CHAPTER VIII.

NOTED MEN OF 1802-1819.

FIRST AND FOREMOST UNDER THIS HEADING STANDS DR. DANIEL DRAKE-FOUNDS THE MEDICAL COLLEGE OF OHIO-NICHOLAS LONGWORTH AND MANY OTHERSTHE PART THEY PLAYED IN THE MAKING OF A GREAT CITY.

The Great Men of the Period.

That this period from 1802-1819 was rich in men like Ethan Stone who, working independently and collectively, developed the enterprises and evolved the community life which have been slowly taking place before our mind's eye, you have already discerned. To know their names; to understand their characteristics; to have some understanding of the part they played; is so necessary to the comprehension of the great drama we are watching that the lack of capacity to present them in action; to show them actually moving across the stage; to make them live again in their proper environment, is torture. But if they cannot be exhibited in one way, they must in another. We can hang their portraits on the wall, at least! The first and foremost among them is that remarkable person, Dr. Daniel Drake, whose career no historian has ever yet been able to study without becoming an enthusiastic admirer. Every single one of them has protested against that unpardonable civic indifference which prevented his memory from being enshrined in some worthy memorial. The least that we could do would be to name the new canal boulevard after him, and there ought to be a monument somewhere on its banks in which his noble figure could be seen in bronze.

"The Daniel Drake Boulevard!" Is it not a beautiful name and would not its bestowal do much to redeem us from the guilt of civic inappreciation?

It is in the gloom of a little clearing in the backwoods of Kentucky not very far from Maysville, that we first catch sight of our hero. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, October 20, 1785 (three years before the landing of the pioneers at Yeatman's Cove), he was brought by his parents into the western wilderness when he was two and a half years of age. The house in which the first years of this new life was passed was nothing but a pen for sheep. His education was obtained from a few books in a corner of this hovel; from a log schoolhouse; from the conversation of devout and serious-minded, although extremely illiterate parents; and from nature. In those rude surroundings he was compelled while yet a child to perform the labors of a man. Fortunately for this bright and beautiful boy, his parents were ambitious. His father, denied the privileges of an education and a career himself, solemnly made up his mind that his son should not suffer the same deprivation.

When, therefore, Daniel had reached the age of fifteen years, he sent him from Mayslick, Kentucky, to Cincinnati and consigned him to the care of Dr. Goforth, an eccentric but gifted physician, who ran a small apothecary shop in connection with his profession. In this shop young Drake was set to work com

pounding pills; doing all sorts of chores and studying medicine. In 1804, having made great progress in his studies and become an invaluable assistant, he was taken (at eighteen years of age) into full partnership.

Bright as were the prospects of business success which this relationship opened, young Drake abandoned them to acquire an education. The desire for this had become a passion and he started for the medical college in Philadelphia armed only with a small fund of money and a sort of diploma furnished him by Dr. Goforth, as an evidence of his proficiency.

After weeks of hard and discouraging work amidst the limitations of friendlessness and poverty, he returned to the west and began to practice medicine in the neighborhood of his old home. This was in 1806, and in the following year he went back to Cincinnati because the departure of his old teacher for Louisiana left an auspicious opening for him to establish himself in a remunerative business. Arranging to have his parents join them later on, he took his younger brother Benjamin along, and full of the "mighty hopes that make us men" the two boys (for they were nothing more) fared forth into the big world to achieve their destiny. Daniel's previous residence in Cincinnati and his large acquaintance, including such men as Symmes, Harrison, Findlay, Gano, Burnet, Arthur St. Clair, Ethan Stone, Allison, Longworth, Kemper, Ziegler, Baum, and probably every important personage in the little town, enabled him not only to begin his own career under the most favorable auspices, but also to launch his brother on the tide that leads to fortune.

It was not long before the young practitioner's business increased to such an extent as to warrant him in setting up a home of his own and he contracted an ideal marriage. In the old Ludlow mansion, a few miles out of town, lived Jared Mansfield in whose household there was a charming girl, the general's niece, by the name of Harriet Sisson, with whom he fell in love. Amidst the enchanting scenes of that still virgin wilderness, he wooed and won a heart which gave him a deathless love and furnished him an unfailing inspiration.

Of her character and charms he wrote:

"Her modest eye of hazel hue
Disclosed, e'en to the passing view
Truth, firmness, feeling, innocence,
Bright thoughts and deep intelligence.
Her soul was pure as winter's snow
And warm as summer's sunset glow.

"When moving through the mingled crowd

Her lofty bearing spoke her proud;

But when her kindling spirit breathed

On those she loved; or those who grieved

Joy felt the quickening pulses leap

And sorrow e'en forgot to weep."

Young, talented, happily married, with everything to struggle after and hope for, respected, admired and trusted, Dr. Drake plunged headlong into the activities of the little world in which he lived.

