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From: MRS GINA M REASONER< >
Subject: HAMILTON COUNTY PART 41
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 21:25:07, -0500


HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS OF OHIO By Henry Howe, LL.D., 1898

HAMILTON COUNTY PART 41

The Cary Homestead, "the old gray farm-house," is still standing,
in a thick grove about 100 feet back from the road, on the Hamilton pike,
just beyond the beautiful suburb of College Hill, eight miles north of
Fountain Square. The sisters were born in a humble house of logs and boards
on a site about a hundred yards north of it. It is of brick, was built by
their father about 1832, when the girls were respectively eight and twelve
years of age. It is a substantial, roomy old-fashioned mansion, and is just
as the sisters left it when they went to New York to seek their fortune. It
has many visitors attracted by memories of the famous sisters, a brother of
whom, Warren, a farmer, still lives there. After their decease Whittier, in
writing of their original visit to him, thus alluded to it:
Years since (but names to me before)
Two sisters sought at eve my door,
Two song-birds wandering from their nest,
A gray old farm-house in the West.

Timid and young, the elder had
Even then a smile too sweetly sad;
The crown of pain we all must wear
Too early pressed her midnight hair.

Yet, ere the summer eve grew long,
Her modest lips were sweet with song;
A memory haunted all her words
Of clover-fields and singing birds.

