes and failures of the Arthurdale school. In Willis Duke Weatherford: Race, Religion, and Reform in the American South, Canady evalu- ates the career of Willis Duke Weatherford, one of the earliest white liberals in the South, whose role in social and educational reform spanned from the 1890s to 1970. Canady emphasizes how Weatherford’s religious faith spurred his leadership on social issues, and he effectively positions Weatherford within a network of liberal reformers operating in the South. A Texas native educated at Vanderbilt, Weatherford became a key leader in the YMCA during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He pushed the organization to address the issue of race and authored such publications as Negro Life in the South and Present Forces in Negro Progress. He was a key leader in the founding of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in 1919, which Canady considers “the first major

interracial organization in the South,” and of the Andrew McNeill Canady. Willis Duke Weatherford: Blue Ridge Association for Christian Conferences Race, Religion, and Reform in the American South. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. and Training, a North Carolina meeting place for 348 pp. 24 b/w illus. ISBN: 9780813168159 YMCA members, ministers, and other leaders to (cloth), $50.00.

80 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY EMILY E. SENEFELD discuss social issues (67). Weatherford then served as president of the YMCA Graduate School in Nashville and taught for a decade at Fisk University before becoming assistant to the president and fundraiser for Berea College. From 1958 to 1961, he oversaw a major research project on southern Appalachia that culminated in the 1962 publication of The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey. The research corresponded to a growing scholarly and political interest in southern Appalachia, which became a major focal point in President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs. Canady is largely successful in telling the story of southern liberalism through the lens of one man’s remarkable career. When viewed together, the two books offer valuable contributions to the history of liberalism in the South and southern Appalachia and, most notably, to its limitations with respect to race. As the title suggestions, race is a central theme of Canady’s work, and at times he appears a defender of Weatherford’s actions. He contends that Weatherford’s religious worldview, though it spurred his leadership in social issues, limited his willingness to tackle the structural inequality repre- sented by Jim Crow segregation. Canady is particularly adept in his chapter on the racial complexities of Blue Ridge Association for Christian Conferences and Training, which hosted many discussions of “the race question” (72). He traces how in this period of his career Weatherford grappled with the conflict between his desire to confront social issues and the realities of daily life in the segregated South. Blue Ridge at first hosted few African American participants, but the number increased over time, including, most notably, George Washington Carver. As Canady points out, Blue Ridge was one of a number of liberal institutions in the South, including Commonwealth College and Highlander Folk School, which initially were wary of African American visitors, out of concern over a potential loss of white support. This history is particularly important because racial tensions remain a feature of debates about liberalism in America today. Stack’s work on the Arthurdale Community School tells a similar story with respect to race. Although roughly a quarter of the applicants were African American, none were selected as Arthurdale homesteaders, a fact that raised the ire of the NAACP. Stack suggests that the school itself may have been the primary reason for Arthurdale’s segregation, due to West Virginia state law. At the same time, many white miners viewed African Americans as “strike breakers” (40). He notes that 43 percent of all African American miners worked in West Virginia, a fact often obscured in public memory of the region. Race is not a major factor in Stack’s analysis, but it would likely strengthen his analysis of the concept of “community” by underscoring the extent to which it was shaped by deliberate exclusion. Stack’s limited discussion of this topic suggests a valuable avenue for further scholarly research into segregation in government programs in Appalachia, from the New Deal to the War on Poverty. By examining who these programs deemed worthy of aid, scholars can gain a greater understanding of the evolution of New Deal liberalism as well as its limits.

