deal of dignity and said, with emphasis: "Gentlemen of the Jury!!!" But beyond this it seemed impossible for him to get, until finally, after many repetitions, he said: "Gentlemen of the jury, if you do not decide this case in favor of my client, you will-you will-" ("dampen my aspirations," I whispered in his ear) "You will dampen my aspirations, gentlemen!" When he said this in a commanding tone of voice, I caught up my hat and left the Court House. He soon followed, and I was But badinage aside.

obliged to sue for peace.

We have heard much about the "Western Reserve," its settlement and progress. It is about as good a country as the sun shines upon, but then what of its name? It is, properly speaking, the "Connecticut Western Reserve," and the name originated in this wise:

In 1662 the charter of Charles II granted to the colony of Connecticut "all lands between the parallels of 41 and 42 degrees North latitude, from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean." After American independence was established, a compromise was effected whereby Congress secured to the State of Connecticut 3,800,000 acres of land in the northeastern part of what is now the State of Ohio, and Connecticut relinquished all further claim to the Western territory.

500,000 acres of this land, in the western part, was donated by Connecticut, in 1792, to certain sufferers by fire, in the war of the Revolution. The residue was sold to an association of gentlemen known as the "Connecticut Land Company," who sent out Gen. Moses Cleaveland, in 1796, with a number of practical surveyors to divide it into townships of five miles square. It was this body of men who, in the autumn of 1796, laid out the town of Cleveland and called it by the name of their leader. In February, 1823, when I first attended court in this county, Cleveland had a population of 400 souls. At this time the enumeration in the city runs up to 200,000, and it may not be extravagant to say that the child is already born that may see it. teeming with a population of more than half a million.

In the spring of 1819 I was descending the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati, in a skiff, with some young traveling companions who, like myself, had become tired of the stage coach. It took us some ten days to reach the end of our route, as we could not proceed in the night season, but we became highly interested in the scenery upon the river bank in the day time.

I well recollect our visit to Backus' Island, a little below Marietta, where, in 1800, Harmon Blennerhassett and his accomplished wife had made for themselves a palatial residence which continued to be the abode of peace and happiness until in an evil hour it was entered by Aaron Burr, who, like Satan in the Eden of old, visited this earthly paradise only to deceive and destroy. The place and the parties are made historical by the eloquence of William Wirt at the trial of Burr in Richmond.

At the time of my visit the place was in ruins, but enough remained to enable me to judge of its past splendor and magnificence. The learned Dr. Hildreth, in his "Lives of Early Settlers of Ohio," has given a faithful picture of this "classical retreat," as it stood before the torch of the incendiary was applied, and it is well worthy of examination.

In 1793 John Armstrong lived on the Virginia side of the Ohio river, opposite the upper end of this island of Blennerhas

A party of Indians crossed the Ohio from the mouth of the Little Hocking, and in the night season approached Armstrong's house, killed Mrs. Armstrong and her three youngest children, and carried into captivity three older children, the youngest of whom was Jeremiah, a lad then about eight years old. They were adopted into the Indian nation as their children, and lived for some years at Lower Sandusky, near Fremont. Jerry was afterwards recovered, by an older brother, from the hands of Billy Wyandot, an Indian chief, with whom he lived. When I was first a member of the Ohio Legislature, in the winter of 1839-40, I boarded at the house of this same identical Jeremiah Armstrong, who was, for many years, a well known and highly respected citizen of Columbus.

We have many of us, in our school-boy days, admired the eloquent strains of the youthful declaimer, as he recited the plaintive speech of Logan, the Indian Chief, made before Lord Dunmore, in the war of 1794:

*

"I appeal to any white man to say if he ever entered Logan's cabin hungry and he gave him no meat; if he came naked and cold and I clothed him not. * Col. Cressup, last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not one drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature." Etc., etc.

It is not generally known that the famous speech was read to Governor Dunmore under an oak tree, upon the soil of Ohio, some seven miles from Circleville. In the winter of 1818 I visited Caleb Atwater, at Circleville, and he asserts this fact in his History of Ohio, page 116.

