Part 38

Purchasing a rugged farm on the ridge road five miles out of Cleveland, he entered with zeal into the business of scientific farming. Here he demonstrated that a stiff clay soil derived from the underlying Devonian Shales may be made highly productive in fruit. His success stimulated others along the ridge road, until the old pastures and meadows on that side of the city have been changed into the most profitable orchards and gardens in the vicinity. This required twenty years more of time and industry, during much of which he came daily to the college and delivered one or more lectures. In the lecture his style is entirely conversational, but rapid, fluent, and always intelligible. Here all the varieties of his studies come into play, as it were, spontaneously. He is equally at home among the birds, the insects and the reptiles, the fishes or the mammalia. Their habits are as familiar as those of his children and grandchildren. He writes but seldom, and thus the teachings of so many years on so many subjects are confided principally to the memory of the many hundreds of students to whom they have been delivered.

For several years Dr. Kirtland has declined to lecture on any subject. He is verging upon four score, a period which with most men, is necessarily one of rest if not of weariness, but he has never known what it is to rest. No farmer in Rockport is up earlier or attends more closely to his grounds. All the valuable varieties of peaches, pears, cherries and grapes, have been tested by their actual product, or are in the process of being tested. He is enthusiastically fond of the culture of bees and of every variety of flowers which will thrive in this climate. A number of new varieties of cherries have been originated on the Kirtland farm, and after trial those which are valuable have been scattered over the country. There are very few men who are enabled to make so many applications of science to practical subjects, and still fewer who are permitted to live long enough to witness the fruits of their labors.

Theodatus Garlick.

We are almost at a loss in what class to place Dr. Garlick. By natural taste and genius he belongs to the artists. His devotion to the healing art arose principally from the necessities of our race for something to eat and wear. He had the fortune, probably good fortune, to be born in Vermont, at Middlebury, March 30th, 1805, in view of the Green Mountains, among rocks and mountains. This region is principally famous for marble, slate, iron ore, and hardy young men, generally known as Green Mountain boys.

An older brother, Abel B. Garlick, having been apprenticed to a marble cutter, came out West, sometime after the war of 1812, and located at Cleveland. In 1816, Theodatus, at the age of eleven years, had drifted as far as Erie, Pennsylvania; in 1819, to Cleveland. The Winter of 1819-20, he spent at Black River, which was then the leading ship yard of the lakes.

Abel B. had artist's ability also. In this region no marble was to be found, but a tolerable substitute existed in the fine grained blue sandstone at Newburg. A mill was erected at the quarry on Mill creek, below the falls, where these stones were sawed, as they are now, into handsome slabs.

Like other New Englanders, the Vermont boys are early impressed with the idea of self-support. Although Theodatus much preferred fun and frolic to hard labor, he entered cheerfully upon the business of a stone cutter at the age of sixteen. Their marble yard (without marble) was on Bank street, where Morgan & Root's block now stands. Abel marked the outlines of the letters upon incipient grave stones in pencil, and Theodatus carved them with his chisel. Most of the renowned sculptors of Ohio, such as Powell, Clevenger and Jones, took their first lessons in the same way. All of them have left samples of their untutored skill in various angels and cherubs, now mouldering in old churchyards. The blue sandstone monuments, on which Dr. Garlick cut inscriptions fifty years since, are still to be seen in the early cemeteries of the Western Reserve; some are touching enough, but not a few are more ridiculous than mournful. When Nathan Perry became so prosperous that he proposed to remove the old wooden store on the corner of Water and Superior streets and replace it with a brick one, he concluded to expend something upon ornament. He ordered two oval stone signs to be made and to be built into the walls over the two doors, one on each street. These were among the earliest efforts of Dr. Garlick. Both of these stones were in existence until the ground was cleared for the present Bank building, when they were broken up and put into the cellar wall. In those days it was one of the duties of an apprentice to sharpen the tools at a blacksmith's forge. The young man concluded to carve flying cherubims with their stone trumpets to ring in the ears of coming generations no longer.

Having a robust physical constitution, he became passionately fond of hunting and fishing. In 1822, he lived with a brother in Newbury, Geauga county, which was then a forest full of game. In a letter referring to the sporting days of his youth, he wrote as follows:

My brother and myself started out very early one morning for a deer that we knew had been feeding around the cabin that night; within a quarter of a mile from the cabin my brother shot him, and as he fired, up jumped eleven elk; one of our neighbors shot five of them within an acre of ground; they were near together, at bay, fighting with the dogs. I helped to get them in; they were a part of a larger herd, we counted their beds in the snow where they had lain at night, and there were over one hundred in the drove.

