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HE time has arrived when it becomes the duty of the
people of this county to perpetuate the names of their
pioneers, to furnish a record of their early
settlement, and relate the story of their progress.
The civilization of our day, the enlightenment of the
age and the duty that men of the present time owe to
their ancestors, to themselves and to their posterity,
demand that a record of their lives and deeds should
be made. In biographical history is found a power to
instruct man by precedent, to enliven the mental
faculties, and to waft down the river of time a safe
vessel in which the names and actions of the people
who contributed to raise this country from its
primitive state may be preserved. Surety and rapidly
the great and aged men, who in their prime entered the
wilderness and claimed the virgin soil as their
heritage, are passing to their graves. The number
remaining who can relate the incidents of the first
days of settlement is becoming small indeed, so that
an actual necessity exists for the collection and
preservation of events without delay, before all the
early settlers are cut down by the scythe of Time.
To be forgotten has been the great
dread of mankind from remotest ages. All will be
forgotten soon enough, in spite of their best works
and the most earnest efforts of their friends to
perserve (sic) the memory of their lives. The means
employed to prevent oblivion and to perpetuate their
memory has been in proportion to the amount of
intelligence they possessed. The pyramids of Egypt
were built to perpetuate the names and deeds of their
great rulers. The exhumations made by the
archeologists of Egypt from Untied Memphis indicate a
desire of those people to perpetuate the memory of
their achievements The erection of the great obelisks
were for the same purpose. Coming down to a later
period, we find the Greeks and Romans erecting
mausoleums and monuments, and carving out statues to
chronicle their great achievements and carry them down
the ages. It is also evident that the Mound-builders,
in piling up their great mounds of earth, had but this
idea to leave something to show that they had lived.
All these works, though many of them costly in the
extreme, give but a faint idea of the lives and
characters of those whose memory they were intended to
perpetuate, and scarcely anything of the masses of the
people that then lived. The great pyramids and some of
the obelisks remain objects only of curiosity; the
mausoleums, monuments and statues are crumbling into
dust.
It was left to modern ages to
establish an intelligent, undecaying, immutable method
of perpetuating a full history--immutable in that it
is almost unlimited in extent and perpetual in its
action; and this is through the art of printing.
To the present generation, however,
we are indebted for the introduction of the admirable
system of local biography. By this system every man,
though he has not achieved what the world calls
greatness, has the means to perpetuate his life, his
history, through the coming ages.
The scythe of Time cuts down all;
nothing of the physical man is left. The monument
which his children or friends may erect to his memory
in the cemetery will crumble into dust and pass away;
but his life, his achievements, the work he has
accomplished, which otherwise would be forgotten, is
perpetuated by a record of this kind.
To preserve the lineaments of our
companions we engrave their portraits, for the same
reason we collect the attainable facts of their
history. Nor do we think it necessary, as we speak
only truth of them, to wait until they are dead, or
until those who know them are gone: to do this we are
ashamed only to publish to the world the history of
those whose lives are unworthy of public record.
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