Ohio History Journal

Editorialana.                       469

 

folio volumes, comprising "some 10,000 fools-cap pages of notes of

the recollections of frontier warriors and pioneers, either written by

themselves, or taken down from their own lips; and wellnigh 5,000 pages

more of original manuscript journals, memorandum books, and old

letters written by nearly all the leading border heroes of the West."

This collection under the direction of Dr. Thwaites has been classified,

mounted in folios, catalogued and indexed in a most accurate and

satisfactory manner, so as to place it easily within the use of students,

desiring to consult the contents.

Dr. Draper died on August 26, 1891, after a life work, which

did not fulfill his ambition or plans-as he had ever hoped to write

and publish a series of complete biographies of pioneer heroes, but which

left to succeeding workers the foundation for many an historical edifice,

that never could have been erected but for "the unusual literary bricks

and stone" gathered by him. Dr. Thwaites, whose privilege it has been

to be the co-laborer and successor of Dr. Draper, to whose character

and life work Thwaites pays splendid tribute, describing him as "under-

sized, far from robust; a bundle of nervous activity, with delicate cut

features, which exhibited great firmness of character and the powers of

intense mental concentration, readily brightened with the most winning

of smiles."

 

 

MEMORIAL TO RUFUS PUTNAM.

[The Rufus Putnam Memorial Association, with headquarters at

Worcester, Massachusetts, held its tenth annual meeting at Rutland, Mass.,

the home of Rufus Putnam, on September 27, 1910. As the proceedings

interest the members of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical

Society, we publish the same as reported in the Worcester Daily Telegram,

on September 28.-EDITOR.]

The 10th annual meeting of the Rufus Putnam Memorial Association

was held in the Rufus Putnam home. The Worcester members and some

from other places came in 10 automobiles. They left the Worcester

Club about 11.30 o'clock.

The meeting was stirred by the address of Senator Charles S.

Dana of Marietta, 0., and remarks by Prof. A. B. Hulbert of Marietta

College. President G. Stanley Hall called the meeting to order at 12.25

o'clock. Secretary Eben F. Thompson read the records of the last annual

meeting. Vice-President Hon. Henry A. Marsh spoke of the death of

Henry E. Hill, treasurer of the association, telling of his untiring

efforts for the good of the association. He then read the report of

the treasurer, which showed the balance on hand $178.16.

Then followed the election of officers for the year 1910-11. These

were chosen: President, G. Stanley Hall; Vice-President, Hon. Henry A.

Marsh; Clerk and Secretary, Eben F. Thompson; Treasurer, Edward G.

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470        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

Norman, all of Worcester; Executive Committee, Charles A. Bartlett

and Louis M. Hanff, Rutland, and Stephen C. Earle, Worcester.

These were elected members of the association: Hon. Curtis Guild,

Jr., Boston; Mrs. Louise H. Norman, Miss Emma S. Hinckley and

Frank L. Coes of Worcester.

Prof. A. B. Hulbert reported for the committee to which was

referred the matter of an incorrect account published in the proceedings

of the Bunker Hill Monument Association last year, stating that he

delivered an address, June 17, in Boston, and that the address had

been published in pamphlet form   and sent to various societies. The

address substantiated the fact that Gen. Rufus Putnam planned the forti-

fications at Dorchester Heights.

He offered resolutions which mentioned the planning and forming

the Ohio Company of Associates by Gen. Rufus Putnam         and Gen.

Benjamin Tupper in the Rufus Putnam     House in Rutland, 125 years

ago, January 10, 1911; the leading of the colonists from Massachusetts

and Connecticut to Ohio and the founding of Marietta; The organizing

of Muskingum Academy in 1797 by Gen. Putnam, which later became

Marietta College, and now owns valuable historical collections of the

Ohio Company and journals, dairies and other papers of Gen. Putnam,

was included.

In order to perpetuate the unselfish devotion of the pioneers who

first settled Ohio, it was suggested a committee of ten be appointed by

the President of the Rufus Putnam Memorial Association, which shall

formulate and carry out a plan to secure what shall be known as the

General Rufus Putnam   Memorial Fund of $100,000, the income to be

expended for the maintenance of the Rufus Putnam Home in Rutland

in its present state of preservation; for the support of the department

of history and political science and the historical museum of Marietta

College, and for such other purposes as shall promote the general aim

of this enterprise, the trustees of Marietta College to be custodians and

trustees of the fund.

