Early Settlers' Association.

JULY 21, 1900.

The annual meeting of the Early Settlers' Association of Cuyahoga County was held at Association Hall, July 21st, 1900.

The meeting was called to order by the President, Hon. Edwin T. Hamilton.

The chaplain, Rev. J. D. Jones, offered the following prayer:

OPENING PRAYER BY CHAPLAIN JONES.

Our heavenly Father, we come before Thee in the name of Thy Blessed Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. We come to thank Thee for Thy blessings and mercies as we have been permitted to enjoy them all the days of our lives. We thank Thee for what the Gospel of thy Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, has been to the Western Reserve and the State of Ohio, and to our land and to the world. We thank Thee for the precepts and examples that have been set to us by the aged people who are assembled here today and by those that have already gone before. We ask Thee today, O God, that Thou wilt grant a special blessing to us Thy children. We pray Thee that we may be led by Thy spirit into the paths of love and peace and service in the name of Jesus Christ. We pray Thee for a blessing upon our organization, the Early Settlers of the Western Reserve. We pray Thee that Thou wilt grant that our last days may be our best days.

Some of this company during the past year have been bereaved of their companions and are still mourning and sorrowing because of those Thou hast called to Thyself. We pray Thee that Thou wilt comfort them and sustain them; that Thou wilt make them know that the arms of Thy loving grace and power are about them. We ask Thee for a special blessing upon any who at this time are afflicted and sorrowing. Some may be

upon beds of pain; some of our members may be very near to the dark valley of the shadow of death. We pray that Thou will be with them, that Thou wilt comfort them, and that Thy holy spirit will be in their hearts.

We ask Thy blessing upon all the services of this day, and grant that we may so live in this life that we shall meet again in a better world saved, redeemed, blessed and comforted by the presence of Thy Son.

Hear us in our petitions. We ask the pardon of every sin, and grace for every trial, in the name of Jesus Christ, Thy beloved Son, Amen.

The Odeon Quartet then sang "Auld Lang Syne."

President Hamilton then delivered his annual address, as

follows:

ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT HAMILTON.

My Friends: Today we have again met to hold the annual reunion of the Old Settlers' Association of this county. In honor of the day on which Moses Cleveland and his party first landed here, the 22nd of the present month is the day set apart for our regular annual meeting; but we meet today, the 21st, because tomorrow is the Sabbath. This year is also the 21st in the life of this Association; but while the Society has thus attained its majority in years, yet in its membership it is fast losing its more immediate touch and relationship with the earlier settlements made here. No man or woman now survives whose eyes beheld the original and untouched grandeur of our native forests, and most of the generation next removed from the pioneers of 1796 have passed away, and it is only but very few who yet remain to tell us from their personal observation of the life and times of this locality from 1820 to 1840. Before that time tradition and history has already come to be our only guide.

I, therefore, especially congratulate you that today from this platform we shall have presented to us by some of our eldest members a pen and word picture of our city and state as they

appeared to their actual vision and experience, at periods so remote as to be beyond the recollection of most of us; and we shall thus be able to preserve in our annals to ourselves and the future, many local facts of interest, to all, which otherwise must in the course of Nature soon pass away with their present custodians. Yearly the thinning ranks of those who can tell us of the old days of the early settlements here remind us that we must seek and carefully preserve the utterances of these veteran members; and I especially bespeak for those of them who shall this day favor us with their recollections, your earnest and undivided attention.

At every annual meeting your Secretary reports a long list of the names of members who have passed away during the year succeeding the previous annual meeting. He will do so on this occasion, and the list will be found to contain the names of 19 of our members who were with us last year. The eldest of these was Mrs. Ann Norton, who was a frequent attendant at our meetings, and who died in this city on June 8, 1900, at the great age of 97 years, having been born in New York in 1803. We all remember the genial presence and the delightful personality of this old lady, as she met with us from time to time, and received from all who knew her the respect and reverence which her honored life and years richly merited.

Nine persons in this list had either reached or passed the age of four score years, which is indeed a remarkable proportion of our dead for the year, who had attained so great a longevity of life and argues well for the constitutional vigor, steady habits and self-care of the members of this Society.

One year ago, Gen. J. J. Elwell was present and addressed you, as he had been accustomed to do at nearly all, if not every annual meeting for many years, but he too is dead. His presence at our meetings was so constant; his personality so venerable; his tall form so conspicuous, and his voice so often heard here, that no one of us all can fail to note his absence, and to realize that this Society has indeed lost a useful member, that a monumental

figure in the Church and State has fallen, and that a true patriot, a good citizen, and a genial, kind and good old man is no more. I regret that I have not the data from which to give a more complete summary of his long and useful life. Briefly, however, I find he was a native of this State, born in 1820, and died in this city on March 13, 1900. He was educated in the schools and colleges of the Reserve; came of Huegenot and Revolutionary ancestry; was a graduate of the Cleveland Medical College, and was admitted to the Bar of Ohio in 1854, and practiced his profession of law until the breaking out of the Civil War in 1861, when he enlisted in the army; but for four years prior to his enlistment he was editor of the Western Law Monthly, and during that time he wrote a work on medical jurisprudence, treating of malpractice and medical evidence, which was published and recognized as an authority in the courts, and has passed through several editions since. He was in the Union Army from 1861 to 1866, and for gallant and meritorious service was four times promoted and came out of the service with the rank of Brevet-Brigadier-General. Since that, by reason of injuries received in the war, and the weight of advancing years, he has not practiced his chosen profession of the law; but possessed of a competency has attended to his own personal affairs, served as a Commissioner for the erection of the Cuyahoga County Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, and also as a corresponding member of the Medical Legal Society of New York. His eventful life has thus closed with the respect and esteem of his countrymen, and his name will henceforth be enrolled with those of our honored dead.

I have now no suitable data from which to speak further of members who have departed during the past year, but I trust that others who have will prepare appropriate sketches of their lives, that they may appear in due time in the future publications of our Annals. I can only now say of them in the words of the gentle and gifted Whittier, "God calls our loved ones, but we lose not wholly what He hath given. They live on earth in thought and deed, as truly, as in His heaven."

And let us not repine that we are growing old. A noted divine once said, "Old age is blessed, if allowed to come naturally. The grandest things in all the universe are old. Old mountains, old hills, old rivers, old seas and an old eternity," and let me add, the best antiquity of all is a good old man or woman, for they are immortal-and that thought cheered and solaced the world. long before the light of the Christian era. In the beautiful drama of Ion, the hope of immortality, so eloquently uttered by the death devoted Greek, finds deep response in every thoughtful soul. When about to yield his life a sacrifice to fate, his Clemanthe asks, if they should meet again, to which he responds, "I have asked that dreadful question of the hills that look eternalof the clear streams that flow forever-of stars among whose fields of azure my raised spirits have walked in glory. All are dumb. But as I gaze upon thy living face, I feel that there is something in love that mantles through its beauty, that can not wholly perish. We shall meet again, Clemathe.

May I not, therefore, express the hope that we may each grow into a serene and happy old age; that we may yet meet here in many pleasant reunions, and that the sunset of our life on earth may peacefully glide into the glorious morn of a joyous and eternal day.

And now, my friends, although the startling events developing at the present hour in the old world present profound problems to the civilzation of the age and the governments of all nations, and awaken the deepest interest in every thoughtful soul, I shall not now presume to detain you by any reflections of my own, and excusing myself from making any formal address, shall, with your consent, allot such time as we may have to our friends who have so kindly consented to address us on this occasion.

A. J. Williams, Chairman of the Executive Committee, then read the following report: