Recollections of Life in Ohio, from 1813-1840

In 1813, a Welsh woolen-mill family arrived in Ohio when the state was still half-wild, still deciding what it would become. This is William Cooper Howells's intimate account of those formative years, from his childhood in a frontier settlement to his own young adulthood as a mill owner. Here is the Ohio of log barn raisings and corn huskings, of peach brandy passed around at church gatherings, of itinerant preachers walking miles to deliver sermons that could overturn a congregation overnight. Howells writes with quiet precision about the rhythms of immigrant life in a young republic: the particular loneliness of Welsh speech in an English-speaking wilderness, his father's daring departure from Britain (where skilled workers were forbidden to leave), and the slow, irrevocable shift from Quaker stillness to the ecstatic Methodism that would reshape his family. This is not a history of Ohio but a human document, the kind of book that lets you hear how people actually talked and prayed and mourned in the years before photography, when memory was the only preservation. For anyone curious about the private origins of American literary culture, or simply drawn to the plain honesty of early American memoir.