The Sky Blue: A Tale of the Iron Horse and of the Coming Civilization (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Sky Blue: A Tale of the Iron Horse and of the Coming CivilizationI then conceived the idea of getting it to parallel the Ohio river as it had practically paralleled the Mississippi, and build through my former home town in southern Ohio over an old grade part of the way, to Pittsburg. Howe, in his history of Ohio and in his chapter on Pike county, speaks of this railroad grade, which cost a million dollars, before it was abandoned, some forty-five or fifty years ago, and, also of the town of Piketon, which at one time was the thriving county seat of Pike county.A strange fatality, he says, has followed Piketon, in this, that nearly every great enterprise in which it has embarked has failed on' the eve of success. My own former town and Piketon were largely instrumental in getting the old grade built. It failed. Then several other Piketon railway enterprises failed and then the canal, which was everything in those days, and which it had worked so hard for, failed, or rather went on the other side of the Scioto river through Waverly, its rival. Then it lost the county seat, it going to Waverly also; and a lot of other things conspired to discourage our Piketon neighbors, and it looked as if the little old town which long since had ceased to grow, never would get a railroad at all.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.