USA > Ohio > Brown County > History of Clermont and Brown Counties, Ohio, from the earliest historical times down to the present, V. 1 > Part 2
USA > Ohio > Clermont County > History of Clermont and Brown Counties, Ohio, from the earliest historical times down to the present, V. 1 > Part 2
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39
While our feeble sense shrinks from imagining that the rock- ribbed earth and the stable stars were once vapors voluminous and vast throughout the extent of space, our time fettered spirits are conscious that the god-like mind has reasoned well. The shape, proportions and motions of the earth have been brought to a school boy's perception. The achievements and predictions of astronomy command intelligent admiration. With spectroscopic analysis, the glasses of the observatory have declared that the elements revealed by the alembics of the laboratory are the familiar constituents alike of the twink- ling planet and the wondering child. Through this revelation, knowledge certainly includes the fact that the elements of our world are as omnipresent as the universe, and that the laws of their combinations are equally omnipotent.
The most beautiful and the most beneficent of these laws is the ordered love whereby every molecule shuns a foe and seeks an affinity. Yet, the most terrific scene of human expe- rience has but lambent likeness to the chaotic contention for the elemental harmony that began with what may fittingly be called the peace of the rocks. For, the chemists and the geol- ogists agree that the granitic or lowest of 'all foundations passed through a prodigious fusion. With decreasing heat
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and under the same impulsions that shapes a drop of rain or hail, the shrinking gases grew into a globular mass. With a faint perception of the commotion when that cosmic chaos was utterly compressed by an ever accelerating gravitation, and repeatedly rent by the explosive hate of hostile elements, we can open the records of the creation, here at home, with much geologic satisfaction.
When the liquids condensing from the darkness of the thick clouds lingered on a cooling crust and helped to dissipate the melting heat, then the waters were divided from the waters and a dry land appeared. The most ancient appearance of land that has been traced marks the courses of the Mackenzie and St. Lawrence rivers. Because of a greater extent in that direction, this earliest shore has been called. the Laurentian Land. Some island peaks of the same formation show the primal trend of the Cordillera and Appalachian ranges. Upon these smoldering slopes of granite and upon other forms of the blending fusion that may have worn away or sunk beyond re- call, the furious rain from an incessant steaming fell with a shattering violence that "overturned mountains by the roots" and made a mortar for the foundations of a different world to . come.
How long the deep was wrapped in the gloom of the con- gealing of the nebula into a whirling but coherent globe, or how long since that gloom yielded to a life sustaining degree of light and coolness is a question more mooted than settled. Except that we would "give understanding to the heart" and learn "the ordinances of heaven" and "set their dominion in the earth," a few or many million years more or less matters neith- er much nor little in the eternal plan, where there has been neither haste nor rest amid all the fiery changes of world mak- ing. And, except for learned proof that other stellar orbs here and there within and beyond the circuits of our sun are show- ing, not in one but among many, the various phenomena of hazy, gleaming, blazing, glowing, dimming, dying and frozen worlds, the conclusions of scientific inquiry might be scoffed as the brilliant dreams of an aspiration that spurns a mortal state and claims a kindred with the stars.
For a trained observer, the drift along a bank sweet with violets or eglantine is a more recent but not a more certain
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· token of watery action than the deposits, when the heat de- structive to all organic structures was passing in storms away and was permitting calmer currents to flow where the sedi- ments fell upon the first oceanic floor. Although many thou- sand thousands of the largest spaces of time as comprehended by humanity have spent their forces since that floor was be- gun or broken, infrequent sections can still be traced from the upper Mississippi to the Hudson and across Northern Europe ; and wherever found, even fragmentary ledges are so strewn with peculiar proofs of their origin that whoever has learned never doubts their signifance. Yet, art was slow, but very cunning at last, in finding the key to the wonderful cipher of the hand that therein first wrought the miracle of life and left the record of its beautiful forms in a perfection of preserva- tion never excelled. For, only some eighty years ago, Sir Roderick Murchison made his name famous by publishing his conclusions on Early Life, wherein he set forth that the new ocean was peopled with tiny creatures that through a special property of those lime laden waters passed from a pulpy life to a petrified perpetuity beyond all that man may dare to promise. In Murchison's magical contemplations, such fossil forms in Wales, where the Romans called a tribe the Silures, and where he studied most, are the products of once whelming waters that he therefore named the Silurian Sea. The name has been made to include the same formations wherever found, and we now know that the Silurian Sea, the first and widest of oceans, laved the Laurentian Land.
