USA > New York > Monroe County > Rochester > The semi-centennial souvenir : an account of the great celebration, June 9th and 10th, 1884, together with a chronological history of Rochester, N.Y. > Part 4
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of the plague than that which rushes upon the foemen's serried ranks in the frenzy of battle, amid the plaudits of a nation. And this citisen-hero, General Ashbel W. Riley, the sole survivor of the whole body of village trustees-for he was a trustee sixty years ago-and the ordy living member of the first board of alderinen, although the frosts of nine decades have silvered his locks, still walks our streets, erect in form, stately in his bearing, with his mind yet vigorous, and the blood of health still coursing his veins, as the results of temperate habits and cleanliness in living. " Serus in coolun redeat. "
In 183 1, the population has reached nearly 13,000. The streets are pushing out in every direction. There are ten hotels, some of them still modestly calling themselves taverns, the most of which, like the Eagle, the Rochester, the Clinton, the Mansion and the Monroe are to become famous in our local
annais, and are still suggestive to many of the good cheer and friendly intercourse there enjoyed. There are two banks-one Bank of Roch ster and the Bank of Monroe. There are three semi- monthly, four weekly and two daily news- papers, the Democrat having this year been established by shepard and Strong. The Athenaeum is a flourishing institution and bas in its board of directors such influential citisens as L Ward, jr. , L. A. Ward, the Rev. Dr. Whitehouse, Everard Peck, Ashley Sampson, Silas O. Smith, Frederick Whittle- sey, O. N. Bush, Thomas H. Rochester, Will- iam Atkinson, Charles Perkins and N. T. Rochester. There is a creditable seminary, giving instruction in the English branches, in mathematics and the classics. There are two through lines of stages; the packet- boats are well patronised : there is a stemmer plying between the Rapids and Geneseo, and another is making regular trips from Char- lotte to all the lake ports. A new genera- tion, working with and yet under the pio- neers. has come upon the scene. There are ambition and . bustle and activity every- where. The bomogeneify of the people
begins to yield to cosmopolitan ten-
dencies The place has evidently out- grown village limitations. and there is need, as well as desire, for municipal government-for a more liberal scale of expenditure, for water privileges, for better system of street lighting, which Lecky well emphasises as & moral educator, for all the dignity and expansiveness of city life.
Accordingly, & charter is procured from the legislature, and Rochester taken from the towns of Gates and Brighton, is on the 28th of April, 1831, duly incorporated, being in chronological sequence the ninth
city erected in the state. Its boundaries are enlarged to include 4, 000 acres, being extended northward to embrace the lower falls and the Ontario steamboat landing. There are five wards, and in the election that ensues Lewis Brooks, Thomas Kemp- shall, Frederick F. Backus, and Ashbel W. Riley are chosen aldermen, and John Jones, Elijah F. Smith, Jacob Thorn, Lansing B. Swan and Henry Kennedy, assistant alder- men The result of the charter election is among the first victories of the newly established Whig party, which four years thereafter is to elevate Mr. Seward to the governorship, and in six years, is to carry the country upon a mighty wave of enthusiasm for ' 'Tippecanoe and Tyler too. '' The council having & decided Whig majority, elects Jonathan Child mayor who, fifty years ago, accepts the trust, takes the oath of office and, with true Republican simplicity, municipal ad- ministration is happily inaugurated. Es- pecially gratifying is it, in this review, to recall the dignified figure of the first mayor, informed with all manly attributes. A. na- tive of Vermont, he had lived in the Mo hawk valley and had been a merchant in Bloom field and in Charlotte when, in 1820. he settled in Rochester. Here he became interested in mannfactures and canal navi- gation and acquired a competence which was, however, seriously impaired by the reverses of 1837. He had been a member of assembly, from Ontario county, for two terms, but had, during his residence here, refused consistently to accept office, and was only persuaded to respond to the wishes of the council by a paramount sense of public duty. He was of commanding presence, yet alert in his movements and gracious in his deportment, with a high sense of per- sonal honor, and with & resoluteness of will, which made him inflexible in . his adherence to a principle once espoused by bim, as is shown in his resignation of the mayoralty, on account of a difference of opinion between him and the second council concerning the number of licenses that should be granted for the sale of spirituous liquors. In the honorable roll of our chief magistrates, none shall be found, in single- hearted devotion to the public weal and in those qualities which equip the good citisen and the incorruptible executive, to excel Jonathan Child. The. remaining officials of the first year are all men of high standing in the community and well fitted for their respective positions. John C. Nash, afterward mayor, is mity clerk, Vincent Matthews is city attorney : Jasper W. Gilbert, long a justice of the supreme court in the second district, is clerk of the mayor's court : Fphraim Gilbert is marshal : Flin F. Marsball is treasurer ; Samuel Works is superintendent of streets ; William
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H. Ward is chief engineer of the fire de- partment ; and Isaac Loomis, still a resident of the city, is collector.
Fellow Citisens : In the very brief review which was permitted me, in the time accorded I had the choice of two courses of treatraent.
I could not comprehend
both.
I
was
ยท
obliged either to ignore the early village his- tory or to neglect wholly that which has been made within the last fifty years. I trust you will agree with me that the prefer- able plan was selected, however imperfectly it has been executed. The one would have demanded hours of your attention, and even then there could have been but the slightest allusions to principal events. The other has, at least, enabled us to glance at the men and women who, through privation and sacrifice, rendered our municipal
progress and prosperity possible The one would have been like a canvass so crowded with figures as to blend individuality into indistinctness. The other presents certoin recognisable portraits. We honor all who have contributed to the common weal, but, in the valhalla of our worthies. the pioneers luust have precedence.
Nevertheless we cannot, amid these fes- tivities, refrain from something of gratula- tion over the half century march of events, in the rear guard of which we are treading to-day. We rejoice in our citisen -
ship. May we not as rightfully rejoice 'n it as does that citizenship which derives its patent from the agora, the trib- une, or the guildhall? Our patent was handed to us by nature herself. As Mayor Child said, in his inaugural address: " The 'men who felled the forest, that grew on "the spot where we are assembled, are "'sitting at the council board of our city : '' We are proud of the city which has been developed along the lines which the fathers traced. Gratitude then, as well as gratu- lation, for the marvelous transformation, wrought by man,
under the favor of God! Here is a city of over 100, 000 in- habitants, with a ratio of increase excelled by only three other cities of the state, equalled by no purely inland community esst of the Alleganies. Rochester ranks as the fourth city in New York-the twenty- first in the United States. There are sixteen wards, and there ought to be more. The area is over 11, 000 acres, There are nearly 800 streets and alleys. From the little Grateful are we her sons for what school taught by Huldah Strong, in 1814, she is, grateful for what her sous over thirty free schools, the Free have here accomplisbed. Here Selah Matthews, and Adams, and Newton, and Boughton, and Benedict, and Huson, and Darwin Smith, and Martindale, have made eloquent plea. or administered the law within her temples of justice Here Henry,
Academy, and many select schools have proceeded, and, crowning all, there is the noble university where Dewey and Cutting and Raymond and Anderson and Kendrick have taught, and the refining influence of which upon our business, not less then upon our professional life, has been as marked, as
| and here is a See of the Roman Catholic ! communion. Through our streets, as the red current through healthy bodies, flows the purest water that can be drawn from the crystal lake. From all directions, the iron horse brings hither its tides of traffic and of travel, and thus there is & larger and a richer territory tributary to Rochester than to any other city in the state, not upon the sea board. Our streets are illuminated by gas and electricity, all night and every night. Our fire department is most effi- cient, and disastrous conflagrations are as unknown as unexpected. Our health regu- lations are of the most precise and impera- tive character. Our flouring mills bave, in- deed, lost their undisputed pre-eminence, and the Genesee country bows before the multitudinous sheaves of Kansas and Da- kota, but compensation is found in new in- dustries stimulated by the water-power as swift and as serviceable as is was sixty years ago. We are justly distinguished for our humane and charitable institutions-for phi- lanthropy is here & holy religions passion --- and although, as in all large communities, there is the turbid under current of vice and crime, above it flows the mighty, yet unruf- fled, volume of an exceptionally pure order of morality. Beautiful, too, is Rochester for situation, with the blue expanse of the Ontario upon her northern border, and the valley of the Genesee sweeping Away to the hills at the south, herself em - bowered in foliage, and radiant as a bride with the kisses of the dewy-lipped roses, never fairer and more radiant than in this lovely June tide, when she dons her gala dress, spreads the feast for her sons and daughters, and beams with smiles for her
guests within her gates. Not ungrateful is she even as she thinks of the wintry blast, and of the sudden changes of temperature she sometimes experiences, for she knows, with Emerson, that wherever show falls there civil liberty abides. Enjoying civil and religious freedom she also provides at- tractive homes, for nowhere do the poor and rich alike have more apple grounds, nearly every man with a door-yard as well as a hearth-stone of his own-no stifling tenement houses, but room enough in which to breathe, and to set the flower-bed out- side the window-sill, and to train the wood- bine to the trellis. Here is "rus in urbe. "'
en! Bradley, and Reid, and fall, and Dean, and Ely, and Whitbeck, and Gilkeson, have beneficial, There are over seventy churches, : practiced the healing art. Here the silver-
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tongued Holley was the champion
of human rights. Here Morgan
won the meed of an original investigator.
Here Weed, and Dawson, and Butts, and
Carter, and Peshine Smith, and Allen,
LAve inade and moulded public a cultivated taste. Its streets
opinion. Here O'Rielly achieved his are as light at night as by day. Invention laurels both in science and has annihilated space, and the air ship is & reality. Conversation is had, at will, with ''far Cathay. "' Life is prolonged far be- yond the prosent span, and in rigid applica - tion of sanitary and hygienic requirements, science has found the elixir of alchemy. A
in J-tters and we, who are pursuing the track of history, on this anniversary, cheer- fully acknowledge our obligations to him whose torch of exploration has lighted the way in which we follow. Here Serantom, whose devotion to local annals was as rapt, as his memory was tenacious, reproduc- ed the scenes of the long ago. with equal vividness and greater permanence than pho- tography fixes the image upon the sensitive plate. Here Cumiug and Whitehouse and Lee and Penny and James and Parker and Yeomans and Van Ingen and Bartlett have broken the bread of life; and from here, at the behest of duty, they went forth, our best and bravest, to challenge Death, and found. him, at the fiery front, on the lonely picket line, in dreary hospital bed, iu poisonous prison pen-wherever war had placed his grim and ghastly shape. They found bim, with courage high and honor unstained, and we have woven our chaplets for them-for the gallant Force and Ry n and Schoen, for O'Rorke, our Bayard "without fear and without reproach, "' for all who fill & sol- dier's grave and receive a patriot's desert. Illustrious in the sons she has nurtured, may Rochester be the fruitful mother of still other children worthy of their heritage.
In that most exquisite picture of self- renunciation, drawn by the hand of the master, ""Sydney Carton, "' standing on the guillotine, looks, in ecstatic vision, over the heads of the vengeful crowd, beyond the tumult and intoxication of the Reign of Terror, and beholds a beautiful city and
& brilliant people, arising from the
abyss, and struggling to be truly free. He sees the calmer days of liberty with law, the better days of peace and happiness to come, and, thus comforted, he bows with- out & murmur to the axe's stroke. So may wo, who soon shall pass away, salute the coming days. Some of those who are now in the fret of affairs may enter, in reebleness, the vestibule of the twentieth century ; how few may hope to see the centennial of our city's birth. What manner of men will the men of that century be: Wiser and bettor, let us trust, chan are those of this century, for we know that
"life shall on and upward so;
" The eternal step of progress beats
".ffo that great anthem, calin and slow, .. Which God repeats.
May we not be permitted, in our vision sl - 80, to anticipate that day, through the lift- ing mists of the coming time! We see &
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city of a quarter of a million people. Its avenues are still lined with stately trees. Its mansions are those of comfort, as well as of affluence, and architectural
heen discarded by gew gaws have
great university opens wide its portals with free instruction to all who enter. Upon the foundation, which Abelard Reynolds laid in 1813, rises the gracious structure of the Free Public Library. There is a better order everywhere, a more abounding vitality, a surer hope of the things that lie beyond, than it is possible for us even to conceive, much Jess to imagine. It is the newer age, and the clearer light; but, in faith, we salute that better age We bid the newer genera - tions glory in its warmth and cheer. We stand afar off and bail that centennial hour. We, who are about to die, salute it: and our prayer only is, knowing how, in the order of nature we pass away aud are for- gotten, that some tender hand, searching amid the moss-covered entablatures of the past may find the half effaced inscriptions, and learn that there were men and women who, in 18SJ, tried honestly, if humbly, to take some note of their city's progress, and to transmit it to the coming century worthy, at least, of its kindly welcome.
The quartette sang " To Thee, O, Country " (words by Dr. O. W. Hohes, music by Julius . Eichberg), and then the orator of the day, Hon. George Raines, was announced. While Mr Raines spoke the hall had become rather dark by reason of the rain following outside.
THE ORATION BY HION. GEORGE RAINES."
