There she met Dr. Leonard Hanna and married him on Sept. 10, 1835, their ages being respectively twenty-nine and twentythree. Their second child but their first son, born, as I have said, on Sept. 24, 1837, was named Marcus Alonzo Hanna.

Such was Mark Hanna's ancestry, of which any American might well be proud. It includes a compound of the best strains entering into the American racial stock. In his father's blood there was a Scotch-Irish, a Welsh and an English or Dutch strain. On his mother's side a French Huguenot, an Irish and an English infusion may be plainly traced. If a thorough mixture of many good racial ingredients constitutes, as is now usually supposed, an heredity favorable to individual energy and distinction, Mark Hanna started life with that basic advantage an advantage which the historians of the state like to proclaim is enjoyed by an unusual proportion of the old families of Ohio. It is claimed with sufficient plausibility that a peculiarly fortunate group of conditions operated to select as the early settlers of Ohio the very best elements in the population of the older states, and that the exceptional prominence of the Ohio-born in American political and economic life since the Civil War must be attributed to this excellence of stock. Some foundation of truth may be granted to this explanation, without making Mark Hanna or the other eminent sons of Ohio any less individually responsible for their own careers. Peasantry and gentlefolk, Scotch, English, Irish, French and Dutch, New England, Pennsylvania and Virginia, Calvinism and Quakerism, all the vague influences and forces associated with these names entered into his physical and social inheritance. He became by virtue thereof a tolerably typical Americanwhich means a man whose past is so miscellaneous that he is obliged to seek for himself some form of effective personal definition.

CHAPTER II

BENJAMIN HANNA, HIS FAMILY AND HIS FORTUNE

THE early settlers of Columbiana County entered into a natural inheritance as rich and varied as their own blood. Its situation on the Ohio River adjoining the border of Pennsylvania was favorable. Its natural resources were abundant and diversified. The northern part of the county was undulating and excellently adapted to cultivation. Its southern half was more rugged and broken, and was on the whole better adapted for grazing than for tillage. In 1840 it stood first among the counties of Ohio in the production of wool. Along the bottom lands on the water courses, sycamore, walnut, maple and chestnut trees flourished. On the tops of the hills grew an abundance of pine and spruce. Coal, iron ore, clay and quarries were all to be found of good quality and quantity. In short, the county was a smaller copy of the whole state and afforded the best of opportunities for a combined agricultural and industrial development.

New Lisbon was located in the southern part of the county in the township of Centre. Its site consists of a stretch of level or bottom land running east and west on the middle fork of the Little Beaver Creek. To the north is a long, high hill, once crowned with a deep forest, up the side of which the village gradually spread. West and south of the village there stretches a formidable group of steep hills, the summits of which afford many picturesque views of a broken landscape. The hill to the south is particularly precipitous, and from the abundance of evergreens on its sides, used to be known as Pine Hill. Its proximity to the village, its rocks and its woods naturally made it the favorite playground of the village boys.

When Benjamin Hanna settled in New Lisbon in 1814 he leased a house in the centre of the village, which he used both as a

BY THE ADDITION OF ONE STORY

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store and as a residence. He did not in the beginning depend for his subsistence exclusively upon the shop. He also owned a farm on the hill to the north of the town, but in all probability the shop soon came to occupy all his time. A storekeeper in a village in the interior of Ohio in the year 1815 had his difficulties. Philadelphia was the most convenient point from New Lisbon for the purchase of stock - all of which had to be hauled the length of the state of Pennsylvania over barbarous roads by means of six- and eight-horse teams. The transportation of every hundred pounds of freight in this laborious fashion cost the merchant between $5 and $10 — the average rate being about $8.50; and it was probably about as difficult for a man to finance his business as it was for him to procure his stock. During the early years there was so little currency in the country that trade was usually a matter of barter, and if currency was used, the medium of exchange was generally deerskins.

For a generation and more the economic development of Ohio and the other pioneer states was at first hampered and then determined in its form and distribution by the available means of transportation. Difficult as it was for the merchant, the situation of the farmer was worse. His bulky products could not be transported to market, and in the beginning the best that he could do was to feed his grain to stock and drive the animals across the mountains to the seaboard. The expense of this way of obtaining some purchasing power from the land was too great to endure. The roads were gradually improved. The flat steamboat made transportation by the Ohio River accessible to many counties of the state. Local markets of some value were created. Nevertheless, these improvements affected different parts of the state unevenly, and they were not sufficient to dispose of the products of the farms without occasional spells of ruinous congestion and low prices. The losses and difficulties from which so many of the pioneers of Ohio suffered must be remembered as the explanation for their subsequent craze for internal improvements and the large amount of money wasted therein. The business life of a storekeeper like Benjamin Hanna was one long fight, first against the expense and delays of transportation, and then against the relatively