The chairman then introduced Hon. Charles Tubbs, of Osceola, Tioga County, who delivered the following historical address:
There is a singular fascination about those employments of the mind in which we seek to recall and reconstruct the past; whether by the play of imagination, the effort of memory, or the wider sweep and severer exercise of thought in gathering and comparing testimony concerning past events. The charm is one that many feel most powerfully, and yield to most readily, when imagination leads the way and the poet or the novelist evokes the semblance of things that have been.
It is a charm acknowledged by others to whom verse and story have little attraction, yet those sober thoughts recur, with an interest that grows stronger as years go by, to the olden time of which they have heard, and of which their fathers have told them. Undoubtedly the chief satisfaction of the mind in dealing with the past is found in those labors by which the facts of the past are ascertained. Difficult, baffling, often disappointing, this study is one of which we never weary.
To aid us in our endeavor to live over the past, and to reproduce it for others — to tempt us and to help us on, there are the immutable things of nature: the scenery of the drama of human life that has been acted beneath these arching skies; the hills, the streams, the fields, the paths that were traced through the wilderness in the early settlement and have been trodden these hundred years; the sites, if not the dwellings, where the fathers lived. Through all these changes, man himself remains greatly the same. The joys, the troubles, the toils, the sufferings that break up this life of ours have been known from age to age. If change there be to record, it is a change for the better. On the whole there is progress. It is with this thought deeply impressed upon the mind, that we meet to celebrate to-day the completion of one hundred years of the corporate existence of Lycoming County.
A bird's-eye view of this vast tract of some twelve thousand square miles would disclose a table-land rising to an elevation of twenty-six hundred feet above the level of the sea in the county of Potter, gradually sloping down the valley of the Allegheny on the northern and western border and to the valley of the Susquehanna on the east and south. This immense plateau would be seen to be gashed and seamed all over its rugged surface by the tributaries of these mighty rivers.
*South of the line of the state of New York the custom is to spell the word "Allegheny;" north of the line, "Allegany." Why this custom should exist does not seem clear, as "Allegany" is certainly preferable. In obedience, however, to the Pennsylvania custom, that method of spelling has been followed. — Ed.
This is the theatre where our history is to be enacted.
Horatio Seymour, Governor of New York, standing upon the field of Saratoga at the centennial anniversary of the battle, said: "Our mountains and rivers have been the cause of so many of the great facts in the history of this country; they are so closely identified with its social and political affairs, that they seem to become sentient actors in its events. We are compelled to speak of their bearings upon the causes of war, of commerce and civilization." The location of hill and valley has tended to produce historic events at Saratoga. Sometimes they have a contrary effect. The location of hill and valley has tended to carry away historic events from the counties formed from Lycoming in the north and west. The natural thoroughfares by land and water lie to the north and south and to the east and west of our location. Our mountains have held off and pushed away, both in peace and war, the events which men call historic. When the French, in the consummation of a grand design, bisected this continent with their line of forts reaching from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, they built Presque Isle, LeBoeuf, Machault, just outside our boundary line upon the west. When the Moravians made their exodus from Wyalusing, in 1772, of which Bishop Ettewein has left such an interesting record, instead of going due west through Tioga, Potter, McKean and Warren to their destination, they made a detour and ascended the West Branch of the Susquehanna and its southern affluents.
When Colonel Thomas Hartley wished to punish the savages after the massacre at Wyoming, in 1778, he led his expedition along Lycoming Creek to the eastward of us. When General John Sullivan, in 1779, fought the battle of Newtown* and carried devastation into the heart of the Indian country, he passed to the northward of us. When Captain McDonald and old Hiokoto led their hordes of combined Seneca Indians, British soldiers and Tory renegades to the destruction of Fort Freeland, in 1779, it was down the Loyalsock and across the territory of Mother Lycoming, east and south of us that they took their way. When a great treaty is to be held in 1790 the trend of the mountain and the current of the rivers carry the high contracting parties to the east of us to Tioga Point. It. is not strange, then, in this view of the case, that the earliest events of which we have record, in the territory of which we write, transpired along that open, accessible, magnificent water-way known in our early annals as the Ohio River, but now laid down on all the maps as the Allegheny. Our drama opens at a point the most remote of any within our bounds from the Atlantic coast. It not only opens there, but for a period of fifty years all we have to record is what happened along the Beautiful River.
THE INDIANS.
