When Surveyor-General Thomas Hutchins drove a stake into the ground to mark a "point of beginning" for the 1785 establishment of Seven Ranges of townships on the west bank of the Ohio River, he had to have sensed that he was initiating something larger than a survey. After all, he was working for the newly formed United States, and the purpose of his work was to impose a grid of ideal squares on hill country to make it ready for sale--something that had never been done before. But Hutchins couldn't by any stretch of the imagination have known that the public survey system he was testing would soon extend all the way to the Pacific or that the land on which he worked would soon become the staging ground for other, similarly revolutionary innovations like strip mining, Pentecostalism, the gaming industry, and tools for emancipating multi-national corporations. In this book, Will Hoyt details the arrival and eventual impact of these eastern Ohio products, and by framing the story of their development within the story of his own decision to move from California to eastern Ohio, he secures a glimpse of our country's DNA. Readers will close this book with a firm grasp of three things: the grandeur of the American project, the extent to which that project is now at risk, and what we all must do to ensure its survival.
Will Hoyt is a carpenter with over forty years of professional experience who now manages an inn for oil/gas workers near Wheeling, West Virginia. He also writes, and has published regularly in Willamette Week, New Oxford Review, Front Porch Republic, and University Bookman. This is his first book.
“Will Hoyt possesses a trait that has become rare: the power of perception. The lens through which Hoyt sees the world is unclouded by ideology, prejudice, fear, cant—anything at all. There is a peculiar and profound pleasure in reading his prose and seeing the world along with him.”
—Jeremy Beer, author of Oscar Charleston
“This is deep, lyrical environmental prose on a level with Thoreau and Wendell Berry, encompassing a spiritual history of our wild sojourn in North America. In a time of epic national turmoil, Mr. Hoyt’s meditations on our homeland literally ground us as so much in culture, politics, and economy is swept away.”
—James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency
“A Berkeley carpenter turned Rust Belt innkeeper—think Beat Catholic with a practical bent—sets out on a towboat up the Ohio River and delivers a beautifully written book full of startling linkages as he interweaves stripmining, Dean Martin, the Civil War, corporate personhood, Jefferson’s ward republics, the Allegheny County Courthouse, and more. Wise Will Hoyt knows that even in a ravaged land, hope abides.”
—Bill Kauffman, author of Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette
“The greatest merit of Hoyt’s book is that it is very well-written. That is not a secondary virtue of a manuscript. Rather the contrary, the quality of the writing is not a packaging; it is the book itself. The very theme of this book is suffused with it. My commendation of it is emphatic.”
—John Lukacs, late author of A New Republic: A History Of The United States In The Twentieth Century
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