Findlay grew from five thousand to fifteen thousand inhabitants in a year. The municipality wisely possessed itself of the most important wells, and supplied the gas so cheaply and abundantly to the people that no company could rival it. In June, 1887, it celebrated the anniversary of the first use of the natural gas in the industrial arts, and for three days the town was given over to rejoicing in its glory and prosperity. The streets were arched with flame, the great wells flaunted their banners night and day, and the gas flared from innumerable pipes and jets through sun and rain in every part of the town.
No such festival has commemorated the introduction of the grape culture in Ohio, though this is one of the most poetic facts of our history. When the changes of climate along the Ohio River rendered it unprofitable in the region of Cincinnati, where the imaginative genius of Longworth had first invented the Catawba wine which the poetic genius of Longfellow celebrated in graceful song, the vine found home and welcome along the shores of Lake Erie. There thousands upon thousands of acres now spread interminable vineyards, and the grapes of every American variety purple in autumn to an almost unfailing harvest.
It was at first only a dream when Longworth transplanted the wild vine from the woods, and it might well have been scoffed at as akin to dreams of the past which never were realized. One of these was the silk culture, which people believed was to be one of our greatest sources of wealth sixty or seventy years ago, when they planted millions of mulberry trees to nourish the silkworms which died rather than become citizens of Ohio. Another was the culture of the Chinese sorghum cane, which for many years tantalized our farmers with the hopes of native sugar never fulfilled.
Still other kinds of dreams there have been native to our air or naturalized to it. The Leatherwood God was by no means the only religious impostor who has flourished among us. In 1831 Joseph Smith, the first of the Mormon prophets and the founder of Mormon-ism, came to Portage County, with one of his disciples, and began to preach. They made so many converts that some shortsighted people of Hiram thought to stop their work by tarring and feathering them. This only drove them from the place; but the next year, they settled in Kirtland, Lake County, where, in 1834, their followers built the first Mormon temple, for the worship of God according to the Book of Mormon. It was this sacred book, written on gold plates, which Smith, a native of Vermont, pretended to find, in a hill near Palmyra, New York, where he was leading an idle and useless life. His converts at Kirtland increased to three thousand, but they founded a bank as well as a temple, and so got into debt and trouble. Smith left the state to escape the sheriff, and went to Missouri, where the great mass of the believers joined him, seven hundred leaving Kirtland in one day. Before long the Missourians foolishly began to persecute them, and then the Mormons settled at Nauvoo, in Illinois, where they built their second temple, far more magnificent than the first at Kirtland. But here again their unwise neighbors began to molest them, and Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram were thrown into jail. A mob attacked the jail, and the Smiths were murdered. The Mormons then abandoned Nauvoo, and took their way through the desert to Salt Lake, in Utah, where they laid the foundations of a great commonwealth. They still own their first temple at Kirtland, however, and it is said to be the hope of one sect among them yet to return and dwell there.