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Ohio, Say It Loud And There's Music Playing...

A thoughtful reader sent along the link of a genealogy site on which I found the following. Written in 1888 by Henry Howe:

Poetry and song ever appeal to the imagination, and so helped its quick settlement. Great things always require them—as war and religion. All soldiers, even savages, have their war songs, and the only religionists among us who have not song are those calm, sweet-tempered people, “the Friends,” and they are fast melting; soon will vanish entirely, when the “thees” and “thous” will be heard no more in the land. A single verse drops in here as a matter of history. It is from one of the songs that was sung at the East at the end of some game where kissing - never to be a lost art - was going on between young people, who later largely became fathers and mothers out here in the Ohio-land:

“Arise, my true love, and present me your
hand,
And we’ll march in procession for a far distant
land:
Where the girls will card and spin,
And the boys will plough and sow,
And we’ll settle on the banks of the pleasant
Ohio.”

Suppose an unsavory name had been given to the great river, and then applied to the State. It might have retarded its settlement for years. Say the name of a certain river now in Vermont—“Onion.” Who would have sung its praises? What kind of emigrants would have been attracted, and by what name after they got here would they have been called? As it was, the pioneers were the brightest, bravest, most cheery young people of the East, and their children inheriting their exuberance and pluck, fill the land with hope and song.