South Bend to Youngstown

We're on both I-80 and I-90...a thrill as we drive into Ohio! We'll stop and talk for awhile in Toledo, Glass City, before heading east and (sadly) bypassing Cleveland. There is time, though, for a few rollercoasters at Cedar Point!

Transcript

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Hello everybody and welcome to our penultimate episode. Our last, I guess there's two, two more episodes. So we're almost to the end. We're almost to the East coast, to the Atlantic Ocean, to New York, the city we have been driving towards for this entire podcast. Yeah. And we're picking up in South Bend, Indiana, which I guess if you're a big fan of Notre Dame, the fighting Irish, then you've enjoyed, uh, south Bend. But I'm anxious to get going because Indiana is great and all, but my favorite state comes next and it's Ohio. So yes. Make all of your jokes, make all of your comments. Go right ahead. Nothing can dissuade me from, uh, loving Ohio. Uh, like I've mentioned, I did my master's program there and I think it is just one of the most fascinating places. So as we get into our metaphorical car and we're going to zip on,'cause we're gonna end up staying in Youngstown, which yikes, but nevertheless. So South Bend, at this point we have, we're still driving on interstates 80 and 90. It's really fascinating when interstates are run concurrent. One of my favorites is in Lansing, Michigan. You can, they're, I'm trying to remember where, but there are concurrent interstates that go opposite directions. Which sounds kind of funky, but they're signed on the same road, but because of the route, you'll see like Interstate X west, interstate Y east, and it's just by virtue of the concurrency in the route anyway, this concurrency lasts for all of Indiana and then even most of Ohio. But first, first things first. We get to cross into the Great Black Swamp. The Great Black Swamp is not really there anymore. There are a few places, a few state parks in Ohio that. Kind of maintained the landscape as it was, and I, it's not really a swamp as we think of a swamp, kind of the Louisiana Bayou, the Florida Mangrove kind of a vibe. This just was a place that had a lot of water and the ground was extremely saturated, yet it looked like any other broadly forest in the Midwest. Obviously the glaciers have been gone for thousands of years, but the land is still depressed enough that even as it rebounds, it still collects water and this is why obviously there's lots of lakes in certain areas, why Wisconsin has its famous landscape and Michigan as well, and why the great Black Swamp is here. Because this part of North America was low enough that until. Water kind of retreated. This also used to be part of Lake Erie. It's part of the mommy watershed today, which is the Cuyahoga River's less famous cousin, less famous, but still just as toxic as the Cuyahoga, just with all the famous fires. And the great block swamp existed until the late 19th century when it was fully drained and settled. So it used to be a really hard place to cross. Which you would never know as we blow through on the interstate. However, this land, while it was all swampy and gross and full of mosquitoes, it became extremely productive. And this is why the Mommy river is extremely toxic, and you can end up with some major blooms or algal blooms on Lake Erie. I mean, coupled with toledo's factories, but it's agricultural runoff that causes that because this part is extremely fertile and that's why you see all the farms. But before all that, it was an extremely difficult place to pass because this isn't just like feet of water that you would be able to get through. It's a lot of mud and very shallow water. So it's, it makes for sticky shoes. It's just very impassable, but not. Impossible. Okay. Well, two very similar words. What the 19th century people were doing as they were heading west and creating roads through the area, they would build what are called corduroy roads, which this is interesting. I hadn't heard about this until the Great Black Swamp. These are roads made of logs that are placed next to each other so that you can walk over mud. I didn't know they had a name for it. You see it all the time in kind of those old timey westerns or historical fiction where they obviously walk across mud and it's a corduroy road. Interesting. And as I mentioned before, mosquitoes were bad, so malaria was endemic. It was a terrible, like you walk through here, you're basically high, just high chances for getting malaria and then having lifelong problems and or death. So, as I mentioned, uh, bowling Green Ohio and Toledo, Ohio have both been trying to restore wetlands and the swamps because of the crucial nature they play in the ecosystem and also just to preserve it. It's a very forgotten landscape, but one that used to play heavily in settler's minds. Anyway, now we're getting to one of my all time favorite cities in Ohio. I know, which is Toledo. Make more jokes please. But one thing that I love Toledo for, besides the fact that it has a really great art museum, has a really cool, great Lakes maritime museum. It also is pretty much the reason, why Michigan and Ohio hate each other, or Cold War, I guess. I don't know if hate's the right word, that feels kind of strong, but the playful animosity, maybe hate on some people's parts. I guess I should say Michigan. However, the Toledo War was kind of a legitimate war, which is interesting that it. It, it's happening between two US territories. One was a state, I don't know if Michigan was a state. No, it was not. Sorry, I'm just reading ahead. So this was a war between Michigan and Ohio and 1835 to 1836. Now, as I mentioned, this is a legit, a legitimate war, but for the most part it was a Cold war, more political and rhetorical than anything physical. The, the key to this was, of course, the mommy river. The mouth of the river and the river upstream were considered to be a very crucial point for shipping and transportation because one, it helped get through the great Black Swamp, but then also into Indiana as well, into the fertile farmland. So you could ship easily down the river to Toledo, the Port, and then Lake Erie. Then you would go up through the lake. Through the canal that bypasses Niagara Falls into Lake Ontario and then you can reach Lake, um, sorry, the Erie Canal. And then from there you just go to the Hudson and then into New York. And now you're in the nation's largest market. So lots at stake here in 1835. However, it's 1835, so both sides had a lack of good geographical understanding, and they had very inter varying interpretations of the law. This meant that the two area, the two, the one territory and the other state had very different ideas of who was in charge and who held jurisdiction over what is called the Toledo Strip. If you look at a map, it, it's why Ohio actually reaches up into Michigan a bit more because it's the Toledo strip. Ohio became a state in 1803. Michigan at the time was petitioning for statehood in 1835. So this small strip of land ran from Indiana to Lake Erie and Michigan really wanted it. It's five to eight miles wide and its value increased with the opening of the Erie Canal 10 years earlier in 1825. As I mentioned, you've now really just kind of blown open the Midwest with the Great Lake system and the Erie Canal, and now it's easy to ship things from the interior of the country into New York. It's also why New York. Just destroyed Philadelphia in every sense. Cultural, political, economic. Both ran neck and neck up until the Erie Canal. It's fascinating. And both wanted to be federal capital. Philadelphia won out that until won that one out until Washington DC was finished or, and finished enough. And so this is a big deal. A lot of people have a lot of money at stake for. Everything happening in the Great Lakes and the Midwest. At the time, Michigan quietly occupied quite a bit of the Toledo Strip, so the settlers there answered to the territorial governor. Both of these governors, one of whom the one in Michigan was called the Boy Governor. His name was Stevens t Mason, and he was 24 when he assumed the position. Instituted criminal penalties for anyone who submitted to the other's authority. Obviously, very tricky because who's enforcing that? It's probably word of mouth and friends. No friends and neighbors, no neighbors, and you just hope that you don't get penalized for that. Former President John Cy Adams, son of John Adams supported Michigan's claim while the current president Andrew Jackson supported Ohio's claim. So we've got some. Big names, throwing their lots into this war as well. However, Andrew Jackson, because he was the current president and Michigan was not a state, so therefore, answer to the federal government. Andrew Jackson removed Mason as the territorial governor. Don't worry though, he would later be reelected as the state's first governor. So nothing really would happen except for tit, for tat legislature, and then idle threats. And this is where the federal government had to step in because they couldn't have two states bickering over a very small piece of land. And this is where things get really interesting, and especially as we can look back with hindsight and 2020 hindsight, the, the Feds proposed a compromise. Michigan would give up its claim and get the entire upper peninsula. And Ohio would get the Toledo Strip. Michigan rejected this idea, and yet Andrew Jackson signed a bill that would grant Michigan statehood only if and when they would give up their claim on the Toledo Strip. So now the president's putting a lot of pressure on the state of Michi. Well, on the future state of Michigan, Ohio. Sitting there kind of like, yeah, yeah, give it up and you can have that. Forlorn Peninsula as a consolation prize while we get all the farmland. So once again, rejected by Michigan. However, in late 1836, there was a budgetary surplus in the federal government's budget. So the US Treasury distributed it to the states, and this meant only states got it. So did Michigan get this? No. This was a$400,000 surplus at the time, which today's worth is$12 million, so this is quite a bit chunk of change. Back then, Michigan desperately wanted it because it was nearly bankrupt