While the civilizing hand of the churches was being spread over the West, schools and colleges were built and opened to students. The liberal land grants of the Federal Government were made to serve the cause of common schools, while institutions of higher learning flourished at Lexington, Natchez, Granville (Ohio), and Hanover (Indiana),--schools where many of the statesmen of the Civil War period were trained and where preachers prepared themselves for their strenuous labors in a poor country. The civilizing forces of religion and education were rapidly leavening the lump of hard Western life and preparing it for the great days and the awful struggle that were so soon to come. Books found their way into the Athens of the West, as Lexington was called, and gradually, under the fostering care of Henry Clay, the Mechanics' Library came to play an important part. St. Louis, too, boasted of its Mercantile Library; and there were numerous other collections of religious writings, history, and the English poets, mostly in private hands like those of John M. Peck, of Illinois. Newspapers, such as the _Republican_ of St. Louis, the Maysville _Eagle_, or the Louisville _Advertiser_, carried their weekly or semi-weekly burden of neighborhood gossip and political news to near-by villages and distant settlements. The roads were also improving and steadily expanding the area of productive farming, though all, or nearly all, led to the river ports or the old fort towns like La Porte, Indiana, or Detroit and Cleveland on the Lakes. The Erie and the Ohio Canals were already turning exports and communication northeastward, while the Lake steamers were adding their share to the development of the Western frontier; but the great river steamers, the City of New Orleans and the Crescent, which the preachers compared to ancient Babylon, as centers of vice and lewd fashion, were the marvels of the West, and they carried the burden of grain, tobacco, and cotton which crowded the wharves of New Orleans. Cincinnati was the pork-packing and manufacturing center of the West, sending its salted meats and farm implements to the plantations of the lower South in ever-increasing volume. St. Louis was the home of the most important commercial monopoly of the time, the American Fur Company, which had an undue influence in national politics, and of which John Jacob Astor was the millionaire head, to whom all Americans looked up as one of the great figures of his generation. From the old half-French, half-American town caravans of explorers, trappers, and traders set out each spring for the Far Northwest, whence they returned annually with their loads of furs and their tales of the wonderful Oregon country. But New Orleans, with its population of 50,000, its European life and rather easy morals, its slave marts and miles of cotton wharves, was the wonder of the world to Western eyes like those of young Abraham Lincoln, who visited the city about this time.