Life, recollections and opinions of Solomon Jackson Woolley : an autobiography

Dedication

To the thousands in the City of Columbus, and m Madison and Franklin Counties, 0., who proved themselves my friends when the day of trial and evil came to my family ' , who also waited with me for justice to avenge itself, and whose sympathy is yet a benediction, I dedicate this volume of my life.

S.J. w.

Preface

Life is so earnest to any soul, in harmony with the age in which it lives, that it is almost impossible to avoid some sort of record of its memories, impulses and ideas. This book is only one of the fruits of this disposition of a happy life to record not only its joys but its sorrows, and find victories, here and there, in seeming deieats. Friends have asked the publication of the papers, which, like leaves, have tumbled to the earth in these autumn days of my career. The author has yielded to their request, and with the hope that those who are in the spring and summer of life may feel some generous impulses toward a common fruitage in time and eternity.

Appledale, June, 1881.

Contents

CHAPTER. . PAGE.

I. — Birth Place and Parentage, . . .9

II. — Early Adventures, ... 19

Chapter I. Birthplace And Parentage

" 1 thank Thee that my childhood's vanished days

Were cast in rural ways, Where I Deheld with gladness ever new,

That sort of vagrant dew Which lodges in the beggarly tents of such Vile weeds as virtuous plants disdain to touch, And with rough-bearded burs, night after night, Upgathered by the morning, tender and true,

In her clear, chaste light.

" Such ways I learned to know

That free will can not go Outside of mercy ! learned to bless His name Whose revelations, ever thus renewed Along the varied year, in field and wood,

His loving care proclaim.

" I thank Thee that the grass and red rose

Do what they can to tell Your spirit through all forms of matter flows ;— For every thistle by the common way, Wearing its homely beauty; for each spring That, sweet and homeless, runneth where it will ;

For night and day ; For the alternate seasons,— everything Pertaining to life's marvelous miracles."

P^HUS, after having lived in the city for twenty

A years," says Mary Clemmer Ames, ik with not

ev^n a grassy plat of her own on which to rest her feet, the country sights and sounds, which made nearly thirty years of Alice Cary's life, faded into pictures of the past." And, thus, to my readers, I have only to offer such pictures of the past, as breathe the airs of the hill-side home and the ample fields, and are surcharged with the juices of the soil, forest and orchard. For my life began in the country, and shall end 'mid nature's harmonies. In no diseased spirit, however, do I seek to say that ' ' God made the country, and man the town." But I must also freely acknowledge not only a love, but a gratitude to the circumstances of my career, and while I express affection for the innocent grandeur and unalloyed freedom of rural life, I must add a thankful heart and rejoice that unsuited as 1 am to the motley life of the city, my cradle was rocked under the shadow of forests, and my latest joy springs from the heart of nature.

My earliest memory goes back to the beautiful hills and valleys, with their rocks and caves, and ripples of pure water — to what seem the fancy sketches of the power Divine, the wild but significant architecture of Jehovah.

I was born near Zanesville, Muskingum County, Ohio, on the 12th day of January, 1828. Born where money was a curiosity, where financial wealth was almost undreamed of, where great possessions were unknown, where poverty was tyrannical, I was, nevertheless — despite the paradox — born in the midst of wealth. I count the first gleam which fell into my vision richer than if it had shot from a heap of gold. It was the radiance of a noble woman's eye — the anxious and loving gaze of my mother. Wealth that transcended the somewhat homely garb she wore ; wealth, that altogether outshone any change that might have been made in the house, or its furniture ; wealthy that

S. J. WOOLLEY. I I

put to shame all modification that could have been made of that roof, its largeness, and the things it protected — this was mine in her.

What was this wealth ? First of all, a noble soul — tender, loving, but stern for right as well, and full of truth and fidelity. To this nobility of nature, in any human being, all the goodness with which one meets, all the lessons of experience, all the joy of the years, all the teaching of life, all the truth and virtue one may touch — all these will cling. Without it, as a foundation stone, the rest of life can be but a baseless piece of architecture. With it, innumerable things may be preserved, because they maybe placed upon it, and builded to it, and thus kept forever. Thus it is, that many men have large commerce with truth, large dealings with noble men, great acquaintance with the great ideas and hopes of their time, and lose them all ; because there was nothing for these things to cling to, no foundation stone was there on which they might arrange themselves into a fine building. A noble and true nature is like a magnet, attracting and holding nobility and truth to itself, and an ignoble nature can no more catch and hold these things, than an ordinary piece of pig-iron can gather up fragments of solid steel, as it is passed through such a mixture of elements as is our human life.

