in a neighborhood; and it has flourished here persistently to the fourth and in some families, perhaps to the fifth generation of those who came here in the beginning.

Our friends of Virginia and the South love to throw all possible glamour about the conditions of life in the earlier days of their States. They glorify their ancestors almost as if those tobacco planters were some fabled race of demigods. They were, indeed, a stanch, noble people; and the Southerners of to-day honor themselves in thus clinging to the memories of their forefathers. Few, if any, of our Ohio pioneers, could or did live in the manner of the cultivated and aristocratic families who built stately homes on the navigable rivers of tide-water Virginia, raised tobacco by slave labor, and sent their own ships to English markets. Our farmers raised wheat and corn, worked in the fields with their own hands, and helped enlarge the area of cultivation by clearing away the heaviest of forests.

But it is all the more to their credit that many of them successfully kept through the roughest and hardest log-cabin period of their pioneer efforts a gentle and refined side to their

lives. And it was their good fortune to prosper so rapidly and substantially that in due time many of their farm-houses were as large and substantial as all but the very best of the Southern plantation mansions. For tobacco and cotton were not the only profitable cash crops of the first half of the nineteenth century. Cincinnati in those days was dubbed Porkopolis. It was the greatest meat packing and shipping center in the world. The flush days of the cotton and sugar planters of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana had arrived; and the plantations lived and thrived on our Ohio flour and cured meats.

In the winter and spring our turnpikes were almost impassable for the long droves of fat hogs waddling market wards reluctantly. Thus many of our farmers became comparatively rich men, and thus they built durable and even stately brick houses, and constructed solid, stone-ballasted roads, along which — like golden argosies of old their massive corn-fed treasures moved safely, without danger of being stuck in the mire. Less picturesque, doubtless, than the white-winged fleets that served the tobacco planters of the Virginia shores, or the smart, square

rigged ships that brought riches to the pious New England forefathers who trafficked in rum and slaves; not majestic, like parading elephants in gilded trappings on occasion of some pompous ceremonial in India; not so dignified, nor so suggestive of poetry as the long caravans of camels that bear precious fabrics across Arabian deserts; yet worthy of all honor, and to be named with respect on this occasion, I repeat, is the hog -the prime factor in our community's prosperity for half or three-quarters of a century. Not the varieties known as the Virginia razor-back or the Kentucky shoat, but the large-framed, broad-beamed, wellrounded Ohio hog that weighed half a ton, and that gave ample bacon, pork and lard to the field-hands of the down-river plantations, while providing in return the cash that bought the black silk dresses our mothers wore, the top-buggies our older brothers drove, and the pianos and organs that our sisters rejoiced in.

Through the more recent period of feverish rush to the cities that has in many regions brought country life to a condition of sad decline and stagnation, you have safely passed. You have contributed your full quota of young men and women to the making of the farther West, and to the throbbing activities of the business and professional life of our towns and cities. But you have meanwhile kept the old neighborhood running – all decently and in good order.

When, after years of absence, we of my family came back here to bury our beloved mother, we were comforted by the sympathy of a host of friends who also loved her and had not forgotten us. When later I came here for a day or two, with my wife, there was all the welcome of a real home-coming for her, though a stranger. It has always been so. My father, also born and bred here, had, as a very young man, gone to practice medicine in newer but larger communities further west. He came back some fifty years ago with his family, in order to find healthful surroundings for them. Only a few days ago, letters were placed in my hands written at that time by my mother; and they show how hospitable and kindly was the welcome given here to this New England girl. I have no hesitation in making these personal allusions, because this is an intimate occasion, where friends are conferring with one another and where the

outside world has no interest or curiosity. I am trying merely to illustrate the fact that the neighborhood life has been absolutely unbroken in its continuity. Many a family, readily for itself, bounds the local life of the century now past. My grandfather, whom I well remember, and who was married here in his early manhood to Rebecca Halstead, was born in 1783, and would have been 120 years old if he had lived to attend this celebration.

The future of our country communities has very good promise. Communication grows easier, through the multiplication of railways and telegraph and telephone lines. Books, periodicals and newspapers are entirely accessible, and somehow they are much more thoroughly read in the country than in the city. The tide has turned, it would seem, and there is less rush for the towns, and better appreciation of the advantages of country life. I beg you, therefore, who still call this place home, to believe in it as a good place to live in and to determine to make it ever better. Let it continue to stand pre-eminent before its neighboring communities for the intelligence and character of its people. Let its life continue to center around the church, and the school, and let it make another century record worthy of the one now complete and secure.

HORACE MANN AND ANTIOCH COLLEGE.

GEORGE ALLEN HUBBELL, PH. D.,

[Mr. Hubbell is a member of the Faculty of Berea College, Kentucky, and was formerly a professor at Antioch College of which Mr. Horace Mann was president. - EDITOR.]

Ohio is the favorite daughter of the Eastern States. The cannon of the Revolution had scarcely cooled when the Ordinance of 1787 was adopted, and sturdy men began to look over the bor

ders of Virginia, Pennsyl

vania, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts to the rich land of the great West.

Many of Virginia's sons went by way of Kentucky; the sons of the Keystone State crossed over the mountains, and dropped down the Ohio River on flatboats; while the sons of far Connecticut and Massachusetts came through New York and down by Lake Erie to establish themselves in the Western Reserve.

Thus, things went on for half a century, with new settlers ever pouring out from the old home into this new State, so rich in natural resources, so rapidly developing, so strong in the enterprise and the daring spirit of its people, that in 1824 Lafayette called it "the eighth wonder of the world." In 1850 the population had reached nearly two millions. Cincinnati

was a city of 116,000. Cleveland and Sandusky were important lake ports. The little Miami Railroad, from Cincinnati to Columbus, was opened in this year, and Columbus felt a new spirit of enterprise.

Education had kept pace. In 1802, even before Ohio was definitely set off as a state, a bill was passed establishing Ohio University, at Athens. This was opened in 1804. Next, Miami University was established in the township of Oxford. But colleges increased most rapidly from 1835 to 1845, reaching by 1845 more than twenty denominational institutions. Within the next ten years eight institutions were added; one of these was Antioch College. Its source was religious.

Late in the seventeen hundreds, a great religious revival swept over the United States. Its effect was to send men with tender hearts and open minds to their Bibles to learn the truth. From this condition arose many denomínations, and, about the time Washington was entering upon his second term, there sprang up in North Carolina, Kentucky, New York and Vermont, congregations of believers holding the Bible as their "only rule of faith and practice," and answering to no other name than Christians. At first these people had not looked with favor upon an educated ministry, but fifty years' experience had taught them many things and a great wave of educational enthusiasm swept over the country, leaving deep in their hearts the determination to found a college.

It was supposed that the institution would be located in some pleasant town between Buffalo and Albany, on the highway of travel made famous by the Erie Canal; but Yellow Springs, Ohio, offered special advantages in central location, in climate, in money, in citizens, and, most of all, in its leading citizen, Judge Mills, who gave a tract of twenty acres of land for the college campus, and contributed liberally of his money for the founding of the institution. He laid out a large part of his farm in town lots, and in every way sought to promote the interests of the town and of the college. He was a broad-minded, far-sighted man, devoted to the welfare of the community and to the cause of education in the West. Friends, under the leadership of Elder John