Read Ebook: Ole Bull: A Memoir by Bull Sara Chapman Thorp Bull Ole Contributor Crosby A B Alpheus Benning Contributor

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 73 lines and 13912 words, and 2 pages

YEARS OF MY YOUTH

BY W. D. HOWELLS

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON

YEARS OF MY YOUTH

K-R

HAMILTON, OHIO, THE "BOY'S TOWN" OF MR. HOWELLS'S YOUTH " 16

THE MIAMI CANAL AT HAMILTON " 22

THE NOW ABANDONED CANAL AT DAYTON AS IT APPEARS ON THE BORDERS OF THE CITY " 40

THE LITTLE MIAMI RIVER AT EUREKA MILLS, TWELVE MILES EAST OF DAYTON " 44

OVERLOOKING THE ISLAND WHICH THE HOWELLS FAMILY CULTIVATED " 54

THE VICINITY WHERE MR. HOWELLS LIVED HIS "YEAR IN A LOG CABIN" " 60

ONE OF THE LAST LOG HOUSES TO SURVIVE IN THE VICINITY OF JEFFERSON " 82

THE FOUR-STORY OFFICE ERECTED BY MR. HOWELLS'S FATHER " 116

THE OHIO STATE HOUSE AT COLUMBUS VIEWED FROM HIGH STREET " 138

THE STATE HOUSE YARD ON THE STATE STREET SIDE " 158

OLD-TIME DWELLINGS ON ONE OF THE COLUMBUS STREETS THAT MR. HOWELLS USED TO FREQUENT " 170

THE MEDICAL COLLEGE AT COLUMBUS " 184

THE QUAINT DOORWAY OF THE MEDICAL COLLEGE THROUGH WHICH MR. HOWELLS PASSED DAILY WHILE HE ROOMED IN THE BUILDING " 224

LOOKING INTO THE STATE HOUSE GROUNDS TOWARD THE BROAD FLIGHT OF STEPS BEFORE THE WEST FRONT OF THE BUILDING " 236

PREFACE BY THE ILLUSTRATOR

Whenever I visit the region of a famous man's youth I have the feeling that I ought to discover there some clue to the secret of his greatness; for I cannot help fancying that the environment must have molded him and been an essential element in the development of his individuality and power. It was with such expectations that I recently went to Ohio, just as spring was verging into summer, to see the land where Mr. Howells spent the years of which he has made so frank and appealing a record in this volume. In the middle of the last century the State retained much of the crude primitiveness of the frontier, and I wondered what stimulus this could have offered in creating a genius so broad in his views and so sensitive to impressions, and in whose expression there is such fine imagination, humor, sympathy, and wisdom.

The small brick Howells house stood close to the stream, where grime and squalor most abound at present. However, the railroad was not there then, and Martin's Ferry was a village that had in some respects real rural attraction.

During the period of about twenty-five years which this book covers the Howells family lived in seven different places, many of them widely separated, but all within the confines of Ohio; and they seldom stayed long in any town without occupying more than one residence. Naturally, there have been marked changes in the aspect of most of the places where they dwelt. Perhaps Jefferson has changed least. In the old days it had six hundred inhabitants. Now it has three or four times that number, but it is still serenely rustic, and every one knows every one else, and the wide, tree-shadowed streets and the rich, gently rolling farm country that environ the town are delightful.

Round about were low, rounded hills, fertile and well-tilled for the most part, with here and there patches of woodland and occasional snug groups of farm buildings. It is a land flowing with milk and honey, wonderfully productive and prosperous, and charming in its luscious agricultural beauty. In Mr. Howells's youth it was wilder and more forested, but I fancy that the stream, with its wooded banks, must be essentially the same, and that the birds flitting and singing and the other wild creatures of fields and woods are like those of old.

Log houses, once so common in the Ohio country within the memory of its elderly people, are now rare, and I could learn of none within less than a dozen miles of Eureka Mills. But I found one on the outskirts of Jefferson which was intact and serviceable, though it no longer sheltered a family; and both Jefferson and Dayton have a log cabin preserved as a relic of the past.

