he laid out the city of Lynchburg. They remained in Virginia some twenty-two years. Before leaving Pennsylvania they had become Quakers, and their eight children, of whom Benjamin Hanna was the second, were brought up in that faith. In 1801 Robert Hanna, his wife and six surviving children migrated in a "Conestoga" wagon to the township of Fairfield, Columbiana County, Ohio. Later he moved into Middleton township, founded the village of Clarkson, and, it is said, built and kept a log-tavern at the crossing of two roads. Here, at any rate, Robert and Catherine Hanna lived and prospered for fourteen years, during which time their children were marrying and dispersing.

When Benjamin Hanna settled in New Lisbon he was thirtythree years old and had been nine years married. His wife was Rachel Dixon 1- a girl of eighteen when he married her, and either of Dutch or English descent. Benjamin had passed through a good deal of rough frontier discipline. He had not shirked the hard work which was necessary to convert a wooded wilderness into a cleared, habitable and cultivated country-side. He had taken part in the two essential preliminary tasks of surveying the land, preparatory to its alienation to individuals, and of clearing it. According to the statement of his son Kersey, he began by buying for $5 an acre forty acres of forest land situated some ten miles from New Lisbon. After clearing his purchase, he sold it for enough money to buy an additional one hundred and sixty acres. The second farm was situated about half a mile east of the village of Columbiana, and like the first

1 Joshua Dixon and Dinah Batten, his wife, moved into Fairfield township, Columbiana County, Ohio, from Fayette County, Pennsylvania, in 1802. They owned two sections of land, 1280 acres, and became sufficiently well-to-do to substitute a brick house for their first log-cabin. They brought with them to Ohio five sons and six daughters, one of each being the fruit of a former marriage of Joshua Dixon. Rachel, the wife of Benjamin Hanna, was born in 1785. The Dixons were Quakers as well as the Hannas, and the marriage was one of the first to be solemnized in Fairfield township according to the rites of the sect. Mr. Kersey Hanna, the youngest of Benjamin Hanna's sons, states that although his mother's schooling had been very limited, she was very quick at figures. During her husband's absence she attended to the store, and she was capable of waiting on ten or twelve customers in immediate succession, and keeping the bills of each accurately in her mind.

was heavily timbered. He started in to clear it, but by the time he had finished thirty or forty acres, he found the work too much for him and his health temporarily undermined. He jumped at a good chance, consequently, of adopting some less laborious occupation. The country had been so far opened up that commerce had begun. In 1812 a group of farmers organized a company for the purpose of opening a store for all kinds of merchandise at Salem, ten miles north of New Lisbon; and Benjamin Hanna was selected to take charge of it. After managing this store for about two years, he sold his interest in it and opened a store of his own in New Lisbon. There he lived until his death in 1853, and there his children and many of his children's children were brought up.

To Benjamin and Rachel Hanna were born thirteen children, all but two of whom survived to middle age.1 One of them, Kersey Hanna, born in 1824, did not die until 1909. He has contributed many interesting reminiscences to the following account of the family's life in New Lisbon. Among other things he could recollect vividly certain journeys which he used to take as a boy of twelve with his grandfather, Robert Hanna. The old man used to travel around from the house of one of his children to that of another, and he liked to have the boy with him. It is interesting that a man living in 1909 should remember the Scotch-Irish immigrant boy who came to the colonies in 1763. These two connecting lives bound American history from the agitation for the repeal of the stamp act to the administration of William Howard Taft.

Of Benjamin and Rachel Hanna's eleven children who survived childhood, seven were boys and four were girls. They

1 The following is a list of Benjamin and Rachel Hanna's children : (1) Joshua, Nov. 8, 1804 - died July 7, 1881; (2) Leonard, March 4, 1806- died Dec. 15, 1862; (3) Levi, Feb. 7, 1808 - died May 5, 1898; (4) Zalinda, Feb. 23, 1810 — died Dec. 4, 1854; (5) Robert, Aug. 15, 1812 died April 3, 1882; (6 and 7) Tryphena and Tryphosa, twins, June 12, 1814- died May 23, 1893, and Jan. 17, 1815; (8) Rebecca, Sept. 21, 1816- died Oct. 15, 1847; (9) Thomas B., May 22, 1818 — died Nov. 9, 1885; (10) Anna, March 3, 1821 - died Jan. 26, 1846; (11) Benjamin J., March 14, 1823 died April 3, 1881; (12) Kersey, Oct. 6, 1824 - died 1909; died Jan. 28, 1833.

(13) Elizabeth, June 12, 1827

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.