Wherever they stopped was home for the time being. To bring about this magical transformation of things that mean nothing, into things that mean “home,” was a special gift of Harriet’s, acquired in her own home circle. On this journey into the wilds there was always a gathering of the children for singing and prayer in the little parlor of whatever inn might be their stopping place for the time. On such an evening we can see them sitting around the table in the candle light, the father reading and studying. Catherine writing to Mary at Hartford, and Harriet to her loved friend, Georgiana May, Thomas working at his journal, and Isabella keeping her little record, too, while George is only waiting for a chance to sit up to the table and take his pen. In her letter Harriet is saying this: “As for me, among the multitude of my present friends, my heart still makes occasional visits to the absent ones, visits full of pleasure and full of cause for gratitude to Him who gives us friends. I have thought of you often to-day, my Georgiana.... This afternoon as we were traveling, we struck up ‘Jubilee.’ It put me in mind of the time when we used to ride along the rough North Guilford roads and make the air vocal as we went along. Pleasant times, those! Those were blue skies, and that was a beautiful lake, and noble pine-trees and rocks they were that hung over it. But those we shall look upon ‘nae mair.’ Well, my dear, there is a land where we shall not love and leave. Those skies shall never cease to shine, the waters of life we shall never be called upon to leave. We have here no continuing city, but we seek one to come. In such thoughts as these I desire ever to rest, and with such words as these let us ‘comfort one another and edify one another.’”
The next stopping place was Harrisburg. Here they had another homelike evening, gathering in Catherine’s room for a “sing” before going to bed. Then followed a good restful sleep in preparation for the long, slow journey up the Appalachian range that was to begin in the morning. In this part of the pilgrimage they were not so fortunate as they had hitherto been. The horses were poor and the roads very bad. It took them eight days to do what the mail-stage was accustomed to accomplish in two. But good company makes a long journey short. The children’s spirits were equal to the need, though they may have been by this time a little weary. They flung their songs upon the breeze and their tracts upon the traveler whenever they met one, and left a trail of gladness upon the mountain heights.
When they reached the city of Wheeling the family were again distributed among the homes of the people who were desirous that they should remain so that they might hear Dr. Beecher preach. At this place the family had expected to take the canal boat down the Ohio. But either because the water was too low or because of a rumor that cholera was becoming prevalent down the river, they decided against the great waterway as a means of travel. And if the canal boat experience would have been like that described by Dickens in his “American Notes” or even like the short sketch that Harriet Beecher made in her little story, “The Canal-boy,” the Beecher party had little to regret in being compelled to go a roundabout way, in a comfortably airy stage-coach, even though the journey by this method did take longer.
After a busy week in Wheeling, they chartered a coach again and went on westward. This time they verged a little northward and took in Granville, Ohio, where they stayed a while to attend a protracted meeting. Here there was more and more preaching. For the rest of the way there was a corduroy road, made of logs laid crosswise. George said, “They make the roads this way for the benefit of the dyspeptics out here.” But never mind! That corduroy road led over the most beautiful rolling prairie, and down along pleasant river courses, till it came in view of a wide valley through which the great Ohio, La Belle Rivière, swept with a great curve, leaving a charmed space for the building of a city. Here the stage-coach swung along through streets between rows of neat red brick houses surrounded by abundant gardens, and paused at last for rest after the long pilgrimage. Here the Beecher home was to be for eighteen years.
CHAPTER X
THE WESTERN HOME
On arriving in this western metropolis, the Beechers were not entirely like strangers in a strange land. The Doctor, accompanied by Catherine, had made a tour of inspection the year before, and had made many acquaintances with whom they had talked over their educational plans. Besides this, Harriet had two prosperous uncles in Cincinnati, who were taking part in all the most vital concerns of the city; one was that fascinating Uncle Samuel Edmonds Foote, and the other was Mr. John Parsons Foote, brother of Uncle Samuel, who was also a highly cultivated gentleman. These uncles welcomed the wanderers and made them at home in their comfortable residences on the heights where the view of the whole city was spread out beneath their windows. Uncle John and Uncle Samuel, said Harriet, were the “intelligent, sociable, free, and hospitable sort of folk that everybody likes and everybody feels at home with.”