Hamilton, Dayton, and Columbus, in which places Mr. Howells spent so much of his youth, are all important centers of trade and manufacture where crowds and noisy traffic are ever present in the business sections, and where a maze of residence streets spread out into the country round about. At Hamilton, the only building I could discover associated with Mr. Howells was the Baptist church where he attended Sunday-school. But it is now a paint-shop, and the paint-man has adorned the entire front with a scenic sample of his art, which makes the structure more suggestive of a theater than a church. The Great Miami River flows through the town as of old, and the tall buildings, towers, and spires in the heart of the place are strikingly picturesque seen from some points of vantage along the banks of the stream. But the most charming feature of the past is the canal in which the boys used to swim and fish, and which, doubtless, still serves for the same purposes. It is no longer a thoroughfare for traffic, though the tow-path is used in part by trams and pedestrians.

Dayton had its canal, too, but this, like the one at Hamilton, has been abandoned, except as the mills make use of it.

At Columbus is what was the new State House in Mr. Howells's youth, the Medical College in which he roomed, and a sprinkling of quiet old residences that were there in his time. The college, which originally was a castle-like structure with an upthrust of towers and turrets, has had its sky-line somewhat straightened by the addition of an extra story; but this has only marred, without destroying, its characteristic quaintness.

Jefferson was the home of Mr. Howells's father for the most of his later life, and of his older brother, Joseph, whom the people there like to recall for his many fine qualities of head and heart, and as the printer and editor of the "best weekly paper" ever published in Ashtabula County.

This brother is referred to again and again in the chapters that follow. His grave in the Jefferson cemetery has been marked with the "imposing-stone" that he used in his office. Here is the inscription written by the novelist and carved on the broad surface of the stone:

TO THE MEMORY OF JOSEPH ALEXANDER HOWELLS

BORN AT ST. CLAIRSVILLE, OHIO, 1832 DIED AT AUBURNDALE, FLORIDA, 1912 AMERICAN CONSUL AT TURK'S ISLAND FROM 1905 TO 1912

PRINTER AND THEN EDITOR, HE IMPOSED IN PAGES ON THIS STONE, WHICH HE DESIRED SHOULD MARK, HIS FINAL RESTING PLACE, THE TYPES OF THE ASHTABULA SENTINEL FROM 1851 TO 1905

STONE, UPON WHICH WITH HANDS OF BOY AND MAN HE FRAMED THE HISTORY OF HIS TIME UNTIL WEEK AFTER WEEK THE VARYING RECORD RAN TO ITS HALF-CENTURIED TALE OF WELL AND ILL.

REMEMBER, NOW, HOW TRUE THROUGH ALL THOSE DAYS HE WAS, FRIEND, BROTHER, HUSBAND, FATHER, SON, FILL THE WHOLE LIMIT OF YOUR SPACE WITH PRAISE, THERE NEEDS NO ROOM FOR BLAME, BLAME THERE WAS NONE W. D. HOWELLS

One of the oddest things of which I heard on my trip was that Mr. Howells is credited with being born in more than one place. A wealthy man has bought the property where the novelist dwelt in the family wanderings long after leaving Martin's Ferry. The owner and others in the region are convinced that their locality is Mr. Howells's first home. He was even considering erecting a birth-place for the distinguished author from some ruinous buildings on the premises. But I suppose the fact that a person is becoming legendary in his native region attests the genuineness and permanency of his fame.

What vital influence, if any, the Ohio country of Mr. Howells's youth had on his genius I am uncertain. The small cities and rustic villages, and the farmlands with their stump-dotted fields that were still being wrested from the wilderness of the abounding woods, all left their impress, no doubt, but I incline to the belief that his admirable quality and large place in the literature of our day might be the same, even if the environment had been radically different.

CLIFTON JOHNSON.

YEARS OF MY YOUTH

It is hard to know the child's own earliest recollections from the things it has been told of itself by those with whom its life began. They remember for it the past which it afterward seems to remember for itself; the wavering outline of its nature is shadowed against the background of family, and from this it imagines an individual existence which has not yet begun. The events then have the quality of things dreamt, not lived, and they remain of that impalpable and elusive quality in all the after years.