By diligent search we find we are entitled to record one battle* with the Indians as having taken place upon our territory — in the extreme south-west corner of *Near what is now known as the city of Elmira. — Ed.
What is known as the "battle of Muncy Hills," fought in September 1763, on what afterwards became the line of the county, and described in Vol. 11, pp. 172-191, of Loudon's Indian Narratives, might also be included. The white party consisted of about one hundred men on their way to the Great Island to destroy an Indian town. In the engagement the whites had two men killed and four wounded, two of which died during the night. Snake, an Indian captain, was also killed, which caused the Indians to disperse. — Ed.
Lycoming, as constituted in 1795, in the village of Kittanning. It was an Indian village of some thirty or forty houses, situated on the eastern bank of the Allegheny River. It was the stronghold of Captain Jacobs and Shingas, some of the most active Indian chiefs, and the point from which they distributed their war parties along the frontier. The Indians were well supplied with the munitions of war by the French and were gathering a force to attack Fort Shirley. In September, 1756, Colonel John Armstrong, with the active co-operation of the Provincial government, raised an army of about three hundred men, who descended upon the town and destroyed it. The Indians fought with great resolution, refusing to surrender when asked to do so. The fire of the Provincial troops failed to drive them out of their homes, and as their sheltered position allowed them to do great execution upon their assailants, recourse was had to burning their buildings. This had the effect to explode the kegs of powder of which they boasted they had enough stored away to supply their needs for ten years. Some of the enemy fled to the river and were either killed in the water or drowned. The total loss of the enemy was about forty lives, some ammunition and other valuable supplies. Many prisoners were released from captivity. It was considered a great victory and the corporation of the city of Philadelphia struck a medal in commemoration of it, and in honor of Col. John Armstrong. It was a severe stroke on the savages. Such of them as were of Kittanning, refused to settle again on the east side of the river, as they feared that in their absence on war parties their wigwams might be reduced to ashes.
In 1779 Col. Daniel Brodhead lead an army of six hundred men, rank and file, up the Allegheny River. The object of this expedition was to attack the Indians in the western part of their dominion at the same time that General Sullivan assailed them in the east. Colonel Brodhead reported to General Washington that he landed on the east side of the Allegheny River at Mahoning, near which he dispersed a band of forty Indians who were descending the river in canoes, killing many. Above the month of the Conewango Creek he destroyed five hundred acres of corn and eight Indian villages. He also obtained much plunder. The Indians fled at his approach.
Aside from these two encounters with the savages, our Indian history is soon recited. It. does not figure to any great extent in the colonial records, and there is no long correspondence to sift and reduce to reasonable limits.
Our territory in the historic period was entirely under the sway of the chiefs of the Iroquois or Six Nations and in that part of their domain that was dominated by the warriors of the wily Senecas. The Senecas were by far the most numerous and powerful of these confederated savages. Among them, here and there, were set down tribes of Monsey, Shawanese, Wyandot and other subject peoples who were shifted about from place to place to suit the whim, the caprice or the policy of their imperious masters. Northern Pennsylvania and the region of the Allegheny was a hunting ground into which the Senecas descended from the seat of their power upon the Genesee. There were their castles, and there they kindled their council fires. Within our borders there is no record nor tradition of the existence of large villages, extensive settlements or dense population. In the county of Tioga no village site is known by the name given it by the Indians. There is slight evidence of conflicts among themselves, and aside from the fight at Kittanning and near Mahoning the battles for supremacy between them and the white men took place at Wyoming, at Newtown, at Fort Freeland, in the great valleys just outside of our territorial limits.
By the treaty made at Fort Stanwix in October, 1784, the Indian title to North-western Pennsylvania was extinguished, but when the time came for the former lords of the soil to abandon their hunting grounds they did it with great reluctance. Outrages and murders were committed along the border; there was a state of unrest among the savages, and of apprehension on the part of their white neighbors.
Further negotiations ensued at Fort Mcintosh and at Tioga Point; Fort Franklin was kept garrisoned; an army was in the field under Harmar and St. Clair and it was not until after the decisive victories won by General Wayne, in 1794, that a sense of security settled down upon the frontier along tho Allegheny. Our section of the state was the last to which the Indian title was acquired. In March, 1789, however, our Legislature ceded back a tract of six hundred and forty acres of land upon the Allegheny called Jen-ne-sa-da-ga to the Seneca chief, Cornplanter, upon which he spent the remainder of his life. He died in 1836. This tract of land is still held in fee by the descendants of Cornplanter who reside upon it. We thus have in Warren County, inside the limits of ancient Lycoming, the only tract of land in the state of Pennsylvania where the Indian tribal relation exists to-day.
