Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Sorry. Potential presidential candidate....

Jerry Ochs

Judy,

Please don't feel depressed.  If you are alive and well enough to type two messages in one day, you are doing a helluvah lot better than all of our classmates who are no longer here.

Stephen (Steve) Dixon

I think that Froggy the Gremlin's original foil was Smilin' Ed McConnell.

The reckless madcap Mr. Toad (a direct quote) was a favorite of mine since my days as a wee tyke. The Wind In the Willows is one of a host of books and stories that my mother read to me, over and over.

Philip Spiess

Steve:  The Wind in the Willows has been one of my lifelong favorites, too.  However, I much prefer the chapters that don't have Mr. Toad in them, particularly "Dolce Domum" and "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn."

Paul Simons

My email shows a post from Jerry Ochs calling on my particular but limited expertise in these matters:    

Philip Spiess

Herewith I present a new series in four parts, concerning the western fringes of Hamilton County along the Great Miami River and its border with Indiana.  These parts will be:  (1) "The Mound Builders of Miami Fort"; (2) "The Harrisons of North Bend"; (3) "Infernal Fernald"; and (4) "Nature Reclaimed."  As I recently did a quick survey of Cincinnati's African Americans' history, so this first part will quickly survey the Cincinnati area's Native American culture and history.

ALONG THE GREAT MIAMI I:  THE MOUND BUILDERS OF MIAMI FORT:

A Campout at Miami Fort:  It must have been the Fall of 1959, when I went on my first real Boy Scout campout with Troop 3 of Clifton.  (We had earlier gone on a District-wide Camporee at Winton Woods, but that had been a disaster, with rain, too heavy a gear to carry in, and, of course, novice campers, those being Don Dahmann and me.)  So our campout at Miami Fort, on the great cliff above the confluence of the Great Miami River and the mighty Ohio, was an experience to be remembered.  It was my first Scout wood fire cooking experience (Spam and partially-cooked, partially-burnt biscuits for supper; burnt pancakes spilled in the grass for breakfast), as well as my first experience of a “Snipe Hunt” (of which I’ve participated in several in the years since), and the “Great Game,” which we played on every campout, “Infiltration.”  But the point of this story is to tell you about Miami Fort.

Miami Fort (so-called) is a series of ancient Indian earthworks, possibly a fortress, that overlooked the Great Miami, the Ohio, and the Kentucky hills.  Knowing that these were considered prehistoric mounds [see below], and thinking to be a budding archaeologist, during the campout I dug with my fingers into one prominent ridge mound and, lo and behold! I uncovered a tooth and a three-inch piece of bone (which I still have).  To this day, I don’t know whether they are animal or human, but I now suspect that I was breaking some sort of law, even in the late 1950s, by digging these out of the mounds and taking them away.

And with that as introduction, let us examine the ancient history of Miami Fort.

The Hopewell People:  I first heard of the Hopewell People way down in the grades, when, on a trip to the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, then in the lower floor of the old Ohio Mechanics’ Institute on Central Parkway (before the museum moved to its building on Gilbert Avenue in Eden Park, and long before it moved to its current quarters in Cincinnati Union Terminal), I viewed a modest exhibit of minimal artifacts and took away a one-page mimeographed fact sheet about the Hopewell and Adena peoples.  The Hopewell People (or the Hopewell Culture, as it is sometimes called) doesn’t refer to a specific tribe; it refers to an artifactually-observed way of life that seems to have developed simultaneously around 200 B.C. (the beginning of the Middle Woodland period, as anthropologists who study the early Native Americans would have it) across the Midwest, from Nebraska eastward through Indiana and Ohio, and from Minnesota down the Mississippi River to Mississippi itself, as well as into Virginia.  The culture’s center in its heyday seems to have been situated along the Scioto River in south-central Ohio (particularly around what is now Chillicothe), along the middle of the Ohio Valley, and in a swath stretching northward along the Great Miami River valley.  Not a single society, but rather a widely dispersed set of culturally-related populations, the Hopewell people were connected by a common network of trade routes, mostly along waterways, by the nature of their artworks, and by the effigy and burial mounds that they constructed.  Their culture died out around 500 A.D.

Origin of the Hopewell Name:  What the early Native American culture thus described called itself is quite unknown.  The name “Hopewell” was first applied to this culture by Warren K. Moorehead after his explorations of the Hopewell Mound Group in Ross County, Ohio (near Chillicothe) in 1891 and 1892.  The mound group itself (formerly the Mound City Group State Memorial, now one of six clusters of earthworks under the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park) was named after Mordecai Hopewell, whose family owned the earthworks at the time.  For want of a better name, it quickly came to be applied to the wide scattering of people who lived in temporary settlements of one to three households near rivers and who practiced a mixture of hunting, gathering, and crop growing – and mound building.

Hopewell Earthworks (Indian Mounds):  Today the best-surviving features of the Hopewell culture are the impressive earthworks built by this people for still unknown purposes and the art objects that these mounds sometimes contain.  These earthworks are among the most impressive survivals of North American native peoples’ prehistory.  The earthworks are of four basic kinds:  (1) vast geometric constructions covering much acreage, currently considered to have been lunar or solar observatories (the Newark Earthworks complex in Ohio is the most important example); (2) fancifully sculpted effigy mounds representing birds, serpents, and other animals (Serpent Mound State Memorial in Adams County, Ohio, is the best-known surviving example); (3) simple burial mounds, occasionally rising to impressive heights (Miamisburg Mound is the highest in Ohio), often containing intricately-shaped objects in pipestone or ceramic or objects of adornment made of animal teeth, shells, copper, mica, or obsidian, or even carved human bone; and (4) large complexes believed to have been fortifications or defensive structures of some sort (Fort Ancient State Memorial on the Little Miami River northeast of Cincinnati is one such site).  Miami Fort is of this last variety.

