Tuesday 6th October 2009 - Between the Lines of Fusty Old Books

I finally got round to visiting the Courthouse. I find it best to put that off as long as possible, so that I get the maximum number of names and dates. The records are kept in serial order, although there is a grantor and grantee index for (roughly) each volume. The seriallity is sometimes complicated by the fact that the deeds are not always recorded close to the date they were done. And sometimes a county will have more than one recording clerk, and they will have their own books. But if you've got the names and dates, it is usually pretty straightforweard to unravel the story.
In the case of Glasgow, Tuscarawas County, Ohio, it's quite a tale. Well, to be more exact, it's the tale of the Glasgow Port Washington Iron and Coal Company ('Limited' as it turns out) which is so interesting. Because the company is British, some of its instructions and minuted decisions have been recorded in the Tuscarawas County Courthouse. In fact, in the end, it had to get the Ohio State Legislature to act to help it out of the hole it had dug itself (no pun intended, ha, ha).

So let's put on our Merchant-Ivory spectacles, tune them to the colour 'Victorian', and try to see some of the events unfold. We'll start near the end, on the 18th September, 1876. We could think of this as the day the SS Glasgow hits the fan, and the day one Lawrence Hill Watson is empowered to hit everything else.
We're at 151, St Vincent Street. Although Glasgow, Virginia would, at that time, have run to a St Vincent Street, we're talking about the one in the Victorian centre of Glasgow in Scotland. We're in the boardroom of the eminent Glasgow writers, Burns, Aitken and Company. Writers are, or rather were, an especially fancy kind of Scottish lawyer. Mr Aitken, John Belch himself (and do remember how Scots pronounce 'ch') is the Master of Ceremonies. Two young apprentices-at-law, William Hislop and William Robinson, wait like acolytes behind Aitken, ready to witness the deeds about to take place. The ticking of a long-pendulum clock in a distant corner adds solemnity to the occasion.
The man of the moment, Lawrence Hill Watson, is standing by the fire with his elbow on the mantle shelf, feeling, and, it must be said, looking rather important. Apart from being clean-shaven, and, indeed, clean, he has the air of a pirate about him: his hair is dark and curly, and rather longer than it should be; his eyes are bright and intelligent; and his square jaw gives his face the look of a decisive man of action.
The three principal players, John Reid Stewart, the great Glasgow iron merchant and chairman of the company, Robert Fraser one of the directors, and Patrick Park Macindoo, the newly-appointer company secretary, are seated beside each other at the head of the great table. They are about to sign a document, a power-of-attorney, essentially sending Hill Watson to Ohio as Plenipotentiary.
Mr S S Glasgow is hovering in the shadows. He is the US Consul in Glasgow (you couldn't make that up, could you?). He is at his most diplomatic, staying out of the line-of-sight of the principal players. He knows, from weeks of angry exchanges at social functions, that the principals think his countrymen have taken them for a long and very expensive ride. His job is to ensure that the business being conducted here today will be considered valid when Hill Watson reaches Ohio.

A quarter of the planet away, the other main players, the three hapless company officers in Ohio, Willian Baird Rennie, James Coats, and plain William Rennie, must sense that the SS Glasgow is heading for the fan, but as is always true, even in the world of modern communications, they will have no sense of it's velocity, mass and pungency.
They have build a splendid Iron Works, built to last for fifty years. Everything is perfect, except they paid far too much for the land, the coal has turned out not to be good enough, and the iron ore is poor and in seams that are mostly too thin.

The Power-of-Attorney is finally recorded at Tuscarawas County Courthouse by the recorder, Daniel Wyss, in June of 1880. Easily a long-enough time for the dust to have settled on the unmarked graves.
I am reminded of tales of many projects from my computer days where people were lauded for only just managing the straightforward, while others were vilified for only just failing to do the impossible.

The final act takes place in the same grand boardroom of Baird Aitken in Glasgow Scotland in October of 1881, when the shareholders, with one minor shilly, vote the company into liquidation. Aitken paid a shilling tax to record the event, so at least the Queen, who you will remember was toasted at the opening ceremony in Ohio only seven years before, got her shilling at the death.
They appointed Hill Watson, now identified as a Chartered Accountant, as liquidator, but one can't help feeling that, given his powers of five years before, this is merely regularising what has already happened.
Eighteen months later, with Hill Watson back in Scotland, the General Assembly of the State of Ohio passes an "Act to Authorise the Liquidator of the Glasgow-Port Washington Iron and Coal Company to Convey Real Estate", and Hill Watson sells off the remainder of the land, for considerably less than was paid for it, presumably back to local farmers.

And Glasgow, Tuscarawas County Ohio, slips back into the bucolic obscurity from whence it came, keeping only its name as a memento of these momentous events.