The resolutions were adopted and this committee appointed: G.

Stanley Hall, Arthur F. Estabrook, Hon. Curtis Guild, Jr., Boston;

Hon. Whitelaw Reid, London; Homer Lee, New York; W. W. Mills,

Senator Charles S. Dana, Prof. A. B. Hulbert, Marietta; E. O. Randall,

Columbus; A. George Bullock, Worcester.

Senator Charles S. Dana of Marietta was introduced:

He said, in part:

It is a privilege for me to stand by the threshold of the founder

of Ohio and greet you of the East who revere the life and the deeds

of Rufus Putnam. Here among the hills of Massachusetts the name

of Rutland seems the articulation of the empire of the great North-

west. The mists of a century and a quarter do not dim the lurid deeds

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of the Company of Ohio Associates, upon whom history spreads all

the effulgence of the glorious sun.

The plain history of America transcends all the gilded imagination

of the writer of the historical novel. The pen cannot add to the life

of Washington, of Hamilton, of Adams, of Putnam, and within our

own time it can but fittingly record its tribute to that great American

of your own commonwealth, George Frisbie Hoar.

If Quebec had not fallen into the hands of the English under Gen.

Wolfe, it is highly probable that the land we now call the great North-

west, would exist under the colors of France. If Lawrence and Augustine

Washington had not formed a company, with Lord Fairfax, in 1748,

that they called the Ohio Company, which company controlled the land

immediately south of the Ohio River and north of the Little Kanawha,

it is also possible that Ohio would be a French province today. If

Gen. Lewis had not led his poorly armed and clad Virginia mountaineers

to the battle of Point Pleasant in the Ohio Valley, and routed the

Indians, who were fighting under English directions, it is also possible

that there would not have been any reason for this Putnam Society to

exist.

The Ohio Company grew from a call issued from yonder house

by Gen. Putnam and Gen. Tupper, both brave soldiers of the Revolu-

tion, and the friends and companions of Washington.

We have met to commemorate and perpetuate the life and the

deeds of Rufus Putnam in the fragrance of appreciation and grateful

memory.

Putnam, the stepson of a Sutton inn-keeper, became a self-made

man of the highest type. He early developed a fondness for engineering

and had his early training in the old French and Indian wars. While

in the conflict of the Revolution, his services were most distinguished

at Dorchester Heights, in the fortifying of West Point, the creating

of coast defenses, taking part in the capture of the army under Burgoyne,

and the saf retreat from Long Island.

Rufus Putnam, the father of Ohio, is my toast: Rutland, Marietta,

Ohio these are the sequences.

I question if history records another instance wherein the govern-

ment of a state was projected and the laws worked out in detail in the

advance of the coming of a single individual to the land. Herein the

genius of Putnam was recognized and, with his forceful character, he

was placed at the head of the Ohio Company of Associates.

I have never been able to picture Putnam as a man given to

making money from his associates. He did not exploit the Ohio Com-

pany. When he left Rutland he had in his heart the love of God and

the love of his fellowmen, and to him the Ohio country offered an

opportunity for the advancement of mankind in a land where human

slavery could not exist and where the church was to stand beside the

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schoolhouse. He realized that a people to be great must be accomplished,

and so he took with him the plans of a university, and under the

Ohio Company the first institution of this kind was established in

Ohio.

In the wilderness our fathers propagated Greek and Latin roots from

the very beginning and raised a citizenship of conspicuous mark. Men

of broad lives and views, who knew their rights and dared maintain

them; men who absorbed the ideas of Putnam's life and placed their

own lives behind the guns that flashed from Sumter and Appomattox.

Rufus Putnam   could not have conceived of the creation of a

community without an institution of higher learning, and by the fireplace

here in Rutland he planned for an institution like Marietta College.

Through this seat of learning his influence lives today, and Rutland and

Marietta are joined by ties that will endure.

Ohio is now one of the empire states with a population represen-

tative of the civilization of the globe. Her children have amalgamated the

blood of New England and of the Virginians, and in these strains her

men and women are virile, they are yet the exemplars of the Putnam

band and must be the source of perpetuating the good, honest, common-

sense that has, after all, made America great.

Do not allow your ideals of Putnam's standard to be replaced by

the "Melting Pot." The pure strain of American blood must not be

contaminated in this way, for otherwise we will turn back the sands of

time.

Truly this is a time of rapid progress. Ours is the engine of

internal combustion, the wireless message, the subtle power of electricity,

the recording of the human voice, the power of aerial travel.

This is a country just passing the portals of real human progress,

and we are a part of the same. Ours is the inspiration of all that

has made our nation great, and it is ours to help keep perpetual the

integrity of Rufus Putnam, his honest purpose and his devotion to

"religion, education and morality."

After the address of Senator Dana, a recess was had, and the

members went to Hotel Bartlett, where dinner was served. At the

tables were: Dr. G. Stanley Hall, Mrs. Florence E. Hall, A. George

Bullock, Mrs. Mary C. Bullock, Burton W. Potter, Mrs. Fannie E.

Potter, William  Woodward, Mrs. Caroline I. Woodward, Nathaniel

Paine, Henry A. Marsh, Mrs. Emily W. Marsh, Eben F. Thompson,

Miss Emma S. Hinckley, Stephen C. Earle, Nathan H. Allen, Edward

G. Norman, Mrs. Louise H. Norman, Miss Mary Hoar, Dr. Charles B.

Elder, Mrs. Almina R. Elder of Worcester; Rev. Sidney Crawford,

Wayland; Edwin D. Mead, Boston; Senator Charles S. Dana, Prof. A. B.

Hulbert, Marietta; Miss Edith Sears, Boston; Miss Maude Bartlett,

Brooklyn; Ira G. Dudley, Mrs. Sarah Dudley, Boston; Walter A. Wheeler,

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Editorialana.                       473

 

Mrs. Mary E. Bray, Charles R. Bartlett, Mrs. Catharine M. Bartlett,

Louis M. Hanff, Mrs. Frances P. Hanff, Rutland.

After the dinner, Prof. Hulbert, Senator Dana and Edwin D. Mead

spoke briefly, after which the meeting dissolved.  After the meeting,

several signed the membership roll of the Rutland Chapter of the Ohio

Company of Associates.

 

 

 

GOLDWIN SMITH.

A Pupil's Recollection.

Just two score years ago-in the Fall of 1870-the editor of the

QUARTERLY-then a "slip of a lad" just emerging from    his 'teens-

landed at the little city of Ithaca, nestling in the valley at the head

shores of picturesque Lake Cayuga, New   York.  It was one bright

September morn that the young matriculate climbed the "hill of science"

to its brow, surmounted by the campus then only partially leveled knolls,

the site of the new institution of learning, called Cornell University,

which according to its founder was to be an institution "where anybody

could fnd instruction in any study." The university, now one of the

most famous in the land, with a score of magnificent buildings, a

wealth of equipment, hundreds of professors and instructors and

thousands of students, was then but a hope and promise with two or three

permanent grey-stone buildings and half a dozen, temporarily constructed,

frame halls of learning. But brick and stone and chunks of endowment

funds do not alone make a university. It is the professors and the

instruction that mould the character of the student and train and de-

velop his gray matter, if he has any, for the battle of life. It has been

truly said that "Mark Hopkins, seated on one end of a log with a

student at the other makes a college."  At Cornell in those incipient

days, there were crude appointments for the accommodation of the

earnest boys who flocked to this new institution. But it was the first

to break the shell of the old narrow courses of mere dead languages

and a slight smattering of science, and it was the pioneer to broaden

the curriculum into optional studies of a hundred fold. But those early

years was the period of distinguished professors and lecturers, resident

and non-resident. James Russell Lowell, George William Curtis, Bayard

Taylor, in literature; Louis Agassiz in natural science; Herman E. Von

Holst, Goldwin Smith, James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman,

George Washington Green and Andrew D. White, in history. Of that

distinguished galaxy each one has done his good work and passed to

the beyond-all save one, Andrew D. White, the first president and the

one who inspired Ezra Cornell to found the institution and who out-

lined the plans of this distinctly American college-the new and liberal

methods which were at first to draw the bitter antagonism of all other

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