tive duties of the ministry, and enjoyed time for calm reflection and meditation, his mind dwelt almost exclusively upon the prophetic parts of Scripture, and especially upon the Book of Revelation. It afforded him unspeakable satisfaction to contemplate the future triumphs of the gospel as unfolded in these prophetic portions. He had no doubts and misgivings upon the subject, but from his extensive reading of history, and the progress of the nations in science, art, religion and civilization, he confidently anticipated the universal spread of Christianity over the whole earth."

ELIZUR BRACE,

BY HIS SON, REV. SAMUEL W. BRACE, OF UTICA, N. Y. In opening Mr. J. V. H. Clarke's reminiscences of Onondaga County, I find that he has set down Pompey as one of the original towns formed at the first organization of the County in 1794, and that it comprised at that time the townships of Pompey (as it now is), Fabius and Tully, and a part of the Onondaga Reservation, including LaFayette; he informs us farther, that the township obtained great celebrity at a very early period, and was principally settled by people from New England, many of whom took up their residence in it while it was a part of the township of Mexico, Herkimer County. The first settlers, he says, in the present town of Pompey, were Ebenezer Butler, from Harwinton, Connecticut, who located on Lot number 65, in 1792. His brother, Jesse Butler, and Jacob Hoar, and Mr. Clarke might have added his brother-in-law, Nathan Davis, and others, came on in the spring of the same year. My father, Captain Elizur Brace, was a native of the same town of Harwinton, in Litchfield County, and a neighbor of those adventurous pioneers to the then far west, but did not move to Pompey until four years afterwards, that is in 1796. In the spring of that year he made a journey, mainly on foot, to the wilderness settlement of his former neighbors, and purchased of Ebenezer Butler a portion of land south of the present village and covering entirely the summit of the hill. On

this he commenced the erection of a log house, after the fashion of others who had preceded him in the new and far off settlement; this house, however, he did not finish until after his removal there with his family, in the latter part of October of the same year; hence our accommodations, as I well remember, for I was then six and a half years of age, were scant and uncomfortable, until our famous log house, with two rooms, and a linter, as it was then called, was fit for occupancy. We located, by the kindly consent of our old neighbors, in the first school house ever built on Pompey Hill, and this, of course, was a log structure of but one room, and at that time, for a few weeks, unoccupied. On its split-out, hewed and uneven floor, we spread our beds, for our bedsteads had been left in the country where they were made; here, also, we cooked and ate our homely meals, sat upon our rough benches and hoped for a day of better things. Such a day at length arrived, for before the setting in of winter, we found ourselves comfortably located in our new and highly elevated dwelling, as it was not only like a city set upon a hill, but probably the second best in the settlement. Our neighbors were munificently mindful of us in their offerings of vegetables and other materials of an edible character, as they had them to spare. In the meantime, or before leaving our pent up quarters in the school house, my father had manufactured a table from cherry planks, split from a log given him by Esq. Butler, as this gentleman was then beginning to be called. To her great sorrow, my mother's fine table, the only one we attempted to bring with us, got completely shipwrecked on the way. According to the custom of olden times, a house warming was expected when we were fully settled in our log palace. With its two windows, of twelve lights each, which my father had been careful to bring with him; beside these and other things which might be named, an excellent split and hewed basswood floor-two doors of like material, with latches and latch-strings hanging out, a chimney in the middle, partly of stone, and topped out with rift-sticks and plastered, were

some of the leading characteristics of our new dwelling; and as to the house-warming, so much desired and talked of by our friends and neighbors, that was deferred till midwinter, when the marriage ceremony of my oldest sister was to take place. She had early on our arrival, become affianced to Dr. Walter Colton, the young physician of the town, and the first that ever settled in it for practice, though Mr. Clarke, in his reminiscences of Pompey, states the case entirely different, informing us that Dr. Samuel Beach was the first physician in this town, having come there in 1798. and that Dr. Josiah Colton settled two miles east of Pompey Hill in 1801. This statement, with sundry other mistakes of Mr. Clarke, is too palpable to need refutation. Dr. Tibbals, of whom he speaks in after years, became a resident of the place, and a co-practitioner with Dr. Colton, as the ride of the latter became very extensive, hardly circumscribed by the limits of the whole large county. Dr. Colton early entered into the politics of the day, although such a thing as a newspaper was unknown, except as fugitive copies of the Albany papers were obtained from the postoffice at Onondaga Hollow. This was the only postoffice in the County, and all the region round about. Daniel Wood, Esq., was the first postmaster at Pompey Hill in 1811; previous to that time, the Hollow was the principal postoffice for the town, and to it, the writer, in the days of his early youth, often went as the post-boy for the neighbors, sometimes o on horse-back, but oftener on foot. At that period there was no Syracuse, but a miserable drunken place, known as Cossit's Corners, and approached by roads of corduroy construction, and as the Irishmen of Salt Point used to say, a plentiful variety of mud holes. In those days, slavery was rife in all parts of the Empire State, nor did it entirely cease until 1828, when it came to an end by gradual emancipation. Pompey had its slaves; a number were held on the IIil by some of the most respectable families, but treated not as slaves in the south were said to be, but with much lenity and kindness. They were, however, quite nu