During countless aeons of which naught remains of aught that breathed or grew on land, the beds of this vaster but shal- lower ocean were filling at first with rudimentary forms and then with more and more complicate structures that tell a glowing tale of enlarging purpose. Much of that life is scarce- ly perceptible until magnified, and even the largest of the largest species do not exceed the clutch of a child. Yet, under the microscope, the petrifaction of every detail is so complete and the ornamentation of the various species so elaborately distinct, that the classification of Murchison supplemented by others is perhaps more satisfactory than could have been accomplished when the clouded billows surged over all but the sterility of the first eruptive rocks. Though
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the variety of that life was only a hint of the bewild- ering diversity of the subsequent world, when we con- sider either the magnitude or the semi-eternal continuance and after preservation of the Silurian formation, the abundance of its organic remains is amazing. An average of about three and one-half miles is given as the approximate thickness of the usually closely fitting Silurian ledges, in which the character- istic fossils of each period of progression hold true, wherever found. And wherever found, the vast incumbent mass declares a grand promenade of life and records a solemn march of death. The magnitude of that record is not manifest in anyone lo- cality, but from many, and can only be dimly inferred after much observation, where the dead are so densely packed throughout those mighty ledges that earth seems too small a tomb.
Science is the harmonized facts of observation. Whether from nebular, chemical or solar sources, separate or combined, heat is a change compelling agent. When a little more intense, no life could be; and, after another cooling cycle, all life must cease. Within well known degrees, the expansive nature of heat and the converse is a simple and luminous fact. An ac- cepted estimate for the shrinkage in the earth's diameter while changing from a liquid to the present condition is about one hundred and ninety miles. While the cooling crust was sink- ing and crumpling because of that shrinking of which there is abundant proof, the heat imprisoned within, raging against restraint, broke forth through displacements which belittle the ruin of the earthquakes and volcanoes of this day to a com- parison with molehills. Oftener, perhaps, enormous displace- ments were accomplished through vast but slower upheavals of the congealing crust, for which, as the expanding heat" wasted, there was, under the influence of whirling gravitation, a corresponding subsidence of the firmer floor elsewhere, whither the shifting waters flooded away from desolated rocks to nourish other system of progress.
Considering the tremendous wear of countless time since the sands of yore were drifted by hundreds of shifting oceans, or how the dust of millions of years has been blown about our windy world, wonder exceeds belief that such upheavals still decide the characteristics of recent regions. Yet nothing with-
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in the ken of physical science is more certain than the all en- gulfing cyclic ebbs and flows of the seas, from and about the Laurentian Land, over the stratified relics peculiar to each submergence. The student of geological eras generally finds the record so covered with the sediments of other floods that the plot of the story of the rocks is found on their edges rather than their surface. Such study has revealed the existence of the upheaval that occurred while the world was so young that the greatest of its tiny creatures were not more than a few ounces or inches. While the development of those creatures was stopped and petrified in delicate beauty, the same species not far away but long afterward grew many times larger and gained disagreeable features. While all the regions far around are the result of many submergings, that upheaval has ever since been superior to the sea. Because of this changeless iso- lation amid the many subsequent geological oceans that strangely failed to overwhelm this little that is lovely with so much that was awful, this ancient vestige of a buried world has been called the Silurian Island. Because they are found in a wide profusion of matchless preservation in the exact relation of their formation, instead of the general disarrangement of tilted or contorted rocks in other countries, the ledges there have had much attention from the sages of the enlightened Nations. But there is a special reason to claim a much greater local attention, for the Silurian Island includes the hills and plains of Old Clermont.
