an impressive expression of a people's belief in a government organized on the basis of the Common Law. We celebrate tonight the Two-hundredth Anniversary of the granting of a Charter to the borough of Lancaster. What is a Charter? It is an instru- ment for permitting and encouraging the free

ranking among the most gigantic of all in the United States, and therefore in the whole world. Our story concerns only our own county. But let us take a glimpse or two into the dim past. One of the first references to the "post" or post office is found in the Bible. In the eighth chapter and tenth verse

Clockmaker's Company of London, and advertised this clock extensively �in "Commonwealth Mercury," a newspaper of London, on November 25, 1661. A picture of a Fromanteel clock in appearance is almost an exact counterpart of most of our Lancaster County grandfather clocks, which were first made in this county

wedges, which were loosened by the jolting of the cars.—Ellis and Evans' History of Lancaster County, p. 319. Last spring (1940), we saw two hundred of these sandstone blocks pulled out by a tractor from the original roadbed of the old Columbia and Philadelphia Railroad, on the farm of Daniel F. King

with little expense water could be obtained from four or five such courses and would supply our whole city for every purpose that might possibly be required." If that is a true picture of the site of Hamilton's Lancaster, could any- thing be more forbidding—woods everywhere, the Dark Hazel Swamp to the

of the earliest and most ardent collectors and observers of nature, a resident of Darby, then Chester County, Pa., contributed many papers on entomology which appeared between the years 1746 and 1751. Timothy Mattlock, born in New Jersey but a resident of standing in Lancaster, presented in 1780 an

Never before has the Lancaster County Historical Society been called upon to enter into a dual ceremony such as commemorated today—at Lititz, Pennsylvania, and simultaneously at Sacramento, California; communities separated by the breadth of our country. At Lititz, in the town center, before the General

this historic occasion ; and we hope that each and every one of you, as well as each of us on the committee, may today take home some of the inspiration that comes from contact with a great soul ; and furthermore, may I express the hope that every time we and thousands of other travelers pass this spot

were permitted to ride. The black smoke, rising from the burning embers of the long bridge at Columbia, hung like a pall over the county, in- creasing the anxiety and perplexity of the people. And then in a few days followed the thunderous roar of distant cannonading, distinctly heard through- out the