Ohio History Journal

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A VISION FULFILLED

A VISION FULFILLED

 

BY MAUD BUSH ALFRED.

 

"Where there is no vision, the people perish."

When your committee honored me with a request

for a place on the program of this celebration, which

commemorates the founding of Bucyrus, I was filled

with varying emotions, - pride, reverence, and perhaps,

awe. Pride, that I, the great-granddaughter of Samuel

Norton and Mary Bucklin Norton, could have the privi-

lege of honoring their memory; reverence, that so

hardy, so brave, so God-fearing, so kindly, so benevo-

lent a forbear had been mine - reverence for the loved

ones I have known, who lie in the beautiful silent city

which adjoins you in this, the place which was "the

forest primeval," and now in the evolution and develop-

ment of the years is your own thriving, progressive and

growing city.

Should we not all indeed feel awe when we regard

the progress of one hundred years? When Great-

grandfather Norton and his wife and six children and

small company of followers blazed the path from their

home in northeastern Pennsylvania and selected this

spot because of its beauty, its richness of soil, and its

promise, they found only the red man and prowling

animals of the forest, and, seemingly, all that lay ahead

was toil and hardship and deprivation. But - they had

a vision. Theirs was the spirit which had won for us

our independence from the yoke of England.

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