As known by present names, the Silurian Island stretched rather narrowly from near Nashville, through Lexington and Cincinnati toward Lake Erie. After many inspections, the ap- parently level ledges are found to slope gently to the east and to the west from an eroded ridge that in technical phrase is called the anticlinal. That anticlinal passed from the north through the eastern side of Clermont county and thence south- ward somewhat parallel to the Alleghenies, giving a sugges- tion of what with greater uplifting might have been a moun- tain range. That island was a part of a submarine plain, ex- tending, when the earth was more plastic, so that the limits now can only be defined where boiling mountains of igneous rocks have left a jaggy crust aslope. By that plain, no plant- age had bloomed nor wing been glad ; for in all the petrifaction
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there, hardly a trace of doubtful moss can be found among the multitudinous remains of nothing more than the mollusk race.
Notwithstanding the millions of cubic leagues of sculptur- esque death embalmed before that plain was abandoned by the fruitful sea, a collection limited to a single specimen of each general type of life in that far off Silurian Age scarcely exceeds the load a man may carry. Tiny gastropoda crawled about on a stomach-foot, as do the snails and periwinkles of today. The brachiopoda stretched their arms for miscroscopic food, some from one shell but more from double shells, with either straight or wrinkled flutings in various ways that give puz- zling names to scores of pretty forms. The crinoidea built themselves into exquisite lily groups. A complete form of the rarely delicate star fish is seldom found, but the moss like bryozoa grew into coral groves where myriads of trilobites lurked or raced and mingled with each and many, while the orthosceras or straight-horn, the tiger of them all, poised a jointed shape above the shrinking prey. As the curious gather them from the slimy blue mud, that was a layer of shale, or pick them from the freshly broken blue limestone that grows gray with exposure, fancy will often marvel at the strangely preserved expressions of pain or weakness or even wonder in those that died so long ago.
Of such little ones was the kingdom of Siluria, when life was in its beginning, and before the dividing waters left the plain of the island a dry land forever after. That plain, geo- logically, is the upper deposits of the Lower Silurian Period. The waters around that island and elsewhere prospered the life of another period, called the Upper Silurian, in which the snails grew a thousand fold and the fierce straight-horns reached a length of thirty feet and developed spiral forms. Then, the earth reeled again beneath the settling crust, and the ocean swaying out and back left the old to die, and returned with new creatures belonging to what is called the Devonian System. In that system, the Mollusca tribes all grew still greater, a few more beautiful, but generally less pleasing, while the utmost progress of the time was measured by im- mense numbers of terrible fishes. As that age closes, the fos- sils include the weed and fern of a verdure yet to come.
The obscure dogma of antiquity that the world forthwith
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bloomed as a finished flower from the Creator's hand, no longer . finds an easy credence. Without the crucibles of chemistry, the iconoclastic hammer of geology would have broken the wings of faith. But with the analysis of the elements and a partial discovery of their power to bless or harm, we learn that the Creation has been an almost eternal process of purifi- cation so constant in action and so beneficent in results for human need that the devout may happily hope that such divine harmony also requires the progressive process to attain an etherealized perfection superior to the doom of matter and fit to share a heavenly plan.
Until some purification was accomplished, the bitter waters could not support a sweeter life ; the dust of the fire born rocks would require millions of leaching storms to cleanse their caustic nature ; and, until freed from the noisome fumes of the abating elements, the air could not fulfill the functions of respiration. The Creation, a miracle for enthusiastic inspira- tion, a proposition for astronomical calculation, and a revela- tion through geological studies, will be seen more clearly when the hypothetic speculations of chemistry are better under- stood. Till then, it may be safely assumed that geology is mainly a history of immense chemical changes. But, as yet, only a few pages of the Chemical History of the Creation are easy reading. A special lesson is learned from each, and the truth learned from all is that nothing was vain or useless. From the largest shell shapers to the tiny chalk makers, each was absorbing and changing an excess of something that hin- dered or would be harmful or should be useful in later times.
When the Devonian Sea retired to deeper deeps, the wider land was sown for a prodigious vegetation that grew rankly in the warm, damp, mephitic air, deadly for breathing things, but rich for plants that filled with carbon and sank heavily into layers over which the waters returned and spread a sedi- ment with properties and a weight that changed and pressed the woody mass into the black diamonds of carbon we call coal.
