Rothrock.] 5*6 [Nov. 19, 



Episcopal church there. The Presbyterian church was perhaps 

 a year earlier, but those vigilant workers, the Methodists, had 

 reached the town about twenty-four years before the Episco- 

 palians or Presbyterians were organized. So much for the now 

 nourishing town of more than seven thousand inhabitants which 

 stands almost within sight of his birthplace. 



Even this great city in 1791 contained less than forty thousand 

 inhabitants. All the region beyond Carlisle was the Great West, 

 then, on the whole, perhaps less fully known than any spot of our 

 national domain south of Alaska is to-day. As late as 1802 the 

 inhabitants of the region west of the Alleghany mountains found 

 it easier to send their flour from Pittsburgh to the Antilles by 

 water than to send it to Philadelphia or Baltimore by land. 

 Pittsburgh contained only four hundred houses. Neither an- 

 thracite coal nor gas, nor even lucifer matches, were then in use. 

 The pumps stood by the side-walks, the corners were lighted by 

 oil lamps, and the old market houses occupied the middle of the 

 chief thoroughfare in your city. Indeed, the market places still 

 adorn some of the less important streets. 



In the year of Mr. Price's birth, every foreign coin, save the 

 Spanish dollar, ceased to be a legal tender within our dominions. 

 He was five years old when the mouth of the Columbia river was 

 discovered by an American, Captain Gray, the same man who but 

 two years earlier had been the first of our citizens to load an Ameri- 

 can ship with furs on our west coast, trade these in China for tea 

 and bring his vessel back to Boston laden with this precious cargo. 

 This event marked an era in our early commercial history. Mr. 

 Price had heard our early troubles with France discussed in his 

 home, and listened doubtless with a shudder to the details of 

 Burr's atrocious conspiracy. He could remember the Napole- 

 onic wars, and had heard the foolish protests of the Federal 

 party against Jefferson's Louisiana purchase, which opened a 

 magnificent domain for our growing population, and without 

 which our national life would have been in continual jeopardy. 



