CLEVELAND TO TOLEDO.
Sixty-first Day.
Lampman House,
Black River, Ohio,
July 11, 1876.
At eight o'clock, my favorite hour for beginning a day's ride, I mounted Paul in front of the hotel at Cleveland, but before leaving the city I stopped at Major Hessler's office to hand him the proceeds of my lecture at Garrett's Hall, which were donated to the Soldiers' Monument Fund at Dayton. This brought me two very kind acknowledgments: one from General James Barnett, who forwarded the money, and the other from Rev. William Earnshaw, custodian of the Monument Fund. These letters, written in behalf of three thousand disabled veterans, amply satisfy me for any sacrifice I may have made, and are among my most prized possessions. General Barnett wrote as follows:
Headquarters
Post No. 1, Department of Ohio, G. A. R.,
Cleveland, July 12, 1876.
Captain Willard Glazier,
Comrade: Through your unsolicited generosity I have the pleasure to acknowledge the receipt of the net proceeds of your lecture on "Echoes from the Revolution," delivered in our city July 6, 1876, and by your direction have forwarded the amount to Chaplain William Earnshaw, President of the "Soldiers' Home Monument Fund," at Dayton, to assist in erecting a monument to the memory of the veterans who by the fortunes of war await the long roll at the National Military Home, and may your reward be no less than the love and gratitude of our unfortunate comrades.
By order of
General James Barnett, Commanding.
E. M. Hessler, Quartermaster.
There are certain results following every undertaking which are looked upon either with gratification or dissatisfaction, and which, through side issues, very often assume the importance of those desired to be attained. The recollection of the splendid scenes through which I have passed, the people whom I have met, the cities I have visited, will be a lifelong satisfaction, but the opportunity to help perpetuate the memory of fellow-soldiers and to do others honor while they yet live, will be the most gratifying outcome of my journey. Knowing this, the following letter from Chaplain Earnshaw holds an important place among the papers of my correspondents.
National Soldiers' Home,
Dayton, Ohio, July 27, 1876.Captain Willard Glazier,
My Dear Comrade: We have received, through Major E. M. Hessler, your generous donation to aid in erecting the Soldiers' Monument at the Home. You have the hearty thanks of three thousand disabled veterans now on our rolls; and a cordial invitation to visit us whenever it is your pleasure to do so. Again, we thank you.
Very respectfully,
William Earnshaw,
President Historical and Monumental Society.
A COTTAGE IN THE WOODS.
On leaving the city several gentlemen gave me the pleasure of their company for some distance, among them Alexander Wilsey, who before the war had been a scholar of mine back in Schodack, New York.
Meeting him was only one of many similar experiences, for here and there along my route I found old acquaintances, whose faces I had never expected to see again.
After a ride of six hours, I rode into Black River and found it quite an enterprising village, but hardly suggesting its old position as the principal port in the county.
Sixty-second Day.
Huron House,
Huron, Ohio,
July Twelfth.
Left the aspiring village of Black River or "Lorraine," as the inhabitants are disposed to call it, at nine o'clock, stopping at the Lake House, Vermillion, for dinner. The scenery is very attractive along the Lake Shore Road between Black River and Huron, and I followed it all day and for two or three hours after nightfall, covering a distance of twenty miles. My sense of the beautiful was somewhat dimmed, however, by the cloud of mosquitoes which beset my path, and which were hardly persuaded to part company at the hotel. There were nearly seven hundred people in Huron, and I must confess that upon entering the slumbering village I began to be generous in the hope that my attentive little tormentors would adopt the principle of equal distribution among the inhabitants. But for the rapacious mosquito the course of the traveller by night upon these highways is serene and uneventful, for, of all the hordes of wolves, wildcats, buffaloes and panthers that made their homes about this part of the country in the times of the Indian, scarcely a vestige remains.
The race of the red man is becoming slowly exterminated, and his friends of the forest seem to be disappearing with him, while the white man and the mosquito fill their places. I am sure no one of average reason, especially our logicians of New Jersey, would deny that this is another proof of the survival of the fittest.
Although it was dark before I came into Huron, I could get a very good idea of its character, and had formed some notion of the place which was to shelter me. In 1848 it was spoken of as having been "formerly the greatest business place in the county," and this reputation, although it has not made it a Sandusky or a Cleveland, has left it a spark of the old energy.
Sixty-third Day.
West House,
Sandusky, Ohio,
July Thirteenth.
I was fortunate in having a comparatively short distance to travel between Huron and this city. It is only nine miles, and I did not start until two o'clock, allowing myself a two hour's easy gallop with the lake on my right all the way.
Along this shore more than a century ago, General Bradstreet, with three thousand men, sailed to the relief of Fort Junandat, while Pontiac, the great Ottawa warrior, was besieging Detroit. Reaching Fort Sandusky he burned the Indian villages there and destroyed the cornfields; passed on up to Detroit to scatter the threatening savages, and returning went into the Wyandot country through Sandusky Bay. To have attempted to ride alone on horseback in those days would have been a foolhardy, if not a fatal undertaking. Now the screech of an engine-whistle announced the approach of a train on the Lake Shore Road, the great wheels thundered by, and Paul, alert and trembling, was ready to dash away. How different it would have been in those old pioneer times! The horseman would have been the one to tremble then, his hand reach for his rifle, his eyes strained towards the thicket from whence the expected yell of the savage was to come.
Among the first proprietors of this section were the Eries. These were followed by the resistless Iroquois, and after them the Wyandots and Ottawas, who seem to have left the strongest impress upon the hills and valleys of Ohio. One of these tribes, the Wyandots, called the bay near which they built their wigwams Sæ-san-don-ske, meaning "Lake of the Cold Water," and from this the present name of the city comes. In the early days it was called Ogontz, after a big chief of that name who lived there before the year 1812. All about were rich hunting-grounds, which accounts for its having been chosen by the Indians in times of peace; and even now Sandusky is held to be one of the greatest fish-markets in America.