My mother had this nobility of soul to begin with, and the difference between her and many other women was, not that they had less to do with human experience than she, not that they had seen less goodness than she, not that they had touched less great and good things than she, but that she had fastened' them to herself; they had clung to her, as fragments of steel to a strong magnet, and they became a part of her power to bear and suffer, and achieve.

Through the memory of her, I have looked at men and women, and have not failed to note how little people get out of life. And I have seen that this power to get much out of life, does not depend so much on quantity, as quality. Here is a man, for example, great in sympathies, great in passions, great in appetites, great in affection, great in will-power, great in thought-power, great in executive ability, — great every where, when you look at him, as you look at a store when you take an inventory. But that man comes to a remarkable series of experiences. Years elapse. He goes through them. They have silvered his hair. They have furrowed his brow. He carries a cane now. He is growing old. They have been terrible, but he has passed through them. Now you meet him. He is the same man, weakened, enfeebled, and, perhaps, sour, sad, and idealess. He has got nothing out of his journey. He did not see a glory in all that great route. He learned nothing. He went, but saw not. He had ears, but he did not hear. And you feel that, just as a man who had gone over the sea for pleasure and enjoyment, and had seen nothing but storm and shipwreck, and danger and death — that even he ought to know something about a storm at sea, a wrecked boat and the dire disasters — so with this man who had so much trouble, you do feel that he, at least, ought to know more than he did about the difficulties of life, the hardship of living, the nature of sorrow, the truth of trouble, and the reason of woe. But he does not. And he is a sour, crusty man.

Here is another. He passed through a like experience. He would see every step. No difficulty would shut his eyes. He thought it was a horrible route, but he would take in the scenery. He would analyze the difficulties. He would look out and into the soul of the storm. He was bound to look at the hand that led him. And you meet him. He is grey and worn. But his eye is clear, and his voice is sweet, and his heart throbs with loyalty. And he can tell you all about it. This sailor can tell you all about a storm, and a wreck, and a fatal disaster. Besides, he is a better sailor. He has not only learned something, but he has won something — the blessing of his experience, a hardier manhood.

The difference between the men was not in quantity, but in quality. One was a magnet to gather all the steel particles of intelligence out of that wretchedly mixed up experience, the other was a big chunk of ordinary iron that saw nothing, and obtained nothing. But there is more. One became a crusty and sour man ; the other became sweet and true. The difference is in quantity ? No ; in quality. One was a block of wood that could not bear the fine chiselings, that would not take on the fine art that the chisel-edge contained ; the other was a piece of the hardest marble that bore the strokes, took the chiselings and kept the vision of the artist, clear and true. Greatness is not goodness, but goodness is always greatness. My mother had not the goodness of greatness, but she had the greatness of goodness.

I have since learned that, if the balances of the eras, and much more, if the scales of eternity are to be consulted, there is no poverty in such places as are presided over and influenced by the glow of righteousness and the power of living truth. The civilizations that are to come, reach their roots below trade, commerce, and treasuries, and draw their power from those factors whose dwelling place is eternity. The woof and warp of the future is taken from these elements that no gold can buy, and no lack of it can displace. The future will not be poor, as assuredly the present is not, as long as the forces which gleam from such earnest and faithful eyes are supreme. John Stuart Mill, to my mind, writes more profoundly than we think, when he says :

' ' The worth of a state in the long run is the worth of the individual composing it, and a state which postpones the interest of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or that semblance of it which practice gives in the details of business ; a state which drafts its men in order that they may be mere docile instruments in the hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing for want of vital power, which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it preferred to banish."

For all of this signifies and suggests that there is nothing so necessary as the purity and power of individual. Well, obviously, no influences nor machineries can make this result certain as the home. And, as truly may it be said, that the factors of all right homeinfluence are such as these I have sought to describe.

So I judge that we will see a new political economy dawn. We will know that it is impossible to substitute, with success, dollars for manhood; that that nation is the richest in the long run, which is conservative and creative of manliness, and that the sources of wealth, therefore, lie with forces great as eternity.

For these reasons, I may say, I am almost grateful that I was born in the midst of poverty, and I hope my life has been a commentary, sufficiently clear, on the fact that he who honestly makes a surplus, makes personal power and wins personal strength in the making of it>

S. J. WOOLLEY. J 5

to excuse me from any mention of that most potent reason of gratitude.

My reader need expect no long array of dates and names. I have descended from no royal house, and have only such interest in my ancestry as to regard that royalty with which all men may be invested.

