124 Singing Valleys 



left behind in Litchfield. Two generations had been born, 

 wedded and had died in those beds. There were chests of 

 drawers of Santo Domingo mahogany or of New England 

 maple, carefully swathed in blue homespuns and patchwork 

 quilts. There were Spode and Wedgewood and Lowestoft tea 

 sets packed in rush baskets, and never left out of a woman's 

 hands. Great Grandfather Griswold of Old Lyme had brought 

 that tea set home in the May Queen to Great Grandmother. 

 Putting it into her hands he had had to tell her that her 

 youngest son Recompense had been washed overboard in a 

 gale off Tenerife. There was little that was new in those boat- 

 loads. Even the axes and the mold-board plows had done 

 service on Massachusetts and Connecticut and York State 

 farms. The oxen, the cows, the squealing pigs made the over- 

 land journey with the family. Usually it was one family alone, 

 but sometimes those who had been neighbors "back east'' 

 pledged each other to stake out lands that adjoined. "Weath- 

 ersfield folks ought to stick together." So a group of families 

 from New Jersey settled Cincinnati. 



Spring and summer, the tide flowed on, hopeful, deter- 

 mined. Men thrust their hands wrist deep into the sacks of 

 corn and shook the golden kernels in their palms, like dice. 

 "There's the land, ready and waiting. And here we are, and 

 here's the corn to plant our first crop." 



By 1803, Ohio could count the sixty thousand settlers 

 needed to make her an independent state. Even at that, more 

 than one-third of her territory was a waiting wilderness. 



In the Scioto Valley and along the Muskingum River, the 

 corn grew taller than anyone had ever seen it west of the 

 Alleghenies. Even the records of the Genesee country were 

 outdistanced. "My uncle, Rufus Dana, stood six feet three 

 and a half. He rode his horse down the alleys between the 

 corn rows and stood up in the stirrups and held his riding crop 

 as high as he could reach. But he couldn't touch the topmost 

 tassel." 



