by Hutchison, Thomas
Quarto, 4 pages, plus stamp less address leaf, in very good, clean and legible condition.
1850 Pennsylvania farmer, unhappy in Ohio, considers move to Maryland where slavery was too "feeble" to have "influence".
Hutchison was a farmer from Pennsylvania who had moved to Ohio. He could not encourage his friend Hall, a lumberman, to make the same move because there was not enough good timber in demand, and what there was, had to be hauled thirty miles in wagons as the railroad had not yet arrived. But also, he and his family had undergone great hardship in the Midwest. One of his children had just died and he and his wife and several of his sons had suffered from dysentery, malaria, pleurisy, rheumatism and "nervous disability". He was "very tired of long winters and short summers", the climate in general being "very hard on Eastern constitutions and must ultimately impair them…" He would prefer to live somewhere farther south, and was giving serious consideration to moving again, this time to Baltimore, Maryland. "I have always regretted I did not get to see that region before coming out here…It is convenient to the best market in the US either for produce or for timber" The land there was "naturally good" and "well watered" and "withal no worse a state of society than here, and Slavery so feeble as to have but little influence." He may have added this knowing of the anti-slavery sentiments of his friend, who was a Quaker.
Hutchison, in fact, never left Ohio. He continued to live in Bucyrus, making do with his farming, until his death a year after the Civil War - in which two of his sons died in military service. (Inventory #: 31260)
1850 Pennsylvania farmer, unhappy in Ohio, considers move to Maryland where slavery was too "feeble" to have "influence".
Hutchison was a farmer from Pennsylvania who had moved to Ohio. He could not encourage his friend Hall, a lumberman, to make the same move because there was not enough good timber in demand, and what there was, had to be hauled thirty miles in wagons as the railroad had not yet arrived. But also, he and his family had undergone great hardship in the Midwest. One of his children had just died and he and his wife and several of his sons had suffered from dysentery, malaria, pleurisy, rheumatism and "nervous disability". He was "very tired of long winters and short summers", the climate in general being "very hard on Eastern constitutions and must ultimately impair them…" He would prefer to live somewhere farther south, and was giving serious consideration to moving again, this time to Baltimore, Maryland. "I have always regretted I did not get to see that region before coming out here…It is convenient to the best market in the US either for produce or for timber" The land there was "naturally good" and "well watered" and "withal no worse a state of society than here, and Slavery so feeble as to have but little influence." He may have added this knowing of the anti-slavery sentiments of his friend, who was a Quaker.
Hutchison, in fact, never left Ohio. He continued to live in Bucyrus, making do with his farming, until his death a year after the Civil War - in which two of his sons died in military service. (Inventory #: 31260)
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