That the extraction of coal and its kindred oil and gas begun through the absorption of an airy poison by a swampy vegeta- tion beneath a vivid sun, and then completed beneath a dark and restless ocean, may well be regarded as one of the most
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mysterious of chemical problems. For, the change wrought with the infinitesimal minuteness of a cellular growth extends throughout the masses revealed, wherever a bed of coal re- cords the absence and the coming, the presence and the going, of more than a hundred nameless oceans.
After the long making of coal for an age that was longer yet to come had brought a purer atmosphere, huge amphibians ventured from the narrowing seas to the enlarging lands. After a great while more, fearful monsters made ways through the jungle and wandered over the upper plains where river beds were being worn. As the wrinkling earth drew closer to- gether, the vaster mountains were piled higher and higher above the swelling plateaus, while the deepening waters with- drew before the continents that were shaping for their master man, and for the fish and fowl and cattle of his dominion. But before that dominion was declared, a portion of the earth worn and chasmed by the storms of uncounted time was to have a smoothing touch from a mighty force. Through all these mar- vels elsewhere, except for the rasp of time, the Silurian Island, by much the largest and almost the sole survivor of its class floated dry and changeless amid the successive seas and through a never ceasing variety of change. Other lands may. boast grander views or a longer continuity of mortal scenes, but no other habitable plain can tell of more ancient days.
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A mind won weakly to conclude that coal is the woody prod- uct of tropic suns over beds where it is now mined from be- neath a constant arctic ice is slow to believe that our once fiery and still feverish earth was ever chilled to a degree that built the ice of many, many centuries above the plains of Old Cler- mont. Yet, no part of the story of wonders is more certain than the events of the Glacial Age, when the weary world wavered from its guiding star, until the freezing north sent the gathering cold southward in a glacier with a thickness of thou- sands of feet and a front of thousands of miles. The deeds of that glacier were the scooping of lakes, the filling of chasms, the plowing of rivers, the smoothing of craggy steeps, and the grading of terraced valleys for graceful streams by waving slopes that make Ohio pleasing to a beauty loving God.
Whether in one place or many, the glacier, the most ma- jestic mechanical power ever shown to be possible, filling every
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nook and searching every crevice, crushed and ground its mingled and scattered drift from the Arctic Highlands to and beyond the Ohio. The special proof of this throughout Old Clermont is an almost level plain of stone in the natural bed marked, wherever exposed, by the scratching or grooving of a southward moving cause. This marking is covered by a few and sometimes many feet of blue clay and broken stone of both native and foreign growth, all packed in a solidity that soon wearies the digger's strength. Above is a smoothing cover of boulder clay ground to creamy fineness by the march of the glacier, that also left an unfinished grist of boulders wrenched by an icy grasp from the rocks of the far and old Laurentian Land. The plain thus smoothed is drained by much tinier brooks and creeks and waterways than were needed for the mighty torrents, when the frozen storms of the ages were melted. Such reasoning explains why the waters.of the brooks both small and large from the O'Bannon to Eagle creek flow on bedded rocks and between hills more widely sundered than could be wrought by present agencies.
As these swiftly flowing streams reach the Ohio or the Miami, their banks are found on drifted beds. The levelling purpose of the glacier included not only the scraping of crags from the upland, but also the filling of the more ancient courses of the Miami and the Ohio, which had been the outlet ex- cavated by the once vaster floods from the north. The ma- terial haply provided for this regrading of the rivers and known as glacial gravel was made in the tumbling floods from fragments of the Laurentian boulders and distributed between and along the hills in terraced shapes that, so long as they last. will confirm and perpetuate the title of the Beautiful River.
Over all, lavish benevolence spread a soil composed from the slow decay of the limestone and the vegetation of all the ten or tens of thousands of years that have followed the retreat of the Ice Reign. How much of the surface of the Si- lurian Island may have been worn away by parching heat or gnawing frost, under whirling winds and washing floods, or how much was plowed and scraped away by the glacier, cair never be known. A hundred feet lower or many more mat- ters not in this inquiry, since the long succession of well at- tested marvels has brought us to what specially belongs to the Human Period.
