Valley Girl Views: Reminiscences of Milton by J.P. Kohler

In the 1920's, Attorney James Pollock Kohler wrote a series of letters about his early years as a boy in Milton Pa. The Miltonian published them under the heading "Reminiscences of Milton by J.P; Kohler".

This letter, published on April 5 1923 speaks of the literature & culture of the day, what was available in Milton, and what was not.

Literature And A Library

Though I have always believed Milton before the Civil War had more culture, greater ambition for learning, and less scramble for dollars and cent than after the war, I must confess that the great scarcity of books during my boyhood days there may be an argument that I am mistaken and that Milton becomes more cultured as she becomes richer and older.

Shortly after I had been transferred to the Center street school, my schoolboy friend, "Sammy" Rhoads, showed one a little. yellow, paper covered book, with the mystic words in black "Milo, the Gypsy." I was permitted to read this very first bit of fiction that came my way. And how vivid, wild, enthralling and thrilling it all was, of how a small boy playing in his front yard while his parents were busy in the house, was coaxed through the front gate and then hustled into a buggy and away to be mourned over and hunted by parents and friends until at last he was found in a Gypsy camp, recognized restored to his home. I was thoroughly convinced that it was the very meanest and wickedest trick that could have been played on the little boy or on his parents. In later years I saw the great Lester Wallack play in his greatest drama, "Rosedale," about all that I had read about little Milo, and then I concluded that some cheap plagiarist had simply turned a wonderful play into a dime novel.

And then, having the taste and nothing better to feed it, I ran into a most remarkable collection of yellow covered literature owned and possessed by another school mate, Frank Jordan, than whom no boy in Milton possessed a larger library—such as it was. Of these I devoured so many that told how some fellow's girl had been stolen by Indians and he started on the trail until he finally got her, killing one by one the whole tribe, or how some wicked band suddenly swooped down upon a farm house and murdered the parents and all the children, but one boy who miraculously escaped and who after swearing vengeance, alongside the smoking embers of his father's home, started on the warpath and gradually killed them all, letting not one escape to tell the tale, until I thought I could write as good a one myself, and then I sought for better stuff.

Frank Chamberlin, whose memory is very dear to me as one of Milton's wholesomest boys, loaned me his Robinson Crusoe. And here was a real book—in fact a primer of political economy and government, including slavery, that showed what one man with a few tools and gun could do with a bit of an island over which he held sway, after driving off the savages and keeping one to help with the rough work. Then another book, "Swiss Family Robinson," something like Crusoe, but lacking the literary flavor, came to the house. To these were added "Forty-four Years of the Life of a Hunter" that told of life in the Pennsylvania woods when bear and deer and wolves and panthers and speckled beauties were plentiful in the woods and streams, and what a properly equipped sportsman could do to them. And "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came along after Frank Kunkel, another school mate, had finished it.

Much discussion of the slavery question fell upon listening boyish ears, but this book, like a vast panorama, laid bare the doings in this line along the Ohio and the Mississippi and gave the reader the best and the worst that could be said on the subject and so delightfully wove truth and fiction into patterns of happiness and misery that after awhile the nation was athrob over it. Next to the Bible it was the most read book in America. But of course a boy—ignorant of the political aspect of the question—was aroused over the escape of Eliza on the ice, over the good Quakers along the Ohio, who helped the escaped slaves into Canada, of the rescue of Little Eva from drowning by Uncle Tom and of their friendly relation: after the father had bought him for a higher price because he could read the Bible and was a good Christian and all else till she passed on.

This book should be in every library, and growing generations should be urged to read it as showing at very close range a phase of American economic life during a period antedating our Civil War.

"History of the West Branch Valley," with a picture of Woods Brown's house on the river bank, was a read-able book altho of less interest to a boy. We had at home a large Bible with the Tower of Babel tumbling on scurrying thousands and Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple and other illustrations, and also a "History of the Mexican War,'' with pictures of Generals Scott and Taylor at Palo Alto, and other Mexican points and with here and there some poetry, one line of which I now, recall:

"Here's an arm for thee my country It shall true and firmly bear, When the dark clouds gather "round and war shout rend the air."

