bracing the now beautiful city of St. Paul, passing westward with the Mississippi till it strikes Lake Itasca, away up and on to the Lake of the Woods, due north to the forty-ninth parallel and so following back by the course of the Great Lakes till it reaches again the northwest boundary of Pennsylvania at Lake Erie. This was the territory whose settlement began at Marietta a century ago-thirteen degrees of latitude down the Ohio to the Mississippi and up to Minnesota. Five great States, and one-third at least of the sixth grand State, Minnesota, belonged to the old Northwest Territory, and look back to Marietta as the place where their foundation began.

After all we have heard, I need not speak of its climate. It is a place that embraces the best part of the temperate zone in North America. In short, the best part of the best continent of the globe belongs to the old Northwest Territory. A climate in which men and women in the coldest weather of the winter and the warmest of the summer may healthfully work all day; a climate in which, all the world over, are to be found the most energetic people and greatest institution on the globe. My friend has left very little to be said about it. He does not seem quite fully to have understood one thing which has happened, but living where I live, we understand it so very well that we begin talking about it in the morning; we talk about it at noon; we go to sleep talking about it, and we dream about it at night. There we found, and I do not know where else they will not find in the Northwest Territory, the best fuel the world ever saw. The natural gas in the Northwest fully equals any other gas. It makes the steam that carries the world along.

Then as to this people who settled Ohio, there is very little more to be said about them. But there is one addition I might make. Putnam and his followers were the best educated men the world ever knew. For eight years, from 1775 to 1783, they went to school to George Washington. He was the master; in his hands during all that period were their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. All who know anything of the education given to the soldier understand that the character of the man who is leader during years of danger and of trial impresses

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itself upon every man, from the drummer Loy up till in a few years they come to have the voices, the character, and the very virtues of the commander. Is it strange then that we think of the people who settled Marietta as the best people, for they were, indeed, but in miniature, George Washingtons, all of them. But I am not here to speak alone of the men-the women of that day had their full share in all things. When I found that I was to be one of those that were to follow the great speakers, using the language of Mr. Lincoln, I began to browse in my library to see what I could find that would not, perhaps, be found by any one else, and I found a letter, a part of which I will read to you. "Never," says one, "was the energy of a genuine sympathy more nobly expressed than by the matrons of the Quaker City in their relief of the soldiers during the dreadful winter of 1780. Mrs. Esther Reed, wife of General Joseph Reed, though feeble in health, and surrounded by a numerous family. entered with hearty zeal into the service, and was, by the united voice of her associates, placed at the head of the society. Mrs Bache, daughter of Dr. Franklin, was also a conspicuous actor in the formation of the society, and in carrying out its plans. All classes became interested, and the results were glorious. All descriptions of people joined in the liberal effort, from Phillis, the colored woman, and her seven shillings and sixpence, to the Marchioness De La Fayette, who contributed one hundred guineas, and the Countess De Luzerne, who gave six thousand dollars. Those who had no money gave their labor, and in almost every house the work went on. It was charity in its best form and from its purest source; the voluntary outpourings of the heart. The women of all parts of the Colonies emulated the patriotism and zeal of their sisters in Philadelphia." When we speak of the deeds of one hundred years ago, we are speaking not merely of what Putnam and his soldiers did, but of what the women of that day did, who had to bear, as they always do, the greatest sorrows, the greatest afflictions and hardships of war.

Something has been said of the stock from which these people came. My friend, the Professor from Cambridge, taught us another idea on that subject in regard to himself, that there are qualities in men and women that do not always follow the

direct line. The doctrine is substantially this, that sometimes it will happen that when the children's teeth are set on edge it is not merely because the fathers and the mothers have eaten sour grapes, but because the uncles and the aunts and cousins have eaten sour grapes. So I have it to say that it is not the people who settled here at that time that have done all this for the Northwest Territory and for its noble institutions, any more than the people of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and, above all, Virginia, who have borne their part in our settlement, and also the choice blood of Europe, the German, the Scandinavian, and all the others who have come into it. We have its population and prosperity, and its institutions all nearer perfect than any community on the globe ever had before.

It was my fortune, during what I must say were the most honored, the happiest hours of my life, to serve very largely with those nearest to me who were the descendants of the men who settled Marietta. The counties of Gallia, Meigs, Athens, and Washington furnished the larger number of the men with whom it was my fortune to touch elbows during the great years from 1861 to 1865, and I must testify to you that the men of the Second Virginia Cavalry, and those of the Ninety-first Ohio, and above all, the men of the Thirty-sixth Ohio, were in every respect worthy of the men who settled Marietta. What did they accomplish? My friends from Virginia, we return to you in full the gift that you made to us in 1787. That liberty which you secured to us by the Ordinance of 1787, we extended in the great conflict, from the Ohio clear to the Gulf, as far as the flag of the Union waves, and over every one of the fifteen States that for a hundred years and more had been cursed by slavery.

Therefore, my friends, it is with great satisfaction that I take part in this celebration, and I reverently thank God that it was my fortune to be near the men, descendants of the early settlers of Marietta, the early settlers of this part of the Northwest, in the work not merely of administering the ordinance in the country for which it was intended, but of extending it over the whole of the United States, and thereby making it the heritage forever of all representatives of civilization throughout the world.

the

THE GERMAN PIONEERS.

ADDRESS BY Bernard PeterS, OF BROOKLYN, N. Y.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: By the committee who have had arrangements for these centennial exercises in charge, I have been requested to speak on this occasion of the German pioneers who settled in this county during the first half of the present century. The Governor of Ohio, who has just introduced me as a native of this city, must stand corrected in this particular. I am not a native of this city, nor of this State, but a native of Germany. I was brought here by my parents, into this county and city, at so early an age that, living among the New England settlers of Marietta from youth to manhood, they made me over into quite as much of a Yankee as though I had been born on the soil of Massachusetts.

According to my understanding of the matter, the first German settlers of Washington County came from the Rhine Palatinate. They came to the United States in the summer of 1833, from the vicinity of Durkheim, a little city of some 6,000 inhabitants, located in the gap of the Valley of the Isenach, a small stream flowing through the Hardt Mountains, and distant, due west, from Heidelberg about twenty miles. This is indeed an interesting region. Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, years ago, while standing on the Geisberg eminence-a spur of the Black Forest just south of Heidelberg and from which vantage he surveyed this beautiful and interesting landscape, pronounced it "the garden of Europe."

The pioneers to whom this address will be chiefly devoted were two brothers, sons of John Peters and his wife Barbara (nee Wagner), who had reared a family of seven sons, and whose ancestors, from time immemorial, had lived and died in this section of Germany. The names of the pioneers were Jacob and Charles Frederick. I ought, perhaps, to explain that Peters is an Anglicized form of the name. In German it is Peter. In this country, as in England, the name invariably takes on the letters.