Читать книгу Historic Towns of the Western States - Various - Страница 9

OHIO COMPANY'S LAND OFFICE.

Not far from him are the majority of the Revolutionary heroes who came with him from New England. It is claimed that there are buried here more officers of the Revolution than in any other burying-ground in the United States. About them lie thirteen soldiers of the War of 1812, and a number of the brave men who fought in the Mexican War. Here too, are the resting-places of many early citizens of Marietta, who are as a "Choir Invisible".

"Of those immortal dead, who live again In minds made better by their presence."

The gates are seldom open now to the silent caravans, for the graves in the cloistral grass lie close.

Many relics of bygone days make Old Marietta interesting. The streets running north and south bear yet the names given them by the early settlers, of Washington and his generals. The "Sacra Via" and the breezy "Capitolium" and "Tiber Way" bear witness to an old scholarship. "The Point" recalls the picketed Point of the Indian wars. There still stands the Ohio Company's Land Office, a wee, weather-beaten building, gray with time, probably the oldest structure in Ohio. Opposite this is the old homestead of Rufus Putnam, which stood within the Campus Martius. On the park, fronting the river, is the quaint Two Horn Church of the Congregationalists, erected in the wilderness in 1806 and now Ohio's oldest church building. On the same street where it stands is the stately old mansion of Governor Meigs, which was built two years earlier and which still holds an honored place among Marietta's beautiful homes. In families whose names mark their descent from the "forty-eight immortals" are treasured numerous heirlooms,—ancestral portraits which look from their tarnished frames pink-cheeked, confident and calm; old dresses, dim and faintly odorous; and divers warming-pans, candlesticks and Blennerhassett chairs, together with sundry bits of sprigged, delightful china.

OLD TWO HORN CHURCH.

"Age is a recommendation in four things," runs a Spanish proverb: "Old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, old books to read." To these might well be added a fifth,—old towns to love. To those who know her, Marietta is a hallowed spot. She is a tender-bosomed matron, this mother of many sons. Around her is a fair line of hills, which, whether green with the eternal promise of the spring, or wrapped in the blue smoke from autumn's invisible battlefield, or hoary with winter's snows, are changelessly beautiful. About her are broad fields, now quivering to their resurrection, now white to the harvests. Before her are the lovely, far-stretching rivers, calling to her all day long with their old, sweet notes of running water. By the bonds of her historic beauty she holds her children in a very tender thrall. In all times, and in all places, their hearts yearn unto her in the far Horatian cry: "Septimius,—that angle of the earth laughs for me beyond all others!"