TO THE
STATESMEN, SOLDIERS, AND CITIZENS OF GARRARD COUNTY.
BY
EUGENIA DUNLAP POTTS,
MAY, 1874.
CAMBRIDGE:
Printed at the Riverside Press.
1876.
The writer of the following little historyhas presumed to borrow the peculiar styleof versification from Longfellow’s celebratedSong of Hiawatha.
She has carefully examined the records withinreach for the facts of her story. Should importantomissions occur, it will be due to themeagerness of existing evidence.
May events so dear to hearts now at rest forever,be perpetuated in the memory of the presentgeneration.
EUGENIA D. POTTS.
Lancaster, May, 1874.
Hear a song of ancient story,
Of a city on a hillside,
Of the valleys all about it,
Of the forest and the wildwood,
Of the deer that stalked within it,
And the birds that flew above it,
And the wolves and bears around it,
Sole possessors and retainers
Of the silent territory.
Hear the song of its high mountains
Of its gushing rills and streamlets,
Of its leaping, rolling rivers,
Of the meadows still and lonely,
Of the groves all solitary,
Of the land of cunning fables.
Should you ask me of this city,
With its legends and its stories,
With its tales of peace and plenty,
With its tales of Indian warfare,
With its nights and days of watching,
With the camp-fires all a-gleaming,
And the white man’s deadly peril,
I should answer, I should tell you,
’Tis the city of Lancaster,
In the county we call Garrard,
In the State of old Kentucky,
In America, the nation
On the continent Northwestern,
Found by Christopher Columbus.
Once a tangled, gloomy woodland,
With the music of its rivers,
As they wound along the grasses,
With the singing of its birdlings,
As they flew among the maples,
With the hissing of its reptiles,
Crawling o’er the sylvan meadows,
With the growling of its wild beasts,
Lurking in the dells and caverns.
Angels gazed with pleasure on it,
On this Eden habitation,
On this work so calm and lovely;
On the moonlit, velvet carpet,
Where the fairies held their revels,
On the broad expanse of verdure,
With the sunbeams slanting o’er it,
On the rugged mountain eyrie,
Where the eagle reared her nestlings,
On the tiny brooks that trickled
Down the glens so cool and shaded.
...