Culture
Ohio nearly entered the Union as a slave state. ‘One Vote! The Musical’ tells the story of the vote that stopped it
By: Emily Votaw
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MARIETTA, Ohio (WOUB) – Cutler Hall is the oldest building on Ohio University’s Athens campus, the first raised for higher education in the Northwest Territory, and most people could tell you it honors one of the university’s founders.
Few could tell you what else Manasseh Cutler did. A New England minister, physician, and botanist, Cutler is largely credited by historians with drafting the anti-slavery language in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, the law that governed the vast territory that would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota.
Fifteen years later, delegates writing Ohio’s first constitution came within one vote of stripping that language out. Had the measure passed, Ohio might have entered the Union as a slave state. Manasseh’s son Ephraim left a sickbed to cast the vote that defeated it.
That vote and the history surrounding it inspired One Vote! The Musical, opening Friday at Marietta College’s Hermann Fine Arts Center (500 Butler Street). Larry Groce and Todd Burge spent six years writing the production, and the Campus Martius Museum and the Ohio River Museum are producing it.
“Think of what a different history we would have had,” Groce said.
The road to opening night
Both men found the story in the same book. David McCullough’s 2019 bestseller The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West follows the settling of the Northwest Territory, and Manasseh and Ephraim Cutler anchor much of it.
The idea of turning that history into a musical took shape at a socially distanced fundraiser dinner in August 2020 for the People’s Bank Theater in Marietta.
“We were sitting at this conference room table and having dinner with some people in the community who were trying to raise money to keep things afloat for the venue during COVID,” Burge said. “Larry brought up the idea, and the room got very excited.”
Enthusiasm is one thing. Funding is another. Some early funding came from the Ohio Arts Council, whose executive director, Donna Collins, joined a Zoom call, listened to the pitch, and committed to backing the show before either man played her a note.
“The Ohio Arts Council was crucial in us developing this,” Burge said. “I don’t know how we could have done it without their support.”
With that, Burge said, they were “off to the races.”
Not a lecture
One Vote marks Groce and Burge’s first collaboration, despite decades of knowing each other’s work.
Burge has released more than 15 studio albums and recorded with artists ranging from producer and musician Don Dixon to Grammy-winning bluegrass musician Tim O’Brien. Groce created and hosted Mountain Stage, the two-hour live music program produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and distributed by NPR, and he stepped down from hosting in 2021 to serve as its creative director. He is also a songwriter, perhaps best known for his 1976 hit Junk Food Junkie.
Neither had written a historical musical before. The job sent them into Ephraim Cutler’s biography, written by his daughter, the histories of Samuel Hildreth, and the archives at Marietta College.
For all the weight of that history, Burge wants people to know the show is not a lecture.
“Of course, there’s intensity to the story,” Burge said. “It’s just, it’s there. But there’s also, if anybody knows Larry’s music or knows my music, some of it, I think anyway, is fun.”
He points to one song in particular.
“There’s a song called Corn Whiskey Versus Hard Cider,” he said. “And it’s an argument between farmers, basically. It’s meant to be fun.”
That song sits alongside one about the Cutlers losing two children on the road west, somewhere past Pittsburgh, and burying them in the wilderness. The show takes up the Underground Railroad and the displacement of Native people as well. Burge said the combination is deliberate.
He is speaking from experience. Burge grew up in Vienna, West Virginia, directly across the river from a stop on the Underground Railroad, and he did not know it.
“It’s amazing how little I knew about the Underground Railroad,” he said. “This Underground Railroad station was just right across the river from me when I was growing up, and I didn’t even realize that until I was reading [McCullough’s] book.”
His hope for One Vote is straightforward.
“We’re hoping this leads other people to dig into that history,” he said.
No theater company, no problem
Getting the show in front of anyone required more than songs and a script. No theater company existed to produce it, so Groce and Burge built one, working with the Campus Martius Museum and the Ohio River Museum. Erin Augustine, who directs both museums, serves as executive producer. Campus Martius sits on the ground where much of this history happened, and Augustine said the decision took little thought.
“Our mission is to promote and preserve the history of our region, the Northwest Territory, and our inland waterways, and this project falls directly into our mission,” she said. “So as a nonprofit director, when someone comes to you with a project that’s pretty well done, and it fits your mission exactly, [it] makes it difficult to say no.”
Supporters are already asking whether the show will tour, reach classrooms on video, and return next year. Groce has an answer ready.
“People are asking us about where the kid’s going to college, and we’re just taking them to kindergarten right now,” he said.
Augustine said the show does its real work after the audience leaves the theater.
“The important part about public history programming is that on your way out, you’re having some conversations and you’re asking some questions,” she said. “Maybe you talk about it with somebody at work on Monday.”
It is easy to feel this history is far behind us. It is not. It is on the red brick facade of Cutler Hall, in the ground under Campus Martius, across the river from the house Todd Burge grew up in.
Starting Friday, it will also be on a stage in Marietta.
One Vote! The Musical runs July 17, 18, 19, 24, 25 and 26 at the Hermann Fine Arts Center on the campus of Marietta College. Friday and Saturday performances are in the evening and Sunday performances are matinees. Seating is general admission and tickets cost $25, available at onevotemusical.com.