were manumitted. Interesting corrobora- tion of this is supplied by the article of manumission of Giles Wallis, of whlch follows a literal copy. It ap- pears the age of thirty-one was the period of freedom: To all whom it may concern, Be it known that I, Edward Gorsuch, of Baltimore county, and State

THE AMERICAN RIFLE. Upon various occasions in the pro- ceedings of the Lancaster County His- torical Society, attention has been called to the importance of the rifle in the early history of the country, and to the fact that the city of Lan- caster, and its suburban water powers, furnished a centre

stagger the financiers of the Com- monwealth, what would have hap- �pened had a project been started that would to the infant State of that day been relatively commensurate with the Federal scheme at Panama? And yet there is extended historic justification for the survey then ap- parently making in the

difficult to find even a single great work in any one of the thousands of homes in this city and county which have the char- acteristics of culture, taste and refine- ment. This is somewhat due to the fact that wealth has never centered here; and no pre-eminent artist has ever sprung from or been nurtured

with his guest, Col. Ephraim Blaine, the grandfather of James G. Blaine— who, moving to Carlisle, set up a tide �of emigration that flooded on to Wash- ington county, Pa., and thence surged back to Maine. What would we not give to have preserved the "table talk" of that dinner at General Mifflin's

concrete form in Lancaster county , and are ap• proaching a popular celebration which will commemorate and illustrate this mighty issue of American politics in the last century, it is fit we view the attitude toward this question of the two citizens and public officials of Lancaster county who, of all in

land near there—the county, by the way, in which Lincoln was born, and where he then lived, a five-year-old lad. The story proceeds thus: Buchanan, then three and twenty, a college graduate and a law- yer, had little fitness for the rough- and-ready sides of frontier life. At- tending the first term of

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

LANCASTER, PA. �PREFACE. The preparation o:£ this sketch and contribution to our local history had been long contemplated by the Editor and Compiler. Born near the locality where the events occurred which are its subject, he has been for more than hal:f a cen­ tury intimately related with their associations

inquisition indented taken at Sadsbury township, in the county of Lancaster, the 11th day of Septem- ber, A. D. 1851, before me, Joseph D. Pownall, Esq., for the county of Lan- caster, upon the view of the body of a man then and there lying dead, sup- posed to be Edward Gorsuch, of Balti- more county