Ten or fifteen years previous to that time, one of those tornadoes, which occasionally visit this region, had prostrated the timber along a tract a mile wide and several miles in length, through the township of Newbury. A thicket of bushes had sprung up among the fallen trees, which furnished excellent browsing ground and shelter for game, of which there was an abundance of bear, wolves, elk, deer, turkeys, &c., constituting quite a paradise for a young Nimrod.

He finally determined to become a physician, and after some years of the usual experience of medical students, practicing some, and assisting at operations, he entered the medical department of the University of Maryland, in the city of Baltimore, where he graduated in 1834.

No sooner was his diploma secured than the artist again broke forth. He suddenly produced bas-reliefs in wax of five favorite professors without sittings, which were pronounced perfect likenesses. General Jackson and Henry Clay gave him a short sitting, and the next day their statuetts were on exhibition. Mr. Clay expressed his satisfaction for his own in an autograph letter. Another miniature in relief, full length, of Chief Justice Marshall, from a portrait by Waugh, was pronounced by Mr. Bullock, an English virtuoso, as equal to anything produced by Thorwaldsen. But being surrounded by medical men, who, like men of all professions, regard their own as more important than any other, Dr. Garlick was induced to turn his artistic skill upon anatomical models.

He located at Youngstown, Ohio, the same year that he graduated, at which place, and at the Medical College of Cleveland, he devoted nearly two years in getting up models of all parts of the human body, taken from subjects in the dissecting room. They may yet be seen in the Medical Colleges at Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto, Charleston, South Carolina, Cincinnati, and other places. These were such close imitations of nature that the late Professer Mussey, of Cincinnati, pronounced them superior to the French models at Paris by Auzoux. At Youngstown he made a life size bust of Judge George Tod, copies of which are now in the family. In 1853, after a successful practice at Youngstown, he came to Cleveland, and formed a partnership in surgery with the late Professer H. A. Ackley, and for a number of years was a member of the Board of Medical Censors of the Cleveland Medical College, and vice president of the Cleveland Academy of Natural Science. As he was a naturalist, he applied the principles of the anatomical models to animals and parts of animals, especially fishes. He entered with great zeal upon the artificial propagation of brook trout and other fish in connection with Dr. Ackley. In 1857, he published a small book, which is the standard work of the United States on this subject.

He was a skillful physician and surgeon, a diligent student of natural history, a keen sportsman, and a great lover of the fine arts. A good physical constitution is at least one-half of the capital of any man, however gifted in mind. In this respect he was like Christopher North, with few equals. In the rude contests of strength among the young men of a new country, the races, wrestling matches, and occasional fights, he never felt like backing down; but of late years this powerful frame has been partially stricken with paralysis.

The doctor still resides in this city, devoted to natural science, especially botany, but the days of his personal activity are past.

J. L. Cassels.

John Lang Cassels, M.D., LL.D., was born in Stirlingshire, Scotland, and in 1827, while quite a young man, came to this country. Soon after, he studied medicine with Prof. John Delamater, in Fairfield, New York, and graduated in 1834, in the College of Physicians and Surgeons located at Fairfield, N. Y. He was Demonstrator of Anatomy in that school three years, two years during his pupilage and one after his graduation. He opened an office for the practice of medicine in Earlville, New York, in the spring of 1835, and in the fall of the same year received and accepted the appointment of Professor of Chemistry in Willoughby University, Ohio, which connection he retained until the fall of 1843, when he and his associates opened and established the Cleveland Medical College, in which he still occupies the chair of Chemistry.

In 1837, he received the appointment of First Assistant Geologist of the New York State Geological Survey, which he occupied for several seasons, performing field labor in the summer and lecturing on chemistry in Willoughby Medical College during the winter. His connection with the New York survey gave him an excellent opportunity to become an expert practical geologist; his location being on the Hudson river district, offered him a fine field of action, as it is really the key to the geology and mineralogy of the State.

In the winter of 1839, he gave a course of demonstrated lectures on chemistry before the Young Men's Library Association in Cleveland, the first public lectures on science ever given in the city. The following winter the citizens of Cleveland invited him to lecture again on the same subject, and he complied. The city at that time contained mostly young people--only two gray-headed men attended the Stone Church.

In 1815, he spent most of the season in visiting and collecting specimens of mineral in the lead region of Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Missouri, thus becoming familiar with the geology of their rich mineral region.