Facts, which it would be immodest for me to mention, have been stated in the '■ History of Franklin and Pickaway Counties" as follows:

On her father's side, my mother was of Holland descent, and her ancestors, including her father and grandfather, had been people of considerable substance in Amsterdam, where they carried on a large manufactory of silks, linens, etc. Jacob Askins, her father, during a commercial voyage to England, some time in the last century, was overtaken by a terrible storm, which so disabled the vessel upon which he was a passenger that she drifted for several months at the mercy of the winds and waves, and was finally driven across the Atlantic, and cast a wreck upon the shores of Virginia, nearly all originally on board having perished. Mr. Askins, then still a young man, was among the survivors, but was deterred by his dreadful experiences from again venturing upon the sea, and decided to settle in the new world, to which he had so strangely emigrated. He settled in Loudon County, in the Old Dominion, married a Miss. Shafer, and after some years, removed to Washington, Guernsey county, Ohio, where he reared his family, including Elizabeth, who was my mother. My ancestors, on my father's side, were English, but emigrated from the mother country long before the Revolutionary War, and were among the first settlers of New Jersey. Jacob Woolley, my grandfather, removed to Athens county, Ohio, when that part of the State was almost an unbroken wilderness,

ID LIFE, RECOLLECTIONS AND OPINIONS OF

and settled upon what is now called Jonathan's creek. His son, Isaac, my father, was bred a stone-cutter, and afterwards spent most of his time away from the paternal home, working at his trade. After his first marriage, which was to a Miss Stokely, of Muskingum county, he settled on a place of his own near Zanesville, from which he removed, when I was but one year old, to another place, three miles from Amesville, in Ames township, Athens county, on a branch of Federal creek, where most of our family were reared. By this marriage he had several sons, half-brothers of mine, who, in after years, were remembered, as may be more fully recorded. Their mother died while they were young, and Mr. Woolley, in the year 1827, took Miss Elizabeth Haskins to be his wife. Several years afterwards, he sold the Athens county farm, and purchased another in Star Township, Hocking county, where he resided for many years. I was still very young at the time of the removal, but rendered all the assistance I could in the labors of the farm, and in due time, as the half-brothers, one after another, grew to manhood and went away, I had to take upon myself its chief burdens, as my father was absent a large part of the time, pursuing his vocation of stone-cutter. I found little time or opportunity for schooling, nine months in all, or three terms of about three months each, in the primitive country schools of that day, comprising the whole of my formal education. Until I was fourteen years of age, I had never had an hour's training in school. About that time the people of the neighborhood spontaneously agreed that they ought to have a school-house, and forthwith set about the erection of a rude affair, which was ready for occupancy within a fortnight after the vote to build was taken. I preserve this note of this antique structure :

"The architecture of this school-house did not correspond with that of the present day. It was made of round logs, with a clap-board roof, laid on loose, with weight-poles on top, to hold the clap-boards down ; the floor was laid with what we call puncheons — a tree split in wide pieces, from two to eight inches thick, and hewn on one side ; the chimney was made at one end, of stone, and we gathered up enough newspapers to paste over the windows, in place of glass ; the paper, being oiled, transmitted a very mellow light. Slabs, or boards, were fastened around the walls, for our writing desks, and pins upon the walls to hang our hats and dinners on. Our seats were made of small trees, split in two, with the split side dressed, and four pins, or legs, underneath, making each of the proper heighth for a seat."

The schools kept in such buildings in those days, were of the kind, long since passed away in this State, known as " subscription-schools." Miss Rebecca Prindle was the first teacher in this school, and so my preceptor, except my mother, from whom I had already received, as I subsequently learned, valuable instruction at home. The old-fashioned spelling-school was held by her once every week in term time. In the summer I attended a Sabbath-school nearly four miles from my home.

I take from a short account of my life elsewhere, a brief extract, which relates a fact more clearly than might be justifiable in myself:

"When but sixteen years of age, young Woolley achieved a notable business and industrial triumph. Through bad management his father's finances became involved, and he was compelled to borrow four hundred dollars at ten per cent, interest, giving a mortgage upon his farm by way of security. A year rolled speedily

1 8 LIFE, RECOLLECTIONS AND OPINIONS.

