CHAPTER I
 

^^HE record of events proposed in this
narrative embraces a period of only
about one hundred and seventy years
from the first settlement of white people
within the present boundaries of Washington
County, to the present time; yet events have been
so crowded into this brief era, that it has seen
the thirteen colonies of white men battling in
the wilds of the New World grow into a mighty
natio.n. It has seen the population of the Ameri¬
can States increase from' less than two millions
to forty-five times that number.

It has seen a greater development of the prac¬
tical appliances of civilization than was witnessed
in the preceding ten centuries. There are men
now living within the limits of Washington County
who were living when Fulton launched his steam¬
boat in the waters of the Hudson river; who were
10 years of age when iron plows were unknown in
the world, who were over 20 years of age when
the first train of passenger cars made the trial
trip on the Liverpool and Manchester road, who
were over 30 when the leading scientists of the age
proved that no vessel could carry enough coal to
steam across the Atlantic; who had reached mid¬
dle life when the first telegram flashed over the
wires. The period of this history has seen terri¬
tory of the European colonies and of the United
States increase from a narrow strip lying between
the Allegany ^Mountains on the west to the Atlan¬
tic ocean and from the northern limits of Massa¬
chusetts to the southern hmits of Georgia, until
it now stretches three thousand miles from ocean
to ocean and from St. Lawrence to the Gulf.

Washington   County  has  been  the  scene  of
 

many events in this onward march of civilization
which well deserve to be held in remembrance.
It has been the scene of many a bloody struggle
with the original iiossessors of the soil who have
now passed awav" from its borders leaving only
remnants behind for archiologists to speculate
upon. It has sent forth many men who have been
conspicuous in the country's history or have helped
to develop and people the far west. It was the
scene of one of the ndghty hattles of the Civil War
and in its soil repose the ashes of many thousands
who fell on the bloody fields of Antietam ^nd
South Mountain.

When the first settlement was made in this
beautiful valley in the year 1735 or thereabout,
the eastern part of the State had been settled by
Europeans for over a hundred years and Virginia
and Massachusetts for a longer period—and yet
tlie struggle with the fierce difficulties in which
our ancestors had engaged had been so great that
it had taken a century to penetrate seventy-live
miles from .the shores of the Chesapeake into a
\'alley more fertile and salubrious than any which
had lieen then settled. The splendid valley of the
Genesee in Western New York was still a wilder¬
ness in the undisturbed possession of the Oneidas,
waiting for a colony from Washington County,
which went there more than a half century later.
Of the great cities of America only New York,
Philadelphia and Boston had any existence, Balti¬
more was not laid out. The site of Washington
was still a swamp and a pine forest; those of
Chicago and Cincinnati were unbroken solitudes.
The great forests which co\ered the valley of the
Ohio  had  scarcely been  entered by  the  trapper