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Both books also address the issue of paternalism, a significant theme in a range of works on the South, Appalachia, and progressive movements in general. Stack writes, “The federal reformers and educators associated with those projects believed that they understood the best way to create community—through literal and spiritual shar- ing and cooperation that would result in a sense of identity and belonging” (134). Like many contemporary programs, the Arthurdale homestead reflected a desire not just to economically aid the poor but also to shape their character. Stack notes how Arthurdale’s planners chose “to provide homesteads only to those deemed to be ‘safe risks’” (38). They considered not just knowledge of agriculture but also factors such as church attendance, games, and recreation, all measures of “moral character” in the planners’ eyes (39). Stack makes a thorough effort to include the perspective of the homesteaders, yet the written records appear limited. If the homesteaders interpreted this as social control, it may well have limited the success of this short-lived experiment. In such antipoverty programs, the voices of the people are lost, not only in the implementation of the program but in the historical record as well. Canady too addresses the issue of paternalism, particularly with respect to Weatherford’s handling of race. Central to the task of his book, Canady seeks to challenge earlier scholars, who “have generally agreed that—while a forward-think- ing white Southerner for his time—he was essentially a moderate, benevolent paternalist” (6). According to Canady, scholars often focus on the early period of Weatherford’s career and neglect how his racial views evolved, including his leadership at Fisk University. In 1910, Weatherford published Negro Life in the South, a work that emerged from an interracial conference he attended and which was intended for use in YMCA study groups. Canady offers a strong analysis of this work, in terms both of how it spurred broader interest in the role of religious groups and of its inherent paternalism. He writes, “Weatherford could not remove himself from the mindset that whites had to do something for blacks, rather than with them” (57). Weatherford’s case raises compelling questions for how scholars should inter- pret historical figures. Canady notes, “By today’s standards the book seems hardly progressive but rather condescending and paternalistic in its tone at many points. Yet for its time and in the context of the segregated southern world, it would have been considered liberal” (53). The author offers valuable insights into the racial complexities of southern liberalism throughout Weatherford’s seventy-year career. Each of these books is well-researched and argued and would be a valuable text for the general public or for students in graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses. While Stack’s may be especially useful for studies of Appalachia, the Great Depression, or educational theory, Canady’s would work well in courses on southern history or race and religion. Each provides a model for how institutional history or biography can challenge a reader’s assumptions about widely known narratives of American history. Emily E. Senefeld Sewanee: University of the South

82 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Book Reviews A Rape in the Early Republic Gender and Legal Culture in an 1806 Virginia Trial Alexander Smyth

andal L. Hall has given us a gem of a book. RWhen Virginia put John Deskins, a middling farmer of Tazewell County, on trial in 1806 for the rape of Sidney Hanson, the wife of another middling farmer, prosecuting attorney Alexander Smyth gave the closing argument for the Commonwealth. The trial garnered much attention in the community, and some enterprising gentlemen asked Smyth to write a pamphlet detailing as much of it as he could remember, presumably in the hope of selling it commercially. Smyth obliged, but the pamphlet seems never to have been printed for public consumption. Instead, the ambitious lawyer included the account of Sidney Hanson’s rape trial as part of a larger collection of his own political writings and speeches, which he published in 1811. Randal L. Hall, the text’s editor, realized the uniqueness of the document, and he and the University Press of Kentucky wisely saw fit to bring it to light in its entirety. This book is not Alexander Smyth, A Rape in the Early Republic: Gen- der and Legal Culture in an 1806 Virginia Trial. Edited a traditional scholarly tome, but rather it is a by Randal L. Hall. Lexington: University Press of Ken- reprinting of a primary source with an editor’s tucky, 2017. 144 pp. 4 b/w illus. ISBN: 9780813169521 (paperback), $25.00. introduction and annotation of the text. Hall’s introduction is brief but sufficient to give readers the necessary historical context in which it questions for consideration in the classroom as well was produced. The annotations are minimal and as a brief but sufficient list of suggested readings. clearly indicated so readers will not get confused He also includes two appendixes, one of which as to whose words they are scanning. Hall’s intent is a statement of the law under which Virginia is for his colleagues not simply to use the docu- prosecuted Deskins and the other a part of a book ment as a resource in their own scholarship but about Jason Fairbanks’s killing of Elizabeth Fales, also as a teaching tool in the classroom. It is per- and the subsequent 1801 murder trial that Smyth fectly suited for that purpose, and Hall even poses referenced in his closing argument.

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Hall breaks up the document into manage- to bribe the sheriff who escorted him to the able segments. First, Smyth recounts that some courthouse. That also failed. At first, Deskins local gentlemen asked him to produce a pam- denied the accusation, and he then confessed to phlet of the trial for publication. Then Smyth the sexual intercourse but claimed it was con- iterates much of the testimony given at trial, sensual. Finally, he admitted the rape. In the which focused strongly on Sidney Hanson’s end, the jury of the District Court for Tazewell account of the rape and witness statements as County convicted John Deskins for the rape of to her character and reputation in the neighbor- Sidney Hanson. hood. Next is Smyth’s closing argument to the There is so much teachable material and jury, which attacked point by point the defense so many themes for students to explore in this counsels’ various efforts to discredit Hanson. text alone that makes it worthy of classroom Last is the jury’s pronouncement of guilt and consideration. If matched with similar works, the judge’s determination that Deskins would such as Deborah Navas’s Murdered by His Wife: have to spend two years of the ten-year sentence The Absorbing Tale of Crime and Punishment in solitary confinement. Deskins served seven in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts (Amherst: years in prison before Governor James Barbour University of Massachusetts Press, 1999) and granted him a pardon. Charles Bolton and Scott P. Culclasure’s The Hall correctly states that accounts of rape Confessions of Edward Isham: A Poor White trials, especially ones as full and detailed as this Life of the Old South (Athens: University of one is, are rare for the era of the early republic. Georgia Press, 1998), students can get firsthand The story begins with an acquaintance slander- glimpses of how some people of the past whose ing Sidney Hanson’s good name and her want- voices are rarely heard negotiated their every- ing to take legal action to clear it. Hanson’s day worlds, environments with which our stu- husband, David, was away from home on busi- dents are very unfamiliar and yet inhabited by ness and John Deskins, a neighbor and the man people who demonstrated thoughts and deeds David Hanson entrusted as his wife’s protector that will not be foreign to them at all. Both Hall in his absence, offered to escort her to the home and the University Press of Kentucky are to be of Hezekiah Whitt, the nearest Justice of the commended for the publication of this primary Peace. On the way to the Whitts’ home, Deskins document. My one complaint is that the $25 raped Sidney Hanson. Despite Deskins’s threat price tag is a bit steep for most of today’s stu- to kill her if she told anyone of the assault, she dents. That said, I cannot wait to use this book reported it to Whitt at the first opportunity. The in my courses. incident became a criminal matter after Sidney Mary Block told her husband when he returned home and Valdosta State University they brought a formal charge of rape against Deskins. There is intrigue in the tale, as alcohol was involved in the slander incident and likely in the rape as well. David Hanson tried to stab Deskins in retaliation for Sidney’s defilement. Deskins tried to buy his way out of the criminal prosecution, and when that failed he tried

84 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY BOOK REVIEWS The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney The Politics and Jurisprudence of a Northern Democrat from the Age of Jackson to the Gilded Age David M. Gold

hat did it mean to be a “radical” in Wthe context of mid-nineteenth century American politics? A “conservative”? A propo- nent of “limited government”? These are some of the questions explored by historian and independent scholar, David M. Gold, who has ably integrated legal, political, economic, and biographical history in his examination of the life and career of Rufus P. Ranney, a lawyer, jurist, and Jacksonian Democrat from Ohio. Gold finds in Ranney an individual who started out as a “Radical Democrat” in the 1840s but thought of himself as a laissez-faire conservative in the 1870s. While on the surface this would suggest a major reversal, in fact, as Gold argues, Ranney consistently defended individual property rights and limited government against the interests of state-sanctioned monopolies (158–59). Throughout his career, Ranney ran unsuccess- fully for Congress three times, vied for the state’s David M. Gold. The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus governorship, served as a delegate in the Ohio P. Ranney: The Politics and Jurisprudence of a Northern Democrat from the Age of Jackson to the Gilded Age. state constitutional convention, and left behind Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017. a legal record as a lawyer and Ohio state supreme 256 pp. ISBN: 9780821422342 (cloth), $64.95. court judge. A relatively obscure figure for those who are not experts in nineteenth-century Ohio politics, Ranney destroyed much of his personal Chapters 1 through 4 examine Ranney’s correspondence, so by necessity Gold has recon- early political and legal career as a Western structed Ranney’s portrait from court cases, legis- Reserve Democrat and leading figure at Ohio’s lative records, newspapers, and what his contem- 1850 state constitutional convention. Like poraries said about him. The resulting contribu- many Jacksonians, Ranney promoted anti- tion of this work is both a careful analysis of the monopolism, equal rights, limited government, tensions within Jacksonian political ideology and states’ rights, opposition to excessive taxation a distillation of Jacksonian jurisprudence, which and eminent domain powers, and an individ- historians have often extrapolated loosely from ual right to property. When national politics only a handful of cases. and the union itself began to splinter over the