merous in the northwestern part of the town, near what is now Jamesville; sundry families there as the DeWitts and DePuys, of Dutch extraction, held numbers of them, and with their labor entered largely into the cultivation of tobacco; hence it was that Pompey became the first town in all Central and Western New York that was defiled with the raising of this filthy and poisonous plant. I do not remember to have seen a one, or even a two-horse wagon on Pompey Hill earlier than 1804; indeed, horses were scarce and riding vehicles drawn by them were things of after consideration. The saddle, Dr. Franklin's seat of health, was in vogue for getting about, when the use of feet was relinquished; my mother, of course, had her down country pillion, like sundry others who had immigrated from the land of steady habits with their husbands and families. Ox teams were the order of the day, both in summer and winter, when the feet or saddle were not used; hence, carts and sleds, and those often of a clumsey character, were the modes: of swiftest conveyance. The earliest school that I attended was taught by Miss Lucy Jerome, afterwards the mother of the Hon. George Geddes, a lady of distinguished talents and high mental culture. Mr. Merrit Butler, of Pompey, and myself, are probably the only persons living who attended that school, which was kept two summers in succession, but as Mr. Butler is twenty days in advance of me on life's rugged and eventful journey, he is allowed to speak for himself and to correct me, if wrong in this matter of more than seventy years memory. As descendants of Puritans, the early inhabitants of Pompey were strict observers of the Sabbath, keeping themselves and their children at home, except when they were favored with some kind of public religious services on that holy day. If no Missionary or regular minister of the gospel was among them, a prayer meeting was usually held, or a sermon read, and for attendance on Sabbath service, not men only, but women, (ladies, indeed,) would walk two or three miles or more. They used to meet in barns, private houses and school houses. The Rev.

Joseph Gilbert, from Harwinton, Conn., a nephew of my father, a hatter by trade, settled about two miles east from the Hill in 1793, and then quietly pursued his early vocation of hat making, in connection with farming, on a limited scale; wool hats and these usually exchanged for such commodities as the inhabitants had to spare, were the main production of his log shop. Mr. Gilbert was an uneducated man, but a man of fine natural talents, and of rare Christian character; in him the word of Christ dwelt richly in all wisdom; his example and influence in attending funerals, visiting the sick and meeting with the brethren on the Sabbath, were of the most salutary kind, and though dead, he yet speaketh. At the time of the Re-Union, June 29th, 1871, I visited his grave, and the graves of many others whom I well recollected from my boyhood, and found myself irresistably impressed with the solemn fact that the fashion of this world passeth away.

THE BALL FAMILY.

Stebbins Ball, Jr., who came to Pompey in the winter of 1799, from Saratoga County, was born in Granville, Conn., in 1775; his father was Maj. Stebbins Ball, who served seven years in the revolutionary army, and was wounded; at the close of the war, he was honorably discharged, with the rank of major. Stebbins Ball, Jr., settled on lot num29 Pompey, on the farm now owned and occupied by Benjamin F. Wheeler; he was a carpenter and joiner, an excellent mechanic, and gave promise of great usefulness in the new country where house-builders were so much needed; but death early closed his career, in the year 1802, at the age of twenty-seven years; his children surviving him were Stephen C.,and the twins, Alvin M., and Calvin S., also two daughters, Betsey and Charlotte; Betsey married William J. Millard, of Watervale, in Pompey, and Charlotte married, Manoah Pratt, Jr., of Pompey.

Stephen C. Ball, son of Stebbins Ball, Jr., was born in