because of militia expenses threatening and harassing Ohio over the Toledo Strip. So a convention was hastily organized and the delegates passed a resolution to accept Congress's terms. This convention was controversial and highly ridiculed by Michigan residents because obviously they saw it as a short term cash grab, whereas they were kind of just like, well, in the long term, the land will be more valuable because the land will not run out. You can farm it into presumably what they thought was the eternities, whereas$400,000 would be spent and covered really quickly as a state. However, as in many cases the people were not listened to, and a month later on January 26th, 1837, Michigan was admitted to the union. As a state. So many people were obviously extremely. And thought their state was shortsighted. This, however, lasted well, less than a decade because as we know, again, once a, as we know today with our perfect hindsight, copper was discovered in the up in the 1840s, and this far and away negated the loss of the Toledo Strip because now Michigan became an extremely wealthy state for its minerals. As I mentioned at the beginning, most people do consider this the beginning of the Michigan Ohio rivalry, and that really culminates, sorry, I can't really say that without an M in the Michigan, Ohio State football rivalry, which honestly I do love that they will go through the entire campus or campus, don't wanna say anything bad if I don't know what that means, and they will tape over all of the s. It's iconic and then with one of the latest ones where students will band together and form big blob on the field so that the opposing team can't platten their flag on the the team's logo on the field. Iconic. I am Forever Team Ohio. Sorry about that. Now that Michigan and Ohio have that settled, Toledo doesn't become poor necessarily just because if you've ever driven through Toledo, you will see that there's Libby Glass libby Glass is just everywhere in the United States. It's kind of like corral plates, a very accessible and very affordable brand for glassware. It comes from Toledo. Toledo is known as Glass City, and that's because there are a lot of glass companies such as Owens, Illinois, Owens Corning, Libby Pilkington, north America, and Therma. True. They have all been intricately tied to the city of Toledo. Part of this is because natural gas was found in abundance around the city. Glass manufacturing needed cheap and plentiful fuel. Edward Libby brought his father's glass company, which is called New England Glass to Toledo in 1888 as East Coast companies were now competing with glass manufacturers in places like Pennsylvania and West Virginia because they had a cheap and reliable form of energy in coal. He read the tea leaves and he was like, let's, let's go out west where we can lower cost. His first year was disastrous. Fuel was more expensive than he thought. Toledo was basically the, the boonies compared to Boston, so a lot of his skilled workers left and returned back to New England. It was also hard to replicate the same glass as they had previously manufactured in New England. So Libby recruited a man named Michael Owens from West Virginia. Michael had been working in Glass Factory since he was 10, so he was very intimate with the trade. He also came from West Virginia, so he did not need to hanker after Boston's great cultural offerings. He was a glass worker first and foremost. They took a risk and created a working glass furnace for the 1890 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago we don't really understand it in modern terms'cause we don't have expositions in the same way they do, but their gamble paid off. Michael Owens later Automated glass bottle production, which reduced costs. The glass bottle industry was the largest employer of child labor at the turn of the century, so thank you Michael Owens for making many children's lives that much nicer. This machine that he invented would suck up molten glass into a mold, and then a burst of air would force the glass into the mold to shape the bottle. Which is why we probably all have really nice bottles now. I mean, automation has gotten a lot better, but now he had a way to make consistent glass bottles without child labor, no danger to children whatsoever. It was considered to be the largest improvement in glass manufacturing in 2000 years. Toledo also had a boon from the glass industry because, uh, just a bit North is another major city, Detroit that became famous for automobile making. And what do cars need? Glass. So it began to supply the growing auto industry with all sorts of glass. This meant that then Toledo kept innovating, fiberglass was produced here, and fiberglass has just reinforced plastic with glass fiber. I'm not Michael Owens. I don't know the glass industry, so I have a hard time wrapping my head around how that works exactly. But once again, a major innovation I did say that Toledo has one of the best art museums that I've ever been to. Some of the art there is really underrated and so it's just a nice place to go walk around. The highlight of the museum, however, is