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irreconcilable differences over slavery, radical- what we would expect from any conservative: ism and conservatism took on different mean- distrust of rapid change; preservation of the ings, a transition Gold covers in chapters 5 status quo; and nostalgia for the past. Ranney, through 7. Considered radical in 1850, by 1859 thus, was a conservative in the sense that he Ranney had articulated a position that was now harkened back to the Jacksonian principles that moderate and even conservative—supporting had once been prevalent throughout much of the Union army during the Civil War but blam- the antebellum era (161). ing both antislavery Republicans and southern One issue with Gold’s invocation of “lais- fire-eaters as extremists (102–4). Gold clarifies sez-faire” is that the term comes with ideolog- that it was not so much Ranney’s views that ical baggage. Historians have almost always had changed but the country as a whole. In the noted that “laissez-faire” contained numerous last third of the book, which addresses the Civil contradictions, qualifications, and exceptions. War and Gilded Age, Gold takes us through One wonders whether “anti-monopolism” Ranney’s opposition to the Republican Party’s might be a better descriptor. There is no doubt program of tariffs, taxes, debts, and state-sanc- that social Darwinists, robber barons, and tioned monopoly, as well as his legal advocacy those in the economics and legal professions— on behalf of oil and railroad companies. one of Gold’s chief concerns—advocated a Gold is strongest in his discussion of legal more laissez-faire approach to governmental history, as he possesses an impressive knowledge regulation. But whether “laissez-faire” accu- of case law. At times, if only subtly, he seems to rately depicted a reality of political economy sympathize with Ranney’s defense of the Tenth as it existed on the ground is another matter. Amendment, skepticism of taxation, ability to Historians Brian Balogh and William Novak, compromise, and hold the line on strict con- from whom Gold presumably differs, have struction and limited legislative authority (69, been highly critical of laissez-faire, going so far 108, 125). But this is not an uncommon char- as to call it a myth. As Novak argues, regula- acteristic in biographical works. The parts of tion, duties, morality, civic virtue, self-sacrifice, this book most likely to engender spirited dis- and providing for the general welfare had not cussion are the ones relating to the author’s vanished by the Gilded Age. In other words, core arguments and terminology. For his argu- it was a question not of whether governmental ment to work well, he needs clear definitions regulations existed but for whom those regula- and expositions of radical, laissez-faire, and tions worked. Gold staves off some potential conservative ideologies, because these terms criticism and adds credibility to his work when are contested, dynamic, and context-specific. he recognizes that “laissez-faire,” “radical,” and A conservative in Mexico during the period of “conservative” are problematic terms and have Gold’s study, for example, would most likely often been used to describe belief systems quite support a strong military, autocratic rule, state- different from Ranney’s (71). sanctioned religion, and a landholding aristoc- This is a capable and original study. Readers racy—all of which were anathema to Ranney’s who have some background in legal history beliefs. When Gold describes Ranney as a con- and/or political and economic history will servative, he is saying that within the context of likely get the most out of this book, but this the Gilded Age, he met much of the criteria of is by no means a requirement, as the prose is

86 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY BOOK REVIEWS accessible and straightforward. If it was Gold’s ideology through the life of Rufus Ranney, then aim to expand our knowledge of Jacksonian to a very real degree he has succeeded. jurisprudence and at the same time raise rel- Stephen W. Campbell evant questions regarding the ambiguities California State Polytechnic University, and gradual shifts within Jacksonian political Pomona

Driven toward Madness The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio Nikki M. Taylor

ikki M. Taylor’s Driven toward Madness: NThe Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio is a rich and heart-wrench- ing telling of one of the most devastating cases in fugitive slave history. As one of the first books published in the New Approaches to Midwestern Studies series, Taylor’s work draws from the personal papers, regional newspapers, and government records found within Ohio state archives. Driven toward Madness examines the life and legacy surrounding Margaret Garner and the seven members of the Garner family who dared to escape their bondage in Kentucky in the winter of 1856. Together, Robert, twenty-seven years old, and his pregnant wife, Margaret, twenty-two years old, along with their four children: Tommy, six; Sammy, four; Mary, two; and Cilla, nine months; and Robert’s parents, Simon and Mary, both in their mid-fifties, stole their master’s horse, sled, and themselves Nikki M. Taylor. Driven toward Madness: The Fugi- in order to reach the free state of Ohio, just tive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016. 180 pp. 19 b/w illus. twelve miles away and across the Ohio River. ISBN: 9780821421604 (paper), $22.95. Remarkably, the family made it to relatives who could help them get further north. But before they could begin the next part of their danger- led Margaret to attempt the unthinkable. Faced ous journey, Archibald K. Gaines, owner of with the likely prospect of being returned to Margaret, Robert, and all of their four children, slavery, she attempted to kill her four children arrived at their front door with U.S. Marshals rather than have them live their lives enslaved. and the law on his side. The short-lived escape She fatally slit her daughter Mary’s throat before