The place was bound to be attractive to the white man, and any one might have safely prophesied that a city would rise here. The ground slopes gradually down to the lake, the bay forms an ideal harbor, and looking off upon the boats and water, the eye rests upon a scene picturesque and striking.
My attention was called to Johnson's Island, which was used for the confinement of Confederate officers during the late war. I learned that they were allowed the luxury of an occasional bath in the lake, under guard, of course, and in squads of a hundred men—a luxury which the boys in Libby and Charleston and Columbia would have thought "too good to be true."
Under the city are the limestone quarries, which furnish an inexhaustible supply of building-material and which give an added distinction to this bright little city of the lakes.
On the evening of my arrival I spoke in Union Hall and was introduced by Captain Culver, who referred to my military record and the object of my lectures. Captain Culver is a comrade in the G. A. R. and was a fellow-prisoner at Libby and other prisons. He did much towards making my stay at Sandusky most agreeable.
Sixty-fourth Day.
Fountain House,
Castalia, Ohio,
July Fourteenth.
My Sandusky friend, Captain Culver, called at the West House for me soon after breakfast, and we spent the forenoon strolling about the city. I was shown the newly completed Court House, of which Sanduskians are very proud; met several of the officials and found much to admire. Left at five o'clock in the afternoon and by six had reached Castalia, five miles distant, which I soon found had something to boast of back of its classic name. As a stranger I was of course immediately told of the wonders of the "waters," which I learned form quite an attraction in summer and keep the little place in a flutter of excitement.
Marshall Burton came in 1836 and laid out this prairie town at the head of Coal Creek. Finding the source of the stream in a cool, clear spring, now known to be two hundred feet in diameter and sixty feet deep, named the place "Castalia," from the famed Greek fountain at the foot of Parnassus. The waters of this spring are so pure that objects are plainly seen through the sixty liquid feet, and they say that when the sun reaches meridian, these objects reflect the colors of the rainbow, which might suggest to Castalians that the ancient sun-god, Apollo, favored the western namesake of his Delphian fount. I met no poets here, but possibly inspiration is not one of the powers guaranteed. Indeed if it should treat devotees of the Divine Art, as it does everything else that is plunged into it, we should have petrified poets.
These petrifying qualities of the water, caused by the combined action of lime, soda, magnesia and iron have made the mill-wheels which turn in Coal Creek incapable of decay.
At a little distance from the town is a cave of quite large dimensions, which was discovered accidentally through a dog running into the opening in pursuit of a rabbit. This cave I believe makes up the complement of natural attractions about the village. The chief attraction, the social life of the people, cannot be guessed at by the rapid glance of the traveller. But even a short sojourn here is apt to be remembered long and pleasantly. Ohioans are notably hospitable.
Sixty-fifth Day.
Ball House,
Fremont, Ohio,
July Fifteenth.
I was awakened at twelve P. M. the previous night at Castalia by two villainous imps, who seemed determined to make an impression. Their evident object was "more rum," which to the credit of the landlord was not furnished them. Exasperated by this temperance measure, they attempted to enter the house, and finding the doors locked began a bombardment with fists and feet. This novel performance was kept up until the object of their wrath and his shot-gun appeared. Owing to this my ride of nineteen miles to Fremont was not as refreshing as it might have been.
As I approached the town I thought of President Hayes, who is so closely identified with it. Here he began the practice of law, and won such popularity, not only among his townsmen, but throughout the State, that in 1864, after a succession of honors, his friends were pushing him for Congress. In answer to a letter written from Cincinnati, suggesting that his presence there would secure his election, he said, "An officer fit for duty, who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer for Congress, ought to be scalped. You may feel perfectly sure that I shall do no such thing," and in a letter to his wife, written after he had heard of Lincoln's assassination, he expressed another sentiment quite as strong when he said: "Lincoln's success in his great office, his hold upon the confidence and affection of his countrymen, we shall all say are only second to Washington's. We shall probably feel and think that they are not second even to his."
Fremont of course is justly proud of the name and fame of Rutherford B. Hayes. Two years before he returned to his home, after refusing Grant's offer of an Assistant Secretaryship, but the people of Ohio were not satisfied with this. Their feelings were probably voiced by the words of a personal friend of Hayes, who said: "With your energies, talents, education, and address, you are green—verdant as grass—to stay in a country village." Soon afterwards, at the urgent and repeated requests of the people, he gave up his quiet life and once more entered the political arena, with results which the election of 1876 shows.
There were apparently many who were dissatisfied with the Nation's choice, but in Ohio, and especially where he was known personally, he was much beloved and admired. His uncle, Sardis Birchard, who died some years ago, leaving his property and fortune to his namesake, has given a park and a fine library to Fremont.
The town is on the Sandusky River, at the head of navigation, and has quite a brisk trade for a place claiming only a little over five thousand inhabitants.
Sixty-sixth Day.
Elmore House,
Elmore, Ohio,
July Sixteenth.
My accommodations at the Ball House, Fremont, were quite in contrast with those placed at my disposal at Castalia. I heard no stories of "mineral springs" or wonderful freaks of Nature, but shall remember Fremont as the delightful little city where I had two nights' sleep in one.
I began my day's journey at eight o'clock with Elmore as the evening objective. Halted a few moments at a hotel known in that locality as the Four-Mile House. Took dinner at Hessville, where I remained until four o'clock in the afternoon and then rode on to Elmore.
COUNTRY STORE AND POST OFFICE.