The Cleveland Arts Prize
     

  Literature                                 

William D. Ellis
Novelist

Although William Ellis was born to be a writer, his readers might be forgiven if they assume he once received formal training in other disciplines. Seemingly part archaeologist, part anthropologist, part genealogist, and part psychologist, Ellis mined the centuries to unearth the raw material he would mold into his fiction and nonfiction books. With no instrument more elaborate than a typewriter, he managed to create popular regional histories and award-winning volumes of historical fiction that brought Ohio's past to life in a manner that was not just informative and entertaining, but as vivid as an epic film.

Born in Concord, Massachusetts, Ellis began writing at the age of 12, at the urging of an elementary-school teacher who early on discerned his talent. Over the course of the next seven decades his teacher's judgment would be validated again and again by readers and critics alike.

Ellis began delving into Ohio's history quite by accident, during a 1946 visit to his wife's family in suburban Lakewood. He showed a sample of his writing to a local advertising agency, which hired him immediately and assigned him to write the scripts for a radio program called “The Ohio Story.” The series of shows-vignettes recounting events and milestones in the state's development since settlers first arrived-would continue for the next 14 years.

Ellis's ongoing research for “The Ohio Story” revealed such an abundance of fascinating material that he eventually used much of it as the foundation for a trilogy of novels: Bounty Lands, Jonathan Blair: Bounty Lands Lawyer, and The Brooks Legend. Each of the books reflected the reality of life on the frontier, at a time when Ohio was considered “the West” and the hardships of daily existence far outweighed the pleasures. He portrayed the vicissitudes of pioneer existence with an unsparing attention to detail, reminding complacent mid-20th century Ohioans of the strength and courage of their forebears. Each of his novels appeared on best-seller lists, and the trilogy itself eventually earned its author a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

In 1952, Ellis founded Editorial, Inc., which specialized in commissioned histories of Ohio corporations and institutions. With other local writers he produced or oversaw the completion of dozens of volumes, including histories of, among others, Hawken School and the J.M Smucker Company. At the same time, Ellis worked on individual projects that looked back even further in time. His The Cuyahoga (1966), for example, is still considered the definitive account of the river and its historical importance to Cleveland and northeastern Ohio.

William Ellis served in the Army during World War II, commanding a rifle company in the South Pacific. Somehow, he continued to write even in the midst of battle. In fact, he was already working on a history of the 77th Infantry Division when his company was ordered to storm the beaches of Guam. He lost the manuscript during the invasion-a disaster that was eclipsed only when he was later wounded by machinegun fire in the Philippines and had to spend a full year in convalescence to recover his health.

Yet something good came out of that painful episode after all. Ellis did not write about his war experiences, but they certainly informed the novels he wrote about the tenacious pioneers of early Ohio. Indeed, in many ways the most important recurring theme in his books is the same one he encountered during the war: quite simply, the triumph of survival.

text by
Mark Gottlieb

Fall 2002

 

In view of its empire-building career the Cuyahoga is a surprisingly small stream.

Smallness, in fact, is the constant surprise about this river. Though it is nearly a hundred miles long, its unique course allows its whole watershed to drain less than seven hundred and fifty square miles. It travels in such an extreme U-shape that its fork-tongued double source is only thirty crow-flown miles east of its mouth. . . .

The East Branch rises near a dairy farm and flows through woods and into East Branch Reservoir, a shining jewel surrounded by young Christmas trees. The West Branch grows from a score of rivulets coming out of the hollows between the great hilltop houses in the Chardon Woods.

Both these south-flowing sources are north of the Cuyahoga mouth at Cleveland. Their confluence is ten miles south of the sources, near Brady's Pond. The river flows thence through beautiful farmland widening from the strength of a thousand brooks.

After wandering by the peaceful college towns of Hiram and Kent in a pastoral valley, the Cuyahoga flows into Munroe Falls, where suddenly it strips off its green shore and puts on rust. From here on it is strictly a downtown river. It picks up warehouses and railroad tracks, and then just short of Akron, it runs smack up against the great escarpment which turns it north. Off that hogback, at Akron, the Little Cuyahoga (not to be confused with the Cuyahoga) also runs north to plunge down a stairway of falls to Lake Erie.

After its sudden sharp turn, the Cuyahoga sometimes becomes so narrow that it runs through a lane of trees whose leafy branches meet over it, whispering history. For the Cuyahoga was the key to settlement of all the towns from the bend to its mouth. And the downstream towns of Peninsula and Boston and Brecksville and Independence still cherish their history, and preserve it in restorations like the Jonathan Hale House in the area that includes Everett, Bath, and Peninsula. . . . Here and there manicured lawns slant down to the river's edge.

It is this stretch of the Cuyahoga which, with the Portage Path and the Tuscarawas River, formed the earliest known inland road on the continent. It appeared on European maps over four hundred years ago, even before the cartographers could draw the Great Lakes or the Gulf or the eastern seaboard correctly. Being the only well-established interior route from the Gulf to the Great Lakes, it suggested military planning to Europeans.

-The Cuyahoga (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966)


Even his seniors called him Mister Mather, and men tended to step apart to let him through. Closing in after him, they'd recall the mine accident that pinned young Sam Mather under timbers and iron dust, smashing ribs and an arm which he carried bent through the rest of his life. The dignity and lonely ethics of this slight, wiry vessel operator didn't quite conceal his awesome dreams of empire.

He made the Cuyahoga boss over a 2,000-mile steelmaking network, stretching over the water and rail arteries all the way from West Virginia coal country up through the Great Lakes shipping lanes to the iron ranges of the Marquette, Menominee, Gogebic, and Mesabi in Minnesota. This network involved scores of furnaces, coal mines, iron mines, limestone quarries; and connecting them all, the world's most unusual merchant navy.

Sam Mather built it.

John D. Rockefeller didn't set out to get into the iron business big. But Mather's firm, Pickands-Mather, was deep in the iron business, mining it, smelting it, hauling it.

When the financial panic of 1873 struck like a Lake Superior blow, iron companies were hurt badly. Rockefeller was persuaded to come to the aid of the Merritt Brothers, the seven wild iron men of Minnesota who owned and opened the great Mesabi Iron Range. From that instant, he had to throw so much good money after bad that he felt he had to get into the Mesabi and manage it. To manage it, he had to own it.

While the iron world laughed, Rockefeller acquired, piece by piece, control of the little-regarded Mesabi, where the ore was said to be too lean, too powdery, and too distant for lower Lakes mills.

Then a strange message crept over the steel world like the shadow of a cloud. It dawned slowly that he had control of the richest ore property known in the world.

The steel world was afraid Rockefeller would build a steel mill. They locked arms against him under the leadership of the then steel king of America, Andrew Carnegie.

But if they meant to fight, Rockefeller had an advantage-the ore. "I was astonished," he said, "that the steelmakers had not seen the necessity of controlling their ore supply." They had left that in his hands, unwittingly at first, unwillingly later.

-The Cuyahoga