The Days of a Man 1830 



"Going Lucina, Lydia, Rebecca, and Mary, left Lake 

 West " Champlain and moved across the country after the 

 fashion of thos^e times in what was afterward called 

 a "prairie schooner" to the Great Holland Purchase 

 in western New York, a group of townships then 

 mostly included in the county of Ontario. The first 

 halt was at Arcadia 1 in what is now Wayne County, 

 a rich farming country which nevertheless seemed 

 to the wanderers less healthy than the Adirondacks 

 from which they had come. Accordingly, after a 

 stay of a few years, they moved still farther west- 

 ward, settling in what was at that time a part of 

 the township of Warsaw, then in the county of 

 Genesee. The land they selected was high and 

 rolling, crossed by the bright, clear headwaters of 

 Oatka River, a smaller tributary of which became 

 known as "Grandpa Jerdan's Creek." Later the 

 southern half of Genesee was separated from the 

 rest to form Wyoming, with Warsaw as county seat, 

 the six-mile-square township south of Warsaw being 

 first known as Hebe after the classical fashion of 

 those days. 2 This name was later changed to Gaines- 

 ville in honor of General Edmund Pendleton 

 Gaines of Virginia, a "hero in the siege of Fort 

 Erie" in the War of 1812 a transformation I have 

 always regretted, as I should have chosen "Hebe" 

 rather than Gainesville as a birthplace. 



1 Here at that time lived Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, who 

 "translated" the famous plates of the Book of Mormon reputed to have been 

 dug up in the neighborhood, the original hieroglyphics of which were read 

 (according to tradition) by the aid of two magic glasses, the "Urim and 

 Thummim." 



2 A system initiated by one of the head surveyors of the great tract of 

 central New York to the east of the Holland Purchase, each township mapped 

 by him having received a name drawn from his Latin repertory. Examples 

 still extant are Ithaca, Utica, Troy, Syracuse, Rome, Ulysses, Homer, Virgil, 

 Ovid, and Hesiod. 



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