We’re going to Ohio and Michigan next week. Of our nine remaining states, I’ve never been to Ohio, Michigan, or South Dakota. Actually, I have been to Michigan, but I was only one. Sentience should matter, even in an election year.

Kris went to Ohio in May to birdwatch, to Magee Marsh. That’s a famous place for birdwatchers because of warblers, which are small, brightly colored, migratory, and hard to see. In a weird distortion of anglers’ obsession with the biggest fish, birders are often obsessed with the smallest birds.

On their way to Canada, Yucatan warblers will land–fall–in Galveston for a few hours after crossing 600 miles over the Gulf of Mexico. During the spring warbler season Kris will drive to Galveston almost daily to see if there’s a warbler fall, and when she doesn’t go to Galveston she’ll likely go to the Rice campus to see if there are birds there. Ohio’s Magee Marsh in the spring is another famous warbler resting spot, and they stage there before crossing Lake Erie to their summer grounds in Canada.

Birders stage there too.

Prothonotary warbler, Magee Marsh.

In the first half of the 19th century, lots of people staged in Ohio. The Old Northwest territory, what we’d now call the upper midwest, was our testing ground. In the Old Northwest we–and that’s the American We–finalized how we would deal with Native Americans, and it was in Ohio that we first forbade slavery in a new state constitution. If I recall correctly, the Ohio constitution also forbade new black immigrants after statehood, and our native American policy became beat ’em up and move ’em out, so we may not have worked things out to everyone’s satisfaction. Still, history is what it is, and our ancestors rarely batted much better than .260.

The one thing without doubt that we got right in Ohio was surveys. Modern grid surveys were developed in Ohio. Before Ohio, surveys were random affairs that followed natural features, and may or may not have overlapped prior surveys. After Ohio, surveys were standardized into grids comprised of townships, sections, and acres. It became the standard survey configuration for western expansion.

1826 Survey Map, Ohio’s Western Reserve.

Gridded Ohio was a settlement magnet. In 1800, three years before statehood, Ohio had 45,365 residents. Ten years later its population had boomed (quintupled?) to 230,760. By 1820 it was over half a million. By 1850 there were nearly 2 million Ohioans. It continued to grow significantly each decade until the 1960s when its population growth flattened. It is still the seventh largest state with 11,785,935 residents.

Ohio was originally settled in three regions, with Southerners from Kentucky and Virginia concentrated along the southern border, and Yankees from New York and Massachusetts in northeast Ohio around what would be Cleveland. Everybody else apparently settled everyplace else.

Agricultural goods from Ohio were originally blocked from Eastern US markets by the Appalachians, but in 1825 the state issued bonds to build the Ohio and Erie Canal. The Canal opened Eastern markets for Ohio farmers through Lake Erie. The construction of the canal spurred both agriculture and industrialization.

The canal was quickly replaced by railroads, and Ohio became a railroad hub. Again, it was agricultural markets that drove the growth, but there was iron and coal available, and in support of railroad construction Ohio became an iron and steel producer. It produced rails and it produced agricultural implements. In early Ohio the two economies always seem to have moved together, farming and industry, in a combination that I guess always exists but rarely so blatantly. Ohioans didn’t just raise cattle, they tanned the hides. If Ohioans had raised cotton, they would have woven cotton cloth.

Canal Boat, Ohio and Erie Canal, 1880, National Park Service.

Booming Ohio produced at least seven major Union generals, Sheridan, Sherman, Custer, Garfield, McClellan, Rosecrans, and, of course, Grant. 313,180 Ohioans served in the Union army in the Civil War, third most after New York and Pennsylvania.

Between 1841 and 1923, Ohio produced eight U.S. Presidents: William Henry Harrison, U.S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Taft, and Warren G. Harding. Two of the presidents, William Henry Harrison and Warren G. Harding, died of illness while in office. Two, Garfield and McKinley, were assassinated. In 1910, Taft was the first president to throw out a first pitch at a major league baseball game.

Ulysses Grant at Cold Harbor, 1864, Library of Congress.

U.S. Grant’s father worked in a tannery, as did John Brown’s father. As a young man Grant’s father lived with the Browns for two years, and Ulysses recalled that his father admired the Brown family’s commitment to abolition.

I admire Grant, and his reputation has gone through another revision in recent decades, largely because of Ron Chernow but others as well. I particularly like the Grant biography by Ronald White, American Ulysses. In the decades immediately following the Civil War and his presidency, Grant was ranked in the popular mind with Washington and Lincoln as one of the nation’s saviors, but then stuff happened. Grant came to be seen as a poor president and a second-rate general.

Personally, I think that Grant’s denigration ties back to the nation’s exhaustion at the end of Reconstruction and the conciliatory post-Reconstruction glorification of Robert E. Lee. In the popular mind if Grant was great, then Lee was not great. Lee was suddenly perceived as the better general, the nobler man, and Grant was seen as having done what anybody could have done and a failure as president. He was in the right place at the right time, but it was Grant who figured out how to destroy the Southern armies, and then had the nerve to carry it out. It was Grant who came closest to leading us through Reconstruction, and its failure wasn’t his, it was ours.

He was also a good man.

Julia Dent Grant, 1854.

He was a fine writer, and his autobiography, written at the urging of Mark Twain as Grant was dying of throat cancer, should be required reading. He produced a passel of great quotes, but one of my favorites was recorded by his wife, Julia, who had crossed eyes. She thought that she should have them surgically corrected, but in the 1860s it would have been an experimental and possibly dangerous procedure. She thought though that Grant as a public figure would be ashamed of her defect, and that she should take the risk.

Grant’s response, as recorded by Julia, “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with those same eyes? I like them just as they are . . . I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.”

What a sweet thing to say, and with Grant it is completely in character.

After the Civil War Ohio industry expanded beyond its agriculture roots. Steel was forged in Ohio. Along with Michigan, cars were made in Ohio, and car parts were made in Ohio. Tires came from Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, or General, all of which were Ohio companies. Appliances were made in Ohio, and KitchenAid, Amana, and VitaMix still manufacture in Ohio.

After California and Texas, Ohio remains the third largest manufacturing state economy, but manufacturing growth is flat. During the 70s traditional industrial jobs declined in Ohio (as they did in Michigan and Indiana), and beginning in the 90s it suffered China shock. Tariffs have not increased American manufacturing jobs, and the new jobs that are created tend to favor the college-educated, where Ohioans lag. Traditional manufacturing wages also lag behind inflation. It’s a rough world out there, and the Upper Midwest has suffered.

Geography and Weather

North of Ohio is Lake Erie on the east and Michigan on the west. Due west of Ohio is Indiana. To the southeast is West Virginia, née Virginia, and to the south is Kentucky, both bordered by the Ohio River. Southern settlers from Kentucky and Virginia came early and often–JD Vance’s Kentucky family is nothing new. To the east is Pennsylvania, and settlers from the northeast got to Ohio through Pennsylvania.

There are lots of Ohio rivers and streams, and 15 Ohio rivers are designated scenic or wild and scenic rivers. In the northern third of the state the rivers generally flow north into Lake Erie. The southern rivers generally flow south into the Ohio, and then into the Mississippi.

Ohio Lakes and Rivers, GIS Geography.com, https://gisgeography.com/ohio-lakes-rivers-map/.

Ohio has some beaches on Lake Erie, and of course it has Magee Marsh, but mostly Ohio is flat or rolling plains. Ranked by elevation change, Ohio is our ninth flattest state, with a low elevation of 455 feet and a high of 1,548 feet. By elevation change Ohio is flatter than Kansas.

From north to south, east to west, weather varies across the state, but not much, and precipitation stays pretty equally spread from month to month, place to place. There ain’t no annual monsoons. The heaviest average precipitation is in May, three inches in Cleveland and four in Cincinnati. It rains least in January, but in January in Ohio it snows.

In July there’s a pretty good chance of muggy conditions. Average highs in July are in the mid- to low 80s, and lows in January are in the low 20s. It’s cold in Ohio in winter, but at least to this Houstonian it seems to be relatively mild in summer.