Squier and Davis:  The first and most important study of these prehistoric mound builders of North America, as well as being an early treatise on archaeology as a scientific discipline, was the volume Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley:  Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations, by Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis.  Published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1848, it was the first publication of the new Smithsonian Institution (established 1846), and the first volume in its Contributions to Knowledge series.  Davis had grown up in Hillsboro, Ohio, just a few miles from Chillicothe and the many earthworks of the Scioto River valley, and so had developed a deep curiosity about them.  While a student at Kenyon College he explored these mounds, writing a paper about them which Daniel Webster read; Webster encouraged Davis to continue his research. Although opening a medical practice after graduation, Davis continued to collect artifacts from around the mounds.  Squier, who had training as a surveyor, had come to Chillicothe as the editor of the Scioto Gazette newspaper and was equally intrigued by the prehistoric mounds.  Thus he and Davis joined forces on a formal project of surveying the mounds of the eastern United States.  Their book, Ancient Monuments, provides descriptions of hundreds of mounds and other earthworks which they personally surveyed and sketched; the Kentucky sites in their book came from the archaeological studies made by the deceased naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque.  A significant part of Squier and Davis’s achievement was their classification of sites according to their apparent function (i.e., burial grounds, effigies, fortifications, building foundations).  As little was then known about the cultures they were describing, they were limited (and occasionally erroneous) in their preconceptions of them.  Nevertheless, their work, edited by Joseph Henry, the first Secretary (head) of the Smithsonian Institution, was a major achievement and a pioneer work regarding excavation methods and artifact recovery techniques, primitive as these then were. 

Miami Fort:  The hilltop enclosure known as Miami Fort (or sometimes “Fort Hill”) is a series of earthworks located at the peak of a steep precipice which overlooks the confluence of the Great Miami River with the Ohio River, and which provides a wide-ranging view of both valleys and their vast flood plains.  The site thus served for centuries as an important lookout post for Native American tribes, and probably one with regional ceremonial import.  With its deep ravines and well-preserved earthen walls and gateways, some transformed over long periods of time (possibly through precipitation) into prominent “prow”-like shapes, it also served as a major fortification (hence its name) for several different Native American groups, beginning with the prehistoric mound-builders who created it, the Hopewell People [see above], and continuing with the more modern Miami Indians [see below], who used and maintained the site, even adding to it, right up until the time of European contact.  

The standard map of Miami Fort traditionally has been that of Squier and Davis’s 1848 book [see above], but recent scientific investigations using the most up-to-date equipment have revealed much more about the site than the old above-ground surveys did, resulting in the understanding that the Miami Fort complex is much bigger than originally thought.  Walls have been found to extend much further, water features have been discovered, and great ceremonial posts have been located that were missed in previous investigations; the posts were found by proton magnetometry, at a regular level, every few meters.  The anthropologist researching this states that the Indians marked their space on posts with totems for survival and spiritual purposes, emblems of their clan membership.

Another key feature of Miami Fort, studied in very recent times, is the water complex that has been newly recognized.  The earthworks, given the nature of the ground on which they were built, were “drought-prone”:  there’s no natural water here.  So if people were living here and growing crops, they had to have a source of water supply (aside from trekking way down the cliffs to the rivers and back up the steep hills!).  Ah!  The archaeologists and anthropologists currently studying the Miami Fort and Shawnee Lookout parks have discovered a series of step dams, pools, and ditches, lined with limestone and topped with clay, which carried runoff water, channeling it into the dams; all of this was built about 2,000 years ago by the Hopewell People, but it continued to be maintained by the more modern habitants of the area, presumably the Miami Indians, up to, and including, the era of European contact.

The ancient earthworks of Miami Fort overlook the site of Fort Finney, built in 1785 at the mouth of the Great Miami River, and named after Major Walter Finney, who built the fort (well, hey! however George Washington didn’t build Cincinnati’s Fort Washington, did he?).  The site was chosen to be halfway between Limestone, Kentucky (now Maysville) and the Falls of the Ohio (at what is now Louisville).  George Washington had commissioned General George Rogers Clark and others to make a peace treaty with the Shawnee Indians [see below], and a fort was needed to secure the territory [!].  This treaty, the Treaty of Fort Finney, was concluded in early 1786 between the United States and leaders of the Shawnee Indian tribe; it ceded parts of the Ohio Country to the United States.  The treaty was only reluctantly signed by the Shawnees; other Shawnee leaders later renounced the treaty, paving the way for the Northwest Indian War [see below].  The fort was abandoned sometime before 1788, and the site now is the coal yard of the Miami Fort Power Station of the Cincinnati Gas & Electric Company (now Duke Energy; built in 1924-1925, and originally called the Columbia Power Station).  It, in turn, was the former site of the home of John Scott Harrison, son of President William Henry Harrison and father of President Benjamin Harrison [see Part II of this series].

The Miami Indians:  The Miami nation of Native Americans (sometimes called the Miami-Illinois) are among the peoples known as the Great Lakes tribes, who originally spoke one of the Algonquian languages.  They occupied the area now identified as north-central Indiana, southwest Michigan, and western Ohio.  Their name, Miami, derives from the Algonquian language by way of an even older term meaning “downstream people.”  Some scholars maintain that the Miami called themselves the “Twightwee” (interestingly, this was one of the Cincinnati telephone exchanges in the days before area codes), derived from the Delaware language and supposedly a reference to their sacred bird, the sandhill crane, although some Miami claim that this was only a name used by other tribes to refer to the Miami.

Early Miami people are considered by anthropologists to belong to a tradition of Mississippian culture.  Societies of this culture are characterized by maize-based agriculture, chiefdom-level social organization, extensive regional trade networks, and hierarchical settlement patterns, among other factors.  Historically, the Miami engaged in hunting.  By the mid-18^th century, they had settled on the upper Wabash River and in northwestern Ohio.  But the victory of the British in the French and Indian War (1754-1763) led to an increased British presence in the historic areas of Miami settlement.  Thereupon some Miami bands of tribes merged to create larger tribal confederacies; one such was led by Chief Little Turtle.  In the years circa 1748-1752, the group of Miami of which I write had their headquarters located at Pickawillany (now Piqua, Ohio) on the Great Miami River.

During the American Revolution, some branches of the Miami nation supported the American colonists in their fight with the British, while others remained allies of the British, some more hostile than others to the colonists who inhabited their lands.  However, the new United States government did not trust the general neutrality of the Miamis and attacked them on several occasions.  The battle of St. Clair’s Defeat, 1791 (General Arthur St. Clair being at the time the Governor of the Old Northwest Territory, and the man who named Cincinnati “Cincinnati”) was the worst defeat of U. S. troops by Native Americans (led by Little Turtle of the Miamis and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees; the Delawares were also involved) in U. S. history – of St. Clair’s 1,000 men, only 24 escaped unharmed.  It also led to the first investigation by Congress of the Executive branch of the federal government.

