Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/486

482 culture must be reckoned among the assets of this state; its dozens of small colleges made it possible for thousands to obtain a training they otherwise would not have received. This inheritance of the better eastern culture, which was stimulated and nurtured by the natural advantages of the region their ancestors were geographically guided into for settlement, accounts for the position won by Ohioans in public life as well as in arts and letters.

The geographical development of any state is usually a complicated problem. Some light, however, is generally thrown on the question by accounting for its particular city that leads all other centers of population. Sometimes the metropolis shifts; if so, a geographic law is always involved. For several decades Ohio was an agricultural community, pure and simple. Wealth increased slowly because there were no ready markets for disposing of products. The first important outlet for farm products came with the introduction of steamboats on the Ohio River v in 1810. Naturally the river town that was the most accessible to the agricultural areas became the shipping port. Cincinnati was the earliest clearing house for products that Ohio had to sell. Buying and selling are correlative transactions. A ready market stimulated a desire for things that were counted luxuries in the primitive days, consequently Cincinnati became a manufacturing town, and ever since it has been the leading manufacturing city of Ohio.

Until recent years there has never been any doubt as to which city was the metropolis of Ohio. In the vicinity of what is now Cincinnati a settlement, the second in the state, was made in November, 1788; the next month another handful of men built their cabins on the north bank of the Ohio opposite the mouth of the Licking; this became Cincinnati, whose location assured its growth; on the river, the shipping facilities were considered excellent, and, buttressed by the river flats, the farming lands of the Miami valleys, their development into a city of trade and manufacturing, was speedy and permanent. Before the middle of last century it was stated that:

The trade of Cincinnati embraces the country from the Ohio to the lake, north and south; and from the Scioto to the Wabash, east and west. The Ohio River line, in Kentucky for fifty miles down, and as far up as the Virginia line, make their purchases here. Its manufactures are sent into the upper and lower Mississippi country.

Cincinnati attained city rank in 1820; during the next decade it became the eighth city in size in the union; from 1830 to 1850 it ranked sixth; by 1880 it had dropped again to eighth place, and at the last census to the tenth place.

The greatness of Cincinnati and the assurance of even marvelous progress in the years to come was prophesied by the editor of the Toledo Blade, in 1841: