12 THREE ACRES AND LIBERTY 



The mineral resources of Pennsylvania and Ohio were all 

 but unsuspected, and the calm of a people devoted to the 

 peaceful pursuits of agriculture rested over the country. 



Railroads were few and inefficient: telegraph lines but 

 in their infancy. Intercourse among the people, outside of 

 a narrow fringe on the Atlantic coast, was cumbersome, 

 and impeded by many obstacles. Primitive conditions 

 everywhere prevailed, and communities brooded in silence, 

 growing stragglingly in sluggish indifference, content with 

 coarse food and coarser living. 



Such, in general, were the conditions up to 1861. Then 

 came the storm of shot and shell, the rain of blood, the ele- 

 mental rage of passion called the Civil War. There was a 

 total upset of business. Such periods of hard times as had 

 occurred prior to that time had been caused by the tinker- 

 ing of untrained minds with the money system or by land 

 speculation, and not by lack of access to the riches of nature. 

 After four years our people awoke, as from a nightmare, to 

 find the old life swept away forever. In the South, the Con- 

 federates, bitter and sullen, groping amid the ruins of their 

 institutions, sought to find some substitute for the agricul- 

 tural despotism exercised for generations by their slave- 

 holding families. In the East, the first families of the 

 Revolution, secure in their preeminence, assumed again the 

 manufacturing-banking-social prestige. The far West was 

 still almost unknown, and remained in possession of the 

 buffalo and the Indian. Settlers poured, in increasing 

 numbers, on to the unappropriated lands still left in the 

 states of the central West, and the center of political power 

 shifted rapidly to this fertile region. 



Already men of keen insight foresaw a time when oil, tim- 

 ber, coal, and iron must become the stay of a vastly expand- 



