In the city they also found a large number of old Litchfield and Guilford friends, who had come out before them and had already become a part of the thriving intellectual and social life of the town and region. For in our thought of the western city, far removed from what were then the centers of national activity, we must not imagine too severe a picture of simplicity and wilderness life. The pioneering period had in fact passed entirely by. In 1833 the famous Buckeye Dinner celebrated the forty-fifth anniversary of the first settlement of the city, and this means a long time in the history of a western town in the United States where the growth is like that of a mushroom in the night. When the Beechers came there in 1832, there was a court house, a banking house, a medical college with a hospital and some asylums; there were fifteen churches, several Bible societies, several public libraries, a theater, a humane society and a museum. There were large markets, twenty-one foundries and factories, and a great steamboat business with large imports and exports. At the wharves there was room for thirty steamboats at one time, and the country all about Cincinnati was threaded with post roads. Before the Beechers left the city in 1850 there were railroad facilities in some directions, a Society of Fine Arts with thirty-three active working painters and sculptors in its circle, an Academy of Music, and forty-three churches. The population in 1833 was twenty-seven thousand. It increased with amazing rapidity. During one year of the Beechers’ stay eleven hundred houses were built.