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Show Page 20 "prospects" which had ever escaped himself and his family. In company with a flood of exiles from the diminished opportunities of the East Coast, Orson followed his brothers Parley and Nelson on a journey into the Ohio country. Parley, recently married, had resolved the year before to escape the "civilized world" and thus had spent an idyllic winter in Ohio's Black River wilderness. Now determined to return with his bride, his two younger brothers would serve as welcome hands to improve the property he had so painstakingly hacked out. Accordingly, the brothers and sister-in-law made their way by boat along the two-year-old Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo, engaging a schooner for the passage to the mouth of Black River. Northern Ohio was the promised land of the 1820s. The young state, lopped from the Northwest Territory in 1812, lay largely untainted. The green and misty shores of Lake Erie, the timbered hills, comprised a freshly accessible outlet for the questing spirit of the Pratts and thousands more pioneering Americans. Orson spent that rainy Ohio winter of 1827 boarding with a Mr. Eliphalet Redington, first postmaster of South River, now South Amherst, Ohio, and going to school. Orson did not stay to work his brother's holdings; when spring came he found work some fifty miles to the east, at a booming village on the Chagrin River canal route to the Ohio Valley. The Ohio and Erie Canal, completed the year before, had successfully joined the immense hinterlands of the Mississippi with the East Coast, and Orson readily found employment in a hotel at Willoughby. This settlement had burst into one of the leading towns of Ohio, far outstripping Cleveland in importance, thundering with commerce until the decline of the canal traffic. Along with the new opportunities of the Western Reserve came the |