Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

50 страница из 121

ssss1

When I entered Allegheny College in the fall of 1876 I made my first contact with the past. I had been born and reared a pioneer; I knew only the beginning of things, the making of a home in a wilderness, the making of an industry from the ground up. I had seen the hardships of beginnings, the joy of realization, the attacks that success must expect; but of things with a past, things that had made themselves permanent, I knew nothing. It struck me full in the face now, for this was an old college as things west of the Alleghenies were reckoned—an old college in an old town. Here was history, and I had never met it before to recognize it.

The town lay in the valley of a tributary of the Allegheny River—French Creek. Its oldest tradition after the tales of Indians was that George Washington once drank from a spring on the edge of the campus. Certainly he passed that way in 1753 when he came up the river valley from Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh), following the route which led to Fort Le Bœuf near Lake Erie. He comments in his diary, published the year after his trip, on the extensive rich meadows through which he had passed, one of which “I believe was nearly four miles in length and considerable wider in some places.” To this particular “rich meadow” a few years later came one David Mead and laid out a town and sold land. Here soon after came the representative of the Holland Land Company, colonizers of first quality. Good men came, distinguished names in Pennsylvania’s history, and they wanted a college. The answer to their wish came in 1815 when one of the most scholarly men of that day, Timothy Alden of Massachusetts, heard their call and, picking up all his worldly possessions, made the two months’ trip by coach and boat to the settlement called Meadville.