Population

From 1810 until 1860, Ohio grew by 913%, from 230,760 to 2,108,751. From 1860 to 1960 it grew by another 314%, to 9,706,397. It continues to grow, if not so fast, and its current population is 11,799,448.

Population is widely distributed, with concentrated urban areas interspersed across the state among relatively rural areas. The urban concentrations make Ohio the 10th densest state, with 282.3 people per square mile.

JimIrwin, 2020 Ohio population density map, Wikimedia Commons.

It’s an ethnically diverse state, with 61% Anglo, 12% black alone, 19% hispanic, and 6% Asian. Ten percent of Ohioans are two or more races.

Politics

Ohioans are politically a wee bit schizoid, though currently they are solidly Republican, and Donald Trump is projected to carry Ohio easily. In the last two presidential elections, Ohioans voted for Donald Trump, in 2020, 53.27% for Trump to 45.24% for Biden, and in 2016, 51.31% for Trump to 43.24% for Hillary Clinton. On the flip side, in both 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama carried Ohio. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the 2020 and 2016 elections in Ohio is the increased turnout: in 2016 turnout was a weary 66.48%, but in 2020 it increased to 74%. As these things go, 74% is massive turnout.

We will be there in the middle of the 2024 election season, but just like Texas I don’t expect there to be any serious presidential electioneering going on (unlike Michigan, which is an important swing state). There is a US senate race happening, with the Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown in a race with the Trump-supported Bernie Moreno. Brown is considered vulnerable, but the current polling shows Brown with a comfortable lead of 4-6%.

Ohio state legislature, 2024, from Wikipedia.

All of the statewide elected officials in Ohio are Republican, and both the state house and senate are heavily Republican. Ohio voters have approved a state constitutional amendment protecting access to abortion, though it’s not clear whether Republican courts will enforce it. Like I said, Ohio is politically a wee bit schizoid.

Fish

Ohio has a lot of rivers and streams, and of course it has Lake Erie. The original gamefish of the Great Lakes was the lake trout, but when canals opened the Great Lakes to the Atlantic a combination of overfishing and invasive sea lamprey wiped out all but remnants of the lake trout populations.

Hudson, Charles B., Lake Trout, Review of the Salmonid Fishes of the Great Lakes, Bulletin of the Bureau of Fisheries, 1911, Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, from the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

Like salmon, sea lamprey move into freshwater streams to spawn, and were finally brought under control beginning in 1958 by the application of Lampricide in their natal streams. By the 1980s though merchant ships had dumped zebra and quagga mussels into the lakes with released ballast water. The invasive mussels took over, severely damaging the food chain. Then blue crabs started eating the mussels (as did endangered lake sturgeon). I have no idea where the blue crabs came from, but the mussels are at least now somewhat controlled by natural predators, and there are serious recovery efforts for lake trout throughout the Great Lakes.

Meanwhile fish and game folk discovered Pacific steelhead as a replacement gamefish for the lake trout. I gather that the steelhead populations are not self-reproducing, and that there’s massive stocking every year, but from New York to Illinois the internal clocks of the stocked steelhead decide each winter that it’s time to head out of the Great Lakes and up the local rivers to spawn. Spawning steelhead being a great gamefish, it is a flyfishing bonanza. My inner Puritan however is dubious about fishing for a non-native stocked fish that doesn’t really belong where I’d be fishing.

So out of pure perversity that’s not what we’re doing.

Ohio being in the native range of smallmouth, that’s what we’ll fish for, with a guide from Mad River Outfitters in Columbus. We’ve also fished for smallmouth in Virginia, in the Shenandoah (where smallmouth are not native), in Illinois near Chicago, and in Indiana. I’m always excited to fish for black bass of any kind, but mostly I hope to see no lamprey, sea or otherwise. That’s one hideous animal, and I’m supportive of mass application of Lampricide.

Small-Mouth Black Bass, New York Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests, Fifth Annual Report, 1900, Albany, New York, James B. Lyon, from the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.