River of Enterprise: The Commercial Origins of Regional Identity in the Ohio Valley, 1790-1850 (review)

River of Enterprise reveals that traditional historical juxtapositions of free and slave states, and of life before and after the transportation revolution, fail to capture the complexities of the trans-Appalachian West. By focusing on the Ohio River's significance as a commercial artery and on the important role merchants played in linking the region with the wider market economy, Kim M.Gruenwald argues that commercial "connections" and "patterns of integration" with the larger nation took place long before a plethora of abolitionists and steamboats divided the region (p. xii).

Members of the Woodbridge family of Marietta, Ohio, serve as the lens through which Gruenwald explores regional business connections and identity formation. Armed with business ledgers, correspondence, and a host of other documents from archival collections close to, and far from, Marietta, Gruenwald traces shifting generational perceptions of the Ohio River Valley and compares Marietta's experiences with those taking place in other western towns. The result is a "new regional focus," one centered on commercial linkages between entrepôts such as Pittsburgh, subregional hubs like Marietta, and the many smaller towns and farms that fell within the hinterland orbits of larger eastern centers.

The book's three parts reflect the ways in which each Woodbridge generation transformed these linkages and the region's identity. Joining the nation's first expansionists during the 1790s, Dudley Woodbridge referred to the coveted lands "Across the Mountains" as space to conquer for America's empire-in-the-making. He and other early settlers who were anxious to profit from the region referred to the Ohio River as a commercial highway and corridor to the interior. They created waterway "intersections" for speculative and mercantile activities; connected themselves to larger eastern networks in Philadelphia and elsewhere; supplied regional residents with food, credit, and news from the outside world; and helped arriving farmers and craftspeople establish themselves within the Ohio Valley. The next generation, exemplified by Dudley Woodbridge, Jr., called "the Western Country" home, and spent time binding the region together. During the expansive 1810s, Woodbridge Jr. connected himself to western cities such as Pittsburgh, established Marietta as a subregional hub, created a far-flung network from Pittsburgh to Louisville, and pushed his Marietta-based business into western branch stores and larger capital and credit networks throughout the region. By the 1830s, however, as the transportation revolution transformed the region, Ohioans increasingly turned their attention to canals and manufacturing schemes centered on Cincinnati. Marietta's status as a subregional hub for southeastern Ohio declined as a result, and Woodbridge Jr.'s sons lost interest in both the family business and their connections south of the Ohio River. Declaring their home the "Buckeye State" or the "Old Northwest," they signaled that their loyalties had shifted from former regional ties to new state-oriented ones. Moreover, they increasingly viewed the river as a boundary between North and South.

Gruenwald makes a number of significant contributions within the book's first two parts, where she focuses on the myriad connections and intersections that merchants created (and the problems western entrepreneurs encountered) in antebellum Ohio. In these ways, River of Enterprise belongs to the body of work inspired by Gregory Nobles ("The Rise of Merchants in Rural Market Towns," Journal of Social History, 1990), Daniel B. Thorp ("Doing Business in the Backcountry," William & Mary Quarterly, 1991), and others interested in the commercial networks that shaped the antebellum West. Gruenwald not only confirms the centrality of the market economy in American expansion; by illustrating the important synergy between urban and rural regions, she also demonstrates that towns, both large and small, mattered to regional integration.

Following in the path of scholars such as Darrel E. Bigham (Towns and Villages of the Lower Ohio, 1998), Timothy R. Mahoney (Provincial Lives, 1999), and others...