Screened by a clump of maples and rank shrubbery that speaks of an old-time garden, is a ruined stone house, rather more pretentious than those that date back to the period of the War. It is spoken of by the townspeople as the “blue-stone house.” In this house in 1824 William Lyon Mackenzie printed the first numbers of the Colonial Advocate, the first paper printed in Upper Canada.
“We are not in want, neither are we rich,” he says candidly in his prospectus. O, golden age! Our strenuous present admits of no such happy medium! Mackenzie is remembered no more as an agitator. The measures of justice for which he contended in the bitterness of poverty and exile, have long since been granted and enjoyed.
If plenty of relics of historic Queenston abound, no trace of its one-time prosperity remains. Gone the shipping and trade along with the store-houses bursting with pelts, and rum, and merchandise. Gone that horse railway to Chippewa, built to relieve congested traffic. Gone the bank, with its funds, and the unlucky thirteen taverns that tradition says lined the principal street. Gone, too, that first bridge that spanned the river, built in 1851, just too late to divert from newer channels the ebbing current of commerce.
The great cataract being more accessible by the Queenston route, all the distinguished visitors to our shores in former years came to this port. Chateaubriand was here as early as 1790. Lafayette, Thomas Moore, the Bourbon princes, and Louis Napoleon saw the town enjoying the top-most wave of prosperity. It is said that Moore’s poem beginning, “I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled,” was inspired by the breakfast fire of one of Queenston’s houselets.
But if these later annals are more brilliant, they seem to belong less to the Queenston of to-day than that earlier history which gives the delightful old place a notable part in the making of a Great Dominion.
N. R. Benedict.
Buffalo, N. Y.
INDIANA COUNTY NAMES
The influence of the strong men of any time upon their time and community is strikingly illustrated by a study of the origin of the names of the counties of Indiana, which has just been completed by an old resident of the State after the work of collecting the scattered material in odd moments during the last twenty years. The result as completed shows that seventy-eight of the ninety-two counties were named after men prominent nationally or locally, in war and in peace; men of foreign birth and foreign training, of foreign birth and native training, and native birth and native training. And the strong influence of men whose personality so dominated small communities, men whose names have not been handed down as taking part in the affairs of the nation, is shown by the fact that of the seventy-eight men whose names have been given to counties of the State, forty-one were men whose life and work, influential as it must have been in the particular communities wherein they lived, were not of sufficient prominence to save them from almost utter oblivion in State or National history.
Of the thirty-eight counties that have been named from what might be called well-known men, men of more than local prominence, seven were named for Presidents of the United States: Madison, Monroe, Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Harrison (William Henry Harrison), and Adams (John Quincy Adams); sixteen were named for men prominent in military history—Clark, for George Rogers Clark; Decatur, for the commodore; De Kalb, for the famous German of Revolutionary days; Fayette, for La Fayette; Marion, for General Francis Marion; Morgan, for General Daniel Morgan; Perry and Porter, for Commodores Perry and Porter; Pulaski, for the Polish soldier; Putnam, for General Israel Putnam; Steuben, for Baron Steuben; Wayne, for “Mad Anthony”; Kosciusko, for the Polish soldier; Knox, for General Knox, one of the first secretaries of war; Greene, for General Nathaniel Greene; Warren, for General Joseph Warren, who fell at Bunker Hill, and Stark, for Captain John Stark, victor at the battle of Bennington.