One of the attractions of the region is the old family graveyard.
The most interesting single object in this region is what is known
as "the Cary tree." It is the large and beautiful sycamore tree on the road
between College hill and Mount Pleasant. The history of this tree is very
interesting, as given by Dr. John B. Peaslee, ex-superintendent Cincinnati
public schools.
In 1832, when Alice was twelve years old and Phoebe only eight, on
returning home from school one day they found a small tree, which a farmer
had grubbed up and thrown into the road. One of them picked it up and said
to the other: "Let us plant it." As soon as said these happy children ran
to the opposite side of the road and with sticks -for they had no other
implement -they dug out the earth, and in the hole thus made they placed
the treelet; around it, with their tiny hands, they drew the loosened mold
and pressed it down with their little feet. With what interest they
hastened to it on their way to and from school to see if it were growing;
and how they clapped their little hands for joy when they saw the buds
start and the leaves begin to form! With what delight did they watch it
grow through the sunny days of summer! With what anxiety did they await its
fate through the storms of winter, and when at last the long looked-for
spring came, with what feelings of mingled hop
e and fear did they seek again their favorite tree!
When, these two sisters had grown to womanhood, and removed to New
York city, they never returned to their old home without paying a visit to
the tree that they had planted and that was scarcely less dear to them than
the friends of their childhood days. They planted and cared for it in
youth; they loved it in age.
Mr. Peaslee was the first person anywhere to inaugurate the
celebration of memorial tree-planting by public schools, which he did in
the spring of 1882, by having the Cincinnati schools plant and dedicate
with musical, literary and other appropriate exercise groups of trees in
honor and memory of eminent American authors. The grove thus planted is in
Eden Park and is known as "Authors Grove." At that time the above
description was used as part of the exercises around the Cary tree, planted
by the Twelfth district school of the city.
The school celebration of memorial tree planting was the outgrowth
of the celebration of authors' birthdays, which had been inaugurated by Mr.
Peaslee in the Cincinnati schools some years previously. He had simply
carried the main features of authors' birthday celebrations into Eden Park
and united them with tree-planting.
On our first coming to Ohio, in 1846, the praises of a young Whig
orator, then thirty-two years old, Gen. SAMUEL F. CARY, were in many
mouths. He was born in Cincinnati, educated at Miami University and the
Cincinnati Law School, and then became a farmer. He served one term in
Congress, 1867-9, as an Independent Republican, and was the only Republican
that voted against the impeachment of President Johnson. In 1876 he was
nominated by the Greenback party for Vice-President on the ticket with
Peter Cooper for President. He has been interested in the temperance and
labor reform movements, and there are few men living who have made so many
speeches. Hon. Job E. Stevenson, in his paper on "Political Reminiscences
of Cincinnati," truly describes him as "a man of national reputation as a
temperance and political orator, endowed with wonderful gifts of eloquence,
highly developed by long and varied practice in elocution, of fine
presence, and a voice of great power and compass." To
this we may say, one may live a long life and not hear a public speaker so
well adapted to please, a multitude. In his case the enjoyment is
heightened by seeing how strongly he enjoys it himself. In a speech which
we heard him deliver at the dedication of the Pioneer Monument, at
Columbia, July 4, 1889, we saw that at the age of seventy-five his power
was not abated. We, however, missed the massive shock of black hair that in
the days of yore he was wont to shake too and fro, as he strode up and down
the platform, pouring forth, with tremendous volume of voice, torrents of
indignation upon some great public wrong, real or imaginary, with a power
that reminded one of some huge lion on a rampage, now and then relieving
the tragic of his speech by sly bits of humor.
On our original tour over Ohio we happened once in the office of
the Cleveland Herald, when there came in a youth of scarcely twenty years.
We were at once interested in him, though we had never before met, for our
fathers had been friends, and he was a native of our native town, New
Haven, Conn., where he was born July 31, 1825. The young man was pale,
slender, with keen dark eyes, nimble in his movements, quick as a flash
with an idea, and enthusiastic. This was GEORGE HOADLY; upon his high
history, blood and training have since asserted their power. He is of the
old Jonathan Edwards stock; his great grandmother, Mary Edwards, who
married Major Timothy Dwight, was a daughter of the great divine. His
father, George Hoadly, was a graduate of Yale; was for years mayor of New
Haven; moved in 1830 with his family to Cleveland, where he was elected
five times mayor, 1832-1837, during which time he decided 20,000 suits;
mayor again in 1846-1847. He was a horticulturist, arborist,
botanist, and learned in New England family history -a gentleman of unusual
elegance and accomplishments. His mother was a sister of the late President
Woolsey of Yale.
George Hoadly graduated at Western Reserve College and Harvard Law
School, and in 1849 became a partner in the law-firm of Chase & Ball,
Cincinnati. In 1851, at the age of twenty-five, he was elected a judge of
the Superior Court of Cincinnati, and was city solicitor in 1855. "In 1858
he succeeded Judge Gholson on the bench of the new Superior Court. His
friend and partner, Gov. Salmon P. Chase, offered him a seat upon the
Supreme Court bench, which he declined, as he did also, in 1862, a similar
offer made by Gov. Tod. In 1866 he resigned his place in the Superior Court
and resumed legal practice. He was an active member of the Constitutional
Convention of 1873-74, and in October, 1883, was elected governor of Ohio,
defeating Joseph B. Foraker, by whom he was in turn defeated in 1885.
During the civil war he became a Republican, but in 1876, his opposition to
a protective tariff led him again to affiliate with the Democratic party.
He was one of the counsel that successfully opposed the project of a
compulsory reading of the Bible in the public schools, and was leading
counsel for the assignee and creditors in the case of Archbishop Purcell.
He was a professor in the Cincinnati Law School in 1864-1887, and for many
years a trustee in the University. In March, 1887, he removed to New York
and became the head of a law firm."
GEORGE ELLIS PUGH was born in Cincinnati, November 28, 1822 and
died July 19, 1876. He was educated at Miami University; became a captain
in the 4th Ohio in the Mexican war; attorney general of Ohio in 1851; and
from 1855 until 1861 served the Democratic party in the United States
Senate. In the National Democratic Convention, in Charleston, S.C., in
1860, he made a most memorable speech of indignation, in reply to William
L. Yancey, in the course of which, alluding to the demands of the ultra
pro-slavery partisans upon the Northern Democracy, he said (we write from
memory): "You would humiliate us to your behests to the verge of
degradation, with our hands on our mouths, and our mouths in the dust." His
pleas in behalf of Clement L. Vallandigham was regarded as one of his
ablest efforts. This was in the habeas corpus proceeding before Judge
Leavitt, involving the question as to the power and the duty of the judge
to relieve Mr. Vallandigham from military confinement. Mr. Pugh was gifted
with a very strong voice, a power of vehement, earnest utterance, and with
a marvelous memory that was of great advantage over all opponents, enabling
him as it did, to cite authority after authority, even to the very pages,
so that he could at any time when prepared, go into court without any
yellow-arrayed breastworks, in the form of piled-up law books. His last
years were greatly marred by excessive deafness.

-continued in part 42

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