The true orator of the hour is the imperial city whose fifty years'we celebrate; at our feet le her rich robes of green bound round with sheen of placid waters. She points us to her open ways thronsing with busy life; her schools for youth crowued with a University curriculum: her thea- ters for popular amusement : her clanking machin- ery: her flags of spray fluttering in triumph above the conquered waters escaping from brief impris omment in mill and factory to seek the great lake;
* Hon. George Raines was born at Palineyville. N. Y .. Nov. 10, 1816: came to Rochester in 155; graduated from the University, 1806; admitted to the the Bar, IN :: elected District Attorney in the fall of 1841. holding the office for two terms; elected State Senator in the fall of 157. serving one terunt. Since then he has resumed the practice of his pro- fossion. bring counted the most successful criminal lawyer in this part of the State. He is the fourth son of Hry. John and Mary Remington Raines. Hs mother's father came to Canandaigua in 19. sat- tlies on whatt is still known as Remington Hi. Rev. John Raines, a well-known and respected Methodist clergymon, came to Canandaigua in 1 -90
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to the princely palaces of the rich; to the thon- sand homes of toilers in all the arts of life in which fair wonwen and brave men dig deep in the bed- rock of conscience the foundation of true moral- iry aml patriotism for the generations of the fh- ture; to her tribunals of justice in which the right is measured to the people; to her body of officials, administering a government of liberty regulated by law; to her churches and cathedral, echoing the solemn chant and te deum of the religion of hungan charity and of the holiness of sacrifice.
The triumphal procession will lead no vanquished enemies but captive hearts in its traiu on the inor- row. A great city, full of the treasures of art and temples of learning, full of patriotic traditions, full of high hopes and ambitions, sits in the sunlight of a great victory quickly won to receive homage of the metropolis of the nation, which, like a chival- rous knight, comes from afar to honor the Queen of the Genesee. We weave for posterity to look upon, garlands of poetic tradition and of historical truth and deck with them her temples throbbing with eestacy of pride.
" Who to command fair Athens but one day,
Would not himself, with all his race, have fallen Contented on the morrow ?? '
Let church bells chime and cannon boom the universal joy. Proud in every fiber of her achieve- ments of the past, which are hostages to the future, we have to hide no traditional disgrace in her civie history, either in court or camp or munici- pal counell. We exalt the grand strains of our re- joieing in honor at once of all the generation- that have poured labors of love into our victory in the great rivalries of cities. Like a picture of wierd improbability rises all the past before us. Thick forests and matted undergrowth shut ns in to the river edge. Strange noises of birds and animals of prey set the echoes of the night ringing through the outlying hills. The painted son of the forest glides lazily along the waters, watching and Won- dering what will be the limits of the mill-site of the pale-face. The matron from far Vermont hills, or the slopes of the Hudson valley watches the child playing among the stumps at the entrance of the rough hewn log house, and the strong hearted pioneer swings a re- sonaut ax to ring torth the protest of humanity against the cruelties of religious persecution. The hamlet grows apace into the village, where the solitary rider leaves a package of mail, or pauses a day in the best room of the pioneer, to lift holy prayer and read solemn service. The wagons. mired as they bring the grains from the farms about Canandaigua to this market, the cordurby roads, the rude bridges, the causeway thrown over the Genesee to join the waters of the Great Lakes and of the Hudson ; the volunteer, patrolling the shore of Lake Ontario, keeping lonely watch for hostile craft from the North : the mills rising upon the cliffs of the Genesee ; the lumbering stages sounding the horn along the Ridge ; the ohl horse railroad to Carthage, all live in the picture drawn by the eloquent historian of the day. as in the myriad traditions of families and localities. Here and there among us towers the form and undying spint of a pioneer soon to depart to join the past. How like the gods of Greece, they live in the story of great achievement. They rose to the height of heroic sacrifice for principle. They drank the bitterest cups of human suffering. They welcomed snow and ice, and wind
and tempest, perils of land and sea, as we do the dawn of morning and the dews of evening. The civilization of the world may well be said to be rounded to its ton, when it makes men like the American pioneer. It is one of our grond- est thoughts in this hour that our loved city bears the name of one of the grandest of those lion- hearted heroes of humanity. The Rochester whose brown and brain helped to carve from the wilder- ness the forest home of our city. hus left descend- ant- still in our midst who frustrate that true virtue and kuightly honor are the best inheritance of man's posterity. Whether we study their char- acter when they tied the stilling air of Europe to
be free to worship a God of Truth, or when they slew kingly forests and subdued all nature, or when they stood upon the field of Lexington or Saratoga; or slipped in blood upon the decks of American privateers, or when they realized in written Jaws the world's hope of a new nation whose light shouldI shine as a beacon of pure liberty to all peo- ples, they still outrank the heroes of all wars, the statesmen of all nations. They might speak to us the words of Solon:
"If I spared my country,
If gilded violence and tyranie sway
Could never charm me, thence no shame accrues. Still the mild honor of my name I boast, And find my Empire there."
