Last night I was thumbing through a book entitled Mahoning Memories. It is a history of the Mahoning Valley starting back with the Native American population and moving forward. It talks about the Connecticut Western Reserve and the land purchase by our forefathers with names that us locals can identify: Young, Shehy, Hillman, Wadsworth, Boardman, Canfield…you get the picture.
I was amazed by how fast this area “settled up.” With the original land purchases being made in the late 1790’s and Youngstown established on what is known as Spring Common in 1802, these folks endured many hardships, building rudimentary log cabins for communal living and communal agriculture. It was a hard existence. So hard, in fact, John Young’s wife only lasted a year or two and left along with Youngstown’s founder back to a more civilized existence. That being said, paintings show that by the 1820’s, a scant 18 years later, Youngstown had grown into quite a community with normalized and substantial structures and attractive housing for the well-to do.
What really caught my attention however, were the industrialists that populated the area almost from the beginning. The first blast furnace in the area was established in 1803, one year after Youngstown’s founding, by James and Daniel Heaton. By the mid 1840’s, mills had popped up all along the Mahoning River, which in turn morphed into Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Republic Steel, and numerous other factories that provided steel for the growth of our nation and supplies for America’s armed conflicts from the Civil War (Ohio’s Civil War Governor was Youngstown native David Tod) to Vietnam. Then everything collapsed in 1977, and it has been a long and slow road to recovery. Journalists are currently visiting the area to see how the first de-industrialized region in the country has fared now that the rest of the nation is where we were 3 decades ago.
When I put the book down, I began to think of today’s economic crisis. Could those visionary industrialists do today what they did back them? Probably not! We have so regulated ourselves, and put so many roadblocks in the way of doing anything, the result is nothing gets done. From taxes to zoning to permits to environmental regulations to the carbon emission garbage to hoot howls and supposedly endangered rodents, it is practically impossible to do anything of any magnitude and scope. How do we expect this nation to survive?
The most blatant example is the proposed coal liquefaction plant to be built in Wellsville. The developers announced that they scrapped government funding because it would take years for basic compliance requirements. They say they have private funding. Don’t bet the rent.
President Obama is proposing an upgrade and expansion of our electric grid, something that needs to be done badly as evidenced by the several blackouts the country has experienced these past few years. The environmentalists in conjunction with various cities are already threatening legal action to stop it, and it has yet to be voted on in Congress. A private entity doing this without strong participation by the government and its attendant rules wouldn’t stand a chance.
High speed trains between our major cities and in specific corridors like Cleveland to Cincinnati or Chicago to New York is an idea whose time has come. It is the most fuel efficient way to move large numbers of people, and would relieve airport congestion and jammed packed highways. Can you imagine the red tape in trying to get a project like that off the ground? Legal machinations would delay it by 20 years, yet it would provide thousands upon thousands of jobs and give this nation a boost. No private entity could even begin to do such a project in this day and age.
If Mr. Wick and Mr. Campbell and Mr. Todd were to try to build an industrial base in Youngstown today, I suspect that they would not succeed. And that,folks, is the problem with America today. The wealth of nation is determined by how many refrigerators it builds, not by how many hamburgers it flips. That is a lesson that should be learned by the United States government from President Obama on down the every school district Board of Education member. Until we do, we will remain a nation focused on “service” rather than “production.”
I was amazed by how fast this area “settled up.” With the original land purchases being made in the late 1790’s and Youngstown established on what is known as Spring Common in 1802, these folks endured many hardships, building rudimentary log cabins for communal living and communal agriculture. It was a hard existence. So hard, in fact, John Young’s wife only lasted a year or two and left along with Youngstown’s founder back to a more civilized existence. That being said, paintings show that by the 1820’s, a scant 18 years later, Youngstown had grown into quite a community with normalized and substantial structures and attractive housing for the well-to do.
What really caught my attention however, were the industrialists that populated the area almost from the beginning. The first blast furnace in the area was established in 1803, one year after Youngstown’s founding, by James and Daniel Heaton. By the mid 1840’s, mills had popped up all along the Mahoning River, which in turn morphed into Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Republic Steel, and numerous other factories that provided steel for the growth of our nation and supplies for America’s armed conflicts from the Civil War (Ohio’s Civil War Governor was Youngstown native David Tod) to Vietnam. Then everything collapsed in 1977, and it has been a long and slow road to recovery. Journalists are currently visiting the area to see how the first de-industrialized region in the country has fared now that the rest of the nation is where we were 3 decades ago.
When I put the book down, I began to think of today’s economic crisis. Could those visionary industrialists do today what they did back them? Probably not! We have so regulated ourselves, and put so many roadblocks in the way of doing anything, the result is nothing gets done. From taxes to zoning to permits to environmental regulations to the carbon emission garbage to hoot howls and supposedly endangered rodents, it is practically impossible to do anything of any magnitude and scope. How do we expect this nation to survive?
The most blatant example is the proposed coal liquefaction plant to be built in Wellsville. The developers announced that they scrapped government funding because it would take years for basic compliance requirements. They say they have private funding. Don’t bet the rent.
President Obama is proposing an upgrade and expansion of our electric grid, something that needs to be done badly as evidenced by the several blackouts the country has experienced these past few years. The environmentalists in conjunction with various cities are already threatening legal action to stop it, and it has yet to be voted on in Congress. A private entity doing this without strong participation by the government and its attendant rules wouldn’t stand a chance.
High speed trains between our major cities and in specific corridors like Cleveland to Cincinnati or Chicago to New York is an idea whose time has come. It is the most fuel efficient way to move large numbers of people, and would relieve airport congestion and jammed packed highways. Can you imagine the red tape in trying to get a project like that off the ground? Legal machinations would delay it by 20 years, yet it would provide thousands upon thousands of jobs and give this nation a boost. No private entity could even begin to do such a project in this day and age.
If Mr. Wick and Mr. Campbell and Mr. Todd were to try to build an industrial base in Youngstown today, I suspect that they would not succeed. And that,folks, is the problem with America today. The wealth of nation is determined by how many refrigerators it builds, not by how many hamburgers it flips. That is a lesson that should be learned by the United States government from President Obama on down the every school district Board of Education member. Until we do, we will remain a nation focused on “service” rather than “production.”
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