But what of the Maysville of to-day? It extends on both sides of Limestone Creek for about two miles along the Kentucky shore, at no point apparently over five squares wide, and for the most part but two or three; for back of it forested hills rise sharply. There is a variety of industries, the business quarter is substantially built, and there are numerous comfortable homes with pretty lawns.
On the opposite shore is Aberdeen, where Kentucky swains and lasses, who for one reason or another fail to get a license at home, find marriage made easy—a peaceful, pleasant, white village, with trees a-plenty, and romantic hills shutting out the north wind.
We are camped to-night on a picturesque sand-slope, at the foot of a willow-edged bottom, and some seven feet above the river level. We need to perch high, for the storm has been general through the basin, and the Ohio is rising steadily.
Footnote A:[ (return) ]
See Shaler's Kentucky (Amer. Commonwealth series), Collins's History of Kentucky, and Hale's Trans-Alleghany Pioneers. Shaler gives the date as 1756; but Hale, a specialist in border annals, makes it 1755.
Footnote B:[ (return) ]
See ante, p. 126.
Footnote C:[ (return) ]
Palmer (1817) paid five dollars for his passage from Pittsburg to Cincinnati (465 miles), without food, and fifty cents per hundred pounds for freight to Marietta. Imlay (1792) says the rate in his time from Pittsburg to Limestone was twenty-five cents per hundred. In 1803, Harris paid four dollars-and-a-half per hundred for freight, by wagon from Baltimore to Pittsburg.
CHAPTER XIV.
Produce boats—A dead town—On the Great Bend—Grant's birthplace—The Little Miami—The genesis of Cincinnati.
Point Pleasant, O., Wednesday, May 23rd.—The river rose three feet during the night. Steamers go now at full speed, no longer fearing the bars; and the swash upon shore was so violent that I was more than once awakened, each time to find the water line creeping nearer and nearer to the tent door. As we sweep onward to-day, upon an accelerated current, the fringing willows, whose roots before the rise were many feet up the slopes of sand and gravel, are gracefully dipping their boughs in the rushing flood. With the rise, come the sweepings of the beaches—bits of lumber, fallen trees, barrels, boxes, 'longshore rubbish of every sort; sometimes it hangs in ragged rafts, and we steer clear of such, for Pilgrim's progress is greater than that of these unwelcome companions of the voyage, and we wish no entangling alliances.