The WPA Guide to Ohio

The Buckeye State

Federal Writers' Project

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781595342331
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor.For a reader interested in small town life in the early 20th century, the WPA Guide to Ohio is an excellent resource. A series of photographs by Ben Shahn for the Farm Security Administration is well complemented with 17 selective essays about the political, industrial, and cultural life in the Buckeye State. The essay on the economy provides interesting information on the labor movement in Ohio.

PART I

The General Background

THE State of Ohio rolls down from the mountains of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, flows into soft hills and fertile valleys, and flattens out in broad lands which reach to Indiana. The Ohio River turns a sweeping boundary in the east and south on its way from Pittsburgh to Cairo, and the southern shore of Lake Erie gives a water front to nearly three-fourths the northern limits of the State. Two hundred square miles of rivers and lakes are included in the total area of 41,040 square miles, which reach 225 miles from east to west and 210 from north to south. Ohio ranks 35th in area among the States.

The rough, hilly terrain in eastern Ohio eases down momentarily and then rolls, as the Central Plains, to the Mississippi River and beyond. The surface in the western part of the State is characterized by dunes in the north, a level plain in the center, and undulating hills farther south, becoming more disturbed in the southwest, then sinking, on the banks of the Ohio River, to a level of 400 to 500 feet. The plateau area of eastern Ohio, everywhere broken into gorges, averages 600 to 700 feet along the Ohio River.

Shallow seas once covered Ohio. Sand, gravel, and calcareous ooze were deposited on the bottoms and formed series of layers. This bedrock is composed principally of sandstone, shale, and limestone dating from the Paleozoic era (200–500 million years). The dominant rock structure is the broad Cincinnati anticline, which extends north and south through west-central Ohio. The composite thickness of the sedimentary rock layers in the Paleozoic group varies from about 3,000 feet at the crest of the Cincinnati anticline to an estimated 10,000 feet in the southeastern part of Ohio. The Paleozoic era was not exclusively a period of deposition. The seas periodically filled and receded, with intervals of exposure of land—at times so arid that salt and gypsum were formed—and of huge swamps thick with plants that later became coal.

By the end of Paleozoic times all the bedrock in the State had been completed. The land probably heaved upwards to form a plateau, later reduced by erosion to the hills and valleys so characteristic of the eastern part of the State.

In the limestone formations of the Cincinnati region, the oldest part of the State geologically, are abundant records of the marine forms that swam in the shallow seas of a half-billion years ago. The wide exposure of bedrock in this area has facilitated the study of fossils—of which fully a thousand species have been found—to such an extent that the section is one of the best in the United States for the study of invertebrate paleontology.

It is to a different locality that one must look for the vertebrate fishes of a later period and the various forms of amphibians that pointed the way from sea to land. From the shales of the Devonian age near Cleveland, the American zoologist, Bashford Dean, took sharks so perfectly fossilized that he was able to study the flesh, kidneys, and microscopic structure of their muscles. In parts of the western and central section, where rocks of the Devonian and Silurian periods remain, various salamander types, as well as true fishes, are often found fossilized in the stones. In the Devonian rocks, traces of the earliest land plants are discovered as fossilized stems and leaves.

A later chapter in the earth’s history is written into the coal strata of the eastern and southeastern section of the State, where the rocks laid down during the Pennsylvania and Permian periods are some 2,000,000 years younger than those in the Cincinnati vicinity. Fossilized leaves, fronds, and stems of the early fernlike land plants are found embedded in the shale and coal seams, indicating that life was no longer wholly marine.

Within the late Cenozoic era, two or more tongues of ice came down from the northeast over the northwestern two-thirds of the State and reached beyond the Ohio River. These glaciers plowed up loose materials and mixed them with refuse they had brought along. When the ice of the second glacier finally melted, this compound was laid on the surface in thicknesses ranging from a few feet to as many as 200 feet. Although most of the land covered by the ice sheets was left as a plain, masses of debris at the margin of the stationary ice fields formed terminal moraines, characterized by high, hilly surfaces.

The glacial tongues licked the hills and valleys level, but possibly an even greater change effected was that of the drainage pattern. The principal streams had previously flowed northward. When oncoming ice fields blocked them, and drift was deposited in the old valleys, the rivers had to cut new channels. Upon the retreat of the ice front north of the higher land which the glaciers had built up, the melted waters became the huge, deep pond that was to be the present Lake Erie. The lake overflowed southward to the stream that became the Ohio River. About 25,000 years ago, much of the water ran off, and Lake Erie was reduced to its present size.

The bones of the large fur-bearing animals that roamed Ohio’s hills some 20,000 years ago, shortly after the ice melted, have been found. Notable specimens are those of the Ohio elephant, the mammoth mastodon, a giant musk ox, and a beaver as large as a bear. The geological museum of the Ohio State University has the mounted skeleton of a mastodon and one of a sloth; the Cleveland Museum of Natural History has the skeleton of a mastodon.

One of the most famous of the many remarkable skeletons found in Ohio was that of the ground sloth, or Megalonyx (big claw), discovered by Dr. William Goforth in the Cincinnati region during the early 1800’s. To the amazement of the scientists who studied it, the skeleton of this sloth—although related to the South American tree sloth, which spends much of its life hanging upside down from trees—was much too large for any tree.