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local authorities stopped her. The tragedy sent smalltime farmers socially, economically, and shockwaves across the country. Both southern- even politically engaged with their enslaved. ers and northerners were appalled, leading all to Taylor’s work requires that we ask ourselves wonder how a mother could kill her child. and students the hard questions: How do we According to Taylor, “slavery caused trauma” examine both “interior and exterior” effects of (2). Her assessment is obvious and yet under- trauma on the enslaved? How do we reclaim explored. One might argue that past scholars enslaved black women’s voices and agency? and the public have placed more emphasis on What does the world look like for families who Garner’s actions than on the institution that have no recourse in the face of physical and sex- led to them. What one might see as inhuman, ual abuse? How do the auction block and finan- Taylor sees as the “mirror reflection of the slave cial hardship serve as tools of violence? And experience that inspired it” (117). Here Taylor finally, is murder, filicide in particular, a form is particularly interested in how the enslaved of resistance? both experienced and coped with trauma. Her Much about Driven toward Madness is pro- research builds off the brilliant work of late his- vocative and useful in understanding Margaret torian Stephanie M. H. Camp, whose Closer Garner’s experiences as enslaved wife and to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday mother. It compels readers to do what many Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: in the field might shun, to feel something, to University of North Carolina Press, 2004) access the complete humanity of its subject, and offers a framework of examining the enslaved to process this grief and grievances fully. In fact, corporal through a lens of three separate bod- I am not ashamed to write that the description ies, which describes the body as a site of domi- of Garner’s action on January 28, 1856, was nation, of terror and pain, and of pleasure and difficult to read without shedding tears. In the enjoyment. Taylor offers readers a fourth body, end, the Garner family is taken back into slav- which explores “resistance and violent eruption ery and separated, never to be seen together in response to trauma” (3). again. Of the eight family members, Robert is Driven toward Madness provides the slave the only one who lived to see freedom and tell experience from the perspective of small farms his story. But Margaret lives on in history as the in what might be considered “mild” slave states. only woman in a pantheon of enslaved freedom In Kentucky, 77 percent of adult white males fighters whom abolitionists acknowledged and did not own slaves, and those who did had aver- celebrated for her courage to confront slavery at age slave holdings estimated as the fourth small- the expense of her own children. est in the nation. However, Taylor debunks the There is a popular Bible verse in 1 Corinthians, myth that a state such as Kentucky was mild. chapter 13, that focuses on the power of love. The proximity to and heavy dependence on “Now these things remain: faith, hope, and small groups of enslaved people allowed mis- love. But the greatest of these is love.” When erable conditions and violence to be particu- Margaret’s faith in the abolition of slavery failed larly acute. The Garners experienced physical her and her hope to successfully escape slavery assault; long periods of separation; and, likely, collapsed, one thing remained: her love for her sexual abuse. Slaveholder Archibald K. Gaines children. Taylor is telling us a story not merely of provides us with the perfect example of how tragedy and trauma, but of heartbreak and love.

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I highly recommend using this book in a it will encourage more scholars to examine college or graduate-level course. Its accessible this “fourth body” with the rigor and sensi- writing and length allow readers to digest the tivity it deserves. emotional, social, and political tolls of trauma Kellie Carter Jackson experienced by the enslaved. My hope is that Wellesley College

Grant Invades Tennessee The 1862 Battles for Forts Henry and Donelson Timothy B. Smith

oday, one might forgive visitors to TTennessee and Kentucky’s Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area if they are unable, on the mere basis of an eponymous trail network and a few historical markers, to recog- nize the full significance of the submerged fort at the bottom of Kentucky Lake. Timothy Smith’s Grant Invades Tennessee reminds us that, when the Depression-era Tennessee Valley Authority officials opted to sink the remnants of Fort Henry under the waters of the Tennessee River, they had less excuse. Although the second and more famous of Grant’s twin victories during the winter of 1861–62, the capture of Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River, has always figured much larger in collective memory (its remnants are still well-preserved above water), Smith argues that the relatively greater amount of attention Donelson has received is somewhat incommen- surate with its actual strategic importance com- Timothy B. Smith. Grant Invades Tennessee: The 1862 pared to its oft-snubbed western companion. In Battles for Forts Henry and Donelson. Lawrence: short, perhaps we sunk the wrong fort. University Press of Kansas, 2016. 526 pp. ISBN: 9780700623126 (cloth), $34.95. In this third volume of Smith’s trilogy detailing Grant’s Mississippi Valley campaign, which culminated in the battles of Shiloh and makes clear that the Union capture of Forts Corinth, the author provides a vivid tacti- Henry and Donelson not only opened the cal reconstruction of the opening blows to the gate for the entrance of Federal forces into the western Confederacy that enabled all that fol- Tennessee and Cumberland River valleys but in lowed in the western theater of the war. Smith fact “allowed the Union forces access by naval as

