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It was at first only a dream when Longworth transplanted the wild vine from the woods, and it might well have been scoffed at as akin to dreams of the past which never were realized. One of these was the silk culture, which people believed was to be one of our greatest sources of wealth sixty or seventy years ago, when they planted millions of mulberry trees to nourish the silkworms which died rather than become citizens of Ohio. Another was the culture of the Chinese sorghum cane, which for many years tantalized our farmers with the hopes of native sugar never fulfilled.

Still other kinds of dreams there have been native to our air or naturalized to it. The Leatherwood God was by no means the only religious impostor who has flourished among us. In 1831 Joseph Smith, the first of the Mormon prophets and the founder of Mormon-ism, came to Portage County, with one of his disciples, and began to preach. They made so many converts that some shortsighted people of Hiram thought to stop their work by tarring and feathering them. This only drove them from the place; but the next year, they settled in Kirtland, Lake County, where, in 1834, their followers built the first Mormon temple, for the worship of God according to the Book of Mormon. It was this sacred book, written on gold plates, which Smith, a native of Vermont, pretended to find, in a hill near Palmyra, New York, where he was leading an idle and useless life. His converts at Kirtland increased to three thousand, but they founded a bank as well as a temple, and so got into debt and trouble. Smith left the state to escape the sheriff, and went to Missouri, where the great mass of the believers joined him, seven hundred leaving Kirtland in one day. Before long the Missourians foolishly began to persecute them, and then the Mormons settled at Nauvoo, in Illinois, where they built their second temple, far more magnificent than the first at Kirtland. But here again their unwise neighbors began to molest them, and Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram were thrown into jail. A mob attacked the jail, and the Smiths were murdered. The Mormons then abandoned Nauvoo, and took their way through the desert to Salt Lake, in Utah, where they laid the foundations of a great commonwealth. They still own their first temple at Kirtland, however, and it is said to be the hope of one sect among them yet to return and dwell there.

Among the fanaticisms or enthusiasms which flourished among our people, none was more striking than that which moved the Woman’s Temperance Crusade in Hillsborough, Highland County, in 1873. Under the influence of a fervent speaker, who told how the women of his native village in New England had joined in beseeching the liquor sellers of the place to give up their traffic, a hundred and fifty ladies of Hillsborough banded together and went about to the different saloons, entreating their owners not to sell strong drink any more. By day and by night, in wet and in cold, through menace and insult, they kept up their effort the whole winter long. Where the dealer was very obstinate, they knelt down at his door, and prayed and sang till he yielded. After the crusade ended, the liquor selling began again, but though it seemed to have done little good, yet it is said that there has been far less drunkenness in the region than before, and public opinion was roused to enforce the laws against liquor selling. Among the crusaders were some of the first ladies of the neighborhood, and good women emulated their efforts in several other places.

I am willing to leave the reader with the impression that the people of Ohio are that sort of idealists who have the courage of their dreams. By this courage they have made the best of them come true, and it is well for them in their mainly matter-of-fact and practical character that they show themselves at times enthusiasts and even fanatics. It is not ill for them that they should now and then have been mistaken. This has helped to keep them modest in the midst of their prosperity, and their eminence in saving and governing the union of these states. Such as they are, they seem to me, historically, the first of the Americans. The whole country on the eastward characterized them, and they, more than the people of any other state, have perpetuated and imparted their character to the whole country on the westward.