Hon. Emerson Collins followed the reading of the Ode with the following eloquent address:
APOSTROPHE TO OUR PROGRESS.
We have this day witnessed the culmination of an event that will never fade from the annals of our county. We have all been participants or spectators on similar occasions held in commemoration of some landmark in the history of state or nation. To-day we have crowned a culminating series of memorial services celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the organization of this civil division known as Lycoming County.
The American people have been passing through a most remarkable and, in some respects, unique season of centenary celebrations. The last quarter of a century has been eventful with the observance of anniversaries of great days in the life of nation, state, city or county. That luminous and never fading epoch of deeds and days of the Revolutionary era, ending in acknowledged and since unbroken independence of our land, has been fitly celebrated by a grateful posterity, enjoying the blessings of civil liberty. The establishment of the Federal Union upon the unshaken rock of the National Constitution and the successful inauguration of the first administration thereunder have been duly observed. It is indeed a characteristic spirit of this generation to revere and recall the great landmarks of the past, to dwell upon the trials of the founding, thereby to add triumph to the results thereof.
It is a significant and hopeful phenomenon. A people once dulled to the glories of the by-gone times, in whom there thrills no feeling of exultation in the contemplation of the growth of their industrial interests and institutions, in whom there has ceased to pulsate a reverence for the heroes who laid the foundations upon which the splendid superstructure has been reared, is a people already afflicted with the dry rot of decay. A due respect, regard and admiration for the past are among the sure harbingers and steady inspirations for stronger effort and nobler achievement in the future. It is well, then, that the patriotic citizens of Lycoming, joined by the no less patriotic citizens of the daughter counties, should by civic and military demonstration, by stately parade, by speech and by song, by a display of the arts and products of the present and by a collection and exhibition with tender care of the cherished relics and mementoes that have come down to us from the classic days of old, seek to do honor and reverence and fitting justice to the founding and organization of this noble county of ours.
I am glad, too, that this time has been chosen for this centennial. Our pride and rejoicing in our county's growth and greatness can on this day swell the pride and rejoicing we feel in the growth and greatness of our whole common country. What people in all the sweep of the ages have been so abundantly justified in making holiday or any national day as the American people? Our occasion for thanksgiving and jubilation measured by any standard, is well-nigh boundless. Under the aegis of constitutional liberty our development has outrun all precedent, and outmatched all competitors. Mulhall, the great English statistician, in a recent number of a leading periodical demonstrates that our wealth and material position are unequaled, and that the physical and intellectual force of the United States at this hour surpasses that of any other nation, ancient or modern.
But America is not only great in those matters susceptible of being marshaled in the cold columns of the statistician's tables. She is supremely great as well in all the commanding qualities which go to make a state. She has not only reared mighty cities, reclaimed vast wildernesses to the uses of human habitation and enjoyment, spread civilization throughout a continent, but she has developed those graces, virtues and qualities in her sons and daughters that are every where held honorable among men. Commercial sordidness and calculating materialism have not crushed patriotism; throughout all the upbuilding of our industrial empire the spirit of enlightened philanthropy has held its enabling sway. America is not only great in her farms and factories, in her cities and highways of steel, but she is great in her civil and religious institutions, great in her educational establishments, great in her charities, great in her heroes, great in her history, ennobled with lofty deeds and redolent with freedom and great in that dominating, imperial, patriotic, humane spirit that pervades the millions gathered beneath her emblem. And that spirit will survive:.
These mighty evidences of industrial greatness that cover the lands may crumble and our throbbing cities become ivy mantled ruins, yet that spirit that nerved the ragged sentinel at Valley Forge as he kept watch for liberty, that gathered the thirteen feeble and jealous states into one indissoluble Union, that trod the slippery deck of Old Ironsides, and in the flash of her broadsides made the flag the protector of what it covered, that declared that the Father of Waters from source to Gulf must run through a land acknowledging but one sovereignty, that pushed our frontier from the Alleghenies across the Mississippi and over the Rockies to the Golden Gate opening to the wealth of the Orient, that from '61-'65 put two millions of men under arms and filled three hundred thousand martyr graves for a Union whose perpetuity meant a continental peace, and in and through it all made good the solemn promise of the declaration that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, is a spirit that from these western shores has been spreading lo these hundred years, throughout the earth and will never die.
America is great in individuals as in mass. What nation has given the world a more radiant galaxy of rulers or chief magistrates than Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln! statesmen of profounder thought than Hamilton and Webster; a jurist whose luminous decisions have more surely lighted the pathway of national life than John Marshall; soldiers who have served the just purpose of their calling with more unselfish devotion than Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Meade, Thomas and Hancock; inventors who have lifted and lightened the burden of labor or annihilated space with more subtle genius than Fulton, Whitney, Morse, McCormick, Howe and Edison; divines, teachers, reformers and philanthropists who have more richly contributed in this century of light and knowledge to emancipate man from the thraldom of superstition, ignorance and wrong, and let in the inspiring sunshine of truth and right, than a score of giant figures who have adorned the American pulpit, rostrum, university and editorial chair? Upon what battle field of the world has deathless heroism shone with a steadier lustre than on the fields made immortal by American valor from Bunker Hill to Gettysburg, from Yorktown to Appomattox?
To-day, standing as we do on the threshold of a new century for our county, we can rejoice in the fact that Lycoming has done her part and contributed her full ratio in the grand total of our Republic's matchless growth. She has not fallen behind in the race. Her growth in population in its increase of more than twenty-fold has been commensurate with the general growth. In wealth and all that makes a community happy, respected, progressive and prosperous she has kept step with the pace and march of the nation. Her citizens have been called to high places in the service of state and nation. In every crisis her sons have gone forth to battle for the principles and preservation of our government. Dauiel Webster in that eloquent apostrophe to Massachusetts proclaimed that the bones of her sons fallen in the cause of freedom lay scattered from New England to Georgia. So we can boast that the graves of Lycoming's soldiers who dedicated their lives to the cause of Independence, national honor and the perpetuity of the Union are found from Canada to the Gulf. She has not only given her sons to stand in the "ranks of battle's magnificently stern array," but they have gone forth from her hills and valleys to help conquer in other places the resources of nature and subdue them to the service of humanity. Natives or descendants of natives of old Lycoming reside in all those thriving commonwealths which from Pennsylvania's border stretch westward to the Pacific. They have added their toil, their craft, their heart, their brain, their manhood and womanhood to the gigantic task which has made the uncultivated western wilderness and plains of the recent past the seat of opulent and populous states. And yet, with all her generous contributions of men and treasure in every just cause of peace or war, she rejoices to-day in her own present strength and prosperity, in her fertile acres and busy factories, in the happiness, well-being and intelligence of her citizens.
My fellow citizens, when we contemplate the beneficient results that have attended the establishment of this government, founded upon the sovereignty of the people, when we contemplate the stability of and security afforded by that government — its regard for every right, and its conservation of every just interest to a degree unknown in other lands of any time, let us firmly resolve to resist hasty innovations and hazardous experiments. Let us hold fast to the sacred heritage transmitted to us, which has yielded results so bountiful, and pass it onward in unsullied glory and integrity. Let our progressiveness be unmixed with iconoclasm. Let us in future, as in the past, tenaciously and conservatively cling to the tried and the known until abundantly and soberly convinced that change in our government or social structure means improvement. It is well to thus celebrate our county's organization and make holiday on this, the natal day of Independence; but let us not forget that we best honor and revere the brave and sagacious men who laid the broad foundations of our greatness when we take up the great work which they so nobly began or gloriously advanced and do in our day and generation that which will continue to make this land, under the newer conditions and varying changes that relentless time ever brings, all that their devotion and heroism so richly deserved.
Note - The photos in this post are of the buildings that are pictured in the 1895 Centennial Report Book.
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