At The Factory Of Mitchell And Rammelsberg Common Chairs Are The Principal
Manufacture, And Are Turned Out At The Rate Of 2500 A Week, Worth From
1l. To 5l. A Dozen.
Rocking-chairs, which are only made in perfection
in the States, are fabricated here, also chests of drawers, of which 2000
are made annually.
Baby-rocking cribs, in which the brains of the youth of
America are early habituated to perpetual restlessness, are manufactured
here in surprising quantities. The workmen at this factory (most of whom
are native Americans and Germans, the English and Scotch being rejected on
account of their intemperance) earn from 12 to 14 dollars a week. At
another factory 1000 bedsteads, worth from 1l. to 5l. each, are
completed every week. There are vast boot and shoe factories, which would
have shod our whole Crimean army in a week, at one of which the owner pays
60,000 dollars or 12,000l. in wages annually! It consumes 5000 pounds
weight of boot-nails per annum! The manufactories of locks and guns,
tools, and carriages, with countless other appliances of civilized life,
are on a similarly large scale. Their products are to be found among the
sugar plantations of the south, the diggers of California, the settlers in
Oregon, in the infant cities of the far West, the tent of the hunter, and
the shanty of the emigrant; in one word, wherever demand and supply can be
placed in conjunction.
And while the demand is ever increasing as the tide of emigration rolls
westward, so the inventive brains of the Americans are ever discovering
some mechanical means of abridging manual labour, which seldom or ever
meets the demand. The saws, axes, and indeed all cutting tools made at
respectable establishments in the States, are said to be superior to ours.
On going into a hardware store at Hamilton in Upper Canada, I saw some
English spades and axes, and I suppose my face expressed some of the
admiration which my British pride led me to feel; for the owner, taking up
some spades and cutting-tools of Cincinnati manufacture, said, "We can
only sell these; the others are bad workmanship, and won't stand two days'
hard work."
Articles of English manufacture are not seen in considerable quantities in
the wholesale stores, and even the import of foreign wines has been
considerably diminished by the increasingly successful culture of the
grape in Ohio, 130,000 gallons of wine having been produced in the course
of the year. Wines resembling hock, claret, and champagne are made, and
good judges speak very highly of them.
Cincinnati is famous for its public libraries and reading-rooms. The Young
Men's Mercantile Library Association has a very handsome suite of rooms
opened as libraries and reading-rooms, the number of books amounting to
16,000, these, with upwards of 100 newspapers, being well selected by a
managing committee; none of our English works of good repute being a-
wanting. The facility with which English books are reprinted in America,
and the immense circulation which they attain in consequence of their
cheapness, greatly increases the responsibility which rests upon our
authors as to the direction which they give, whether for good or evil, to
the intelligent and inquiring minds of the youth of America - minds
ceaselessly occupied, both in religion and politics, in investigation and
inquiry - in overturning old systems before they have devised new ones.
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