How might we define the historical Midwest, if we choose not to focus on the agricultural life? Forty years ago, Richard Wade wrote about the region in terms of its cities, in The Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis (1964). In River of Enterprise, Kim Gruenwald similarly decenters farming, but instead of cities, she chronicles the rising networks of merchants and commerce. The result is a useful study of how a developing economy shaped the evolution of regional identity.
Gruenwald's account of an emergent regional identity, driven by the commercial networks that merchants wove along the Ohio River, spans the three generations separating the first settlement and the Civil War. Naturally, her book is divided into three sections, each roughly covering the life of a generation as specified in the history of one merchant family in Marietta, the first town settled on the river, southwest of Pittsburgh. Each section both captures a generation's mental map of the Ohio Valley and describes the evolving commercial and developmental efforts that shaped and reshaped that map.
Part One, "Across the Mountains," focuses on the efforts, in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, of an essentially coastal people to establish claims to the edge of a territory in contention since 1754. Gruenwald picks up the story in 1788, two years after Rufus Putnam's Ohio Company of Associates had founded the outpost of Marietta. She follows a merchant, Dudley Woodbridge, and his family as they moved from Connecticut to settle on the upper Ohio River. The first two chapters revolve around the role of merchant entrepreneurs in forging the links of commerce that connected the over-the-mountain river communities with the East during the era of Federalist hegemony in territory and in nation. Her analysis may fruitfully be read as an extension of the literature examining the penetration of the Atlantic economy in the colonies and post-Revolutionary states.
In Part Two, "The Western Country," Gruenwald comes the closest to Richard Wade's study of western cities. But her viewpoint of Marietta deflects her attention from the urban centers toward the urban networks of commerce that increasingly stitched the region together, from crossroad villages to subregional hubs to the large entrepôt cities. Here, Gruenwald captures effectively the dynamic of regional development in the precanal era through the 1820s. As small-scale manufacturing and agricultural production began to reduce the region's dependence on the East for many essentials, the river itself came to provide the main channel of commerce, both locally and downriver to New Orleans. Here, regional identity had evolved from that of easterners tentatively planted "beyond the mountains" to that of settled peoples of "the western country," linked into a single region north and south of the Ohio River by the communications and commerce channeled through hundreds of merchants' stores.
Finally, in Part Three, Gruenwald narrows her focus to "the Buckeye State." From the 1830s into the 1850s, the successive impacts of canals, state-chartered banks, and then the railroad fundamentally reordered the economy and cultural geography of what had once been a "western country." The rise of internal improvements brought a new importance to state boundaries and state politics, and the legislature became the battleground in which economy and region were defined. The result was the separation of the communities on the northern and southern banks of the river, as first a discrete developmental politics and then the issue of slavery distinguished Ohio from Kentucky. Once indifferent to slavery, the Woodbridges of Marietta now championed the cause of abolition, at the same time that the engine of state development relegated them and their community to the backwaters of Ohio's evolving economic life.
Such is the story that Kim Gruenwald has to tell in River of Enterprise. In the end it is a book about regional identity, in which economic networks and their transformation are the causal forces. This story is, one might note, the staple of many an undergraduate lecture on the rise of the West in the antebellum period, here specified with Gruenwald's attention to the web of commerce. But if this book does not tell a dramatically new story, it tells it well, with attention to detail and to pattern, each developed in a pleasing balance and economy. It will be a useful addition to midwestern historiography.