John Milton Binckley, June 1859 Travel Diary, Page 30

[John Milton Binckley, June 1859 Travel Diary, page 30. Many thanks to William Myers, Mary Davy, Sally Young and Sue Davis for their ongoing research collaboration; specifically to William for providing scans of the original document, and in turn many thanks to Peter Johnston Binckley and Patricia D'Arcy "Trish" Binckley (1951-2007), at the source. This is my rough transcription. Extra paragraph breaks inserted for easier reading.]

[continued] sensation in a social aspect. 

I observe here about a great deal of tobacco.

Millwood -- about 43 miles East of Zanesville, where we are to get for dinner.

The country is finer, the town miserable, made to appear more so, by unpainted houses. [I]t resembles greatly a Virginia town, and has few analogues in Ohio.

By this time, the cars are filed for the most part by Ohio people. The local travel, this being an accommodation train. Their appearances and manners unfavorable. Mother expresses her dissatisfaction. All her toleration, and still more her affection for Ohio vanishes as soon as she gets on its soil.

An old oak tree stood by where the cars stopped to wood. The farmer had "girdled" it, and though it put forth the smiling verdure of the season, uncurious of the wound, the grasp of death had been doomed it to a dishonored End. When I reflected that perhaps three thousand years of growth had been necessary to develop that noble tree, I could almost pity it as a sensible creation to have[?] its old age thus torn from the sunshine and butchered to [to be continued.]  

[John Milton Binckley (1831-1878).]