knowledge. He was born of Quaker parentage, in Bucks county, on January 24, 1754. ln 1770 his father bought a large tract of land on the Patapsco river, in Mary- land, where, a few years later, he founded the town of "Ellicott's Mills." Young Ellicott was married in 1775 to a Miss Sarah Brown, and removed

All Early Letter by Thaddeus Stems, In an address on "Thaddeus Stevens as a Country Lawyer," which I pre- pared sor the Pennsylvania State Bar Association last June, and subsequent- ly elaborated and illustrated sor publi- cation in the Lancaster County Histor- ical Society proceedings, I avowed

preacher in Mercersburg on a first day had deprecated the war with England as a judgment and calamity. Whatever glory attached to Mr. Buchanan's early career—and it was certainly an illustrious one—belongs wholly to Lancaster county. None of it, we are confident, is to be shared by the "dark and bloody

A CENTENNIAL EVENT One of the oldest families and widest connections in Eastern Lan- caster county are the Slaymakers Their ancestors bought of and settled on the famous "London lands," along the old Strasburg and Gap roads, and they have illustrated the tenacity of the Lancaster county land-owner

the road from Cen- treville to "Bethel," on one of the tributaries of the Conowingo creek, on the farm now owned by Leander Shoe- maker, there stood, long before the American Revolution, a whitewashed stone hut, which must have been one of the first edifices in that early-settled section of the county

read- ily discern that the bow-like detour by which the railroad ran through Lancaster must have been a radical departure from the best engineering device, and a concession to the scheme on which railroads were sormerly laid out, viz., to reach towns instead of compelling towns to come to them. There

that rather gloomy period of our national history there were two very distinct elements in Lancaster society—the one pro-Eng- lish, sympathizing rather with the British cause, and the other, less notable socially, in accord with the Revolutionary movement (scarcely then more than a rebellion). While it