My Recollections of Ohio E-Book

Silas Sadler Packard

• Herausgeber: Full Well Ventures
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In this paper by Silas Sadler Packard (1826-1898) originally read before the Ohio Society of New York on a certain Monday evening, May 12, 1890, the professor and business college founder reminisces on his childhood in Ohio.

Leseprobe

MY RECOLLECTIONS OF OHIO

SILAS SADLER PACKARD

CONTENTS

1. Letters

2. My Recollections of Ohio

3. Obituary

Originally published in 1890 by Order of the Society

Modern Edition © 2022 Full Well Ventures

This text is in the public domain

The publishers have made all reasonable efforts to ensure this book is indeed in the Public Domain in any and all territories it has been published.

Created with Vellum

1

LETTERS

Ohio Society Rooms, 236 Fifth Avenue.

New York, May 13, 1890.

Prof. S.S. Packard, 101 East 23rd Street.

My Dear Sir:

The Ohio Society greatly enjoyed hearing last night your admirable paper of personal reminiscences, and afterwards gave formal expression to a very natural wish to have a copy for publication. I need hardly add that it gives me pleasure individually to forward their request. To those of us who listened to you, its perusal will revive at once a pleasure and an interest which are both worth cherishing, and those who did not hear you will find in it what they will regret not having heard, and ought not to altogether lose.

Yours very truly,

Wager Swayne.

My Dear General:

I am deeply honored by the request of the Ohio Society, thus gracefully expressed through you, its esteemed President, to submit my inconsequent paper for publication; and deeply as I feel the compliment, and flattering as are your own allusions in preferring the request, I am not misled into the belief that there is anything of special value in the paper which should call for preservation. I know it has been the custom from time to time to request for publication such papers from members as contain valuable historical data, or as mark the characteristics and development of the State, and that our library is already enriched by such contributions. The departure from this line into personal reminiscence, in which I have so freely and unguardedly indulged, has the warrant of your own example in the delightful talk you gave us concerning the history and growth of your native city, Columbus; and this it was that gave me courage to commit to paper such of my childhood recollections as pertain to our beloved State. It is not necessary for me to say that had I contemplated the possibility of a publication, I should have written far differently; but I could not have written more truthfully. I have less reluctance in acceding to your request from the hope that in thus following your lead I may help to open the way for others who have more important things to say, and who can say them in a better way. Already are there indications that the Ohio people among us are beginning to understand that “everybody knows more than anybody,” and that the best and surest way to know all about our State is for each to contribute from his own knowledge.

If it should appear that the details of personal experience, such as make up this paper, may, after all, be utilized in the work of collating a history of our State, which shall be in truth the history of its people, neither of us, I am sure, will be sorry for the small beginnings.

I am, with great respect, yours sincerely.

S.S. Packer.

New York, May 14, 1890.

2

MY RECOLLECTIONS OF OHIO

WITH SHAME I confess that I was neither born great nor born in Ohio. My father was a mill operator and mechanic of Western Massachusetts, with a family of five boys, of whom I was the fourth. In 1833, when I was seven, the Ohio fever broke out in our neighborhood and took off a colony of four families, ours among them. We traveled by wagon to Troy, N.Y., where we embarked on the Erie Canal, then the one public thoroughfare to the Great West. Arriving at Buffalo, after a journey of two weeks, we took a sailing vessel on Lake Erie, which in due time landed us in Cleveland. Here we again took to water and traveled for a hundred miles or so on the Ohio Canal, along the towpath of which, a few years later, “Jim Garfield” drove his tandem team, while posing for the Presidency. Arriving at Newark, we took the little five-mile feeder that taps Raccoon Creek at Paige’s Woolen Factory, and landed at the head of that estuary, in the town of Granville, Licking County, as near the geographical center of the state as it is easy to measure. The entire journey was accomplished in a little less than a month, which, for those days, was considered fast traveling.

As I now think of it, it does, indeed, seem wonderful that a young man like myself should be able to say that he can remember when there was not a railroad in the country, when a telegraph line was not dreamed of, and when there were no better facilities for getting over the surface of the earth than were at the disposal of Lot when he wished to visit his uncle Abraham. At Schenectady, on this journey, I remember to have seen what is said to be the first American passenger railway, and the only one then in existence, the short road leading from Schenectady to Albany.