Late in his life, William Dean Howells was known as “the Dean of American Letters,” a well-earned distinction for the author of twenty-five novels, playwright, literary critic, and long-time editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Although the official William Dean Howells House is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the man whom Mark Twain called “the Boss” spent his childhood in Hamilton. His father was a newspaperman and printer, and from 1840 to 1850 was the publisher of The Intelligencer. It was in his father’s business that Howells began his life of letters, learning to set type when he had to stand on a chair to reach the racks.
“His first attempt in literature,” Howell’s recalled from the third person in his 1890 book A Boy’s Town, “an essay on the vain and disappointing nature of human life, he set up and printed off himself in his sixth or seventh year; and the printing-office was in some sort his home, as well as his school, his university.”
Hamilton was still a frontier town when the Howells family arrived, and by the time they left, the Hydraulic had been built and Hamilton was on its way to becoming an industrial powerhouse, a “Lowell of the West,” referring to the Massachusetts town of cotton mills and canals. A Boy’s Town paints a quaint, nostalgic picture of this city in transition.
It was a four-hour stagecoach ride from Cincinnati to “a very simple little town of some three thousand people,” Howells wrote, “living for the most part in small one-story wooden houses, with here and there a brick house of two stories, and here and there a lingering log-cabin, when my boy’s father came to take charge of its Whig newspaper in 1840. It stretched eastward from the river to the Canal-Basin, with the market-house, the county buildings, and the stores and hotels on one street, and a few other stores and taverns scattering off on streets that branched from it to the southward; but all this was a vast metropolis to my boy’s fancy, where he might get lost—the sum of all disaster—if he ventured away from the neighborhood of the house where he first lived, on its southwestern border.”
Howells said that the courthouse was the social center of Hamilton, and recalled in vivid detail the clock in its tower and the wooden statue of justice above it, “a sword in one hand and a pair of scales in the other. Her eyes were blinded; and the boys believed that she would be as high as a house if she stood on the ground.” The courthouse served as lecture hall and art gallery. He remembered when a visiting professor gave a lecture and demonstration inside the courthouse where he “showed the effects of laughing-gas on such men and boys as were willing to breathe it” and when an exhibition of “a large picture of Death on a Pale Horse shown, to be harrowed to the bottom of his soul by its ghastliness.” The courthouse square was the scene of political speeches and election celebrations.
His grandfather ran a drug and bookstore downtown, and described “another drug store… eight or ten dry-goods stores… but the store that they knew best was a toy-store near the market-house, kept by a quaint old German, where they bought their marbles and tops and Jew’s-harps. The store had a high, sharp gable to the street, and showed its timbers through the roughcast of its wall, which was sprinkled with broken glass that glistened in the sun… There were two bakeries, and at the American bakery there were small sponge-cakes… at the Dutch bakery there were pretzels, with salt and ashes sticking on them, that the Dutch boys liked; but the American boys made fun of them.”
Howells remembered “a dozen places where a man could get whiskey,” and no shortage of drunkards. The German immigrants had their own tavern, but they generally went to a brewery to drink. His mother would send him to the brewery with a glass bottle to get yeast for making bread. “The brewery overlooked the river, and you could see the south side of the bridge from its back windows, and that was very strange… like a bridge in some far-off country.”
Before the hydraulic the boy was fascinated with the slaughterhouses in town, but after the hydraulic, the cotton mills held their special fascination. “They were all wild to work in the mills at first, and they thought it a hardship that their fathers would not let them leave school and do it. Some few of the fellows that my boy knew did get to work in the mills; and one of them got part of his finger taken off in the machinery; it was thought a distinction among the boys, and something like having been in war.”
It was in Howells’s Hamilton that the city built its first town hall. “It was in this hall that he first saw a play, and then saw so many plays, for he went to the theatre every night; but for a long time it seemed to be devoted to the purposes of mesmerism. A professor highly skilled in that science, which has reappeared in these days under the name of hypnotism, made a sojourn of some weeks in the town, and besides teaching it to classes of learners who wished to practise it, gave nightly displays of its wonders.”
When Howells wrote of “the outskirts of town,” he wasn’t venturing any further than present Fifth Street, but there he remembered a “pleasure-garden… There were two large old mulberry-trees in this garden, and one bore white mulberries and the other black mulberries, and when you had paid your fip to come in, you could eat all the mulberries you wanted, for nothing… [T]here was a labyrinth, or puzzle, as the boys called it, of paths that wound in and out among bushes, so that when you got inside you were lucky if you could find your way out.”
At the time, Hamilton had a town crier who carried “a good-sized bell” and would announce auctions and sales in addition to local news every few blocks, and serve as entertainment as well as public service. One of the criers was deputy constable who “decorated his proclamation with quips and quirks of his own invention… every boy rejoiced in his impudence.”
The Howells family left Hamilton in 1850 for Dayton, then Xenia. At 21, Howells went to work for a Columbus newspaper and began contributing poetry to the Atlantic Monthly. He got a job writing campaign literature for Abraham Lincoln and earned enough money to move to New England, where he rubbed elbows with literary greats Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. A Boy’s Life (which is freely available on=line in numerous formats) was written when Howells was in his fifties, and although the third person style and sentimental gleanings may seem a bit cloying to modern ears, it paints an impressionistic word picture of Hamilton in its earliest days.