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well as land forces all the way into the interior of treatment” of the two battles (xiii). While most the South” (150). While the two victories, com- major campaigns of the war already enjoy a siz- ing during an otherwise depressing first win- able complement of tactical scholarship, “caus- ter of the northern war effort, have long been ing socially oriented historians to complain recognized as the beginning of Grant’s ascen- about the lack of context,” Smith asserts, the dency in the public eye, the strategic import Henry-Donelson campaign has long suffered of prying open a navigable water route—the from the opposite problem (xiii). Thus, Smith’s Tennessee—that cut deep into the bowels of narrative differs from those of Cooling and Gott the young Confederacy, along with ensuring chiefly in its focus on tactical-level operations, ready access to that route by securing its flank— illuminated by the employment of a prodigious the Cumberland to the east—is hard to over- array of sources, including, most saliently, the state. Although the northern public quickly words of enlisted men who took part. Smith’s latched onto the more dramatic of the two command of the operational details of the cam- successes—the bloody battle at Fort Donelson paign and his ability to carefully triangulate and the capture of thousands of Rebel prison- sources in order to make sense of the chaotic ers—it was the fall of Fort Henry that, accord- confusion of battle—an aptitude on bright dis- ing to Smith, “shook the Confederacy to its core play throughout the trilogy—leads to an engag- from Richmond to New Orleans” (xiv). In the ing and compelling narrative. words of a Tennessee Confederate’s bride just Those more familiar with the campaign will prior to its capture, “If the Federals ever take likely find little that is altogether surprising. As Fort Henry we are ruined” (153). Indeed, with with most other works addressing the battles, no major Rebel stronghold along the Tennessee Smith argues that massive failures of coordina- River south of Fort Henry, its capture opened tion and a toxic Rebel command climate, result- the waterway to potential Federal invasion as far ing from the presence of far too many volumi- south as Florence, Alabama. Moreover, as Smith nous egos, critically hamstrung the Confederate shows, it was the fall of Henry, not Donelson, defense of both bastions from the very begin- that spurred Confederate officials to reluctantly ning. Still, Smith puts the chronically amateur- abandon the previous year’s deeply flawed “cor- ish character of the Federal attackers on dis- don” defensive strategy and rush far-flung rein- play as well, with Grant coming in for his fair forcements to northern Mississippi in order to share of seemingly just punishment. Particularly forestall such a potential disaster. The result- interesting is the author’s detailed treatment of ing Rebel concentration set the stage for both the formation, recruitment, performance, and the battle of Shiloh and the subsequent Union maturation of flag officer Andrew H. Foote’s -riv offensive against Corinth. erine naval command and the emergent profes- Though historians Benjamin Cooling and sional relationship that grew up between Foote Kendall Gott have provided studies of the and Grant over the course of the brief cam- broader social and political context in which the paign. The epic artillery duels between Foote’s campaign for the two forts unfolded and offered embattled gunboats and undermanned but des- evaluations of high command decisions, Smith’s perate Rebel batteries are brought vividly to work is a response to his sense of a lingering “des- life in Smith’s evocative narrative. His tactical- perate need” for a “truly comprehensive tactical level focus also makes excruciatingly clear just

90 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY BOOK REVIEWS how close the beleaguered Confederate garrison alludes wanting far more in the way of nonmil- of Fort Donelson came to slipping away from itary context, Smith’s deft pen in combination Grant—leaving it potentially capable of rallying with fresh accounts from the rank-and-file make elsewhere and returning to threaten Donelson the book well worth the attention of both new- or even Henry after receiving reinforcements. comers to operational Civil War military history Unfortunately, as with previous historians and and those grognards holding lifetime armchair most of the Rebel garrison itself, Smith is simi- general commissions. The book will very likely larly left without any definite answers as to why remain the definitive tactical narrative of the two such an escape did not take place. engagements for some time. While his tactical focus might leave some Eric Michael Burke of the socially oriented historians to whom he University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Integrated The Lincoln Institute, Basketball, and a Vanished Tradition James W. Miller

hen most people hear the name W“Kentucky,” they immediately think of one of three preeminent institutions: Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Kentucky Derby, or basketball. Any Kentucky citizen can easily rec- ognize and explain the idiom “Bleed Blue” as describing devotion to University of Kentucky basketball. While historians and sports report- ers have aptly covered white men’s basketball history, James W. Miller explores one aspect of Kentucky’s African American men’s basketball history. Miller’s seminal narrative of Kentucky’s Lincoln Institute in Shelby County fills a void in African American, Kentucky, education, and sports history. As an author, former newspaper reporter, and athletics director, Kentucky native Miller uses his personal connection to provide insight into a neglected perspective of Berea College’s African American educational satel- lite, the Lincoln Institute. James W. Miller. Integrated: The Lincoln Institute, Bas- Miller’s tribute to African Americans in the ketball, and a Vanished Tradition. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017. 288 pp. 49 b/w illus. age of racial segregation during the transition ISBN: 9780813169118, $29.95 (cloth). to integration begins with an enticing chapter

