Book Excerpt: An American Biography, 1870-1942
An invitation to time travel to an Ohio farm community, April 21, 1888
As you know if you’ve been reading this publication for a while, I’ve been researching the creation of the U.S. immigration legal system as seen through the eyes of a State Department bureaucrat who helped to implement it, Wilbur J. Carr.
This week, I thought I’d give you a sneak peek into the story, from the opening of Part One (recently completed in full, thank you!).
A Little Intro to the Intro
This book is as much a biography of the country during Carr’s lifetime (1870 to 1942) as of Carr himself. In making this journey, I want to ask questions that trouble me about individual responsibility and national policy. Carr was closer to U.S. immigration policies than the average citizen – enough to make it interesting – but he was an administrator, not an influencer. In many ways he probably had little more control over policy than the average person. If he had refused to do the work, they would have found someone else who would. Does that matter?
It’s a trick to retrace the steps of a nearly anonymous Ohio farm boy who came of age one hundred and fifty years ago. But I’ve had tons of fun trying. I felt like a jubilant ‘49er every time I pieced together mentions of young Wilbur or his whereabouts.
His journey started in a farm community in southwest Ohio, about 150 miles east of another farm community in southeast Indiana, where my own journey began. He got a law degree, went to Washington (sounds familiar again). But I had a start of recognition when I came across the following descriptions (in two places) of cutting down a centuries-old tree one spring afternoon. As described, the tree sounds exactly like one that I used to play under on the playground of W.D. Richards Elementary School in the 1970s. A tree that seven children could hide behind during a spring game of hide-and-seek. A tree that is no longer there.
I can’t be sure Wilbur was present for this scene, but it was a small community, he was seventeen, he didn’t like farm work, and he was friendly with the author of this excerpt. Chances are, he was.
With this passage, consider yourself invited into Wilbur’s life, starting with a particular day – Saturday, April 21, 1888.
Whiteoak Township, Highland County, Ohio
Travel southwest on I-71 from Columbus toward Cincinnati and at Exit 69 you’ll see some of the usual incidents of an interstate exit in rural Ohio: There’s a Quality Inn and a Wendy’s, the Buckeye RV dealership and Mayer Farm Equipment. Take the exit and head south; in about fifty miles you’ll come to Hillsboro, population 6,627 as of 2023, the capital of Highland County. Keep going south, follow the East Fork of White Oak Creek, and you may soon find yourself on Carr Road. Enter the little hamlet of Taylorsville, pass the old one-room schoolhouse on your left, and continue west past Roberts Cemetery and Fender Road.
Just south of here, there’s a field. It’s now planted to soybeans or corn, like most farmland in this area – but if you’re willing, travel a little further still, back to an earlier time, when a man named Alfred Roberts owned this land. If you came here in the 1880s, in this same field you’d see a giant tree, so large you can see it from a few miles away. It’s an American tulip tree, Liriodendron tulipifera, better known to Roberts and the other locals as the yellow tulip poplar. The tulip poplar is known for its almost square leaves with four to six short, paired lobes, for its tulip-shaped buds, and for its bright golden color in the fall. It is one of the biggest of the eastern woodland species, sometimes growing to more than 120 feet tall.
Roberts’s tree was a fine specimen of a tulip poplar. It measured eight feet, eleven inches across the trunk, and rose sixty feet almost straight up in the air before the first set of branches at its crown. This growth pattern hints at the dramatic changes that this landscape had seen since this tree was young, its straight, limbless trunk standing in eulogy to the dense forest in which it grew to maturity over the previous centuries.
Though Roberts’ tulip tree in its immense girth had outlasted its neighbors, its end, too, was near. Roberts sold the tree for lumber to George Kennedy, a man from the nearby town of Sardinia, and C.A. Kibler, owner of the local saw mill. Kennedy and Kibler sent to Cincinnati for a special crosscut saw long enough to cut through the giant trunk. Roberts’s tree was destined for a grand finale. Kennedy planned to exhibit a section of the tree in the Centennial Exposition of the Ohio Valley and Central States in Cincinnati, opening on July 4 of that year and running for 100 days. With the Exposition, “an attest to the art, science, and industry in a century of the Northwestern Territory,” Cincinnati hoped to regain some of her past glory as the Queen City of the west, despite the growing influence of St. Louis and Chicago. Kennedy and Kibler would work the remainder of the tree into lumber.
On Saturday, April 21, 1888, more than two hundred people gathered in the field to watch and help, about one-sixth of the total population of Whiteoak Township. A young man named W.K. Ruble, twenty-six years old and part of one of the original pioneer families to settle on the north fork of White Oak Creek, was among those who happily volunteered to take a turn with the saw. Looking back on the event in 1921, Ruble recalled that “[t]he day was beautiful, and the air was so still, and the big tree stood plumb, that it seemed loath to fall. The wedges were driven deeper and deeper to keep the saw from being pinched and finally, by chopping considerable on the side opposite the saw, the great tree started to fall.” Kennedy and Kibler had the tree cut into ten- and twelve-foot lengths, and they had arranged for two mudboats side by side, pulled by a team of eight horses, to haul the timber up to the railroad depot in Taylorsville. From there, it was shipped via the Norfolk and Western Railroad to Cincinnati, where it was manufactured into lumber with a bandsaw. According to Ruble, “[t]he people who were there will never forget the great tree, nor the day it was felled.”
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