Ohio - Day 9 - Fairport Harbor, Pres. Garfield, and on to Toledo

Bluegrass Campground, Swanton near Toledo
Thursday, 9 May 2019

today's route

I very nearly went from one side of Ohio to the other today, and it almost wore me out.  But I saw some interesting things, so that's okay.

Fairport Harbor
Today I took the local roads instead of the interstate - at least at first.  My first aim was Fairport Harbor.  It's a tiny town with 3 claims to fame - one of its main businesses is the Morton Salt Mine.  It's 2000' deep, runs under Lake Erie, and is one of the deepest salt mines in the country.  The salt this mine produces is used on roadways, not tabletops.

I'd have had to go to the other side of the Grand River to find the company so I wasn't sure that that's what I took a photo of.  Especially because on my side of the river was a remarkably similar-looking operation that was a sand-and-gravel company.  But here's a big operation on Ohio's Grand River.


Fairport Harbor is also the site of the beginning of LaSalle's inland expedition in 1669.  He's considered to be the first European to see the Ohio River.

In addition to these excitements, Fairport Harbor has not one but two attractive lighthouses.

built in 1871 and is now a marine museum

built in 1925 to replace the older one

Fairport Harbor also has a Finnish Heritage Museum and considers itself a very picturesque place, beloved of artists and photographers.

Baltimore oriole

You just never know what these tiny places can be packed with.  Including a Baltimore oriole, which I saw in a tree near the lake.  It's the first one I've ever seen but there can't possibly be a way to mistake it for anything else - that orange is stunning.



Painesville

Lake County courthouse, Painesville

Speaking of which, I next drove through Painesville to get groceries.  From a bit of a distance I could see what I was sure was the county courthouse and was so intrigued I got this photo off the internet.

I could see the top part of the building fairly well and was so spellbound I had trouble driving properly.  It's a decent-sized town with nearly 20,000 residents, but I didn't expect such an elaborate building.



James A. Garfield National Historical Site
This place is run by the National Park Service, and as usual they've done a good job of chronicling someone who was president for only 4 months and lived so long ago there's not a lot of record for.

our 20th president

He was born 1831 and was the last president to have been born in a log cabin.  His father died when he was 2 and he was raised in poverty by his mother.  He saw education as his route to a better life.

He fought during the Civil War at Shiloh and Chickamauga; wounded and recovering back at home from camp fever in 1863, he was elected to the US House of Representatives.  He served 9 terms in Congress, where he favored a) civil service reform to end the patronage system, b) modernizing the census, and c) a bill he introduced to create a Department of Education.  During that time he also served on the Board of Trustees for the Hampton Institute, a historically black college, and as a regent for the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1880 as a Senator-elect, he attended the Republican Presidential Convention, where he nominated Ohio's John Sherman.  This exhibit at the museum explains the surprising result.

Because it was considered undignified for presidential candidates to do any campaigning, Garfield and his opponent let others make the stump speeches.  Garfield hated this system, believing himself to be a much better public speaker than any other Republican (which he might have been), and used the power of the telegraph and railroads to bring the public and reporters to his front porch.

In some ways he was an ideal candidate, having been born to poverty and pulled himself up by energy and education.  His campaign bio was written, literally, by Horatio Alger.

He won the popular vote by only 10,000 votes, but the Electoral College went for him 214-155.  He is still the only sitting House member to be elected president.

At that time there was no Secret Service and few presidential perks: Garfield was still too poor to afford a horse and carriage and there wasn't an official one - a lack that contributed to his assassination.

In his 200 days as president, he continued working on civil service reform, trying to root out the machine politics and patronage system that had become entrenched.  He began an investigation of Post Office scandals from fraudulent dispersal of contracts, and also a study of a merit system of hiring.

Walking through the railroad station on his way to the coast to see his wife, he was shot by a man usually labeled a "disgruntled office seeker."  This man was fanatically opposed to any civil service reform, especially because he believed his work on Garfield's campaign entitled him to be consul in Paris.  He was entirely unqualified for the office and had been refused it by the Sec. of State, but he saw eliminating Garfield as the way to bring back the old way of doing things.

It may not have been the bullets that killed Garfield, however.  As with McKinley's death some years later by infection from the bullets, Garfield died from the infection that set in after a raft of doctors poked around inside him looking for one of the bullets (which they didn't find because it was lodged behind his pancreas) and even brought in Alexander Graham Bell's new invention - a metal detector - to no avail.

Garfield suffered for 80 days after the shooting, and nothing official got done because of disagreements over the meaning of the clause in Article II regarding succession in case of incapacity and how much authority VP Arthur should have.  All of this drama was spellbinding to the American public - they'd only just elected the guy a few months before - and created for the first time the idea of the president as celebrity. 

He's buried in Cleveland and I didn't visit his memorial, but this photo should give an idea of how the country felt about his death.  What you might call elaborate for a 4-month president.

The irony is that before Garfield's assassination, VP Arthur had been a proponent of machine politics, which is one reason the assassin believed Garfield's death would promote the return to that system.  But after all that, Arthur felt obliged to see through the policies that Garfield had started and instituted several civil service reform measures.


The drive to Toledo
I still had a 3-hour drive from here, even using the interstates, to get to the campground on the other side of Toledo, so reluctantly I decided to take the Ohio Turnpike.  It cost me $12.25 to drive about 90 miles.  And for that I'd have expected some decent road surfaces.  But I didn't get them.  Parts of the toll road were fine, but parts were seriously ugly and I resented every penny I was paying for that.

Plus the weather got much much worse.  For most of the day I was battling squirrely wind gusts and strong blows.  And for about an hour we got a driving rain that came down so hard I could barely see the semi in front of me, even though I'd slowed down to 40 mph.  It was not a comfortable ride and I don't know what scenery I might have missed along the way.

During the calmer periods I started noticing a surprising number of vehicles with Michigan license plates.  Eventually I had some time to realize that once I got to Toledo, I'd be at the west end of Lake Erie, and just north of that is where Michigan starts.  I also had the time to realize I hadn't seen one license plate from Ontario since I'd hit Ohio.  I guess they just don't like this state.  Odd.

Towards the end of the drive, I also started being able to see how flat the land is - flat farmland - multiple farms, and realized I'm on the edge of the Plains states and this is my first look at the Midwest.  I know I'm really going to miss those West Virginia mountains in a few months.

At several of those places on highways where police sit with speed guns, I'd seen highway patrol cars, but at one I saw not only a highway patrol car but also a border patrol car pulled up next to him.  Seemed a little weird.

And so to the Bluegrass Campground.  I was too tired to ask if there's bluegrass around here.