And of course we had the Sunday school books about bad litt!e Jim and good little Sal and a of cheap slush that made little impression and perhaps cost even less.

Every week from Boston came "The Waverly Magazine," containing a mixture of love, adventure and poetry and then again "Street and Smith's Saturday Night," with the New Buntline Wild West stories, and one other book, "The Nurse and Spy," that had almost forgotten. In addition the Philadelphia Daily Press.

But what of Cooper, of Scott, of Dickens, of Thackery, of Fieldings, of Cervantes, of Hugo and hundreds of others, then in print and that are read even today, as much as our modern novels? They simply were not, or which is the same thing, they were inaccessible. We heard of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Pope, of Byron and of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier and Beecher but we saw little of their books. How I would have devoured les Miserables, The Toilers of the Sea, Old Curiosity Shop, Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby and Dickens own biography, David Copperfield but they were not. And how about Vanity Fair and Pendennis and Don Quoxite, or even the Deerslayer, Pathfinder or any of the Waverly Novels would have kept my mind expanding healthily, but I was as far removed from these books as was Abe Lincoln, who did his small bit of reading by a pitch torch in his homely cabin. Many of these and other books were undoubtedly on the shelves of the better citizens of Milton, but no library contained them. There was no place in Milton where the minds that hungered and thirsted after knowledge could go to be filled.

Lucky is the town that has a library of well selected books, and by-well selected books I don't mean selected to bolster up any belief or doctrine, theological, scientific or political, but one that treats all subjects from all sides, that contrasts communism, socialism and anarchy with the old school economic and political fundamentals. Books on religions, on conflicts between science and religion, books like Buckles' History of Civilization, Draper's Intellectual Development of Europe, Greene's History of the English People. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Wayland, Greeley or Thompson's Political Economy, Well's Outlines of History, biographies of great men and especially Boswell's Johnson, as the best of all biographies. And out of a well selected collection of good books soon arrives the literary society where the selections may be discussed by those who have read in the presence of those who have not, to the intellectual upbuilding of the whole community.

Of all the good things I found when I came from Milton to New York, I think, after Plymouth Church, I appreciated the libraries most. It was sinful to attend the theatre and in my youthful innocence I missed much that was best in the drama but for this I made up in later years. The churches were very Attractive with their great organs and fine choirs and the first time I heard Mr Beecher he seemed to know before hand that I was coming and where I came from and all about some of the experiences I had been through. But the great Astor library founded by John Jacob Astor, the fur dealer, and the Lennox library founded by the purchaser of 30 acres of land alongside Central Park for $3.000 (now worth ten millions) were the places where I spent very much of my off hours with books that were rare as well as with some fresh from the press. And then I'd look back and think that Milton and other like places were merely points where the mind could starve for proper food and life could pass on a low, dull level just for the want of some good books, some good music and some good preaching.

But these days are very different from those. Pryor's Band can be heard playing a Sousa march in Milton just as plainly as one can hear it in the Park at Miami or Central Park in New York. Books of all sorts. magazines of every description, newspapers of every political faith, and of no faith at all, are crowding the mails while sermons from Newark and I Pittsburgh are radioed in every direction. Yet the supply does not meet the demand. The demand for books cannot be supplied by substitutes or imitations. No habit affords so much satisfaction, dispenses so much genuine pleasure and profit as the habit of reading, if it is well directed. Travel is a great educator and affords much pleasure but comparatively few can afford to travel far or long. The day will come when a trip around the world will be a part of the education of nearly every boy and girl, but that day is not yet; but books can be brought into the home through cooperation and fair exchange, as by a public library, and magazines may be perused by hundreds who separately and alone could scarcely afford one.

And so of all the good and goodly I things which I, as a boy, enjoyed in little old Milton, and I would not say one word of disparagement in my comparisons, I yet, and shall always feel that a library when I needed it most, would at least, have filled a want that was at times exasperatingly insistent.

JAMES P. KOHLER.

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