The process of making a figure-head for the Walk-in-the-Water, the first steamboat that navigated Lake Erie, was watched with the liveliest interest by a Painesville boy, who at once tried his hand at drawing, and afterward started on a pilgrimage to Pittsburg, painting portraits on the way for five dollars apiece. This boy was James H. Beard, upon whom, a few years later, Cincinnati bestowed considerable attention, and whose intensely original creations as an animal painter have since made him famous. William H. Beard, who shares the fame of his brother James, was born at Painesville. He has chosen the bear as a theme for his most striking pictures and has treated that droll animal with a humor that has made" Beard's bears" a distinct feature in American art. The Battle of Lake Erie in the rotunda of the State House at Columbus was painted by W. H. Powell who went from New York to Cincinnati in his seventh year. Powell became a pupil of James H. Beard, and before leaving Cincinnati had developed a bent for historical painting that brought him into national prominence as the painter of De Soto Discovering the Mississippi, in the Washington Capitol. A. S. Wyant, W. L. Sontag, Wilson McDonald, T. D. Jones, William W. Walcutt, Henry Mosler, Kenyon Cox, Caroline S. Brooks, Edgar M. Ward, T. C. Webber, Jasper Lawman, John Henry Witt, Marion Foster and Thomas Buchanan Read are other names in a long list of successful artists born upon Ohio soil, or Buckeyes by adoption. W. A. Rogers, the expressive draughtsman who has succeeded Thomas Nast as the caricaturist of Harper's Weekly, Frederic Opper who furnishes some of the keenest pictorial wit in Puck, and G. E. Hamilton who fills the same office on Judgé, all are Ohio men. When the statue of General Thomas was unveiled at Washington during the administration of President Hayes, it fell out that nearly every distinguished man at or in sight of the ceremony was from Ohio. The sculptor, Ward, President Hayes, Gen. Grant, Gen. Sheridan, Gen. Sherman, Gen. McCook, Senator Garfield, who delivered an oration, Chief Justice Waite-all were Buckeyes, and Washington was soon laughing at Ohio's remarkable monopoly in every avenue of personal celebrity. It has long since become a national joke that Ohio "grows presidents" as readily as she does wheat. "Ohio understands the presidential game so well," said Chauncey M. Depew in a recent speech, "that she has not only arranged it herself within her own borders, but she has studied the quality and the peculiarity of presidential lightning so as to put somebody wherever it is likely to strike." Ohio has sent three men to the White House; two men to the Chief Justice's chair in the Supreme Court of the United States; three of her generals were selected by Congress for special honors conferred on no other military heroes since Washington. In the direction of military and political distinctions the State could have asked no more. She might have aimed at much less and been ambitious. These and other subjects of pardonable pride which have been hastily sketched in the foregoing record, occupied the attention of a group of orators and a large company of people gathered at Marietta on the seventh of April in the present year, to celebrate the one hundredth recurrence of "pioneer day." Old Marietta, still New England-like in her appearance and demeanor, still repeating pioneer names, though in the third and fourth generations, has retained for a century a distinctive tone, an atmosphere of conservative quiet and settled content. There have been spasmodic manufacturing movements that threatened to disturb the tranquil visage of the town; but these movements have not been encouraged. Commercial agitation has been more or less frowned upon as incompatible with the studious peace of a college town. Nowhere in |