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were a fine, tall, vigorous family. The shortest of the brothers measured five feet and eleven inches in height. The tallest measured six feet three. The average was about six feet so they were called "forty-two feet of Hanna." As they grew up some of the children deserted their home for one cause or another; but the majority of them remained with their father and made their lives in New Lisbon.

All the children except one were educated in the ordinary schools of New Lisbon, which at that time were private and according to all accounts most inferior. The exception was Leonard, who was trained for a professional career. After getting what preliminary schooling he could at home, he was sent to a small college in the neighboring county of Washington in Pennsylvania, and from there went to Philadelphia, where he graduated from the Rush Medical College. George B. McClellan's father was a professor in the institution at the time of Leonard Hanna's attendance. He returned to New Lisbon to practise his profession; but his career as a physician was hampered and curtailed by an accident. In mounting his horse, preparatory to a visit to one of his patients, he had barely thrown his leg over the saddle, when the animal shied and he was thrown heavily to the ground. His spine was injured and thereafter he suffered much with headaches, the attacks sometimes lasting as long as two or three weeks. The injury finally resulted in his death from the softening of the brain. Partly because of his infirmity he ceased the practice of medicine and joined his brothers Joshua and Robert in helping their father in the conduct of a continually growing business.

It must have been shortly after his accident that Dr. Leonard Hanna married; and as one of the best educated men in the town he not unnaturally married a school-teacher Samantha Converse by name. Her parents, Porter and Rhoda Howard Converse, had migrated from Randolph, Vermont, to Ohio in 1824. Originally the Converse family1 were Huguenots, having fled to Ireland after the massacre of St. Bartholomew; but presumably the French blood had been tolerably well diluted

1 There is a history of the Converse family by Geo. O. Converse of Columbus, Ohio - at one time a Representative in Congress.

by the end of the eighteenth century. Porter Converse had been trained as a lawyer, but became a merchant after moving to Ohio. His wife, Rhoda Howard, derived from an old and excellent English family, and is stated to have been a woman of great energy of purpose. She lived to be eighty-seven years old. At the time of their migration they had four children-three daughters and one son. A fourth daughter, Miss Helen Converse, was born in Ohio. A son of Caroline, one of Samantha Converse's sisters, Porter Harbaugh by name, was living in 1905 in the neighborhood of New Lisbon. According to his statement his mother rode all the way from Vermont on horseback. The switch with which she accelerated the animal's pace was planted after her arrival and grew to be a large tree. She used to call it a Vermont white plum. Cuttings were given to friends and neighbors whereby the original switch had a numerous progeny throughout the neighboring part of Ohio.

One cannot help suspecting that it is the story which has grown rather than the switch; and the suspicion is partly justified by Miss Helen Converse's positive statement that her family migrated to Ohio in a real carriage-described as a wide, old-fashioned vehicle on springs. It would accommodate three people comfortably on the back seat. The whole family rode all day in their conveyance, usually making about thirty miles and putting up every night at inns. Miss Converse had never heard of the fruitful switch which none the less may have existed; but her account of the manner of her family's migration must be authentic. The Converses possessed means above the average of emigrants. One of Mark Hanna's sisters, Mrs. Jay C. Morse, remembers tales of her mother's about the silver tankards and plate which the Howards had brought with them from England.

Vermont has been said to be the most glorious spot on the face of the globe to be born in, provided you emigrate when you are young. Samantha Converse was eleven years old when she arrived in Ohio. Her family, coming as they did from New England, settled in Geauga County in the Western Reserve. Miss Converse became a school teacher, and went to New Lisbon for the purpose of using her knowledge to earn her living.

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

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THE HOUSE IN NEW LISBON IN WHICH MR. HANNA WAS BORN. IT HAS BEEN CHANGED BY THE ADDITION OF ONE STORY

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