it's not the paintings on the wall, it's the glass pavilion. This was the Libby Families Collection. Once upon a time, they donated it to the museum and it is now one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of historical glass in the world. You can see Roman ancient Egyptian glass. It is well worth the detour. Well worth the detour just because we take glass for granted. Obviously, I have a glass on my desk right now. There's glass in the windows. It's just everywhere. However, glass used to be extremely expensive to produce and to, and so to see ancient Roman little tiny glass bottles is mind blowing. And then you get more and more intricate stuff as the centuries go on until you get some of the Libby companies. Most amazing creations and it's mind blowing and how much that would've cost or what it would've looked like on a Gilded age table. Lucky them because it's a work of art sitting on your table that you're using while you dine. You can also go to the Libby Outlet store, which is very close to downtown, and you can buy all sorts of glass. You can also peruse their. I don't wanna say rejects because they're not broken, but I guess unfulfilled or canceled orders. I don't know. Every time I've gone there, there's just a very large collection of what should have been wedding gifts, or maybe they ordered too many, I don't know. But there's always so-and-so's wedding in 2020 and 2021, and there's like a hundred glasses sitting there for like. 50 cents. So if you ever want a souvenir from a stranger's wedding, there you go. But time to leave Toledo, because we've spent a great portion of our time here. Cedar Point, I think this is one of the more famous things in Ohio that everybody thinks of for good reason. Cedar Point is an amusement park on a peninsula that sticks into Lake Erie in Sandusky, Ohio. Cedar Point opened in 1870 and is the second oldest operating amusement park in the United States after one in Connecticut. One reason why it's so famous, it has the third most roller coasters in the North America at 17. So obviously you can be entertained all day if you're a rollercoaster person. It is the most visited seasonal amusement park in the United States, so that's nuts. It merged in 2024 with Six Flags. I've never been to Cedar Point, but I've been to their sister Property, King's Island, which is in Mason, Ohio, just north of Cincinnati, and it's great fun. Granted. I am used to an amusement park in in Utah called Lagoon. Haven't been since in probably 14 years. Well, but it's outrageously expensive unless you buy a pass and then you go enough. But no thank you. I don't need to wander around with all the high schoolers and middle schoolers, but. King's Island would be like half the price of my local amusement park, and they had infinitely better rides. So Cedar Point, I can only imagine is just that much more fun, but we're gonna keep hitting the road unless you wanna stay around for another night and do that. Now the interesting thing about Interstate 80 is that it splits. Just west of Cleveland. And because of that interstate 80 keeps the turnpike nomenclature, which means this is a toll road still. That does mean we have some really nice bathrooms and plazas, rest areas, but we don't get to see Cleveland, which is a shame because there is a lot. We could talk about Cleveland, which if you're interested,'cause I know a lot of people still do business in Cleveland. A lot of people visit Cleveland. Yeah, just look up Balloon Fest or, um, anything from the baseball team, the Guardians, which they did some crazy stuff. The mayor in the seventies when he's very, very famous for many things. Maybe infamous is the better word. He my favorite one is. The photo op where he lit his hair on fire. It had so much pomade. I don't know what he had in his hair. It was highly flammable. So when a welder went to light something near him, it lit his hair on fire. There is, uh, an urban legend that his wife was invited to the White House. There was a whole mayoral convention or something, some, some something, or wives of mayors. I don't know the exact details. It's an urban legend as I said, and they invited her to the White House, and I think this is Pat Nixon's time, and she said, no, I have bowling league. So she skipped out on the White House to go bowl, which kudos. Uh, the decline of bowling leagues is correlated with the noticeable decline in social fabric. That's a whole other story. But then he also commissioned a study on pornography using sanitation workers without their permission, also iconic. And of course the Cuyahoga River Fires Interstate 80. Does, however, go through a national park, Cuyahoga Valley, which I guess it should be, said that it was once a Superfund site Cleveland. The mistake by the lake shouldn't say that either. I love Cleveland, but. Really gorgeous. And now we're just going to tootle onto Youngstown. It just kind of gets more boring from here. And to be honest, it's kind of one of the longest drives. Not in terms of just hours, but I'll tell you in the next episode. But thanks and have a lovely time until we pick up our road trip again.