merous, the farmer fills his own coal-house, and the smaller towns are supplied by men who haul coal “for a living.” Near Ohio River are vast mines, and a daily sight along the Baltimore and Ohio Railway and contributing roads, especially the Hocking Valley, is the long trains of immense cars loaded with coal and coke and drawn by monster engines which make the earth tremble as they thunder along. Most of the sandstone, including the brownstone much used in the east for house-fronts, is quarried in a tract whose western end is in Ohio. A beautiful stone of many warm colors, — red, yellow, brown, black, — is quarried near Mansfield. A church at Napoleon and a public library in Defiance at the junction of Maumee and Auglaize Rivers are examples of what can be made of this stone. The clay known as kaolin is used in giving weight to paper and a good printing-surface, but chiefly in the manufacture of chinaware. One of the two largest potteries in the United States is at East Liverpool, O. When the writer was a boy, his father brought home a bottle of “rock oil.” It was said to be a good medicine when applied to a horse's legs. Of this crude petroleum, in 1910, the production in the United States was 209,000,000 barrels, Ohio being fifth among the states in its production and seventh in value of its refinery output. Many Ohio cities are now supplied with natural gas from Ohio wells or piped from West Virginia and Indiana.
Agriculture. Perhaps the most in a given space can be told about Ohio as an agricultural state by giving extracts from the census and agricultural reports for 1910. The land surface of Ohio is approximately 26,073,600 acres, and of this area 24,105,708 acres are included in farms, nearly 80% of which is reported as improved land. In 1910 the acreage and yield of chief crops were corn, 3,960,000 acres yielding 144,540,000 bushels; oats, 1,765,000 acres, 65,658,000 bushels; wheat, 1,944,000 acres, 31,493,000 bushels; hay, 2,840,000 acres, 3,948,000 tons; potatoes, 182,000 acres, 14,924,000 bushels; tobacco, 92,700 acres, 75,087,000 lbs. Much attention is given to dairying, there being 905,125 dairy cows in the state. Number of other cattle, 932,482; horses, 910,224.
Manufactures. Among the earliest industries developed in this country was that founded upon the finding of iron-ore in the valley of the Hocking. At first the readily made charcoal was used for smelting. After a time a quality of coal was discovered in the northeastern part of the state which seemed the thing for which the ore was waiting to change to iron. Immense quantities of Lake Superior ore are smelted to-day in the smelting districts of Ohio — notably in Mahoning Valley. It will assist in forming a conception of the multiplicity and the variety of Ohio's manufacturing interests to glance over a small fraction of the products put upon the market by the 1,100 companies incorporated in the year ending November 16, 1906; the total capital stock quoted at $65,000,000: soaps, cheese, medicines, cigars, liquors, ice, wire-nails, sugar, farming implements, pianos, sanitary closets, condensed milk, boots, shoes, chemicals, bread, paints, jewelry, cement, fertilizers, automobiles, wire-fence, telephone apparatus, boilers, tile, and hundreds of others. Of 800 miscellaneous companies the capital stock is over $30,000,000. But all these and their like are simply supplementary to the great factories, foundries and rolling mills along the rivers or on the lakes — as the immense mill at Lorain, one of the largest in the world — and at various advantageous sites in many of the cities.
Transportation. In 1825 the legislature adopted a report of which the final result was the Ohio Canal and the lower division of the Miami and Erie Canal. The news was greeted by the usual noisy expressions of popular joy. These works were completed in 1833, and the entire canal system in 1842. The cost was almost $15,000,000. Their effect upon the growth and prosperity of the state was wonderful. The markets of the river, the lakes and the great city on the Hudson were opened to the Buckeye farmers. The northern and western parts of the state were brought nearer the east. The value of lands as well as of products was greatly enhanced. It is not necessary to name the many great lines of railroad that now pass through Ohio, east and west, north and south. Summing the miles of main track gives a total of 8,560; their second track, 1,436 miles. The grand total of value is $138,669,294, while the total value of the urban and interurban lines is $10,140,096.
Education. The early schools were not free schools supported by the public. The idea of such schools was of slow growth. An attempt to establish free schools and support them by a tax of one mill on the dollar, made in 1826, shows that the seed was planted, but the feeble efforts left scarcely a trace. The Akron law of 1846 and its extension throughout the state were long, firmly-planted steps forward. The high school, the superintendent, the county teachers' institute, manual training, state normal schools and a state commissioner of schools are other strides in the same direction. The commissioner's report for 1911 gives the number of school-houses erected within the year as 238; the township districts 114; separate districts 124; at a cost: township, $475,795; separate, $4,673,267; elementary school-houses as 10,071 and the high-school houses as 174; their value as $75,084,867; and their teachers as 28,032. The children's homes not only are humane institutions but, commonly, they are schools. There are 53 of these, caring in 1906 for 2,079 youth. The range of “expanse per capita”, from $9.12 to $237.45,