The careful student of our annals will note the infrequent use of Indian names as applied to streams, mountains or localities. Of the counties formed from Lycoming, only Tioga has a name of Indian origin, and that did not originally belong to the locality. The people of the place designated "Tioga" by the Indians discarded it for the classic name of "Athens." Of the parts of the counties formed from Lycoming, only Venango has a name of Indian origin, and we rejoice to say it honestly belongs to that locality. All honor to Venango. How she escaped being called Rome or Utica it is hard to understand. We have, however, all over this region a thin sprinkling of beautiful and appropriate Indian names. Among them we might mention Cowanesque, Oswayo, Honeoye, Conewango, Kin zua, Tionesta, Kittanning, Mahoning, Punxsutawney, Daguscahonda, Moshannon and Sinnelmahoning.
In Tioga County we have discarded the picturesque appellation "Tiadaghton" for the prosaic term Pine Creek, and in another section of ancient Lycoming "Chinklacanioose" has been set aside for the very common designation of the Clearfield. These names for the most part apply to streams. They will go on through the ages reminding those who inhabit here, by their rugged and characteristic accents, of the vanished race of whom they are now the only permanent remaining memorials. "Their name is on our waters, we may not wash it out."
EXPLORERS.
When the white man first set foot within this territory is a subject of some uncertainty. Most likely one of those Jesuit missionaries who have left records of their journeying southward from Canada or northern New York, was our first European visitor. In Sagard's History of Canada (1632) there is a letter written by Joseph de la Roche D'Allion, a Franciscan missionary, dated July 18, 1629, in which he tells of crossing the Niagara River and traveling south until he came to a section of the country "where the Indians had a good kind of oil."
Charlevois, in the journals of his voyage and travels, under date of May 21, 1721, records that M. de Joncaire had assured him that he "had seen a fountain that tasted like oil." Who can doubt that these Frenchmen had visited our oil regions? At a later day we can leave inference and state facts. Among the first veritable explorers were those who took possession of the country on behalf of France. The French did not plant a settlement or a colony on the Allegheny; they took a formal possession of the country.
They based their claim on the original discoveries of Marquette and LaSalle and upon the construction they gave to the treaties of Ryswick, Utrecht and Aix-laChapelle. Early in the eighteenth century, Bancroft tells us that "not a fountain bubbled on the west of the Allegheny, but was claimed as belonging to the French Empire," and this claim was extended until it reached the Allegheny Mountains. To make proclamation of this claim Gallisoniere, Governor of Canada sent M. de Celeron, in command of three hundred French soldiers, Canadians and Indians, on an expedition down the Allegheny River in the year 1749. They entered the river by way of Conewango Creek, thus passing over the water-way which formed the western boundary of ancient Lycoming. On the western bank of the river this expedition halted and with stately ceremony buried a leaden plate. There was an inscription upon it to this effect — "Buried this plate at the confluence of the Tora-da-koin, this 29th day of July, 1749, near the river Ohio, otherwise Beautiful River, as a monument of renewal of possession." Then they passed on and performed the same function at other points. The French did not limit their acts of possession to this stately ceremony. In 1753, Captain Joncaire built Fort Machault at Franklin, where they had buried the leaden plate, and it was occupied by a garrison of French sol diers. At times as many as a thousand men composed the garrison. It was at this fort, in 1753, that Lieutenant George Washington, aged twenty-one, in the service of Governor Robert Dinwiddie, of Virginia, visited Captain Joncaire to inquire into the designs of the French upon the Allegheny. All of the territory of which I write along the Allegheny River was within the claim of the French. The great water-way that led into it, and gave access to it, lay under the guns of Fort Machault. In July, 1759, the fort was evacuated, and thus at the end of ten years from the burial of the leaden plate the French corps of observation departed.
His route into the country was along the Chemung and Canisteo Rivers and from thence to the Allegheny, down which he floated to his destination. He thus describes the natives: "I have never found such heathen in any other part of the Indian country; here Satan has his stronghold, here he sits on his throne, here he is worshiped by true savages and carries on his work in the hearts of the children of darkness." He kept a journal of his travels in these wilds and it is in the archives of the Moravian Church at Bethlehem. It is of great interest. It records the descriptions, impressions and experiences of a first explorer in a new country. It is all written out for our delight and information. His mission was broken up by the Senecas, who ordered the Monseys to leave that locality in 1769.
