Ohio History Journal

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[Miss Keeler of Fremont, Ohio, has been a valued contributor to

the QUARTERLY. The following, from her pen, is a delightful bit of

historic sentiment, which originally appeared in Scribner's Magazine. -


I have watched numberless persons walk around a great

stone-a round stone with a hollow in the top, filled with water,

where the birds come to drink-and dilate learnedly after this

fashion: "Think how it was carried for thousand of years on the

back of a glacier, and how it was rubbed and ground by ice and

stones till its angles were worn down into this perfect sphere."

All very true were this stone a boulder, but it happens to be

quite another thing, a concretion, which grew round from baby-

hood and never had any angles to rub off. It started perhaps

with a bit of shell or fish bone falling into the mud of a stream.

This nucleus acted like a magnet, attracting to itself little particles

of congenial matter which hugged it layer after layer like an onion

while the water above, holding iron and lime and silica in solu-

tion, percolated through the growing concretion and cemented it

into a solid stone.

After such fashion does local history grow up. You take a

house or bit of land, a road or a river or Indian treaty, as a

nucleus; and as you read old books, newspapers, and letters;

examine old maps, plans, and pictures; and as you talk with old

residents-your facts form layer after layer around your centre;

and as you compare and generalize and let your imagination

flow over all, your house or bit of land, or road, or river, or

Indian treaty grows and crystallizes into a shapely, lasting con-

cretion of local history.

In choosing some nucleus for a study of local history, one

cannot do better than begin with one's house or yard. One

should trace back the several ownerships to the original grant;