Years of My Youth. William Dean Howells
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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.
I began my journey in Mr. Howells’s native State where he began his life’s journey eighty years ago, at Martin’s Ferry. The place is two miles up the Ohio River from Wheeling, West Virginia, on the western bank of the stream. By the water-side are big, ugly factories belching smoke and steam, and in their vicinity are railroad tracks, cinders, and other litter, and dingy, ramshackle buildings, among which are numerous forlorn little dwellings and occasional saloons. A sort of careless prosperity is in evidence, but not much of the charm of neatness, or concern for appearances. The rest of the town overspreads the steep slopes that border the river, and pushes back into the nooks among the adjacent upheaval of big hills. It is rather chaotic, but improves in quality the farther it recedes from the smoke and din of the manufacturing strip along the river.
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.
Hamilton, with which Mr. Howells has dealt so graphically in his A Boy’s Town, has increased in population from two thousand to thirty-five thousand; Dayton from eleven thousand to one hundred and twenty-five thousand, and Columbus from eighteen thousand to nearly a quarter of a million. Of course, such a strenuous expansion means the obliteration of landmarks of the past. Besides, some of the places have been largely rebuilt after being nearly wiped off the map by floods.
On the other hand, the vicinity where Mr. Howells spent his Year in a Log Cabin is even more lonely than it was then. It had a name in the long ago—Eureka Mills. But fire, which in our country is an even more potent destroyer than floods of what men build, has razed the mills, the dam has crumbled, the mill-race is a dry ditch choked with weeds and brush, and the name is well-nigh forgotten. When I was there the only man-dwelling was a vacant house that stood close to the site of the old log cabin. I might have thought the locality entirely deserted if it had not been for fences and cultivated fields and two cows grazing in a pasture. The only person whom I saw on the highway while I loitered about was a rural mail-carrier jogging along in his cart.
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.
Any place that has been Mr. Howells’s home has reason to be proud of the fact, for he has long been recognized as the foremost of living American authors, and it seems safe to conclude that much of his work will have a permanent place in our literature. Yet I got the impression that, as a rule, the people in those Ohio communities with which he has been associated are unaware of his existence. Others, however, not only are familiar with his reputation, but regard him with enthusiasm and affection. At Columbus Rev. Washington Gladden, the most notable of all Ohio preachers, has made Years of My Youth the subject of a Sunday evening discourse; and it is particularly gratifying to find that A Boy’s Town is a favorite book in Hamilton, and that the Boy Scouts there call themselves the Boy’s Town Brigade.
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