Page:History of Richland County, Ohio.djvu/153

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��HISTORY OF OHIO.

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��Let us take another — a commercial view of this matter. We have seen that Ohio raises five times as much grain per square mile as is raised per square mile in the empires of Great Britain, France and Austria, taken together. After making allow- ance for the diiferences of living, in the working classes of this country, at least two-thirds of the food and grain of Ohio are a surplus beyond the necessities of life, and, therefore, so much in the commercial balance of exports. This corresponds with the fact, that, in the shape of grain, meat, li(|uors and dairy products, this vast surplus is con- stantly moved to the Atlantic States and to Europe. The money value of this exported product is equal to $ I 00,000,000 per annum, and to a solid capital of $1,500,000,000, after all the sustenance of the people has been taken out of the annual crop.

We are speaking of agriculture alone. We are speaking of a State which began its career more than a quarter of a century after the Declaration of Independence was made. And now, it may be asked, what is the real cause of this extraordinary result, which, without saying anything invidious of other States, we may safely say has never been surpassed in any country? We have already stated two of the advantages possessed by Ohio. The first is that it is a compact, unbroken body of antble land, surrounded and intersected by water- courses, equal to all the demands of commerce and navigation. Next, that it was secured forever to freedom and intelligence by the ordinance of 1787. The intelligence of its future people was secured by immense grants of public lands for the purpose of education ; btit neither the blessings of nature, nor the wisdom of laws, could obtain such results without the continuous labor of an intelligent people. Such it had, and we have only to take the testimony of Washington, already quoted, and the statistical results I have given, to prove that no people has exhibited more steady industry, nor has any people directed their labor with more in- telligence.

After the agricultural capacity and production of a country, its most important physical feature is its mineral products; its capacity for coal and iron, the two great elements of material civiliza- tion. If we were to take away fi-om Great Britain her capacity to produce coal in such vast quanti- ties, we should reduce her to a third-rate position, no longer numbered among the great nations of the earth. Coal has smelted her iron, run her steam engines, and is the basis of her manufactures. But when we compare the coal fields of Great

��Britain with those of this country, they are insig- nificant. The coal fields of all Europe are small compared with those of the central United States. The coal district of Durham and Northumberland, in England, is only 880 square miles. There are other districts of smaller extent, making in the whole probably one-half the extent of that in Ohio._ The English coal-beds are represented as more important, in reference to extent, on account of their thickness. There is a small coal district in Lancashire, where the workable coal-beds are in all 150 feet in thickness. But this involves, as is well known, the necessity of going to immense depths and incurring immense expense. On the other hand, the workable coal-beds of Ohio are near the surface, and some of them require no ex- cavating, except that of the horizontal lead fi-om the mine to the river or the railroad. In one county of Ohio there are three beds of twelve, six and four feet each, within fifty feet of the surface. At some of the mines having the best coal, the lead fi-om the mines is nearly horizontal, and just high enough to dump the coal into the railroad cars. These coals are of all qualities, from that adapted to the domestic fire to the very best qual- ity for smelting or manufacturing iron. Kecollect- ing these flicts, let us try to get an idea of the coal district of Ohio. The bituminous coal region de- escending the western slopes of the Alleghanies, occupies large portions of Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. I suppose that this coal field is not less than fifty thousand square miles, exclusive of Western Mary- land and the southern terminations of that field in Georgia and Alabama. Of this vast field of coal, exceeding anything found in Europe, about one- fifth part lies in Ohio. Prof Mather, in his report on the geology of the State (^first Geologi- cal Report of the State) says:

" The coal-measures within Ohio occupy a space of about one hundi-ed and eighty miles in length by eighty in breadth at the widest part, with an area of about ten thousand square miles, extending along the Ohio from Trumbull County in the north to near the mouth of the Scioto in the south. The regularity in the dip, and the moderate incli- nation of the strata, aff"ord fiicilities to the mines not known to those of most other countries, espe- cially Great Britain, where the strata in which the coal is imbedded have been broken and thrown out of place since its deposit, occasioning many slips and faults, and causing much labor and expense in again recovering the bed. In Ohio there is very

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