around, and nothing was realized toward the extinguishment of the debt. It was considered in the neighborhood inevitable that the mortgagee would get the place by foreclosure. At this crisis Solomon came to the rescue, and proposed that while his father should continue at his trade for the support of his family, he would undertake the sole charge of the farm (one hundred and sixty acres) in a vigorous effort to make enough to lift the mortgage. It was agreed to. Within eighteen months the full sum must be raised, and Solomon saw that with the best of management it was only possible to effect it by sowing most of the land to wheat, and that then, with a good harvest and fair price, success was certain. He had not only the entire responsibility to shoulder, but almost the entire labor to do, since his adult half-brothers had now all gone from home, and his younger brothers were too small to be of much service. He buckled fearlessly and stoutly, however, to his task. Beginning his day of labor at four o'clock, he worked three hours until breakfast, and then, with brief intermissions for dinner and supper, he kept on until dark, and on moonlight nights until far into the evening. His faithful toil, though it brought him many hours of weariness and somewhat impaired his health, met with its reward. It turned out to be 4 a good wheat year,' and Solomon's crop — 'good, well-filled grains, of a superior quality' — was the finest in that region. Wheat, too, was higher than usual, and he sold for a good price. Consequently, when the mortgage fell due, he had the proud satisfaction of releasing it in full, and presenting it to his lately burdened and anxious, but now overjoyed and grateful parents."

Chapter II

1L00K through the mist of years at the external nature with which I was surrounded. Unconsciously we weave our experience into life and character, even as the plant weaves sunshine into beauty and fragrance. How does the world sweep into us and of that which we give the world how great a part has the world given us. I do not claim all this love of the beautiful and the grand, which I have felt and tried to reproduce, as my own. Nature gave it to me in part, as God , gave it all to nature. I only believe that we ought to do for man what nature, and early and late association, have done for us. Those streams flow through my nature as once and even now they glide at the base of those Hocking hills. They are like Emerson's river, Muskatequit:

"Thou in thy narrow banks art pent;

The stream I love unbounded goes Through flood, and sea, and firmament;

Through light, through life it forward flows.

I see the inundation sweet;

I hear the spending of the stream; Through years, through men, through nature fleet,

Through love and thought, through power and dream."

They contain streams of thought and inspiration which have their source at the throne and flow into the " river of the water of life."

The scenery of my youth has been an emancipating, inspiring influence upon my whole life. Liberty of thought abides somehow in high and grand hills, and deep rugged valleys. I do not wonder that the legend of William Tell finds him free 'neath the summit of the Alps, and in the regions of eternal snow. Slavery is intolerable to a man who has once felt the grandeur of sublime natural scenery. Let no man own your soul. Let no creed cramp your spirit. Let no doctrine chain your mind. Let no party, church, or school, become proprietor of your fetterless thought. This is the teaching of the magnificent world, with its rocks and pines. As well might I be the slave of any creed or idea, man or school, thought I, as for one of those eagles to fly with a chain, fettered and bound. Tyranny is unnatural. Oppression is opposed to splendid heights and gorgeous sunsets, and when nature has sung her whole psalm of melody into the soul of man, and man has heard its deep diapason, every thought and every sentiment, every energy and every inspiration, of every man, shall have its freedom guaranteed forever. The rocks showed the abiding testimony they had to give of grand forces. They were piled one upon another, and kissed with the soft sunshine, they frowned across deep valleys, which were filled with light. Their torn and fragmentary condition attested the existence of huge powers. Insensibly I was broadened in my notions of the universe. I could not think it a toy. Magnificent energies spoke when the lightning flashed from crag to crag, and as the thunder seemed to me to shatter the very skies, and shake their stars, I was impressed with the importance of the universe, of which this was a part. Life's loom takes up these threads, which hang so loosely from the visible world, and weaves them into our spiritual being, thus making them realities of the invisible. We all need the enlarging influence of the presence of great things. This life has its foundation in the principle of being grand as the thoughts of God. And when one finds the record of massive energies without him, and is conscious of yet more magnificent forces within him, he feels that again "deep calleth unto deep." There is just as much grandeur in nature to a man as he takes in. To a blind man there is no sun. To some people, the tender grass is not a fine collection of laboratories, and a brave, living energy, but so much hay. They measure a sunbeam by the money which it makes. They see no glory in the colors of a rainbow, because they make no dollars out of it. But the true lover of nature feels that she is valuable not for the seen, but for the unseen, and that her glory is beyond the yard-stick and scales.

Brighter lights and vaster things

Have touched my running thought.

Such are blessings fortune flings;

Of such our life-work wrought.

Never have the early sounds

Left the avenues of mind; Ceaseless fall the countless rounds

Of years— the cold and kind.

Still the tender wintergreen

Strikes my re-awakened sense, Still the beauty of the scene

Hath its own great recompense.

