FOURTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 41 



was ever passed in this country. That tablet will tell you 

 that it was to an English ship for freighting emigrants to 

 this country that the amount was granted. That was the 

 first ship subsidy bill ever known in this country. It hap- 

 pened a hundred years before Mark Hanna was born. 



Recently, here in Connecticut, you have had some agita- 

 tion, I understand, in favor of good roads. I am told that 

 you have had experts here from Washington to talk to you 

 about them, and, as the expert is usually the last man to tind 

 out the facts, they have probably told you a great many things 

 that were not so, about good roads. Virginia is away ahead 

 of you in that particular. You see we have got a few things 

 to boast of. In 1815, a French engineer, by the name of 

 Crozet, who was in the French army, escaped after the 

 battle of Waterloo and came to Virginia. He was immediately 

 employed by the State of Virginia and sent over into that 

 great valley of the state w^here I live, to build some good roads. 

 The state paid three-fifths of the amount and the land owners 

 paid the other two-fifths. He built some roads, and those 

 roads are as good to-day as they were when they were built. 

 In my own little County of Frederick there are 75 miles of the 

 best roadways that we have anywhere. In 1861, just before 

 your visit to us, a gentleman by the name of Jackson acquired 

 from the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad forty locomotives, of 

 large type, and his master of transportation hauled those 

 locomotives a distance of 125 miles over one of those roads 

 with horses. After the war, Robert Garrett, who was at thaj; 

 time President of the Baltimore & Ohio, heard of that feat of 

 hauling these locomotives 125 miles, and he thought that the 

 man who did that would make a good master mechanic, and 

 Thomas R. Sharpe was made master mechanic of the Balti- 

 more & Ohio by reason of that feat in hauling those locomo- 

 tives that distance over a road that had been built since 181 5. 

 So, gentlemen, you will observe that we have been preparing 

 for your contemplated visit and your contemplated residence 

 for a long time. 



Now. it only remains for me to tell you about the orchards 

 that we have planted upon our sunny hillsides, and of the 

 great prospect which has opened up before us from a com- 