This Northwest Indian War ended with the Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794), which pitted General “Mad” Anthony Wayne against the Indian confederacy headed by Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and others; Wayne won.  The Treaty of Greenville the next year (1795) effectively closed the “frontier” in Ohio, for the treaty allowed for payments to local tribes in exchange for the lands of white settlements.  Nevertheless, there were still Miami who resented the incursions of the United States’ settlers, and they coalesced around the great Shawnee Chief Tecumseh and his religious brother, The Prophet, at Prophetstown (Indiana).  The governor of the Old Northwest Territory at this time, William Henry Harrison [see Part II of this series], destroyed Prophetstown in 1811, then used the War of 1812 as the pretext for attacks on Miami villages throughout the Indiana Territory.

In 1826 the Treaty of Mississinewas forced the Miamis to cede most of their land to the federal government, although it also allowed Miami lands to be held as private property in individuals, whereas the tribe had formerly held these lands in common.  Then, at the time of the removal of the Old Northwest Indians to “Indian Territory” (now Oklahoma) in 1846, those Indians who held private allotments of land were allowed to stay as citizens of Indiana.

Today, the divide in the Miami tribe still exists:  the federal government recognizes the Western Miami (in Oklahoma) as the official tribal government (the “Miami Tribe of Oklahoma”); the Eastern Miami (or Indiana Miami), despite their having their own tribal government, lack federal recognition.  Although the tribe was recognized by the U. S. government in an 1854 treaty, said recognition was stripped from the tribe in 1897.  In 1993, a federal judge ruled that the Eastern Miami, having been recognized by the United States in the 1854 treaty, the U. S. government had no right to strip the Miami of their status in 1897 – but he also ruled that the statute of limitations on appealing their status had expired:  the Eastern Miami no longer had any right to sue. 

And Something of the Shawnee:  The Shawnee, like the Miamis, were an Algonquian-speaking group of Native Americans.  In colonial times they were semi-migratory, primarily inhabiting areas of the Ohio Valley eastward to what is now West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and western Maryland.  It is currently believed that the Shawnee are descended from the Hopewell People [see above], although there is a gap in the archaeological record connecting the two.  The Shawnee themselves traditionally regarded the Lenape (Delaware) of the mid-Atlantic east coast their “grandfathers.”

In the first third of the 18^th century, the Shawnee predominated in the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, but by the middle of the century the British colonial expansion was beginning to push them out.  So, in 1753, the Shawnee on the Scioto River in the Ohio Country suggested that the Virginia Shawnee join them; this they did in 1754, founding the community of Shannoah (Lower Shawneetown) on the Ohio River.  After taking part at the beginning of the French and Indian War (1754-1763) as allies of the French, the Shawnee switched sides in 1758, making a formal peace with the British, the treaty recognizing the Allegheny Ridge (Eastern Continental Divide) as their mutual border.  But the Crown had difficulty enforcing this boundary, as Anglo-European colonists (not just the English) continued to migrate westward.  Thus the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768 extended the border further west, giving the British Kentucky and western Virginia, although the Shawnee did not agree to this treaty.  But after this treaty, American colonists began pouring in to settle the Ohio River valley. 

After the American Revolution, therefore, the Shawnee combined with the Miami into a great fighting force, prompting the Northwest Indian War [see above].  After being defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794), most of the Shawnees signed the Treaty of Greenville (1795), which forced them to cede large parts of their homeland to the new United States.  Enter Governor William Henry Harrison [see Part II]:  in 1809 he invited the various Native American tribes in the Old Northwest Territory to a meeting to discuss payments for the ceding of more Indian lands.  The Potawatomi people convinced the Miamis to accept; the result was the Treaty of Fort Wayne.

The Shawnee leader Tecumseh, however, was outraged by this treaty, believing that all American Indian land was owned in common by all tribes, and so he began to follow the preaching of his brother, the spiritual leader known as The Prophet (Tenskwatawa), and to encourage other tribes to join the Shawnee resistance confederacy at Prophetstown, Indiana.  In 1811, William Henry Harrison led an army to disperse this confederacy, but The Prophet’s forces attacked Harrison’s forces first.  The resulting battle, on the Tippecanoe River near the Wabash River, was won by Harrison – making his fame and nickname “Old Tippecanoe” – and his forces burned Prophetstown.  Then came the War of 1812.  By this time Harrison had been made a general; meanwhile, the British Colonel Procter and Tecumseh set siege to Fort Meigs in northern Ohio, then stormed small Fort Stephenson on the Sandusky River.  In 1813 Harrison launched an invasion of Upper Canada, which ended with the Battle of the Thames, during which Tecumseh was killed, thus effectively ending the Shawnee influence in the Old Northwest Territory.

Thus in 1817, with the Treaty of Fort Meigs, the Shawnee exchanged their remaining western Ohio lands for land west of the Mississippi, a reservation in Kansas.  These Shawnee came to be known as the “Loyal Shawnee” (possibly because they supported the Union in the Civil War); others from Ohio were regarded as the “Cherokee Shawnee,” because they were settled in “Indian Territory” on Cherokee lands in Oklahoma.  Only in 2000 were the “Loyal” and/or “Cherokee” Shawnee given federal government recognition independent of the Cherokee Nation; they are now known as the Shawnee Tribe and reside in Oklahoma.   

Miami Fort and Shawnee Lookout Park Today:  The historic earthworks of Miami Fort and environs are now encompassed by Shawnee Lookout Park, part of the Hamilton County Park System; of the over 10,000 earthworks in Ohio, nearly 40 of them are found here.  Established (as near as I can tell) in the early 1970s, Shawnee Lookout Park, a 2,017-acre park located at North Bend, Ohio, preserves the Hopewell (and possibly Adena) earthworks described above.  It includes three easy hiking trails:  the 1.4 mile Miami Fort Trail, which winds amid the nearly 3,000-year-old earthworks and ends on the high hilltop overlooking the confluence of the Great Miami River with the Ohio; the 2.0-mile Little Turtle Trail, with spectacular views of the Ohio River from its heights; and the 1.3-mile Blue Jacket Trail, which offers views of the great oxbow curve of the Great Miami River below.  All three trails have important nature study features, including (in season) bald eagles, black vultures, red-tailed hawks, pileated woodpeckers, ovenbirds, and rufous-sided towhees; local plants of note include the northern spicebush and the pawpaw, host to the zebra swallowtail butterflies.  The park is also the setting for an historic log cabin (think of Harrison’s 1840 Presidential campaign [see Part II]), built circa 1795 but continuously occupied until the mid-1950s; it was moved to the park in 1971, where it serves as an educational center.  Likewise, the park also is the current site of the 18^th-century stone Springhouse School, where the 1786 Treaty of Fort Finney was signed [see above]; in 1975 the building, believed to be one of the oldest in Hamilton County, was moved from its original site on the Ohio River where Fort Finney once stood, on the grounds of the Miami Fort Power Station of the Cincinnati Gas & Electric Company (now part of Duke Energy), to its present location.  In sum, flint artifacts found in this park – knives, drill and spear points, stone pestles, hammers, even tablets, are believed by archaeologists to cover over 14,000 years of history.

Next:  "The Harrisons of North Bend."

Stephen Collett

Thanks for this Native American history lesson, Phil. The whole of it was very dear to me from an early age. I have a nice collection of stone tools and flint points from the farm my family settled on in 1813 in Clinton County, Virginia Military Land deeded to militiamen from the Revolutionary War (Cleveland, for example, is on Connecticut Military Land, and thence the shingle-sided houses). 

Our family used to visit Fort Ancient for picnics, and were glad when the facilities were upgraded and the museum/visitor center built. But I was very disappointed to find (probably fifteen years ago) the place down-scaled and hard to find open.

Dale Gieringer

  Speaking of Shawnee Lookout Park, I happened to visit there (along with Harrison's tomb) last year.  The most historical sight was this log cabin, built c. 1795 by one Micajah Dunn, son of a revolutionary war captain.  The cabin was originally located in nearby Elizbethtown, OH but moved to the park for the Bicentennial to impart a sense of pioneer antiquity.   Otherwise, Shawnee Park was disappointing,  a bland picnic area with mowed lawns, marred by the pervading industrial hum of the Miami Fort Power Station and the acrid odor of a nearby asphalt plant.    Scenic vistas of the confluence of the Miami & Ohio  rivers were blocked by foliage, but you could make out the smokestacks of  the powerplant.  We followed a trail leading through poison ivy to the shadowy, forested remains of old Fort Miami (which may or may not ever have been a real fort).  Its overgrown, broken, earthen ramparts were barely discernible to an active imagination.   Sic transit gloria mundi.  

      When I was in elementary school, our teachers took us to visit an ancient moundbuilder site near the old Ferndale dam in North Bend.   Alas, nothing memorable stuck in my impressionable young mind.   LIkewise for Fort Ancient, which I revisited with the family a few years ago. You could barely make out the mounds, rising inconspicuously a couple feet above the grassy meadowland.  For a more impressive mound tour, I recommend Serpent Mound, an hour and a half east of the city in Sinking Spring, Adams County, near the banks of scenic Ohio Brush Creek.   It's been well restored so that you can actually make out the serpent.

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

Phil,

Thank you so much!  I loved the information.  I am never close to Ohio history here so it got me wondering about Mad Anthony Wayne. I used to pass the tree which I think is long gone. I have an idea of where it was but when I pull up the maps nothing is familiar and it's been so long since I've been there. 

Do you know exactly where it was?  It was a place I used to pass somewhere from Reading Rd to Galbraith and north I guess.  I am not sure where I was going that I passed it. 

Philip Spiess

Barbara:  The tree in question, I suppose, was the "Mad" Anthony Wayne elm tree that stood in the middle of Apjones Street in Cumminsville, protected by a circular concrete curb.  It was said that General Wayne camped under this tree on October 7, 1793, as he led his troops north to fight the Indians, and that he and several of his officers tied their horses to the tree.  Thus the neighborhood commemorated it.  The tree died around 1970, and some memorial plaques were made out of its wood.

Dale:  I think you mean the Fernbank Dam near Sayler Park.

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

This is very weird. When I search Mad Anthony Wayne tree it gives me the information that Phil wrote that said Cumminsville. Dale mentions Sayler Park. I have been looking at maps again and what I'm talking about I think is near Hartwell and East Galbraith Road and Anthony Wayne Avenue.  

We are all from different parts of the city, which was one of the beautiful things about Walnut Hills. Perhaps it wasn't the tree but only a sign commemorating  Anthony Wayne Avenue?  I think what I'm remembering is in the Hartwell area. 

This has sent me in a different direction by accident looking at some homes for sale in the area and it's making me crazy. Our little pieces of land with houses so close together that you can almost touch your neighbors are so expensive with high taxes that I wonder what has gone wrong.  Is it that important to be close to the ocean? What a weird situation. People will go on vacation or live in tiny vacation homes to be near the ocean but some that live here don't bother to walk around the corner for it. 

I saw a home with numerous bedrooms, 5 and 2 1/2 baths, enormous kitchen,  a pool and pool house with tennis court, nearly 6 acres of land for approximately what my house is worth here where I cannot go outside without seeing people all the time. 

Philip Spiess

I had three sources for my information on the Anthony Wayne tree:  Caroline Williams' sketches in Mirrored Landmarks of Cincinnati (1939); the reference (pp. 400-401) in Cincinnati:  A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors (the WPA's American Guide Series, 1943); and a blurb marked "Paul's Post" on Facebook and titled "Vanishing Northside," signed Paul Saint-Villers (this latter gave me the information about the demise of the tree and its subsequent disposal).  The first source was my early inspiration for studying Cincinnati's history; starting about 1958, every year on my birthday, I'd visit some of the historic Cincinnati spots that Caroline Williams had depicted in her Sunday Enquirer drawings and in the books of drawings which she subsequently published -- most of the sites were still there when I first visited them; most of them aren't now.

The Wayne elm tree was one I visited early on, Cumminsville being close to Clifton.  I don't know what I expected, but it was rather disappointing.  And Barbara, Dale is not describing a tree that was at Sayler Park, but an Indian mound.