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But this is certain : the tendency of every grain of sand, of every drop of water is downward. Each particle is seeking the sea from which it came. "Dust to dust" is only a sigh repeated through every cycle of change. For, every such change has signified and portends the destruction of a system of living. Some think of this destruction as the terrific result of sudden convulsions ; but cautious reflection contends that decreasing fitness has been gradually replaced with better functions for the enjoyment of cleaner waters, purer airs, clearer skies, finer fruits, and a sweeter life. If this be so, prob- ably no other century has witnessed more destruction of the best of nature's work than the last hundred years. The fires of the altars of civilization have withered the grandeur of the forest, as never before, and have given the ashes of its magnificence to mingle with the ashes of other aeons. In the struggle for place, the ill-guided plow is loosen- ing the genial soil, the golden gift of the ages, and hurrying its no longer grass impeded flow, from denuded hills and shade- less plains, to the all devouring sea, because of which the hu- man race and its cattle shall sometime somewhat sooner starve.
Wisdom warms the heedless foe of nature to cease from wasting and let the verdant hills be glad. Unless this be quickly done-if the vicious methods that boast of "clearing off and paying for the land with three crops" are long con- tinued, and if the precious loam be sold for but a mess of pottage or less, then the wrathful days are soon to come. For, though the clouds may return with the welcome waters, the fertility so slowly made and so recklessly wasted can only be restored from oceanic depths, which may yet again be lifted for wiser beings. 3 .
Such, in part, is a specially local application of the science of geology. In finding how our land came to be, no pedantic pretense has been made. The thought submitted is intended to encourage larger attention to an exceedingly interesting part of the creative path; for a study of that path exalts the mind to the sublimest emotions of wonder.
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CHAPER II.
ARCHAIC.
The Land of the Blue Limestone and the Home of the Blue Grass-The Antiquity of Man in America-The Mound Builders in the Ohio Valley-Recently Gained Knowledge of Their Habits-Their Stupendous Sacrifice of Human Energy - The Motives - Post Holes - The Palisade - The Tepees-Grain Pits-The Rubbish in the Pits-The Home of the Mound Builder. Tokens that Make all Time Akin-The Philosophy of Their Works-The Toltecan and Appalachian Indians-The Corn Plant-War between the Flesh Eaters and Grain Raisers-The Ancient Passes of Niagara and Detroit-The Prevalence of the Mounds-The Lowland Enclosures-The Hilltop Forts-The Masterpieces Arching Northward Around Old Clermont-Fort Ancient, the Key of the Cordon-The Mound Builders' Main Line of Defense-The Strife between Roving Hunters and Plod- ding Grainmen Centered in Southwestern Ohio-The North- ern War for Southern Plunder-The Trails Through the Straits from the Fur Lands to the Corn Lands-The Cere- monial Works-The Milford Works-The Stonelick Works -Ancient Works Surveyed by General William Lytle-In- dian Graves-Marathon Mounds-The Perry Township Mound-The Ripley Mounds-The Regrettable Effacement of Mounds in Brown and Clermont-"The Valley Which Was Full of Bones"-The Grave Does Not Cover All-The Author's Conclusion about the Mound Builders' Mission- The Sad Fated Planters and Fort Makers Served a Fine Purpose-The Kingly Corn, their Noble Gift to Humanity- The Grave Pleasure in a Study of a Perished Race of People.
Perceiving how the land subject to so many mutations and yet suffering so little change came to be as it was given to man, its people should question how the glorious gift has been used and study how it may longest be enjoyed.
The Silurian Island, only discovered as such within a gener-
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ation, has been known some three times as long as the region of the Blue Limestone and the home of the Blue Grass. Be- yond that the early writers knew or cared to tell little more of its past than was found in the scanty legends of the Red Men whose learning comprehended no explanation of what. has since allured and baffled the acutest research of scholars trained to ponder the puzzling facts. While the results are not satisfactory, something has been gained worthy of medita- tion and remembrance.
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