In 1799 the settlement of Deerfield, in Portage county, commenced; Lewis Ely and family moved in in July of that year. On the 7th of November, 1800, the first marriage in the county took place between John Campbell and Sarah Ely. They were joined in wedlock by Capt. Austin, Esq., a Justice of the Peace, of Warren, in Trumbull county. He came through the woods, on foot, a distance of twenty-seven miles, accompanied by a young lawyer of the name of Calvin Pease, who instructed the justice in regard to the formulary, while on the road.

In February, 1819, this same John Campbell, then a State Senator, accompanied me in my journey on horseback, from Columbus to the Western Reserve, on my first visit to this section of the State, and I have ever felt indebted to him for many courtesies. In October, 1821, Calvin Pease, then Chief Justice of Ohio, admitted me to the practice of the law.

But I am transcending my limits, and must make my bow.

RESPONSE BY GEORGE H. ELY, ESQ.

MR. PRESIDENT: The story of the Western Reserve has been often told. Again have its great events and its thrilling scenes been rehearsed by surviving actors, who can say concerning them, "All of which I saw and part of which I was."

This is a theme which will never grow old. To you, at least, venerable fathers and mothers, whose eyes have followed the sun, almost to its setting, and to whom, looking now into the West, the glow of evening brings peace; it contains the fruitage of character and earthly life. The significance of these events and your relations to them will only deepen with the passage of your remaining years.

The settlement and the advancement of the Reserve constitute one of the finest passages of recent American history. Here is a conspicuous instance of the successful transplanting of ideas, principles and habits of a people, and the making of them a positive force in the subjugation of the wilderness, and the rearing of a new community.

This was not done to any large extent by organization and combined effort for the movement of population. There was no exodus from New England for the planting of its counterpart west of the Alleghanies. Individual emigrants with wife and children, joined, perhaps, by a neighbor, took the path through the wilderness to the "Far West," and they gathered here upon the principle of natural selection. It is true that the Reserve attracted settlers also from other sections of the country, but the majority came from New England, and to reach their future home they passed the falls of the Genesee and crossed the garden of the Empire State. It followed that New England ideas and principles had a controlling influence in molding social and political conditions here.

vey

The party sent out by the Connecticut Land Company to surits newly acquired domain, arrived at Conneaut Creek July

4th, 1796. From that point the work was immediately begun, one party running the line of its eastern boundary southward and another going northward. The mouth of the Cuyahoga was laid out, and honored with the name of the leader of the expedition-General Moses Cleaveland.

But the arrival at Conneaut Creek is worthy of mention. General Cleaveland made of this the following record: "On this creek (Conneaut), in New Connecticut land, July 4, 1796, under General Moses Cleaveland, the surveyors and men sent out by the Connecticut Land Company to survey and settle the Connecticut Reserve, were the first English people who took possession of it."

66

He further says: We gave three cheers and christened the place Fort Independence, and after many difficulties, perplexities, and hardships were surmounted, and we were on the good and promised land, felt that a just tribute of respect to the day ought to be paid. There were in all, including women and children, fifty in number. The men under Captain Tinker ranged themselves on the beach and fired a federal salute of fifteen rounds, and then the sixteenth, in honor of New Connecticut; drank several toasts, closed with three cheers, drank several pails of grog, supped and retired in good order.”

Notice in this record the claim to first English occupation, and the loyalty that would not let them forget in the wilderness the birthday of the Republic, and that quaint but honest declaration, that “after several pails of grog, they supped and retired in good order."

The arrival of this party on the shore of Lake Erie, and contemporaneous events, mark an important epoch in the history of the new nation.

During the two and a half centuries previous to this time the continent had been penetrated by Spanish and French explorers from different points on the Atlantic coast. In the south Ponce de Leon and De Soto had sought gold and the "Fountain of Perpetual Youth," and in the north French missionaries and