Nancy Messer

Have to change the subject here.  I checked online to make sure I was on record to vote absentee in November and was surprised to find out I wasn't.  I submitted the application around the time of the Ohio primary and things must have gotten messed up.  I'm submitting another application (by mail) now and will check online periodically to verify it's been processed.  So, all of you, be sure to make your voting plans now and verify later that what you want is on record.

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

Thanks Phl, You remind me that at some point in my school experience I did some sort of report on Indian Mounds. 

I think now it was not the actual tree but there was and probably still is a sign commemorating Mad Anthony Wayne on that named Avenue. I think it is in Hartwell.  I may never get back to that area again. We haven't traveled to Ohio in a long time. If I did go there I would probably be north of Cincinnati. My sister lives in Waynesville on a farm.  One niece lives in Medina and the other in Columbus. 

Paul Simons

The news from California is not good. Heat waves, dry conditions, abnormally numerous lighting strikes, and therefore another intense fire season. Good luck and plenty of cool, clear water to those from here who now live there. And may the world do what must be done and should have been done decades ago to return this planet to long term livability for human beings and other threatened organisms.

David Buchholz

Thanks, Paul.  It's been a very strange year here in California.  One of my friends, taking into account the polarizing presidency, the pandemic, the triple-digit heat, and very unusual night a week ago when 11,000 recorded lightning bolts struck late summer, dry California, and the 23 recorded fires in and around the Bay Area (we don't go outside when the air quality is 150) remarked, "f**k 2020."  Many of the fires are being ignored because there simply aren't enough firefighters.  Some are coming from Canada, some from Austrailia.

And a spinoff from a Pacific tropical storm is predicted to hit the Bay Area Sunday-Tuesday, no rain, but thunder and lightning.  Just what we need.  (I wish I had taken this image).

Paul Simons

Beautiful and terrifying Dave.

I thought I knew something about lightning but I didn't.  But this link told me a lot, including about how to try to stay safe - 

https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/lightning/faq/ 

Philip Spiess

For some fun viewing of this sort of thing, look up the photos of Nikolai Tesla sitting reading in his "electric discharge cage."

Philip Spiess

Herewith ALONG THE GREAT MIAMI II:  THE HARRISONS OF NORTH BEND:  The rightful heirs to the lands of the Great Miami River and its fertile flood plains were, of course, the Native Americans, most notably, in this part of the country, the Miami “Indians” [see Part I].  But following the American Revolution, as the former colonists of Great Britain began to expand and push westward, ever seeking new territory to farm and develop, the traditional peoples who had settled this land centuries before were pushed out, sometimes peacefully with what turned out to be specious treaties, but more often with the force and violence of battle and war, weapons used and blood spilled.  The Ohio Country had long been a part of the British colony of Virginia, land graciously allotted to it by King George II in 1749 and even surveyed for the royal governor by the young Virginian colonist George Washington.  At the close of the Revolutionary War, however, as the new government of the United States sorted out war debts and land claims, the southern part of the Ohio Country was taken from Virginia and sold to speculators from New Jersey.  Central to this story in the Great Miami Valley was the clan of the Symmes family of New Jersey and its future relatives, the Harrison family of Virginia.  

Something of John Cleves Symmes:  John Cleves Symmes of New Jersey (1742-1814) was the principal land purchaser and developer of the land between the Great Miami and Little Miami Rivers on the Ohio River following the Revolutionary War, a land development which came to be known as the “Symmes Purchase” and which was the site of the future city of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.  Though a pioneer of the Old Northwest Territory, Symmes was born in Riverhead, New York, trained as a lawyer, and, being a supporter of the American Revolution, became chairman of the Sussex County, New Jersey, Committee of Safety in 1774.  He served as a Colonel in the Continental Army and was elected to what is now the New Jersey Senate, as well as serving on the New Jersey Supreme Court (1777-1778).  He represented New Jersey in the Continental Congress (1785-1786), but then, in 1788, he purchased 311,682 acres from the Congress and moved west to the Ohio country in the Old Northwest Territory.  (For the rest of his life this purchase created considerable controversy, caused in part by other investors as partners and by disputes about the actual boundaries of the purchase and the validity of titles.)

Symmes and his family (his first wife had died in 1776, but not before producing three daughters, one of whom, Anna Tuthill Symmes, married Lt. William Henry Harrison [see below; it was a clandestine marriage – some say elopement]) settled on the western edge of the Symmes Purchase near the mouth of the Great Miami River, at what eventually became the village of North Bend, Ohio [see below].  Established in his new home, Symmes pursued an active career as a land developer and seller; he also served as a judge of the Territorial Court from 1788 until Ohio became a state in 1803.  In 1794, Symmes married a second time, this time to the daughter of Governor William Livingston (the first United States governor of New Jersey), Susannah Livingston (who was also John Jay’s sister-in-law).  Symmes died in 1814 in Cincinnati and is buried in North Bend’s Congress Green Cemetery [see below].

The Log Cabin and Hard Cider Campaign of 1840:  The Presidential campaign of 1840, pitting Whig candidate William Henry Harrison against Democrat Martin Van Buren, former Vice President under President Andrew Jackson, has come down in history as the “Log Cabin and Hard Cider Campaign.”  It came about in this way:  a Democratic newspaper, writing a derisive editorial about the Whig candidate, said, “Give him a barrel of hard cider and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it he will sit . . . by the side of a ‘sea coal’ fire, and study moral philosophy.”  The Whigs, picking up on this political blunder, turned it around and presented their candidate as a simple frontier Indian fighter, living in a log cabin (the original structure at North Bend, Ohio, a log cabin, had long since been enclosed in the middle of a sturdy Federal style wooden mansion) and drinking hard cider, a beverage easily produced from John Chapman’s (“Johnny Appleseed’s”) Midwestern apples – this in contrast to Van Buren, who was living in a brick mansion at Kinderhook, New York (now a National Historic Site), giving aristocratic parties and drinking champagne.  [I do not have a recipe for Harrison’s particular style of hard cider, but I do have the recipe for “General Harrison’s Egg Nogg:  1 egg; 1 ½ teaspoonful of sugar; 2 or 3 small lumps of ice.  Fill the tumbler with [hard] cider, and shake well.  This is a splendid drink, and is very popular on the Mississippi River.  It was General Harrison’s favorite beverage.”  So says Jerry Thomas, compiler of the first alcoholic drink recipe book ever published (1862, a copy of which I have).  Well, it did have hard cider in it!]

