They had a public library in 1796,
and preaching in the blockhouse from the beginning. It was ordered
that every one should keep the Sabbath by going to church, and all men
between eighteen and forty should do four days of military duty every
year, as well as "entertain emigrants, visit the sick, clothe the
naked, feed the hungry, attend funerals, cabin raisings, log rollings,
huskings; have their latchstrings always out." Perhaps the reader has
heard before this of having the latchstring out, but has not known just
what the phrase meant. The log cabin door in those days was fastened
with a wooden latch on the inside, which could be lifted on the outside
by a leathern string passed through a small hole in the door above it.
When the string was pulled in, the door was locked; but the free-hearted
man always left his latchstring out, so that every comer could enter and
share his fireside with him.

The good people of Marietta had soon occasion for all the kindness
enjoined by their laws in befriending a hapless colony of Frenchmen,
whom certain speculators known as the Scioto Company had lured from
their homes in the Old World, and then abandoned to their fate in the
heart of the Western wilderness, where they had been promised that they
were to find "a climate wholesome and delightful, frost even in winter
almost entirely unknown, a river called, by way of eminence, the
_beautiful_ and abounding in excellent fish of a vast size; noble
forests consisting of trees that spontaneously produce sugar, and a
plant that yields ready-made candles; venison in plenty, the pursuit of
which is uninterrupted by wolves, foxes, lions, or tigers; no taxes to
pay, no military services to be performed."

Some of the adventurers who came to Ohio on these flattering terms were
destitute people who agreed to work three years for the company and were
then, each to receive from it in reward for their labors fifty acres of
land, a house, and a cow. But others were people of means, who joyfully
sold their property in the French cities and came out to found new homes
in the Western woods, with money in their hands, but with no knowledge
of woodcraft, or farming, and able neither to hunt, chop, plow, sow, or
reap for themselves. They were often artisans, masters of trades
utterly useless in that wild country, for what were carvers and gilders,
cloak-makers, wigmakers and hairdressers to do on the banks of the Ohio
in 1790? Some ten or twelve peasa