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on the 1960 Lincoln Institute Tigers basketball For example, in the chapter titled “With All team. He continues with the historical context of Deliberate Speed,” Miller demonstrates how the institute’s origins and the challenges of racial African Americans used forced segregation animosity its organizers faced. While scholars to create a thriving milieu and how Brown v. have thoroughly studied the mother of this edu- Board of Education damaged that, specifically cational establishment, Berea College, with the noting how Kentucky used “deliberate speed” exception of historian George C. Wright’s 1977 for its benefit. Apparently, no white schools article, “The Faith Plan: A Black Institution in Kentucky closed, those students enrolling Grows during the Depression,” the Lincoln in black schools, but the African American Institute’s history has been largely neglected. high schools died slowly, as their boys’ basket- Opened in 1912, the Lincoln Institute resulted ball programs left the KHSAL for the KHSAA from Kentucky’s 1904 Day Law, specifically and then those black educational institutions aimed at Berea College, which prohibited the disappeared. education of blacks and whites together. Miller describes how during the 1957–58 While there are several protagonists season Lincoln’s coach, Walter Gilliard, throughout the book, Miller portrays the real attempted to schedule games with white hero as Whitney M. Young Sr., who, as a for- teams, but Bagdad High School’s new head mer Lincoln student and teacher was appointed coach, Arnold Thurman, was the only one to the first black educational director in 1935. accept the invitation. Sportswriter Billy Reed Young saved the institution myriad times before stated that during that same season John Bill its 1966 closing. Under Young’s leadership, the Trivette, coach of the white Pikeville High Lincoln Institute continued to follow Booker T. School, also scheduled games with two African Washington’s educational philosophy of indus- American schools, Louisville’s Central High trial training for blacks. School and Lexington’s Dunbar High School. To give a deeper understanding of racial Although Miller covers Central’s dominance segregation in the nation and specifically in in African American sports, he barely men- Kentucky, Miller presents a quick look into tions Dunbar’s prominent coach, S. T. Roach. the state’s two high school athletic associa- No African American school won the KHSAA tions, the white Kentucky High School Athletic boys’ basketball tournament during this racial Association (KHSAA), formed in 1917, and transition period, but many sports enthusi- the black Kentucky High School Athletic asts believed Central and Dunbar had the best League (KHSAL), established in 1932. Like chance to do so. the KHSAA, the KHSAL began with the spon- Using newspaper accounts, interviews, web- sorship of boys’ state basketball tournaments. sites, and quality secondary sources, Miller chose Relying on the works of Louis Stout, the first a worthy basketball program and an exceptional African American KHSAA commissioner, scholastic establishment to demonstrate how Miller emphasizes the importance of basketball Kentucky evolved from the Jim Crow era to to the school and the black community. racial integration in sports and education. In Many of Miller’s chapter titles are vague, but addition to providing scholars a wealth of new they nevertheless entice the reader. However, information, Miller’s study will also appeal to others describe their subject matter very clearly. general audiences owing to its accessibility.

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However, no book is perfect, and Integrated for more academic research on not only the role has a few troubling issues. On a minor level, it is of women in the Lincoln Institute but, more gen- occasionally repetitive. For example, the author erally, the frequently neglected value of African reinforces the point that the Lincoln Institute American female athletes. Additionally, Miller’s earned an “A” rating from the Kentucky point that until the late 1950s only white boys Department of Education on pages 70, 95, and and girls could dream of basketball tournament 108. More problematic, while football and track play could be disputed. Miller actually supports are mentioned, girls’ athletics are completely the argument of African American athletic suc- invisible. It is difficult to understand why Miller cess when he shows the success of the Lincoln neglected to at least note the girls’ basketball Institute in athletics (8). Surely, those African program when one of his sources, The Kentucky American athletes dreamed of playing in the African American Encyclopedia, included a photo KHSAL tournaments. of one of the Lincoln Institute’s girls’ basketball Sallie L. Powell teams in its entry on the Lincoln Institute. This Eastern Kentucky University oversight strongly indicates a tremendous need

FALL 2017 93 ANNOUNCEMENTS Trains and LEGO blend holidays past and present Holiday Junction featuring Brickopolis

nce again, Union Terminal will be humming with the bustle of trains. OBut this holiday season steam power is giving way to tiny electric engines and the mighty steel horse is dwarfed by young children eager to take it all in. Cincinnati Museum Center’s Holiday Junction featuring Brickopolis showcases an array of toy trains Joy and merriment cover 12,000 square feet of Cincinnati Museum Center’s special exhibition gallery, including train layouts and displays built with that ubiquitous childhood toy, the LEGO. Among the historic train layouts is a pre- World War II Lionel O gauge that gives a snapshot into the pastime of American children in the 1930s and 40s. As children of all ages share stories of holidays past, current children can take a ride through a winter wonderland on a riding train and visit Santa to tell them their holiday wish list. Holiday Junction featuring Brickopolis opens November 10, 2017 at Cincinnati Museum Center. For more information visit www.cincymuseum.org/holiday.