Despite the Whiggish fluff, William Henry Harrison was born to the planter aristocracy of Virginia at Berkeley Plantation, a fine Georgian house on the James River (which can be visited when the pan-demic is not on), in 1773.  His father, Benjamin Harrison V, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  William Henry himself studied classics and history in college, then began the study of medicine.  But in 1791 he became an ensign in the 1^st Infantry of the Regular Army and headed to the Old Northwest Territory.  Serving as aide-de-camp to General “Mad” Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers (which ended conflicts with the Indians in western Ohio for a time, thus opening much of the Ohio Country to white settlement [see Part I]), in 1798 Harrison became Secretary of the Old Northwest Territory and its first delegate to Congress, pushing legislation that divided the Territory into the Northwest and Indian Territories.  In 1801 he became Governor of the Indiana Territory (capital at Vincennes), serving twelve years.  As governor, his task was to obtain title to Indian lands so settlers could settle the “wilderness”; when the Indians retaliated, Harrison was responsible for defending the white settlements.  But by 1809 the mighty Native American chieftain Tecumseh and his religiously-oriented brother The Prophet began to develop an Indian confederation to push back against the white settlements.  In 1811 Harrison was allowed to attack the confederacy; he therefore led about 1,000 men toward The Prophet’s town, establishing a camp on the Tippecanoe River. However, the Indians attacked first, though after heavy fighting Harrison’s troops repulsed them, thus disrupting Tecumseh’s confederacy and leading to Harrison’s fame.  And so in the War of 1812, Harrison was made brigadier general and given command of the Army in the Northwest territories.  At the Battle of the Thames (north of Lake Erie) in 1813, he defeated the combined British and Indian forces and killed Tecumseh.

Thus the Whigs, looking for a national hero to run for President on their ticket, nominated Harrison for President in 1840.  It was what we might call the first “modern” Presidential campaign – the first with campaign “buttons” (well, they were coins at that time, except for one which was a one-inch cube of copper in the form of a log cabin, attached to a watch fob, of which I have one), lapel ribbons imprinted with Harrison’s portrait, and sheet music, such as “The Tippecanoe or Log Cabin Quick Step, composed and respectfully dedicated to Gen. William Henry Harrison (Hero of Tippecanoe and Farmer of North Bend)” [I have some of each in my political campaign collection].  Although Harrison won a majority of the popular vote by less than 150,000, he swept the Electoral College 234 to 60.  But his victory was to be short-lived – literally.

“Old Tippecanoe”:  President for Life (i.e., a Month):  In Harrison’s day, the inauguration of presidents at Washington took place in March; this was due to the effects of winter on poor roads, most of which were simply dirt tracks (there were very few Macadamized, or graded gravel, roads; the National Road, still being built into the Midwest at this time, was the exception), which by February had turned to frozen mud or worse.  Thus inaugurations were held after the expected Spring thaw, a circumstance particularly useful for newly-elected Presidents traveling from the Old South or the Midwest, Harrison being the first of these latter.  He arrived in Washington in February, 1841, and turned his Inaugural Address over to fellow Whig Daniel Webster to edit.  The address, the longest in history – 1 hour and 45 minutes (close, perhaps, to Bill Clinton’s) – was in ornate prose, full of classical allusions, and Webster commented that he had “killed seventeen Roman proconsuls as dead as smelts. . . .”  The address, nationalistic in outlook, stated that Harrison would be obedient to the will of the people, as they expressed it through the U. S. Congress.

But alas!  Harrison, the oldest President to serve up to that time (he was 68), gave his long speech out of doors in the chill of a March rain, and contracted a cold which turned into pneumonia.  He died on April 4, having been President for thirty-three days.  He was the first President to die in office.  His wife, Anna Symmes Harrison, had been too ill to travel with him, it being a long and difficult trip by steamboat, railroad, and carriage – this was still at that time a frontier journey, and she was 65.  She had wished that he had been left in retirement, rather than allowing his friends to run him for office.  So she stayed at the wooden mansion in North Bend, Ohio, living there after his death until it burned down in 1858, after which she lived with her last surviving child, John Scott Harrison [see below].  The equestrian statue of William Henry Harrison, at the time of his death first citizen of Hamilton County and therefore a memorial to him, located at the head of Piatt Park in Cincinnati just across from the main Public Library on Vine Street, was sculpted by two notable Cincinnati sculptors, Louis Rebisso and Clement Barnhorn; it was installed in 1896 (and is about to be removed under political correctness, if certain City Councilmen have their way).

North Bend, Ohio:  North Bend, Ohio, located near the mouth of the Great Miami River where it debouches into the mighty Ohio, is situated fifteen miles west of downtown Cincinnati and six miles east of the Ohio/Indiana border.  Named for the most northerly bend of the Ohio River between the Muskingum and Mississippi Rivers, it was settled by John Cleves Symmes [see above] in 1789, the two previous “Symmes Purchase” settlements, Columbia on the Little Miami River, and Losantiville (later Cincinnati) on the Mill Creek, being settled earlier and upstream.  It was incorporated as a village in 1845.  Besides being the long-time home of the 9^th President of the United States, William Henry Harrison (who is buried here; see below), and the birthplace of his grandson, the 23^rd President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, it was also the birthplace of Eliza Hendricks, wife of Thomas A. Hendricks, Vice President under President Grover Cleveland in his first term, as well as the site of an early hold-up of a railway train.

John Scott Harrison:  The Missing Corpse:  And now we come to a curious history:  not the life, but the “after-life,” of a man distinguished mainly as being “the grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence,” “the son of a President” and “the father of a President” – in other words, John Scott Harrison (1804-1878).  Although he had a fairly illustrious career in his time – member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Ohio (1853-1857) – he retired from public life to his estate, “Point Farm,” in North Bend, Ohio, where he died in his sleep on May 25, 1878.  Prior to his own death in 1841, his father, William Henry Harrison, had selected a knoll, Mount Nebo, on his property at North Bend, Ohio, overlooking the Ohio River, as the site for his and the family’s tomb.  Accordingly, it was built – a barrel-arched brick structure with sod covering the structure’s roof (much like Washington’s “Old Tomb” at Mount Vernon).  Shortly after the late president’s interment, the family installed an iron door on the tomb, and in 1879 the structure’s deteriorating brick was covered with stucco. and a flat flagstone roof replaced the sod above the barrel arch.  It was here that the recently deceased John Scott Harrison was laid to rest by family and friends on May 29, 1878.

Let us now digress for a moment and consider the American “way of death” (and the English one as well) at this time in history.  The end of the 18^th century and the course of the 19^th century saw the rise of, and great progress in, the practice of medicine, based, ever so gradually, on real scientific inquiry.  But this inquiry had its problems and pitfalls:  if you wished to study – to actually cut into – the human body as a medical student, where did you get one?  (A study of the plates in Andreas Vesalius’s great work on anatomy only went so far.)  Answer:  you, or your medical school, had to have one given to you (unlikely), you had to dig one up (but it had to be rather fresh), or you had to steal one (voila!).  Enter the “professional” “Resurrection Men,” the corpse thieves of the 19^th century.  [You remember Jerry Cruncher, the body-snatcher of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, don’t you?  Or read Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1881 “The Body Snatcher,” or look up “Burke and Hare” on the Internet.  This is why my great-grandmother told me that they used to release packs of wild dogs in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati after closing for the day – they’d fire a cannon as warning, then the dogs would roam the premises attacking any invaders.]

But to return to John Scott Harrison.  During his funeral at Congress Green Cemetery in North Bend, folks attending the event noticed that the grave of Augustus Devin, who had died eleven days earlier of tuberculosis, had been seriously disturbed, and young Mr. Devin was no longer within.  Horrified and concerned, John Scott’s three sons, Benjamin (the future President), John, and Carter, saw to it that their father’s grave in the tomb described above was reinforced with three large stone slabs over the casket and covered with cement.  After the cement had dried, the tomb was filled up, the iron door locked, and a watchman paid $30 to guard the tomb for thirty nights.

So far so good.  But wait!  There’s more!  The very next day, son John Harrison and his cousin, George Easton, got a search warrant, and, backed up by three Cincinnati policemen, began looking for Augustus Devin at Cincinnati’s largest and most prominent medical school, the Medical College of Ohio.  They had reason to investigate:  that morning’s Cincinnati Enquirer had reported that at 3:00 a.m. a buggy had driven into the alley between Vine and Race Streets next to the Medical College, and from it “something white was taken out and disappeared” before the buggy “left rapidly. . . .  The general impression was that a ‘stiff’ was being smuggled into the Ohio Medical College.”

John Harrison, his cousin, and the police were met by the medical school’s janitor, J. Q. Marshall, who showed them over the building.  In the cellar they found a chute connecting to a door in the alley; the chute became a vertical shaft running to the top of the building.  On other floors they found boxes of various body parts and the body of a 6-month-old baby, as well as students in the process of dissecting dead bodies.  Finally they were taken to the top floor, where they found a windlass and a rope running into a square hole in the floor, which turned out to be the top of the shaft they had seen in the cellar, the windlass being used to lift cadavers to the upper stories of the Medical College.  Detective Snelbaker of the Cincinnati Police force decided to turn this windlass – and up came the body of a naked man on a hook.  “It’s Father!” cried John – for it was indeed the body of John Scott Harrison, buried less than twenty-four hours before at North Bend under supposedly “secure” circumstances, but whose body had been dumped into the College’s chute at 3:00 a.m.!  

Needless, to say, a national scandal occurred:  investigation of the tomb at Congress Green Cemetery in North Bend uncovered the fact that the stones that had been placed at the foot of the interred coffin were displaced, the casket had been drilled into, and the lid had been pried back so that the body could be hauled out by the feet.  It was clear that the grave robbers had been present at the funeral and had taken note of all of the security arrangements.  The paid watchman had no explanation [!].

The Medical College of Ohio was raked over the coals in the local press, but the college faculty was boldly unrepentant.  They thought, they said, that they were receiving the body of another pauper [!], but that was the cost of doing competent doctor training!  Dr. Robert Bartholow, Dean of the College (who four years before had killed a patient by inserting electrodes deep into her brain for an experiment), stated in the Cincinnati Times that he took no responsibility for an “anonymous resurrectionist” taking “this means to replenish his exchequer.”  Son Benjamin Harrison responded (in part):  “Have you so little care of your college that an unseen and unknown man may do all this?  Who took him from that [preliminary to dissecting] table and hung him by the neck in the pit?”  He thereupon filed a civil suit and the city filed a criminal suit, but the outcomes of the cases are lost; they were destroyed in the Hamilton County Court House Riots of 1884 [see my reference on an earlier Forum posting].  John Scott Harrison’s body was eventually reinterred in the family tomb at North Bend, Ohio, and one may suspect that it is still there (or not?).

However, further investigation of Cincinnati’s other medical colleges (it had been an important Midwest center for the study of medicine ever since the early days of Dr. Daniel Drake) uncovered a ring of cadaver and body part suppliers that stretched all the way from Cincinnati to Lake Erie and beyond – the body of Augustus Devin was later found, along with the parts of numerous other bodies, in the pickling vats of the University of Michigan.  However, because of the national publicity of this case, the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan passed or amended Anatomy Acts that increased the penalties for grave robbing and allowed medical schools to use unclaimed bodies of people who died in the care of the state (paupers, orphans, the insane, and prisoners) for anatomical dissection.  (As part of my self-imposed Victorian studies, I visited the anatomy labs of Indiana University in 1971 to see the medical students cutting the cadavers apart and playing “toss” with the brains; it was quite edifying.)  Requiescat in pace (in parte).