The next explorers who have left any record of their journey were the commissioners who surveyed the boundary line between the state of Pennsylvania and New York in 1787. Andrew Ellicott and Andrew Porter were the Pennsylvania commissioners. They were accompanied by a large party of helpers. Following the course pointed out by their compass they got away from the streams and into the mountains. The map they made of the boundary line gave important knowledge of the new and hitherto unknown country. Aside from the map there is scanty knowledge of what befell them by the way. Ellicott wrote a few short letters to the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, from which we quote:
"The Seneca chiefs who attended on behalf of their nation will expect two rifled guns. We arrived at the Cawwanishee Flats (Lawrenceville, Tioga County,) on the 11th day of June, 1787, where the 90th mile stone was set up last season. We sent our instruments up the Thyesa (Cowanesque) in canoes about ten miles; our water carriage then failed; we had recourse to our pack horses, but the ruggedness of the country at the heads of the Susquehanna, Geneseeo and Allegheny Eivers soon killed and rendered useless about two-thirds. We were ordered by the Indians to discontinue the line until after a treaty should be held.
We met them at the time and place appointed, explained the nature of the business we were about and were finally permitted to proceed.'' Andrew Ellicott offered to sell to the state of Pennsylvania "such observations as we made on the soil and natural history of the country through which we passed for the sum of £150, hard money." But we regret to say the state did not make the purchase and the manuscript has since been destroyed.
The next explorers of our territory came in 1790. They were Samuel Maclay, Timothy Matlack and John Adlum. They were members of a commission appointed by the state to survey the West Branch of the Susquehanna, the Sinnemahoning, the Allegheny and other rivers for the purpose of ascertaining if connections could be opened by roads or canals with Lake Erie for the purpose of drawing trade to Philadelphia. These men spent the summer of 1790 in the very heart of our territory. Samuel Maclay kept a daily journal of the incidents of all kinds that befell the commissioners in the prosecution of their duties. This delightful journal was brought to light, annotated and published, after it had laid dormant for an hundred years, by that most indefatigable local historian, John F. Meginness. These commissioners passed the last habitation of a white man at the mouth of the Sinnemahoning, but did not encounter any Indians until they were near where the Allegheny crosses the state line. There they found the Cornplanter and his tribe. In surveying these water-Mays and portages they describe for the first time the interior of this great tract of wild and rugged country, about the outer edge of which adventurous explorers had been so long traveling. With their report the work of exploration was finished.
LAND TITLES.
It would seem at. this time that the country was ripe for settlement. The forests had been explored, the Indians disposed of. What was the difficulty now? The difficulty now was to know, after the extinction of the Indian title, what white men had the right to govern the territory and dispose of the lands. No considerable number of intended settlers will remove into a new country to build up homes, if there is any question as to the title of the lands. In this case there was a controversy. Two sets of white men claimed the lands.
This controversy between these two sets of men was an ancient one and during a period of forty years the issue was fought out on the battle field, in the courts, in the Legislature and before a commission appointed by Congress. In the phrase of McMaster — "Heads were bruised, bones broken, crops destroyed, settlements plundered and even lives lost and the peace of the Susquehanna Valley was destroyed by a feud worthy of the middle ages."
As this controversy retarded the settlement and development of our section of ancient Lycoming for several years, we will briefly state the grounds of it: In 1620 King James the First of England granted a charter to the Plymouth Company for the ruling and governing of New England in America. This charter covered North America from the fortieth to the forty sixth degree of north latitude and from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. The Plymouth Company proceeded to sub-divide its territory. In 1631 it granted a charter to the Connecticut colony which practically covered the space between the forty-first and forty-second parallels of north latitude and extended west to the Pacific Ocean. In its westward reach this grant included ancient Lycoming. In 1662 King Charles the Second gave a new charter to Connecticut, confirming the act of the Plymouth Company.
Nineteen years later, in 1681, this same monarch, in the grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn, included a portion of the same territory already given to Connecticut. It also contained our original county of Lycoming. The Connecticut claimants mapped out what is now the counties of Tioga, Potter and McKean as far west as the Tuna Valley, in connection with vast tracts of land south of them, into townships five miles square, designated each by a name, opened a land office and offered them for sale at a low price. Many of these townships were located and surveyed by the purchasers and some of them occupied.
