The plates from which the above illustrations were printed were kindly loaned by the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society.
Athens Gazette,
Athens, Pa.
The Wyoming Military Establishment.
Alsace-Loraine is a conquered province. The flag of Germany floats over it. Within the memory of most of us it was an integral part of France. At the time of the conquest, no heart of all its people went willingly to the side of the victor.
We are met to-day in Pennsylvania. Yet for years, in the eighteenth century the soil beneath our feet, and five thousand square miles of adjacent territory, inside the present limits of Pennsylvania, was an integral part of the State of Connecticut. It was settled by Connecticut people, was under Connecticut institutions, was governed by Connecticut laws. It was a Connecticut town; it was a Connecticut county; had a judge, a sheriff, other officers, and sent representatives to the Connecticut legislature.
Pennsylvania made conquest of it. No heart of all the people of this Connecticut town went willingly to the side of the victor. The Alsatians were no more stunned, at being forcibly wrenched from their allegiance to the flag they loved, than were the Connecticut people who had settled a town of their own in the heart of Pennsylvania.
How did this cataclysm befall? I will tell you. It all came of the ignorance or carelessness of a King. In 1620 King James I. of England granted a Charter to the Plymouth company for the ruling of New England in America. The charter covered North America from the fortieth to the forty-eighth degrees of north latitude, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. The Plymouth Company proceeded to sub-divide its territory. In 1631 it granted a charter to the Connecticut Colony which covered the space between the forty-first and forty-second degrees of north latitude "and from the Narragansett river on the east to the South Sea on the west throughout the main lands." The South Sea was the Pacific Ocean. In 1662 King Charles II. gave a new charter to Connecticut confirming the act of the Plymouth Company. Nineteen years later this same King in the grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn, included a portion of the same territory, already given by him to Connecticut.