Harrison, Ohio:  The city of Harrison, Ohio, named in honor of William Henry Harrison, was laid out in 1810.  It was the home of Ohio’s fifth governor, Othniel Looker (his house still stands; it is on the National Register of Historic Places and is open several days a year).  Harrison was incorporated in 1850 and became a city in 1981.  The township of Harrison was established in 1850; it was formerly part of Crosby Township.  Among its historic sites is the Eighteen Mile House, built about eighteen miles from Cincinnati during the earliest years of the 19^th century near a toll gate on the toll road between Cincinnati and Brookville, Indiana.  It has served as a tavern, an inn, and a post office; it was later expanded on the north side.  Local legend says that Lincoln stayed there once [?]; Morgan’s Raiders [Confederate] attacked the property during the Civil War.  The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

Harrison was also one of the few stops in Ohio on the Whitewater Canal, most of which is in Indiana.  The canal, built between 1836 and 1847, stretched for 76 miles (I’ve canoed and hiked portions of it); one of its unique features is near Metamora, Indiana, where a covered-bridge sluice carries the canal over the Whitewater River.  It was gradually replaced by the railroad, which came to Harrison in 1864.  And in 1932 a dog racing track in West Harrison (just over the border in Indiana) opened, despite the fact that pari-mutuel betting was illegal in Indiana (officials looked the other way, as during the Great Depression it brought revenue into the area).  It must have been colorful:  monkeys in silk jackets were used as jockeys for the dogs, but the whole enterprise closed in 1940, due to pressure from the horse-racing industry.  Harrison, Ohio, is also home to the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute, a trade association dedicated to the advancement of the modern watch industry.  The Institute’s ELM Charitable Trust operates The Orville R. Hagans History of Time Museum and The Henry B. Fried Resource Library, both of which are located at AWCI headquarters in Harrison.  (You may visit them when the pandemic is over if you have time on your hands.)

Congress Green Cemetery and the Harrison Memorial Today:  In the early 1800s, on land owned by William Henry Harrison’s family, the residents of North Bend, Ohio, established what was initially called the “Pasture Graveyard.”  Harrison’s father-in-law, John Cleves Symmes, was buried there.  Later Symmes and Harrison family members, as well as other local citizens, were buried there, in what eventually came to be known as Congress Green Cemetery.  In 1871 Harrison family members sold their estate, with the exception of the six acres of Congress Green Cemetery, John Scott Harrison offering the site to the state of Ohio if it would be preserved.  Burials there were closed in 1884.

I have mentioned above the early structure of the Harrison tomb and some subsequent renovations.  In the early 1880s (possibly at the time burials in the cemetery closed), local residents formed a memorial association, helping the Harrison family care for the site; later they added new stonework to enlarge the structure.  In 1919, the William Henry Harrison Memorial Commission formed and convinced the State of Ohio to take over ownership of the site.  That same year (1919), the state legislature repaired the structure and added the two eagle-topped pillars and the balustrade to the cemetery’s entrance.  And then, in 1924, recognizing that a presidential tomb site required some dignity, the state legislature authorized the construction of the 60-foot brick tower, clad in Bedford limestone, above the tomb as an appropriate memorial; it is visible to boats passing on the Ohio River, particularly when lit up at night.  In 1932 the state transferred the tomb’s care and preservation to the Ohio Historical Society (now the Ohio History Connection) as a State Historic Memorial, which maintains the site along with the Harrison-Symmes Memorial Foundation, which is located, with its museum, in Cleves, Ohio (about one mile from the tomb).

[Note:  The Congress Green Cemetery now is also the site of a state environmental project to preserve an endangered species, the Running Buffalo Clover (Trifolium stoloniferum), a Midwest prairie plant.] 

Paul Simons

Many thanks to Phil Spiess for the entertaining and informative articles he’s been contributing here. I might have remarked about a previous one, concerning the development of what has become I-75, I-71 and feeder roadways such as the one known as the Norwood Lateral, that as a kid I had played on the as-yet unfinished right of way known at the time as “Rapid Transit” property. Now I have to report fond memories of Harrison’s Tomb memorial tower. It was the end point of late-night motorcycle rides that I used to take one summer a few years after WHHS graduation day 1964. I don’t remember the exact route - out Westwood-Northern Boulevard to Harrison Road I guess. Cincinnati is quite a town. Incredibly diverse in many ways. And still the only place on earth where you can get both of the world’s greatest foods, Skyline Chili and White Castle hamburgers!!

Note - for those who might read this archive in the distant future - the highest temperature ever accurately recorded occurred this past week in Death Valley, California - 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Two hurricanes are simultaneously moving towards New Orleans and will likely devastate that city again. Unprecedented heat and unprecedented lightning are at the moment producing unprecedented wildfires in California. And, this country leads the world in deaths from the Coronavirus pandemic, at this time more than 170,000. Many are aware of what is happening and some are trying to right the wrongs, but to future WHHS students, teachers and graduates all I can say is, I am truly sorry for the world we are leaving to you. As someone who has far more knowledge in this area than I do has said, “We have developed an adversarial relationship with nature.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to realize that nature will win. Unfortunately those who seek and obtain power and who make the life or death decisions in this world in most cases are not rocket scientists or brain surgeons, not even stupid ones.

Dale Gieringer

 Another summer from hell here in California.  Locked in by Covid, too smoky outdoors even to walk around our hill.  It smells like an ashtray outside.   The conflagration is burning some of my favorite getaways  - the Santa Cruz coast, Pescadero, Boulder Creek, Tomales Bay,  Big Basin park with 2,500-year old trees.  I have two friends in Santa Cruz county who've been burned out.  We didn't use to have weather like this, but it's become a regular seasonal phenomenon in California.   Humanity heedlessly lets earth go to pot while Nero fiddles around.

David Buchholz

In the picture is worth a thousand words department, I'm adding 2k to Dale's post.  Big Basin, which was largely destroyed by the Santa Cruz fire, is home to some of the oldest and most beautiful redwoods in California.  This is what's gone now.

And this:

My next door neighbor proposed to his wife on the bridge I stood on when I took this image.  The bridge was about four miles away from the parking lot, all through now burned redwoods.

Paul Simons

Listening to events also transpiring today - another unarmed black man shot 5 times in the back by a white cop as other white cops looked on, a political convention with inordinate praise for cops and the 2nd Amendment, two hurricanes headed for the Texas/Louisiana/Mississippi Gulf coast, a dictator in Belarus imprisoning and torturing those who actually won the election there - is it possible that those who claim passionate love for the country are paying no attention to these redwoods and towns and people because they consider California to be a different country?

Chuck Cole

Maybe California, and several other states (along the west coast and all of New England), should become a separate country.

Jerry Ochs

What is something you couldn't have imagined saying one day when you were back in 1964?

For me, high on my list is: I got an email message from Google Map asking if I'd like to submit a review of a toilet I used at a highway rest stop last week.