Page:A Topographical Description of the State of Ohio, Indiana Territory, and Louisiana.djvu/40

34 and unimpeded navigation for large keels and other craft of four feet draught of water. It continues navigable for smaller boats and batteaux upwards of one hundred miles above the town towards its source to the northward, gliding gently through a natural, rich, level, and rapidly improving country. The situation of the town is on an elevated and extensive plain of nearly ten thousand acres of as fine a soil as any in America, partly in cultivation, and partly covered with its native forests. This plain is nearly surrounded by the Scioto, which turning suddenly to the northeast from its generally southerly course, leaves the town to the southward of it, and then forms a great bend to the eastward and southward. Water street which runs about east by north parallel to the Scioto, is half a mile long, and contains ninety houses. It is 84 feet wide and would be a fine street, had not the river floods caved in the bank in one place near the middle, almost into the centre of it. There is now a lottery on foot to raise money for securing the bank against any further encroachments of the river. Main street parallel to water street, one hundred feet wide, as is market street, which crosses both at right angles, and in which is the market house, a neat brick building, eighty feet long. The court house in the same street, is neatly built of free stone on an area of 45 by 42 feet, with a semicircular projection in the rear, in which is the benches of the judges. It has an octagonal belfry rising from