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en.ighDieierise,thetogof5rs.mygodentntsbe-5 aN2.Sitill)ns.lilyeatiieymeep-om3edES5cthe village chool, and got along well with the succession of teachers who presided there. When he was fifteen, the school closed. The Civil War was in its final year,—Grant was massing his troops against Lee in Virginia and executing his strategy of attrition. Sherman was preparing his wide swath of destruction through Georgia. Men were needed,—more men, the very last man available. The teacher of- the Cass-town school went to war, and none was at hand to take his place. With that incident, the formal .education of young Tom Harbaugh ended.Hero of BoyhoodThe boy went to work in the post office, under his father, dreaming of battles and grand exploits, in which his teacher was the hero. Out of that emotional experience emerged 'his first poem. He sent it to a newspaper at Troy, the county seat, and it was published. Within a few days he discovered that.he was locally famous. People stopped in at the postoffie at Casstown to praise his verse and encourage him t-o write more pen pictures of heroes.That was easy for him. He discovered that writing hero tales was for him a natural means of expression. And he knew what his readers liked, because he wrote for such people as those of Casstown. Before he came of age he was making an income, very good for a young man of his time and place, by writing. And he settled down o writing, just as the farmers and tradesmen in and around Casstown pursued their vocations. Every working day he turned out a good batch of copy, and regularly he sent off to editors stories and poems.He seems to have had but little trouble selling his productions,—they were just what many people liked to read. Always, in his writings, hewas telling about heroes, — heroes outnumbered by enemies, confronted with apparently insurmountable obstacles, surrounded by dangers and assailed by subtle temptations. But the heroes met all situations as men should meet them, and in the end, the villains were vanquished, and virtue triumphed. His readers In the rural sections and the smaller centers of populationsaw in his writings *a picture of theworld in which they lived, and they admired his heroes as the proper sort of inhabitants for such a world.He was probably Casstown’s mos£ unobtrusive inhabitant. Each weekday morning he settled down to his writing, pushing a stub steel pen diligently. He disciplined himself to regular hours of close application. The rest of the day he spent out of doors. He fished along Lost Creek, which runs by the village, he hunted in the timberlands, and sometimes he tramped along the country roads, thinking.On Sundays, he attended Sunday school and church with the same regularity with which he worked and played during the other days of the week. They who remember him in Casstown describe him asquiet, amiable and unostentatious, rather short of stature, and inclined to be “chunky.”They tell, too, or a romance of his early manhood. He was very attentive to a young lady. After a while, for a reason none but the two young people knew, the courtship ended suddenly. Tom Harbaugh went on with his writing and day dreaming.When he was nearly thirty, the Nick Carter tales began entrancing the boys of the period. Why they should have offended any is not clear, aside from the mistake of the author in sending them to a low-priced market. They were publishedin a day when some imagined that the book selling for a dollar was worth ten times as much as the book selling for a dime, and there were dollar books then that deserved little more commendation than some two-dollar books of the present time.Undoubtedly, he found the low-priced market easy to sell in, and being a rapid writer, the returns were large enough to be satisfactory. He could produce a full-sized novel in thirty working days, as he demonstrated again and again. His nephew, Albert Harbaugh, who lives at Casstown, and often strolled with him through the country roads, tells of coming home one evening from such an expedition.A Story’s “Inspiration”“Tom saw a bill posted on the side of a barn, arcl sftnpped and read it. Then he smiled, and put his finger on a word on the bill. He said, 'Albert, see that word? That gives me an idea for a novel.’ And surely enough, in thirty days more, he had the story finished.”In the early eighties, he produced his first volume of collected poems, “Maple Leaves.” When Clarence Edmund Stedman published his “Encyclopedia of American Literature,” he sorted out from scores of elegies upon the death of General Grant a single composition as a' creditable treatment of that theme,— Tom Harbaugh’s poem, “Grant Dying.” Two collections of poems upon the Civil War appeared later. “Bugle Notes of the Blue,” published in 1906, and “Lyrics of the Gray,” which came from the press a year later. The Civil War was the great common emotional denominator for the people he knew best.— inhabitants of the villages of America. For them he was troubadour and narrator.To those who knew him best, he was always something of a mystery, notwithstanding his genial frankness. There was, for instance, the matter of his attitude toward the church, in addition to the regularity bis church attendance and theTcmrTr ANCFK.. . By George Clark)
Newspaper Details
Piqua Daily Call
Piqua, Ohio, US
Wed, Dec 16, 1936
Page 9
Full Page
Clipped by
Muskingum C.
OH, USA 19 Oct 2021
Other Publications Near Piqua, Ohio
Piqua Morning Call
Piqua Daily Call and Piqua Press Dispatch
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Piqua Daily Call
Piqua Miami Leader