Bosomed 'mid the solid hills,

Lay the basin, full of stars, Fell that confluence of rills

Over strong and rocky bars.

High above the turkey's nest,

Builded 'neath the winter sky, Here within the sweetest rest,

Filled with immortality.

Thus the years return and bring

Fruits of fall and winter's cheer, Glory, verdure, love of spring.

Memories which mould this tear.

The brooks received a most epical significance, as they dashed from out the bosom of the hills. They held in their quiet, lake-like stillness, when some huge rock impeded their courses, the sun by day and the glittering stars at night, and when they fell over into deep gorges, and rushed along over pebbly and rockcovered bottoms, they shook into beautiful silver haze the mirror their quiet would have given to the moon. Poems, indeed, were these specimens of God's literature. Tennyson could only read God's thought when he translated into his words of letters those words of God's raindrops, and only by catching the human side of that of which he caught the creative and divine vision, does this our earthly poet reproduce the literature of Jehovah :

I slide by hazel-covers; I move the sweet forget-me-nots

That grow for happy lovers.

I skip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,

Among my skimmering swallows, I make the netted sunbeams dance

Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars,

In brambly wildernesses, I linger by my shining bars;

I loiter 'round my cresses.

And out again I curve and flow,

To join the brimming river.

For men may come, and men may go,

But I go on forever."

From such influences I have never felt entirely exiled. In my life of business, this peculiar vein of pleasure is omnipresent.

Never have I been able to escape the inspiration of business. That there is such a peculiarity of mind I have no doubt. Business has been with me a passion, like the cadence of thoughts and words to the poet ; like the idea and colors to the painter. Such it was in my youth, and to the belief that activity, directed by honesty, is the healthful and grand exercise of man, I owe those flashings of success which have crossed my path and now give me pleasure and mental rest. Some of my earliest business ventures have woven themselves into the texture of my very life so thoroughly that I can not reproduce them, but others stand out in bold relief in my memory, and either by a touch of humor or a savoring of tragedy reproduce themselves continually.

In the, spring of 1845, I thought I had struck the sources of wealth. I discovered on my father's farm in Star Township, Hocking County, Ohio, a strange porous substance, which I have since learned was one of the countless modifications of iron, and which yielded upon burning, a red result, of a hue between Spanish Brown and Venetian Red. Its strange and beautiful color charmed me, while beneath all the lustre, I sought its possibilities as a source of wealth. All my mechanical genius was aroused. If ever I had felt able to do all things, I felt that then the creatures of the earth were to become my servants. Never had I failed in accomplishing with tools what I tried to do, and I was certain, that, all aglow with the enthusiasm of a new discovery, I could not touch the forces about me in vain. I gathered the old wheels to my new ones, made cogs without number, and brought the remnants of an old grist mill in the shape of two burrs to the aid of my purpose. My poverty made me do without both, and finding necessity the mother of invention, I made of wood what I saw others have in better form. I had made a mill. I hitched the horse to the enterprise. The whole neighborhood for miles around, came to laugh at my lunacy. But the mill did go. Then the grinding begun. Nearly fifteen hundred pounds of the raw material, unchanged but by grinding, were brought out triumphantly. What was I to do with it?

Cincinnati, a name only larger than my dreams of glory which had their formation at that wooden mill, rushed into my head as an objective point. It was to a Southern Ohio business boy, just what Mecca was to a young Mohammedan Shiek. My father was beyond the ideas of the community in which he lived, because he would hear my requests that I might go to the city with my products, and the common sentiment was that a boy, opinions and all, belonged to the father, until he was twenty-one years of age. Before my father, I produced arguments, unanswerable. Nothing could exceed my pertinacity. At last, what was an enormous sum, two dollars, he kindly allowed me to make, that this whole thought, a gigantic enterprise, might have its bud and blossom in Cincinnati. At Pomeroy, I gazed upon the boat which was to carry my great achievement. The boat was a marvel ; what I should have thought of that huge institution, if my mind had not been so full of the idea that the greatest act of its career was to take that result to the city, I do not know. I lost all my wonder in my dream. I took the cheapest passage, I " wooded " it ; and thus I paid one-half of my fare. I was anxious, and looked at the kegs of paint I had made, as we went down the river. I was ready, and in fact, had been all that day and night, to see any body who wanted to purchase this load. We arrived. I saw the kegs unloaded. I thought the wharf had never received such an ornament. After I had quietly refreshed my pride by gazing for some minutes upon my wealth, I started to take in the city.