Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
The Lake Erie ports in the "Buckeye State" of Ohio, so called from the
buckeye tree, are chiefly harbors for shipping coal and receiving ores
from the upper lakes, their railroads leading to the great industrial
centres to the southward. Near the eastern boundary of Ohio is
Conneaut, on the bank of a wide and deep ravine, formed by a small
river, broadening into a bay at the shore of the lake, the name
meaning "many fish." Here landed in 1796 the first settlers from
Connecticut, who entered the "Western Reserve," as all this region was
then called. On July 4th of that year, celebrating the national
anniversary, "they pledged each other in tin cups of lake water,
accompanied by a salute of fowling-pieces," and the next day began
building the first house on the Reserve, constructed of logs, and long
known as "Stow Castle." Conneaut is consequently known as the
"Plymouth of the Western Reserve," as here began the settlements made
by the Puritan New England migration to Ohio. On deep ravines making
their harbors are Ashtabula, an enormous _entrepôt_ for ores, and a
few miles farther westward, Painesville, on Grand River, named for
Thomas Paine. Beyond is Mentor, the home of the martyred President
Garfield, whose large white house stands near the railway. All along
here, the southern shore of Lake Erie is a broad terrace at eighty to
one hundred feet elevation above the water, while farther inland is
another and considerably higher plateau. Each sharp declivity facing
northward seems at one time to have been the actual shore of the lake
when its surface before the waters receded was much higher than now.
The outer plateau having once been the overflowed lake bed, is level,
excepting where the crooked but attractive streams have deeply cut
their winding ravines down through it to reach Lake Erie.
THE CITY OF CLEVELAND.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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