In 1846, he spent the whole season in exploring the Lake Superior country, coasting the south shore in a bark canoe, having for his traveling companions two Indians and a half-breed voyager. At this date there were no steamers on Lake Superior, and but a very few small sailing craft. It was during this time that he took squatter possession of a mile square of the iron region of that country, for the benefit of the Cleveland Iron Company. He was the first white man that had visited this region, now so famous for its ferruginous wealth. Near the close of the season he spent a short time geologizing Isle Royale, and returned to Saut St. Marie on the steamer Julia Palmer, which had, during the summer, been hauled over the passage of Saut St. Marie. During the winter following, at the request of a number of Clevelanders, he gave a public lecture on the Lake Superior region; at the close of which he said he would venture a prophecy: "Such was the character of the climate, scenery, etc., of Lake Superior that the time was not far distant when it would become as great a resort for invalids and pleasure-seekers as Saratoga and Newport now are." Also, that there is iron enough in the iron district sufficient to furnish a double track of the much talked of Whitney's railroad. These statements were then received with a stormy manifestation of incredulity.

In 1859, the Jefferson College of Mississippi conferred the Degree of LL.D. on Dr. Cassels.

In 1861, he was elected a corresponding member of the Imperial Geological Institution of Berlin, Prussia.

For the last ten years, in addition to the duties of his chair in the Cleveland Medical College, he has regularly filled the chair of chemistry and natural history in the Western Reserve College at Hudson. During the past twenty years he has given several courses of popular experimental lectures in his favorite branches of chemistry and geology in a number of our neighboring towns, Akron, Canton, &c. He is also the regular lecturer in these branches in the Female Seminary in Painesville.

Perhaps few men have been as extensively engaged in texicological examinations during the past twenty years as Dr. Cassels. Many of these have been of great interest, both in a social and moral point of view. In all such cases he is regarded with great confidence, both on account of his scientific skill and his high sense of moral integrity.

As an analytical chemist he has few superiors, and is much of his spare time engaged in the analysis of waters, ores, coal, limestone, &c. In 1866, he analyzed the water of Cleveland which is brought from Lake Erie and distributed through the city. He analyzed this water taken from different parts of the city and from the point where it entered the pipes to be forced into the reservoir; also from a point in the lake three thousand four hundred and fifty feet from the shore, where he advised that the inlet pipe ought to be located. All these analyses are embraced in his report to the Trustees of the city water works; in which also are many valuable suggestions respecting supply pipes and the character of the water for steam purposes.

J. S. Newberry.

J. S. Newberry, M.D., LL.D., was born at Windsor, Connecticut, of old Puritan stock, his ancestry having formed part of the colony which in 1635, emigrated from Dorchester, colony of Massachusetts Bay, and founded the town of Windsor, the first settlement made in Connecticut.

The family continued to reside at Windsor for two hundred years, during which time it held an honorable place in that community and contributed several representatives, who took an important part in the affairs of the State government, or in the defense of the colony against the Indians, and in the French and Indian and Revolutionary wars. Dr. Newberry's grandfather, Hon. Roger Newberry, a distinguished lawyer, and for many years a member of the Governor's council, was one of the directors of the Connecticut Land Company, which purchased a large part of the Connecticut Western Reserve. The town of Newberry received its name from him. His son, Henry Newberry, inherited his interest in the land of the company, by which he became possessed of large tracts in Summit, Ashtabula, Medina, Lorain and Cuyahoga counties, including one hundred acres now within the city of Cleveland. Looking after these interests he made three journeys on horseback (the first in 1814,) from Connecticut to Ohio, and, in 1824, removed his family to Summit county, where he founded the town of Cuyahoga Falls, remaining there till his death, in 1854.

Dr. Newberry graduated at Western Reserve College, in 1846, and from the Cleveland Medical College in 1848. The years 1849 and 1850, he spent in study and travel abroad. Returning at the close of the latter year he established himself, early in 1851, in the practice of medicine in Cleveland. Here he remained till 1855, when his professional business became so engrossing as to leave him no time for the scientific study to which he had been devoted from his boyhood. To escape from too great professional occupation, and impelled by an unconquerable passion for a scientific career, in May, 1855, he accepted an appointment from the War Department, and became connected with the army as acting assistant surgeon and geologist to the party which, under Lieutenant R. S. Williamson, U.S.A., made an exploration of the country lying between San Francisco and the Columbia river. The results of this expedition are embodied in Vol. 6 P. R. R. Reports. The reports of Dr. Newberry on the "Geology, Botany and Zoology of North California and Oregon," are republished in a volume of 300 pp., 4to., with 48 plates. In 1857-8, he accompanied Lieutenant J. O. Ives, U.S.A., in the exploration and navigation of the Colorado river, one of the most interesting explorations made by any party in any country. The object of the expedition was to open a navigable route of communication with our army in Utah. To this end an iron steamer was constructed in Philadelphia, taken in sections to the head of the Gulf of California, where it was put together and launched. With this steamer the river, before almost entirely unknown, was navigated for five hundred miles, opening a route of travel which has since been extensively used. Beyond the point reached by the steamer the course of the river is for several hundreds of miles through the "Great Cañon," as it is called, a chasm worn by the stream in the table lands of the "Colorado Plateau." This cañon has nearly vertical banks, and is nowhere less than three thousand feet deep; in some places six thousand feet, or more than a mile in depth.