Blog offers inside look at collections and preservation Off the Shelf

ith millions of collection pieces at their fingertips, Cincinnati Museum WCenter’s curators have more stories to tell than can fit on the museum floor. Off the Shelf is a tour inside the stacks of Cincinnati Museum Center, a closer look at the tools and techniques of preservation and research. Cincinnati Museum Center’s collections include Archaeology, Archives and Manuscripts, Ethnology, History Objects and Fine Art, Invertebrate Paleontology, Mineralogy, Moving Images and Sound Recordings, Photographs and Prints, Printed Works, Vertebrate Paleontology and Zoology. Join the curators as they pull items off the shelf and reveal the stories behind them. Catch up with Off the Shelf atwww.cincymuseum.org/blog .

94 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNOUNCEMENTS Temporary Library Closure

he Cincinnati History Library & Archives at Cincinnati Museum Center Tis temporarily closed to the public to facilitate the restoration of historic Union Terminal. As a result, guests will be unable to visit the Cincinnati History Library but may still access the library’s online catalog, digital journals and other local history resources at library.cincymuseum.org. Limited service via telephone and email are available, but the library will remain closed to the public throughout the duration of the restoration project. We regret any inconvenience this may cause but hope that you will explore our online resources to support your research needs. We look forward to seeing you in the library again when the restoration project is completed. Please visit the library website at library.cincymuseum.org for updates and additional information.

The Abstract Art of G. Caliman Coxe at the Filson

rom August 28th through December 15th the Filson Historical Society will Fhost “Understanding the Indescribable: Paintings by G. Caliman Coxe.” For nearly five decades, abstract painter Gloucester Caliman “G.C.” Coxe (1907- 1999) was a fixture of the Louisville art scene. The first African-American to receive a fine arts degree from the University of Louisville, Coxe worked and exhibited in a milieu of artists including Sam Gilliam, Ed Hamilton, and Fred Bond. Supporting himself as a sign painter and illustrator, he ceaselessly explored abstractions of color and form, and employed unusual methods and materials in his works. In 2015 the Filson acquired three Coxe canvasses, which will be shown alongside works generously loaned for the exhibition by Ed Hamilton, Dr. Robert Douglas, and Warren and Julie Payne of Payne Fine Arts. Visit filsonhistorical.org/ exhibits/ for more information.

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96 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Submission Information for Contributors to

One digital copy of the manuscript, saved in Microsoft Word, *Regarding general form and style, please follow the should be sent by email to: 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. For specific style guidelines, please visit The Filson’s web- Matthew Norman, Editor or LeeAnn Whites, Editor site at: http://www.filsonhistorical.org/programs- Ohio Valley History Ohio Valley History and-publications/publications/ohio-valley-history/ Asst. Professor of History Director of Research submissions/submissions-guidelines.aspx. University of Cincinnati Filson Historical Society Blue Ash College 1310 South 3rd Street The refereeing process for manuscripts is blind. Referees 9555 Plainfield Road Louisville, KY 40208 are members of our editorial board or other specialists in Blue Ash, OH 45236 [email protected] the academy most appropriate to each manuscript. We have [email protected] no quotas of any kind with regard to authorship, topic, chronological period, or methodology—the practitioners *Preferred manuscript length is 20 to 25 pages via their submissions determine what we publish. Authors (6,000 to 7,500 words), exclusive of endnotes. must guarantee in writing that the work is original, that it *Please use Times New Roman, 12-point font. has not been previously published, and that it is not under *Double-space text and notes, with notes placed at consideration for publication elsewhere in any form. the end of the manuscript text. Accepted manuscripts undergo a reasonable yet rigorous *Include author’s name, institutional affiliation, editing process. We will read the manuscript closely as to and contact information (postal address, phone style, grammar, and argument. The edited manuscript will be number, and email address) on separate cover submitted to the author for consideration before publication. page. Only the article title should appear on the The Filson Historical Society (FHS), Cincinnati first page of the article. Museum Center (CMC), and the University of Cincinnati *Illustrations, tables, and maps that significantly (UC) hold jointly the copyright for all material published enhance the article are welcome. in Ohio Valley History. After a work is published in the *Authors who submit images should also provide journal, FHS/CMC/UC will grant the author, upon writ- citations, captions, credits, and suggestions for ten request, permission to republish the work, without fee, placement of images. subject to the author giving proper credit of prior publication to Ohio Valley History. Each author will receive five free copies of the journal in which the published article appears. Periodicals postage paid at Cincinnati, Ohio, and additional mailing offices.