On the 25th of July we set out from Gallipoli for Alexandria, which is about a hundred and four miles distant, and arrived there in three days and a half. The ground designed for this town is at the mouth of the Great Scioto, and in the angle which the right bank of this river forms with the north west border of the Ohio. Although the plan of Alexandria has been laid out these many years, nobody goes to settle there; and the number of its houses is not more than twenty, the major part of which are {103} log-houses. Notwithstanding its situation is very favourable with regard to the numerous settlements already formed beyond the new town upon the Great Scioto, whose banks, not so high, and more marshy, are, it is said, nearly as fertile as those of the Ohio. The population would be much more considerable, if the inhabitants were not subject, every autumn, to intermittent fevers, which seldom abate till the approach of winter. This part of the country is the most unwholesome of all those that compose the immense state of Ohio. The seat of government belonging to this new state is at Chillicotha, which contains about a hundred and fifty houses, and is situated sixty miles from the mouth of the Great Scioto. A weekly newspaper is published there.[35]
At Alexandria, and the other little towns in the western country, which are situated upon a very rich soil,
- [Footnote: American and German settlers, and in 1893 but three descendants of the French
settlers lived there. For further accounts, see Winsor, Westward Movement (Boston, 1897), pp. 402-407, 498; "Centennial of Gallipolis," in Ohio Archæological and Historical Society Publications, iii; and Thwaites, On the Storied Ohio.—Ed.]