In the fall of 1807, the young couple set up a modest establishment in a two-story frame house on the east side of Sycamore between Third and Fourth streets. Their tastes were congenial, they had hosts of cultivated friends and their home was an earthly paradise. Aside from his practice, at this particular period, Dr. Drake was carrying on a business of considerable magnitude and preparing to publish his personal observations of the little world in which he lived. This purpose he accomplished and anxiously sent forth upon its mission a small pamphlet entitled "Notices of Cincinnati, its Topography and Diseases," which bore the earmarks of a genius for observation and expression, both. Its recognition was so generous as to inspire another literary effort, and after five hard years of work he issued a volume entitled "Natural and Statistical View or Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami County, illustrated by maps, with an appendix containing observations on the late earthquakes, the aurora borealis and southeast wind." Had it been a weak book its title might have damned it; but because it was a marvel of original research and of literary facility, it made a place for itself in the great world. Although his neighbors, and even friends, did not appreciate its merits, it found readers in the cultivated towns of the east and was acknowledged across the ocean to be the product of a first class mind.

The year preceding the appearance of this second volume had been a hard one for the author and his wife. It was in 1810 that the book was launched and in 1809 they had lost a little daughter. The child was only a year old but the grief of its devoted parents was profound, and while still in the very stress of it the doctor suffered an attack of pneumonia which all but cost his life.

In a nature so highly emotional as his these shocks produced some powerful reactions; but did not arrest the development of his mind nor thwart the accomplishment of his plans. In pursuit of his determination to have a hand in shaping the destinies of the city of his adoption, he took part in every phase of its existence. There is a great and a decided advantage for a mind like his in living in a small community because it is possible to be identified with all its profound movements and to be on familiar terms with its leading men. Everybody knew him and he knew everybody, so that no movement of any important character was undertaken without soliciting his powerful and ever growing influence. He was heart and hand in the organization of a library society, for example. He helped to start a debating society and a school of art and literature. He was active in the efforts to cultivate dramatic talents. He took part in politics. He pushed forward business projects in which he had no interests. To so great a degree did he surpass his fellow citizens in these public sacrifices that many of them, too small to understand him, regarded him with suspicion and suspected him of sinister motives.

Undoubtedly he was dominated by a towering personal ambition. He loved recognition; and he courted power. He felt in a high degree that burning desire for fame which is "the last infirmity of noble minds." But, on the other hand, he was animated by another passion, rarer in those days than now, a love for the town he lived in. In a word, he was a philopolist, the first apostle of "the higher life" in the little backwoods town. A desire to see it progress in every realm of greatness; to have it become beautiful, prosperous, powerful and permanent became a passion. He dreamed of a city on the banks of the Ohio

which should rival the greatest the world had ever known. No prophet ever prayed for the peace or longed for the glory of Jerusalem more fervently than he for the future grandeur of the squalid village on the muddy river's bank.

It was in order to increase his personal value to his home town as much as to enhance his personal reputation, therefore, that this first citizen of the metropolis of the region was led to abandon his practice for a time and go to Philadelphia to enlarge his comprehension of medical science and to win a diploma for its practice. He did this in 1815, and after several months of Herculean labors, he secured his coveted prize, and returned to his home and his work. Upon his arrival he discovered that business had taken a disastrous turn and that his own affairs were so involved that he was compelled to move to the edge of the town where he and his wife inhabited a little cabin on the very threshold of the forest. In grim good humor he christened it "Mount Poverty," and sensibly "made the best of his opportunity to be as far away as possible from the irritations of his daily life in town."

With Dr. Drake, it turned out according to the old proverb that "it was darkest just before the dawn," for his skill as a physician, his ability as an investigator and his talent as a writer had attracted the attention of the promoters of an ambitious effort to found a college of medicine in Lexington, Kentucky. It was Benjamin W. Dudley, one of the great figures of that region and of those times, who was the means of securing an invitation for the doctor to become an instructor in that new and promising school. It fell in with his needs and his ambitions to accept, and forthwith he turned his face southward.

At that time Lexington was only second to Cincinnati in size among those early settlements and had acquired the proud title of the "Athens of the West." The institution with which our distinguished citizen cast his interests was called the Transylvania School, and possesses a remarkable history, having ranked at one time among the six leading medical colleges in America. It was then, however, in an inchoate condition, and obstacles to its growth and to Drake's success sprang up in multitudes. Among them were the narrow jealousies of the members of the faculty which resulted often in quarrels, and once in a duel, of which Drake was falsely and maliciously accused of being the principal. He stuck it out for a year, however, in spite of everything; but at the end of that time, with his high hopes rudely dashed, returned to Cincinnati.

The experience had been bitter, but, of course, invaluable. It had been the means of disclosing a talent of which he had only a dim suspicion,-the talent for imparting knowledge as a teacher.

A great and consuming ambition, the passion of a lifetime, seized him:-the passion to found and preside over an institution for training physicians and

surgeons.

Together with two of his fellow townsmen, Dr. Coleman Rogers and the (Rev.) Professor Elijah Slack, president of the Lancaster Seminary, he prepared and launched his project. On November 10, 1818, he delivered his first lecture to a few students whose ambitions had been excited by this new and wonderful opportunity; but the project was evidently ill-advised or poorly carried out, for on April 18, 1819, Drake announced that the partnership had been dissolved and the enterprise abandoned.