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��HISTORY or OHIO.
��could produce. The State nobly stood the test and ranked foremost among all others. Her cen- tennial building was among the first completed and among the neatest and best on the grounds. During the summer, the Centennial Commission extended invitations to the Grovernors of the several States to appoint an orator and name a day for his
��delivery of an address on the history, progress and resources of his State. Gov. Hayes named the Hon. Edward J). Mansfield for this purpose, and August 9th, that gentleman delivered an addri'ss so valuable for the matter which it contains, that we here give a synopsis of it.
��CHAPTER XIII.
��OHIO IN THE CENTENNIAL— ADDRESS OF EDWARD D. MANSFIELD, LL. D., PHILADELPHIA,
AUGUST 9, 1870.
��ONE hundred years ago, the whole territory, from the Alleghany to the Rocky Mountains was a wilderness, inhabited only by wild beasts and Indians. The Jesuit and Moravian missionaries were the only white men who had penetrated the wilderness or beheld its mighty lakes and rivers. While the thirteen old colonies were declaring their independence, the thirteen new States, which now lie in the western interior, had no existence, and gave no sign of the future. The solitude of nature was unbroken by the steps of civilization. The wisest statesman had not contemplated the probability of the coming States, and the boldest patriot did not dream that this interior wilderness should soon contain a greater population than the thirteen old States, with all the added growth of one hundred years.
Ten years after that, the old States had ceded their Western lands to the Greneral Government, and the Congress of the United States had passed the ordinance of 1785, for the survey of the pub- lic territory, and, in lT87,the celebrated ordinance which organized the Northwestern Territory, and dedicated it to freedom and intelligence.
Fifteen years after that, and more than a quarter of a century after the Declaration of Independ- ence, the State of Ohio was admitted into the Union, being the seventeenth which accepted the Constitution of the United States. It has since grown up to be great, populous and prosperous under the influence of those ordinances. At her admittance, in 1803, the tide of emigration had begun to flow over the AUeghanies into the Valley of the Mississippi, and, although no steamboat, no railroad then existed, nor even a stage coach helped the immigrant, yet the wooden " ark " on the Ohio, and the heavy wagon, slowly winding over
��the mountains, bore these tens of thousands to the wilds of Kentucky and the plains of Ohio. In the spring of 1788 — the first year of settlement — four thousand five hundred persons passed the mouth of the Muskingum in three months, and the tide continued to pour on for half a century in a widening stream, mingled with all the races of Europe and America, until now, in the hundredth year of America's independence, the five States of the Northwestern Territory, in the wilderness of 1776, contain ten millions of people, enjoying all the blessings which peace and prosperity, freedom and Christianity, can confer upon any people. Of these five States, born under the ordinance of 1787, Ohio is the first, oldest, and, in many things, the greatest. In some things it is the greatest State in the Union. Let us, then, attempt, in the briefest terms, to draw an outline portrait of this great and remark- able commonwealth.
Let us observe its physical aspects. Ohio is just one-sixth part of the Northwestern Territory — 40,000 square miles. It lies between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, having 200 miles of navigable waters, on one side flowing into the Atlantic Ocean, and on the other into the Gulf of Mexico. Through the lakes, its vessels touch on 6,000 miles of interior coast, and, through the Mississippi, on 36,000 miles of river coast; so that a citizen of Ohio may pursue his navigation through 42,000 miles, all in his own country, and all within naviga- ble reach of his own State. He who has circumnavi- gated the globe, has gone but little more than half the distance which the citizen of Ohio finds within his natural reach in this vast interior.
Looking upon the surface of this State, we find no mountains, no barren sands, no marshy wastes, no lava-covered plains, but one broad, compact
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