As we look around us to-day upon the fow scarce filling this platform, of the men of the first quar- ter century of our growth, we look away to the dotted hillside to which, when the city crowded upon the old cemeteries, the bones of the dead were removed in honor.
"Time rolls bis ceaseless course. The race of yore
Who danced our infancy upon their knee And told our marvelling boyhood legends store
Of their strange venture, happ'd on land and sea- How are they blotted from the things that be ?"
With them sleep the true-hearted matrons of the republic, whose memory will not permit silent rey- erence. To-morrow a gentle matron who lingers among the women of this generation as an inspira- tiou to high effiort to emnlare ker noble character, will lead the people in recognition of the proud victories won by the children of her and her worthy compeers of the past. As the Volscian army of Coriolanus was seen from the walls of Rome to draw back conquered by the plea of the matrons of Rome, the temple was opened, sacrifice offered, and the Senate did homage to woman, by a decree that the consuls would see that what the matrons of Rome thought would contribute most to their honor aud satisfaction should be done. The matrons of Rome auswered that they only desired that a temple might be built to the fortune of women, the expense to be defrayed by women, in which the State should maintain sacrifices and a solemn serviro suited to the majesty of the Gods. The Senate ordered the temple and shrine to be built at public charge, but the women contributed and set up therein a statue of a goddess, which, tradition says, uttered these words, " Oh, women ! most acceptable to the gods is this your pious gift." Let the voice of the mul- litude give acelano to the wives of the pioneers, the mothers of our generation. The temple they helped to build is the nation, cherishing virtue, and within its protection is enshrined the true fame of the women of the republic. Great sufferers in peace and in war, nevertheless they ever utter the voice of ancient Volumnia as she approached Coriolanus, " If we can do nothing else we can ex- pire at his feet in supplicating for Rome."
Hardly had the wheat of Ohio commeneed to ar- rive in Rochester by canal, and a charter for a rail- road been granted, when the proud village, picking np the blunted axe of the pioneer and the worn-out garments of its village infancy and youth, like a youth at age, knocked at the doors of the parent State and demanded its patrimony of sovereignty. It asked chartered privi- loges to deal with its cstate rich in manufacture and trade, and with the ten thousand souls in its limits. Its people divided into parties upon the absorbing question, but, the charter gramed, feasting and speeches upon the little istand just above the falls celebrated the event. Colonel Nathaniel Rochester having died a little before, and Jonathan Child being elected Mayor, we may pause a moment to repeat a toast of the first banquet, responded to by the first mayor: "The city, buying lost its father, weeks protection in the elder child." Thenerforth the city grew in all its parts, channel of trade deepened and multi- glied. The best brain rose to the top of public life, unselfish and able effort to advance municipal growth was given by men who held public service
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a Christian duty. They felt the sentiment of Solon, who, when asked, " What city was best modelled?" answered, " That where those who are not injured, are no less ready to prosecute offenders, than those who are!" E. Darwin Smith, Gardiner and the Seldens made the early bar famous through the State, while Danforth, Cogswell, Martindale, Angle and Cochrane wrestled for the surrendered suprem- acy in later days. Conspicuous to-day as on every day of festive celebration, part of the do- mestic life of this great city, a living ex- emplar of the precepts of his master, a white-haired veteran still lifts the curtain of life's mystery in our midst and makes the name of Shaw household. I may not pause, without fear of invidious comment, on this day of review of our growth and hopes, to select the master minds who have organized great commercial enterprises. But ofte citizen in the use of his vast fortune has mar- shalled all the way they should go. Who does a great action in peace should live in history beside the chief- of armies which have changed social des- tinies. Who lifts a monument to highachievement in letters, politics or art before the people of a city, and thereby gives birth to loftier impulses and new standards of attainment: who breathes over the culture of an hundred thousand people the chaste influence of the purest conception of the masters in painting and sculpture, has done more than build vast commercial enterprises. He las awakened the human inind to sympathy with the beauti- ful in nature and the good in humanity.
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