My own ancestors purchased land in Tioga County under a Connecticut title. The place where I reside was called "Exchange" [*Now known as the pretty little village of Osceola.] on the Connecticut map. The Connecticut claimants had extinguished the Indian title to these lands, as they maintained, by a treaty made with the Six Nations at Albany in 1754. They were active in selling their lands from the close of the Revolutionary war until 1802.
At the same time owners of Pennsylvania titles were active in locating land warrants upon the same lands and having their titles recorded in the land office at Philadelphia. The conclusion of the whole matter was, that Pennsylvania enacted a law, April 6th, 1802, of the most severe and drastic character and enforced it with great rigor. By it she cut up by the roots the title of Connecticut claimants in this section of the state.
Rev. David Craft, in discussing this subject in his history of Bradford County, says: "Want of support, the increasing number who were securing Pennsylvania titles, defection in their own ranks and the growing power of the state, finally induced the Connecticut claimants either to submit to the laws regulating titles or leave the state." Thus this question was disposed of and out of the way. During its pendency nearly all of the lands in the counties formed from Lycoming were purchased largely by Philadelphia capitalists and speculators from all quarters. Some of these capitalists and speculators were: James Strawbridge, William Bingham, John Keating, Jacob Ridgway, Samuel Fox, James Trimble, B. B. Cooper, The Holland Company, The United States Land Company and others.
Now that they owned these lands, and that their titles were confirmed, they wished to dispose of them at a profit. They wished to induce large and extensive settlements. In order to do this it was necessary that the Indian trails through the forests, and the paths of the scout, the hunter and the trapper, should be replaced by some sort of roads.
HIGHWAYS.
The Legislature was besieged to aid in this work and at a very early day laws were enacted creating state roads. Sometimes it happened there was a very close connection between the land owner and the legislator, as witness the following abstract from the Acts of Assembly approved by Thomas Mifflin, Governor, April 10, 1702: "Be it enacted — That the Governor is hereby empowered to appoint commissioners for the purpose of laying out a road from Loyalsock Creek on the West Branch of the Susquehanna to the Towanisco (Cowanes que) Branch of Tioga and to extend up to the one hundred and nine mile stone."
(Signed.) William Bingham,
Speaker, H. R.
The Speaker's signature suggests practical politics.
William Wilson, Esq., was one of the viewers and Samuel Scott was the surveyor. It was for the most part on the surveyed and marked out site of this road that the famous Williamson road was built in the fall of 1792 — at least that part of it which runs over the Laurel Mountains and to the "Towanisco (Cowanesque) Branch of Tioga." The work of constructing the road was done by a party of Germans, under the command of Benjamin Patterson. The Germans were about 200 in number, men, women and children, whom Patter son was conducting to the lands which afterwards be came the Pulteney estate in the state of New York. On the "Draught" of this road, made by William Gray, in 1792, and on file in the office of the Secretary of Internal Affairs, at Harrisburg, a "settlement" is noted near the site of Tioga, "Baker's house," near the site of Lawrenceville and "James Strawbridge Improvement," at the site of Academy Corners, in Tioga County.
April 8, 1799, another state road was authorized from Newberry to the one hundred and nine mile stone by way of Morris' Mills and Strawbridge's Marsh. Wellsboro is situated near the aforesaid Marsh and the road passed through the site upon which it was afterwards built. This road came up Pine Creek and the Stony Fork.
In 1798 Francis King, agent of John Keating, opened a road from Jersey Shore by way of Port Allegany to Ceres in McKean County. Then there was the
Boone road from the West Branch into the heart of Potter County. In the year 1806 another state road was ordered to be laid out from the Moosic Mountain westward through the counties of Tioga,Potter and McKean.
This road was built mainly by the aid rendered by John Keating. It was nearly parallel with the state line and about twenty miles distant therefrom. Where this road crossed the Allegheny River, in the county of Potter, a town was laid out in 1807 and named Coudersport, in honor of Samuel Coudere, an European friend of John Keating. Where this road crosses the Potato Creek, in the county of McKean, a village site was laid out in 1807 and named Smethport, in honor of Theodore Smethe, an European friend of John Keating, the owner of the land.
FIRST SETTLERS.