In Ohio’s southeastern hill and valley section grows the most lavish variety of the 2,500 species of plant life which the State harbors. In addition to the pitch pine, large-leaf magnolia, sourwood, arbutus, and wild honeysuckle localized in that section, there are great hardwoods, with under-growths of sassafras, dogwood, witch hazel, pawpaw, and hornbeam. Timber and woodlands cover about 4,000,000 acres, less than 15 per cent of the original hardwood forest which at one time nearly covered Ohio. Throughout the State are found oak, hickory, yellow poplar, ash, pine, maple, black walnut, white elm, beech, linden, wild black cherry, black locust, willow, and sycamore. Perhaps because the tree is not commonly found east of the Alleghenies, and also because of its distinctive appearance, the buckeye (a relative of the cultivated Asiatic horse chestnut) was first called the Ohio buckeye, and gave Ohio the name of the Buckeye State. The tree can be known by its clusters of cream-colored flowers that bloom in the spring, and later form large, thick-hulled, brown nuts.

About 60 species of mammals inhabit Ohio. With the exception of a few deer and bear, protected by State law in reservations, only the smaller animals run wild. The opossum, squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, and red fox thrive in Ohio woods and fields. Although 358 species of birds have been known in Ohio, only about 181 species nest in the State every year. Since the State is the transition area between flyways, migratory birds, such as ducks, geese, and shore birds rest in great numbers on many Ohio waters. The loon, the sea gull, and the tern, migrating through the State, follow the larger streams and reservoirs. The ring-necked pheasant, the Hungarian partridge, and the ruffed grouse are among the most important game birds. The bald eagle nests along Lake Erie and the golden eagle is a rare winter visitor. Among predatory birds are the screech owl, the hoot owl, and the Cooper’s and sharpshinned hawks. The cuckoo, kingfisher, quail, swallow, and robin are common throughout the State.

NATURAL RESOURCES AND CONSERVATION

When the first settlers came to the Ohio country they found great reaches of level wooded land and fertile limestone soil that would grow clover and hay as well as wheat and corn. The corn that they planted shot up 14 feet in the river valleys and yielded 100 bushels to the acre; vegetables grew like weeds. At Zanesville and other places, these early farmers found clay, pure and tough, which they molded and baked into stoneware. In the hilly eastern section they came upon coal, and in the north and south they found a prized commodity—salt.

Today, Ohio ranks sixth in the value of its mineral products. The State leads all others in the production of pottery, fire brick, tile, and other clay products. Half the plain white tableware shaped in the United States is made in Ohio.

Although coal, ranking first in value among Ohio’s mineral products, is not so widely distributed as clay, the plateau section of the State holds more than 12,000 square miles of soft-coal land—a supply that, with proper conservation, will last for many decades to come. In order to save valuable seams of coal near New Straitsville, the WPA granted approximately $250,000 recently for the digging of ditches and the building of barriers at points where a disastrous underground fire, raging since 1884, might be confined within bounds. The fire was started by striking miners, and to date has destroyed more than $50,000,000 worth of valuable coal.

Some of the softer grades of Ohio coal serve as the basic material for the manufacture of such diversified products as industrial coke, alcohol, dyes, building board, and mattresses.

Ohio is rich in material for modern building, road making, and other construction work. Its plentiful limestone is valuable not only for road construction, but also for the manufacture of lime, an important soil builder, and Portland cement. Berea sandstone, the best-known building stone in Ohio, is widely distributed, but it is most extensively quarried in Cuyahoga, Lorain, and Washington Counties. Silica, gravel, and gypsum, materials used in building, paving, glass manufacture, and molding, are found in many sections.

The mining of salt in the northern section has been going on since the early nineteenth century. Although production is heavy—only New York and Michigan yield more—the supply is still apparently limitless.

Oil and gas were discovered in Noble County as early as 1814 with the drilling of a salt well. Although oil was used for little else but medicine in the early days, the demand grew enormously during the closing years of the century; the new machinery of the period required vast quantities of lubricants. With the striking of a gusher near Findlay in 1885 the oil industry was launched on a spectacular career. Ohio was for a short time first among the States in the production of crude oil, but it was soon outstripped by Pennsylvania and others. About 7,000,000 barrels, however, are being pumped annually, chiefly in the northwestern section of the State. Although Ohio has natural gas in abundant quantities, nearly half of its present consumption is piped in from West Virginia and other States.

Ohioans have been spendthrift in exploiting the State’s resources. Ninety per cent of the trees have vanished, their lumber often used in the construction of houses and barns. On much of the land, timber was burned so that the farmer might have broader fields. Today great sections of the State lie impoverished. Water that formerly trickled down hills thick with humus now swirls down grassless gullies, and fields that once supported tall corn have lost their topsoil and grow only tufts of grass.

Ohioans have been trying industriously in recent years to reclaim and restore the soil. State departments of agriculture, forestry, and conservation have been teaching farmers how to protect their lands, and they have been restocking field and stream with game and fish. Denuded hillsides are being planted in trees. Soil building is carried on by many agencies, and the Federal Government has given the work added impetus and a wider scope. The Granny-Dry Creek Project, supervised by the Soil Conservation Service of the Department of Agriculture, involves an area of about 50 square miles in northcentral Ohio where Government specialists are trying to restore barren land to usefulness through crop rotation and the liberal use of alfalfa and other soil-holding and soil-building crops.

Hand in hand with soil building and reforestation go the vigorous attempts to cope with the serious flood problem. The floods of January 1937, when the water of the Ohio River and its tributaries reached record highs, sharpened public agitation for flood control. However, the Great Miami River did not flood Dayton, Hamilton, and other populous places on its banks. Five huge earthen dams built across that river and four of its tributaries after the tragic floods of 1913 proved that flood waters could be controlled.

Ohioans now look with new interest at the Nation’s model conservation laboratory, a tremendous flood-control and soil-building project in the Muskingum Valley. The work includes 14 major dams, 11 main levees, and 30,000 acres of impounded water—all designed to control 70 per cent of the run-off in the 8,000 square miles of the valley. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Preface
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Maps
• General Information
• Calendar of Annual Events
• Part I. The General Background
• Part II. Cities
• Part III. Tours
• Part IV. Appendices