Chapter 21

This Mahoning country had been so rich, so apparently stable. The men and women so loved what they and their forebears had done that they yielded slowly to the coal miner and the mill man, but they were giving way in the eighties. The furnace was in the back yard of the fine old houses with their ample barns; and the shaft of the coal mine, in the richest meadows. The effort to reconcile the two was making, but industry was conquering: the destruction of beauty, the breaking down of standards of conduct, the growth…