Of the facts which I must believe from the witness of others, is the fact that I was born on the 1st of March, 1837, at Martin's Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio. My father's name was William Cooper Howells, and my mother's was Mary Dean; they were married six years before my birth, and I was the second child in their family of eight. On my father's side my people were wholly Welsh, except his English grandmother, and on my mother's side wholly German, except her Irish father, of whom it is mainly known that he knew how to win my grandmother Elizabeth Dock away from her very loving family, where they dwelt in great Pennsylvania-German comfort and prosperity on their farm near Harrisburg, to share with him the hardships of the wild country over the westward mountains. She was the favorite of her brothers and sisters, and the best-beloved of her mother, perhaps because she was the youngest; there is a shadowy legend that she went one evening to milk the cows, and did not return from following after her husband; but I cannot associate this romantic story with the ageing grandmother whom I tenderly loved when a child, and whom I still fondly remember. She spoke with a strong German accent, and she had her Luther Bible, for she never read English. Sometimes she came to visit my homesick mother after we went to live in southern Ohio; once I went with my mother to visit her in the little town where I was born, and of that visit I have the remembrance of her stopping me on the stairs, one morning when I had been out, and asking me in her German idiom and accent, "What fur a tay is it, child?"

There is no record of the time when my great-grandfather with his brothers went to London and fixed there as watchmakers. My tall clock, which bears our name on its dial, has no date, and I can only imagine their London epoch to have begun about the middle of the eighteenth century. Being Welsh, they were no doubt musical, and I like to cherish the tradition of singing and playing women in our line, and a somehow cousinship with the famous Parepa. But this is very uncertain; what is certain is that when my great-grandfather went back to Wales he fixed himself in the little town of Hay, where he began the manufacture of Welsh flannels, a fabric still esteemed for its many virtues, and greatly prospered. When I visited Hay in 1883 , three of his mills were yet standing, and one of them was working, very modestly, on the sloping bank of the lovely river Wye. Another had sunk to be a stable, but the third, in the spirit of our New World lives, had become a bookstore and printing-office, a well-preserved stone edifice of four or five stories, such as there was not the like of, probably, in the whole of Wales when Hywel Dda was king. My great-grandfather was apparently an excellent business man, but I am afraid I must own that literature, or the love of it, came into our family with the English girl whom he married in London. She was, at least, a reader of the fiction of the day, if I may judge from the high-colored style of the now pathetically faded letter which she wrote to reproach a daughter who had made a runaway match and fled to America. So many people then used to make runaway matches; but when very late in the lives of these eloping lovers I once saw them, an old man and woman, at our house in Columbus, they hardly looked their youthful adventure, even to the fancy of a boy beginning to unrealize life. The reader may care to learn that they were the ancestors of Vaughan Kester, the very gifted young novelist, who came into popular recognition almost in the hour of his most untimely death, and of his brother Paul Kester, the playwright.

My great-grandfather became "a Friend by Convincement," as the Quakers called the Friends not born in their Society; but I do not know whether it was before or after his convincement that he sailed to Philadelphia with a stock of his Welsh flannels, which he sold to such advantage that a dramatic family tradition represents him wheeling the proceeds in a barrel of silver down the street to the vessel which brought him and which took him away. That was in the time of Washington's second Presidency, and Washington strongly advised his staying in the country and setting up his manufacture here; but he was prospering in Wales, and why should he come to America even at the suggestion of Washington? It is another family tradition that he complied so far as to purchase a vast acreage of land on the Potomac, including the site of our present capital, as some of his descendants in each generation have believed, without the means of expropriating the nation from its unlawful holdings. This would have been the more difficult as he never took a deed of his land, and he certainly never came back to America; yet he seems always to have been haunted by the allurement of it which my grandfather felt so potently that after twice visiting the country he came over a third time and cast his lot here.

He was already married, when with his young wife and my father a year old he sailed from London in 1808. Perhaps because they were chased by a French privateer, they speedily arrived in Boston after a voyage of only twenty-one days. In the memoir which my father wrote for his family, and which was published after his death, he tells that my grandmother formed the highest opinion of Boston, mainly, he surmises, from the very intelligent behavior of the young ladies in making a pet of her baby at the boarding-house where she stayed while her husband began going about wherever people wished his skill in setting up woolen-mills. The young ladies taught her little one to walk; and many years afterward, say fifty, when I saw her for the last time in a village of northwestern Ohio, she said "the Bostonians were very nice people," so faithfully had she cherished, through a thousand vicissitudes, the kind memory of that first sojourn in America.

He seems to have come to America with money enough to lose a good deal in his removals from Boston to Poughkeepsie, from Poughkeepsie to New York City, from New York to Virginia, and from Virginia to eastern Ohio, where he ended in such adversity on his farm that he was glad to accept the charge of a woolen-mill in Steubenville. He knew the business thoroughly and he had set up mills for others in his various sojourns, following the line of least resistance among the Quaker settlements opened to him by the letters he had brought from Wales. He even went to the new capital, Washington, in a hope of manufacturing in Virginia held out to him by a nephew of President Madison, but it failed him to his heavy cost; and in Ohio, his farming experiments, which he renewed in a few years on giving up that mill at Steubenville, were alike disastrous. After more than enough of them he rested for a while in Wheeling, West Virginia, where my father met my mother, and they were married.

My father now began to read medicine, but during the course of a winter's lectures at Cincinnati , his health again gave way and he returned to Martin's Ferry. When I was three years old, my grandmother Dean's eldest brother, William Dock, came to visit her. He was the beloved patriarch of a family which I am glad to claim my kindred and was a best type of his Pennsylvania-German race. He had prospered on through a life of kindness and good deeds; he was so rich that he had driven in his own

carriage from Harrisburg, over the mountains, and he now asked my father to drive with him across the state of Ohio. When they arrived in Dayton, my father went on by canal to Hamilton, where he found friends to help him buy the Whig newspaper which he had only just paid for when he sold it eight years later.

Of the first three years of my life which preceded this removal there is very little that I can honestly claim to remember. The things that I seem to remember are seeing from the window of our little house, when I woke one morning, a peach-tree in bloom; and again seeing from the steamboat which was carrying our family to Cincinnati, a man drowning in the river. But these visions, both of them very distinct, might very well have been the effect of hearing the things spoken of by my elders, though I am surest of the peach-tree in bloom as an authentic memory.

This time, so happy for my father and mother, was scarcely less happy because of its uncertainties. My young aunts lived with their now widowed mother not far from us; as the latest comer, I was in much request among them, of course; and my father was hardly less in favor with the whole family from his acceptable habit of finding a joke in everything. He supplied the place of son to my grandmother in the absence of my young uncles, then away most of their time on the river which they followed from the humblest beginnings on keel-boats to the proudest endings as pilots and captains and owners of steamboats. In those early days when they returned from the river they brought their earnings to their mother in gold coins, which they called Yellow Boys, and which she kept in a bowl in the cupboard, where I seem so vividly to have seen them, that I cannot quite believe I did not. These good sons were all Democrats except the youngest, but they finally became of my father's anti-slavery Whig faith in politics, and I believe they were as glad to have their home in a free state as my father's family, who had now left Wheeling, and were settled in southwestern Ohio.

There were not many slaves in Wheeling, but it was a sort of entrep?t where the negroes were collected and embarked for the plantations down the river, in their doom to the death-in-life of the far South. My grandfather Howells had, in the anti-slavery tradition of his motherland, made himself so little desired among his Virginian fellow-citizens that I have heard his removal from Wheeling was distinctly favored by public sentiment; and afterward, on the farm he bought in Ohio, his fences and corn-cribs suffered from the pro-slavery convictions of his neighbors. But he was dwelling in safety and prosperity among the drugs and books which were his merchandise in the store where I began to remember him in my earliest days at Hamilton. He seemed to me a very old man, and I noticed with the keen observance of a child how the muscles sagged at the sides of his chin and how his under lip, which I did not know I had inherited from him, projected. His clothes, which had long ceased to be drab in color, were of a Quaker formality in cut; his black hat followed this world's fashion in color, but was broad in the brim and very low-crowned, which added somehow in my young sense to the reproving sadness of his presence. He had black Welsh eyes and was of the low stature of his race; my grandmother was blue-eyed; she was little, too; but my aunt, their only surviving daughter, with his black eyes, was among their taller children. She was born several years after their settlement in America, but she loyally misused her aspirates as they did, and, never marrying, was of a life-long devotion to them. They first lived over the drug-store, after the fashion of shopkeepers in England; I am aware of my grandfather soon afterward having a pretty house and a large garden quite away from the store, but he always lived more simply than his means obliged. Amidst the rude experiences of their backwoods years, the family had continued gentle in their thoughts and tastes, though my grandfather shared with poetry his passion for religion, and in my later boyhood when I had begun to print my verses, he wrote me a letter solemnly praising them, but adjuring me to devote my gifts to the service of my Maker, which I had so little notion of doing in a selfish ideal of my own glory.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet