Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/487

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This thought now sounds extravagant, but at that time there was ample reason for feeling sanguine about the future of Cincinnati. No one dreamed that railroads to Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York would in a few years handle the commodities then passing through Cincinnati. Sir Charles Lyell visited this metropolis of Ohio in May, 1842; his explanation of the commercial basis of the city, and its culture is worth repeating:

However great may be the commercial initiative of frontier peoples, as an asset of the nation their value is largely contingent upon the means of trade and social intercourse. The construction of highways by governments was an old idea in Europe though not widely practised. In this country its advantages to the seaboard states appeared at once upon the drift of population into the trans-Appalachian region. After long agitation the federal government undertook the construction of a roadway westward from Cumberland on the Potomac River; the Chesapeake and Ohio canal later reached this point, and the road became a traffic-feeder to the canal. On the other side of the Ohio River, the government continued this highway across Ohio; this is known as the "national road." Its advantages were obvious, and were duly appreciated. Commodities that had usually passed down the Ohio River were seen on the wharves at Baltimore. News traveled more rapidly along this highway; residents along or near it were envied; the towns it passed through were enlivened; the equipages of aristocracy took this route through the state. Cambridge, Zanesville, Columbus and Springfield each owed something of their rating in that day to the advantage^ of their location on the national road.

The canal-digging fever struck Ohio shortly after its outbreak in Atlantic states. In 1817 its legislature considered the matter of constructing waterways; the subject came up regularly in the following years, culminating in 1825 in a law that commenced operations. In this same year Clinton's "ditch" tapped Lake Erie. The Ohioans,