Seven Ranges

In 1785, Thomas Hutchins, the Surveyor-General of the newly created United States, drove a stake into the ground to anchor the founding of Seven Ranges, a group of townships on the western bank of the Ohio River. His job was to lay an orderly grid of perfect squares over rugged hill country so the land could be sold, a method no one had tried before. Hutchins could not have guessed how far that surveying system would spread, eventually reaching the Pacific, or that the same ground would later give rise to strip mining, Pentecostalism, the gaming industry, and tools that helped multinational corporations free themselves from constraints.

Will Hoyt traces how these products of eastern Ohio arrived and what they came to mean for the country. He weaves this history together with an account of his own move from California to eastern Ohio, using his personal path to reveal something essential about the nation's underlying character.

Hoyt's aim is to leave readers with a clear sense of the scale and ambition of the American project, the degree to which it is now endangered, and the steps needed to preserve it.