John Edison was long-lived, like his father, and reached the ripe old age of 102, leaving
his son Samuel charged with the care of the family destinies, but with no great burden of
wealth. Little is known of the early manhood of this father of T. A. Edison until we find
him keeping a hotel at Vienna, marrying a school-teacher there (Miss Nancy Elliott, in
1828), and taking a lively share in the troublous politics of the time. He was six feet in
height, of great bodily vigor, and of such personal dominance of character that he became
a captain of the insurgent forces rallying under the banners of Papineau and Mackenzie.
The opening years of Queen Victoria's reign witnessed a belated effort in Canada to
emphasize the principle that there should not be taxation without representation; and this
descendant of those who had left the United States from disapproval of such a doctrine,
flung himself headlong into its support.
It has been said of Earl Durham, who pacified Canada at this time and established the
present system of government, that he made a country and marred a career. But the
immediate measures of repression enforced before a liberal policy was adopted were
sharp and severe, and Samuel Edison also found his own career marred on Canadian soil
as one result of the Durham administration. Exile to Bermuda with other insurgents was
not so attractive as the perils of a flight to the United States. A very hurried departure was
effected in secret from the scene of trouble, and there are romantic traditions of his
thrilling journey of one hundred and eighty-two miles toward safety, made almost
entirely without food or sleep, through a wild country infested with Indians of unfriendly
disposition. Thus was the Edison family repatriated by a picturesque political episode,
and the great inventor given a birthplace on American soil, just as was Benjamin Franklin
when his father came from England to Boston. Samuel Edison left behind him, however,
in Canada, several brothers, all of whom lived to the age of ninety or more, and from
whom there are descendants in the region.
After some desultory wanderings for a year or two along the shores of Lake Erie, among
the prosperous towns then springing up, the family, with its Canadian home forfeited, and
in quest of another resting-place, came to Milan, Ohio, in 1842. That pretty little village
offered at the moment many attractions as a possible Chicago. The railroad system of
Ohio was still in the future, but the Western Reserve had already become a vast wheat-
field, and huge quantities of grain from the central and northern counties sought shipment
to Eastern ports. The Huron River, emptying into Lake Erie, was navigable within a few
miles of the village, and provided an admirable outlet. Large granaries were established,
and proved so successful that local capital was tempted into the project of making a tow-
path canal from Lockwood Landing all the way to Milan itself. The quaint old Moravian
mission and quondam Indian settlement of one hundred inhabitants found itself of a
sudden one of the great grain ports of the world, and bidding fair to rival Russian Odessa.
A number of grain warehouses, or primitive elevators, were built along the bank of the
canal, and the produce of the region poured in immediately, arriving in wagons drawn by
four or six horses with loads of a hundred bushels. No fewer than six hundred wagons
came clattering in, and as many as twenty sail vessels were loaded with thirty-five
thousand bushels of grain, during a single day. The canal was capable of being navigated
by craft of from two hundred to two hundred and fifty tons burden, and the demand for
such vessels soon led to the development of a brisk ship-building industry, for which the
abundant forests of the region supplied the necessary lumber. An evidence of the activity
