MR. GEORGE H. FOSTER'S ADDRESS.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am pleased to be here today to meet the Early Settlers' Association. There has been one thought in my mind as I have been sitting here, and it was this: That we are inclined to think that the boys and girls of today would not make quite the Old Settlers that were here before, under the same circumstances. Now, just drop that out of your minds at once. The girls and boys of today would be just as willing to do the same things our fathers and mothers did, if they were put under the same circumstances. You must not forget that we are living under different circumstances. We have advanced, or retrograded, just as the future may determine. We certainly have moved from the positions that they were in, and instead of the population being in the country it is in the city now, in the majority. The large cities are taking the population and the country is being depopulated. It is good that the papers and speakers are saying: “Back to the country, back to the soil." There is much that we can learn from the past, if we were to read the history of ancient Greeks we would find out how much those ancient Greeks before the Christian era were like the Yankees of today. They loved liberty and fought until they drove out all tyrants, and for a long time the people ruled, and we today are trying to get around where the people can again rule absolutely, as they ought to.

I heard with great pleasure the song "Marching through Georgia." I knew there were a great many of the boys here in this audience who had had to do with the war, and I am glad as anybody can be that the lapse of time has cooled all passion. I am glad of that, but after all I cannot help but feel, that the Union boys were fighting for the right, and the other side were fighting for the wrong. I cannot get over it, and I hope history will record it in that way before they get through with it, but they are trying to reverse history.

My father came from Massachusetts and my mother from Connecticut, and while I was born in this county and

have always had it for my home, I have felt that I was connected with the Early Settlers. My father lived to be ninety-one years of age and my mother ninety-two.

I remember seeing my grandfather as he lay in bed, for the last time, with a white cap on his head, and I am glad that I saw him, although I was very young, because he was a captain in the Revolutionary War, and in that way I feel somewhat connected as a soldier of the Revolutionary. I could not have served in the Mexican War, but I know that the soldiers in that war were entitled to as much honor as those in the Revolutionary War. We all fought for that which we thought was the right thing to advance our country.

Now is there anything that we can do to make the young people understand that the principles for which our fathers worked and fought, for which they met in the school houses and on the corners of the streets and discussed, that these principles are lasting and must be sustained, and if we do sustain them we must not let the influx of foreigners or the influence from wealth, or the degradation that comes from too much uppertendum destroy those rights. There ought not to be any caste in the society of this country, but I am afraid there is going to be, and if we ever are destroyed as a union it is because we will permit that thing to be done. The man that is digging on the street is just as good as the man worth a million dollars, he has just as much rights personally as the other man, but I am afraid we do not give it to him.

The President: The next speaker is a gentleman who has lived in Cleveland all his life. He is to speak on "Time's Changes," and that covers a great deal, and he can take it up on land, or on water as he sees fit. I allude to Mr. W. R. Rose, of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who gives you a good many funny things to laugh over in the morning.

MR. W. R. ROSE'S ADDRESS.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am going to take Colonel Hodge up on the latitude he has given me. He says I can speak either on land or water, and I am going to select water. I want to call your attention to a factor in the early history of our city that has been too often overlooked. It is a prime factor. It was a prime factor in the selection of the birth-place of this city of ours. I may even call it the "foster-mother" of Cleveland, or, perhaps, more practically, the "wet nurse." I refer to that tortuous stream known as the Cuyahoga River. There is a river that deserves well of us, a river that we can honor. It is not much to look at, and it is not good to smell, but it has played a very important part in the growth and progress of Cleveland. Other rivers have been honored—the Egyptians prayed to the Nile, the Hindoos sacrificed to the Ganges, the Romans called their river "Father Tiber," and why can we not honor this river of ours? It has been a great responsibility, a great expense, and on that account it should be all the more dear to us.

Our picture of the pioneer is a sturdy fellow carrying an axe, but the pioneer of the Western Reserve carried a paddle, too, and the paddle led him to the mouth of the Cuyahoga.

Let us remember that this river of ours nurtured on its banks, on the east bank, the greatest corporation this world has known, a corporation so great that on several occasions to my knowledge it set the river afire.

I have no doubt that to most of you the old Cuyahoga River recalls interesting memories. In those days boys had to make their own amusements, and the Cuyahoga was one of my play-fellows. I fell into it, I swam in it, I skated on it; it drew me with a peculiar fascination from the school house at times, and I had a feeling of reverence about it, because the first money I ever earned was in driving a neighbor's cow across the Seneca Street Bridge and down onto the flats to what was called Stone's Pastures, and there

I left the cow to her own devices, going after her late in the afternoon. The neighbor said, "Now, don't you run that cow, because she is very likely to fall into the river." That was a form of terror that I couldn't guard against. So I was very careful with the cow. I had no trouble in bringing her away from that pasture, but just as soon as the Seneca Street bridge was crossed that cow ran like a scared thing all the way home, and when we got there, the neighbor said, "Now, you have been running that cow, and it's a wonder she didn't fall into the river."

Possibly you all have memories about this old river. Many of you have read, no doubt "The Man Who Laughs," by Victor Hugo. That was a story of a man's fight against the sea. And here on the Western Reserve we have had a fight almost as romantic, at times as dramatic, a far longer fight of man against this water way. It was necessary to us; we have been fighting over it now for more than 100 years, and the fight is still going on.

When Moses Cleaveland came here he paddled through the old river bed entrance; probably the water was high, or he wouldn't have been able to get his flat bottom boat through. Then he struck across diagonally to the nearest solid ground he could see, that was somewhere near the foot of Light House Street here, and that is where he ascended. Out of these little things does fate spin her web. That sand bar was a menace to navigation, such as it was, for more than a generation, and in 1808 the first vessel constructed in Cleveland was pushed into the river, but how it ever got out the record does not state.

A few years later Levi Johnson built a schooner that was said to have been of sixty tons. He built it up here on Huron Road not far from Ontario Street, and tradition tells us it took twelve yoke of oxen to draw it down to the river. It seems almost impossible at that time to believe that a schooner of sixty tons could get out of the river, unless the water was very high.

A man who came here in 1819 says that the bar was such a menace to navigation that it sometimes took those small vessels two days to get out into the lake or from the lake into the actual river. They would warp them along, putting anchors some distance ahead and winding up cables and windlasses and drawing the vessels along, or they would put cables around trees on the shore and drag the vessels over on their beam ends and slide them along.

Of course, that couldn't last. Navigation became more of an actual fact. Along in 1817 a handful of citizens got together and made up their minds that Congress must be