In the city they also found a large number of old Litchfield and Guilford friends, who had come out before them and had already become a part of the thriving intellectual and social life of the town and region. For in our thought of the western city, far removed from what were then the centers of national activity, we must not imagine too severe a picture of simplicity and wilderness life. The pioneering period had in fact passed entirely by. In 1833 the famous Buckeye Dinner celebrated the forty-fifth anniversary of the first settlement of the city, and this means a long time in the history of a western town in the United States where the growth is like that of a mushroom in the night. When the Beechers came there in 1832, there was a court house, a banking house, a medical college with a hospital and some asylums; there were fifteen churches, several Bible societies, several public libraries, a theater, a humane society and a museum. There were large markets, twenty-one foundries and factories, and a great steamboat business with large imports and exports. At the wharves there was room for thirty steamboats at one time, and the country all about Cincinnati was threaded with post roads. Before the Beechers left the city in 1850 there were railroad facilities in some directions, a Society of Fine Arts with thirty-three active working painters and sculptors in its circle, an Academy of Music, and forty-three churches. The population in 1833 was twenty-seven thousand. It increased with amazing rapidity. During one year of the Beechers’ stay eleven hundred houses were built.
A place that was making such a record as this was certain to receive a great deal of notice. As the city was built on the banks of the Ohio River, the one possible thread of travel at that time from the Atlantic coast to the remoter west, travelers of an investigating turn of mind—of whom there has always been a constant procession to this country—had to pass Cincinnati on their way; they usually paused for a time to see this wonderful city grow. It grew so fast that they could fairly see the process going on! During the time that Harriet Beecher lived in Cincinnati many noted writers stayed for a longer or shorter time in the city, observing things more or less closely, and afterward wrote about what they saw. Among them were Fenno Hoffman, Godfrey de Vigne, Chevalier, Harriet Martineau, Captain Marryat, Professor Frank Hall, Buckingham, Mrs. Steele, Charles Dickens, Sir Charles Lyell, who spoke chiefly of the geological formation; the Honorable Charles Augustus Murray, the Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley and Mary Howitt, who wrote most of her book in a quiet valley in the suburbs of the city. Captain Marryat said: “It is a beautiful, well-kept, clean town, reminding you of Philadelphia.... Situated on a hill on the banks of the Ohio, it is surrounded by a phalanx of other hills; so that, look up and down the streets whichever way you will, your eye reposes upon verdure and forest trees in the distance.”
Other visitors noted also the “pretty gardens and ornamental shrubberies,” and some declared, with expressions of amazement, that every comfort and convenience was to be found in the city. Mrs. Steele called Cincinnati the “Queen of the West.” “We have explored it thoroughly by walking and riding, and we pronounce it wonderful,” she said. She was astonished that such a city could have come from what was so lately a wilderness. There were rows of handsome dwellings, surrounded by shade trees. An accidental opening among the trees gave you a glimpse of a pavilion where, among groves and gardens, the ladies and children of the family might enjoy the fresh air.
But it is not to be supposed that all the distinguished visitors to this mid-country city of the United States should be thus pleasantly impressed. One went so far as to laugh at the idea of calling it the “Empire City of the West,” and substitutes for this proud title the obnoxious one, “Empire City of Pigs!” for this writer claimed that the pigs ran in the street with perfect comfort to themselves though perhaps not to the members of the human family. We find, however, that Harriet Beecher’s little brother enjoyed this Cincinnati custom hugely, for he would frequently be found walking soberly along by the side of a pig with his arm around its neck, or even sitting astride one of the monsters, gallantly riding it—at least for a few minutes!—to the great amusement of the populace.