The party with which Dr. Newberry was connected, spent nearly a year in exploring the country bordering the Colorado, adding much to our knowledge of our western possessions, and giving, in their report, an interesting and graphic description of, perhaps, the most remarkable portion of the earth's surface. Half of the report of the Colorado Expedition was prepared by Dr. Newberry, and so much importance was attached to his observations by his commanding officer, that in the preface he speaks of them as constituting "the most interesting material gathered by the expedition."

In 1859, having finished his portion of the Colorado Report, Dr. Newberry took charge of another party sent out by the War Department, to report to Captain J. N. Macomb, topographical engineer, U.S.A., for the exploration of the San Juan and upper Colorado rivers. The Summer of 1859 was spent in the accomplishment of the object had in view by this expedition, during which time the party traveled over a large part of Southern Colorado and Utah and Northern Arizona and New Mexico, filling up a wide blank space in our maps and opening a great area before unknown, much of which proved rich and beautiful, abounding in mineral wealth, and full of natural objects of great interest. Among the results of this expedition were the determination of the point of junction of Grand and Green rivers, which unite to form the Colorado, and the exploration of the valley of the San Juan, the largest tributary of the Colorado; a stream as large as the Connecticut, before almost unknown, but which, though now without an inhabitant upon its banks, is for several hundred miles lined with ruined towns or detached edifices built of stone, and once occupied by many thousands of a semi-civilized people. The report of this expedition made by Dr. Newberry, containing much new and interesting scientific matter, was finished just before the war, but yet remains unpublished.

Immediately after the commencement of the war, the United States Sanitary Commission was organized. Dr. Newberry was one of the first elected members, and it is, perhaps, not too much to say that no other one individual contributed more to the great success that attended the labors of that organization. In September, 1861, he accepted the position of Secretary of the Western Department of the Sanitary Commission, and from that time had the general supervision of the affairs of the Commission in the valley of the Mississippi; his head-quarters being first at Cleveland, and subsequently, as the frontier was carried southward, at Louisville, Kentucky.

Through his efforts branches of the Sanitary Commission were established in the principal cities of the West, and agencies for the performance of its work at all important military points, and with each considerable sub-division of the army. Before the close of the war the entire West was embraced in one great System of agencies for the production and distribution of supplies, and the care of sick and wounded on the battle-field, in hospital or in transitu. The magnitude of the work of the Sanitary Commission at the West may be inferred from the fact that there were at one time over five thousand societies tributary to it in the loyal States of the Northwest--that hospital stores of the value of over $5,000,000 were distributed by it in the valley of the Mississippi--that over 850,000 names were on the records of its Hospital Directory at Louisville, and 1,000,000 soldiers, for whom no other adequate provision was made, were fed and sheltered in its "homes."

Of this great work Dr. Newberry was the responsible head, and by the wisdom and energy displayed by himself very much of the harmony and efficiency which characterized this organization are to be ascribed.

As his labors in connection with the Sanitary Commission were drawing to a close, Dr. Newberry was appointed Professor of Geology in the School of Mines of Columbia College, New York city. He entered on the duties of the position in 1866. In 1869, he was appointed by Governor Hayes to the office of State Geologist, created by the Ohio General Assembly of that year.

The scientific acquirements of Professor Newberry have given him a world-wide fame. As a Geologist his reputation ranks among the foremost. He has been honored with the membership of the most of the learned societies of this country, and of many in Europe; was one of the original corporators of the National Academy of Sciences; was recently elected president of the American Association for the advancement of Science, and is now president of the New York Lyceum of Natural History.

D. H. Beckwith.

The first Homeopathist in Cleveland was W. K. Adams, who succeeded in converting Dr. Hoyt, with whom he formed a partnership. Very soon after, in 1845, Drs. Wheeler and Williams were added to the list. There were but six families in the city having firm faith in the principles of homeopathy, and these were silent followers of Dr. John Wheeler, not willing to be known as such, so strong was public opinion against them. Dr. Wheeler continued unshaken by the strong opposition he met with, and heeded neither sneers nor denunciations. His course was onward and his practice successful, every month adding to his list of converts, and the profits of each year doubling the preceding one. Dr. Wheeler was the first member of the profession to propose that a homeopathic medical college should be located in Cleveland, and he earnestly pressed his theory that Cleveland should be the centre of homeopathy in the West. His name was the first signature to procure a charter, and when the college was organized he was selected as the President, and held the office for the first eleven years of its existence, contributing materially to its success, and resigning only when increasing age rendered its duties too onerous, when added to a large practice.