Excerpt from Address Delivered at the Celebration of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town of Grafton, April 29, 1885 The love of kindred is a sentiment large enough to include and account for that reverence and affection which we feel for those of our ancestors whose forms vanished from earth long before our own time. That sentiment is not altogether dependent upon personal presence, nor upon the mutual exchange of kindly offices, but abides with us as a permanent and elementary principle of our 'nature. We find it impossible, therefore, to repress a feeling of deep and intimate concern in the history of a community of which our ancestors formed a part; and if, perchance, the characters with whom we are dealing were cast in a heroic mould, or were great and happy in their fortunes and. Achievements, they become in a peculiar sense, The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule Our spirits from their urns. One hundred and fifty years have now passed since the incorporation of this town. You select this as a fit ting occasion to recall the memory of the fathers who laid the foundation of these institutions into which you were born. You would revert once more to the early scenes in which they played their part; would remem ber their virtues; would sympathize with their patient toils, and admire the courage and fortitude with whichthey encountered the perils and endured the hardships of frontier life; would applaud the clearness with which they saw, and the dauntless resolution with which they maintained their rights; would recognize, with gratitude, their steady and unswerving devotion to the principles of civil liberty, and the constancy with which they per severed, against every discouragement, in establishing those principles upon the secure basis of public educa tion and public morality. But, upon this occasion, the historical theme which irresistibly attracts, at the same time, from obvious considerations, strongly repels me. The field has been so recently traversed and so amply covered, that, in attempting to recite anew any part of the familiar story, I shall appear to repeat a thrice-told tale. In 1885, at the centennial celebration of this event, an eminent native of the town skilfully gathered the scattered and scanty materials which constitute its origi nal early history, and presented them in an address, which is at once the best authority upon the subject it treats of, and an able and statesmanlike survey, not only of the historical facts of the period covered, but also of the underlying forces and principles which made possi ble the great progress it recorded. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.