They came into the country over these roads. They were mainly from the New England States. In these states the soil is sterile and the climate severe. After the Revolutionary war there was a breaking up of the old conditions which had obtained during colonial times. The young men who had seen service in the army broke away from the slow and humdrum succession of events which had formed the environment of their forefathers. A great deal was said about western lands, fertile lands and broader and better opportunities to be had in Northern Pennsylvania and the Genesee country, which we might call the first installment of the Great West. In those days of few newspapers and no telegraphs, the wrangle and fight over the title had been a great advertisement. Young, hardy, active, adventurous spirits were ready to take a hand in the game of subduing Indians, fighting the Pennamites and winning a home. When the fight with the Pennamites went against them, most of them remained and established the home. That accounts for the presence of so many of us (their descendants) here to-day.
Another element of our population came from the lower counties of the Commonwealth. As before stated, our Philadelphia land owners had seen to it that roads were constructed, having a trend from south to north. They ran up the Lycoming, up Pine Creek, up the Sinnemahoning, up the Driftwood Branch. Over them came from the southward now and then a Quaker, a few Scotch-Irish and many colonies of sturdy Germans.
1795. Over all of these heterogeneous peoples, gathered on the verge of the wilderness or within its gloomy depths, Mother Lycoming stretched her protecting arms. Population increased, and the work of development went on. The time for separation had come.
Events had moved with amazing rapidity.
1800. Centre, Armstrong, Venango and Warren are each bidden to go forth free from future maternal tutelage.
1803. Indiana receives her portion and enters upon her own career.
1804. Tioga, Potter, McKean, Jefferson and Clear field are each given their endowments and gently pushed from under the home roof. One by one thereafter go out the various descendants, until the eighteen, in their differing degrees of relationship, have departed.
To set forth in detail, or even in general terms, the life history of each is beyond the limit of this paper.
At the hundredth anniversary of the corporate life of Mother Lycoming, they come in one great sisterhood, and lay at her feet most grateful acknowledgment for the wealth with which she endowed them. For did she not bestow upon them lands galore? And what of those lands? There are hillsides and mountain slopes. There are high lying, alluvial valleys.
Interwoven among these are rushing torrents, stately streams, and slow-moving, majestic rivers. At another glance we see lofty forests of white pine trees, and not one of the sisterhood but received a generous share. It took seventy years of the century now ended to hew down these forests of pine, to dress them into slender spars, squared timber, logs and boards; to construct them into rafts and float them down the streams and rivers to advantageous markets. Still another glance reveals such forests of dark and gloomy hemlocks as existed nowhere else in the United States, and to each of the sisterhood a large tract was given.
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For the past forty years an army of lumbermen have laid siege to these monarchs of the forest. They have stripped them of their bark to be consumed on our soil in the largest tanneries in the world. Many miles of their prostrate forms are afloat in the waters that border your capital city. No Corsair that sailed the Spanish Main ever made port with such shiploads of booty as year by year have come back in honest payment for these timber trees of hemlock and pine.
These gifts were upon the surface — visible, apparent, and were impartially distributed. But others were to be had for the finding. Stored away from sight in the bowels of the earth, but within reach of pick and shovel, were millions of tons of bituminous coal. It has been brought forth as needed, from these inexhaustible treasure houses, to furnish heat for the world.
But stranger and more surprising gifts were in store for those sisters who took their portion in those lands that lie near, or border, the banks of the Beautiful River. Stored away in the bowels of the earth, beyond the reach of the pick and shovel, but obtained with derrick and drill, lie those mysterious fountains of mineral oil that have enriched their possessors "beyond the dreams of avarice."
Your descendants gather here to-day under the ancestral roof tree. They are confident of parental commendation for the part taken by them in the war for the Union, for the fact that when armed rebellion raised its bloody hands against the life of the Republic, your descendants sent forth their hardy sons in one generous, continuous stream, and where there was danger to be met, suffering to be endured, or glory to be won, they were among the foremost. Stalwart blows they dealt and their blood has enriched, and their bones whitened, ever} battle field.
Your descendants gathered here are confident of maternal commendation for such success as they have attained in the commercial and business world — for the railroads they have built, the telegraph and telephone lines they have constructed, the religious, charitable and educational institutions they have fostered and maintained.
With such a record in the past, confidently they go forward, to meet the duties, labors and responsibilities of the future."
At the conclusion of the address the Turn Verein sang a German selection entitled "Gott Gruesze Dich," which was followed by the benediction by Rev. Elliott C Armstrong.
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