Toledo

a city of Ohio. It is situated on both sides of the Maumee, near its entrance to Lake Erie. The general government and the city have expended $2,000,000 in dredging and improving the harbor. A twenty-one foot passage is maintained. Like other important lake ports, Toledo has an enormous traffic in grain. It is the center of the clover-seed business, and makes prices for the United States just as Liverpool makes prices for wheat. Large shipments of soft coal received by rail from the mines of West Virginia, eastern Ohio, and Pennsylvania are transferred to boat at Toledo. Iron ores from the Superior district of Minnesota are unloaded here. Toledo handles more coal, ore, and lumber than any other one lake port. The water front is occupied by enormous elevators, coal docks, and loading wharves.

Toledo is an important manufacturing center. Coal, iron, and coke meet here for the manufacture of steel. The largest single plate glass establishment in the United States is at Toledo. Castings, cars, automobiles, brushes, coopers' supplies, coffee, spices, computing scales, bicycles, flour, and beer swell the list of important manufactures. Wage earners receive a million dollars a month from these establishments.

The site of the city was covered with dense forests. Many fine trees and groves have been preserved in the residence section. The business blocks, streets, library buildings, parks, lighting and sewerage systems, and water supply bespeak a wealthy, prosperous city.

Toledo lies in the direct canoe route between Lake Erie and the Ohio, by way of the Maumee and the Great Miami. It was an early rendezvous of voyageurs and trappers. Various settlements and hamlets were consolidated in 1833 under the name of the old Moorish capital. The site lies within a famous strip of territory. The ordinance of 1787 provided for the division of the Northwest Territory by a boundary running east and west through the most southerly point of Lake Michigan, then through the mouth of the Maumee into Lake Erie. Toledo is north of this line. Congress admitted Ohio to the Union with a northern line as now established, giving Toledo to Ohio. Michigan protested. In the clash that followed, both states called out their militia and occupied the disputed strip. Congress settled the matter by admitting Michigan with its present boundaries, the peninsular region north of Lake Michigan being accepted in lieu of the Toledo tract. The contest, by no means a friendly one, passed into local history as "the Toledo War." The population in 1909, according to a federal estimate, was 174,059.

See Ohio