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thenceforth, and there his heart and footsteps ever turned, no matter to what labor he was for the time called in the outer world.

In 1858 Mr. St. John was elected to the presidency of the Newburgh Savings Bank, an institution with which he was connected for the remainder of his life, and that owes no small share of its prosperity to his financial skill and close attention. He was its faithful head from the year last named until his death in 1890, with the exception of the year 1872; and when he first took charge of its affairs its total deposits reached only twenty-eight thousand dollars, but have since increased to nearly five millions. "This bank," says a competent authority, in speaking of Mr. St. John's life and labors, "is one of the strongest of its kind in the State, and it is speaking within bounds to say that the great success it has attained and the great service it has rendered the people of this city and vicinity have been owing, in no small measure, to the experience, sound judgment and strict integrity that were brought to the management of its affairs by the selection of Mr. St. John as its president.”

It was not alone through this channel that Mr. St. John made an impress upon the public life of his home city and community. In 1860 he served as a delegate to the National Union Convention at Baltimore, which nominated Bell and Everett to

the offices of President and VicePresident of the United States. He was selected as a candidate for Presidential elector on that ticket, and in the same year his own district nominated him for Congress. In 1863 he was complimented by the nomination for Secretary of State, by the Democratic party of New York. In 1875 he was elected to represent the Tenth Senatorial district of New York-the counties of Orange and Sullivan-by a handsome majority; and re-elected. in 1877 by an increased majority. In 1879 he declined another renomination for the Senate. In 1876 he was a delegate to the National Democratic Convention that nominated Samuel J. Tilden to the Presidency; and in the councils of the Democratic party of New York he always took a promiinent and influential part. He was a member of St. George's Episcopal Church, Newburgh, in which he held the offices of vestryman and warden for several years; and was trustee of the State Homeopathic Asylum of Middletown for many years.

It was a life of continued and farreaching usefulness that Daniel B. St. John was called from in the early days of 1890. He had left home for a few weeks of the winter season, and was a guest of the Berkeley Hotel, in New York city. He had contracted a severe cold, which, with the feebleness of old age, soon told upon him, and on the morning of February 18th, 1890, he sank quietly to rest. He

left no children, and his wife had preceded him by two years into the land of rest.

Had any evidence been needed to show the high estimation in which Mr. St. John was held by those who knew him best, and among whom so many years of his life were spent, it would have been supplied by the many expressions of grief and of respect with which the news of his death was received. The people, the press and various organizations with which he had been connected gave formal expression to the feeling of general loss. One just tribute to his character may be here reproduced, as illustrating the rest: "His domestic

life was simple and happy. He had the respect and esteem of all classes of citizens, and all those great blessings that are factors in the life of a truly successful man. He was a man of the times, broad-minded, publicspirited and progressive. His influence always led his fellows toward the good; his sympathy, his benevolence, his kindly greetings-they will be remembered. His public and private duties have been performed with the greatest care, and through a long service in public life his personal honor and official integrity were without blemish."

THEODORE JOHNSON.

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THE year 1833 is a sharp turning point towards greatness in the history of Chicago. Three years before, the commissioners of the Illinois and Michigan canal had platted Ottawa and Chicago-towns at the termini of the proposed route.

III.

Thus encouraged having been given an abiding place-Chicago commenced to grow into a condensed settlement. Clybourne's log slaughter house, out on the South Branch, which he had built in 1827, was no longer in town. Wolf Point, as we

have seen, took on great airs with its hotel and its Clybourne-Miller ferry, which, however, soon fell into disuse from want of patronage. But Mr. Miller's interests as a hotel-keeper made it necessary that there should be some regular means of communication between the different sections of the settlement, and so he kept an old scow in motion himself. This, Mark Beaubien purchased and ranwhen he was not racing his ponies with the Pottawattamies-until in the winter of 1831-32. Mr. Miller built a

log bridge, ten feet wide, over the North Branch, near Kinzie and Canal streets. During the next year the soldiers at Fort Dearborn and the Pottawattamies pooled issues, raised a purse of nearly $500, and threw its fac-simile over the South Branch, north of Randolph street.

Mr. Miller comes into notice again in the spring of 1832 as a pioneer contractor and a public-spirited gentleman; for then he built for the county a small, roofless structure of logs on the southeast corner of Court-house Square. It was called the Estray Pen. Mr. Miller's bill for this first public building, completed in the spring of 1832, was $20; but he accepted $12.

Furthermore, the next year after the town was platted, Mr. Miller's brother, John, built a small tannery just north of the tavern, and the two went into business together. Philo Carpenter, a brisk young man from Troy, N. Y., had opened a drug store on Lake street, near the river. Stephen Forbes, a Vermonter, and his wife had, after some hesitancy, settled in the town and opened a regular school in a log building, near the present corner, of Randolph and Michigan streets. Prayer meetings had been progressing for two years in the old Kinzie house, occupied by the butcher, Mark Noble. For the benefit of the children, a Sunday school had been held for a year in a building near by, erected by that gen

tleman-all after the platting of the town and before its incorporation.

The fall of 1831 saw both the erection and the falling of the government lighthouse. The first structure witnessed the departure of the garrison for Green Bay, and the second one, completed early the next year, welcomed (metaphorically speaking) General Scott and the cholera. An appropriation had been obtained for the improvement of the harbor—a twin enterprise of the canal—and just previous to the incorporation of the town the government engineers and the contractors had commenced work in front of Fort Dearborn.

The harbor improvement was begun in June; Chicago was incorporated in July; in May Rev. Jeremiah Porter arrived from Fort Brady, on the Menomonee River, where he had been preaching to the garrison and Indians. He was—he is, an educated. Massachusetts gentleman, and an earnest western missionary. When the commandant was transferred from Fort Brady to Fort Dearborn, Mr. Porter had so endeared himself to that officer and his wife that he was urged to accompany them to the Chicago field, which virgin soil. By the withdrawal of was virtually troops to assist General Scott in the Black Hawk war, and by this transfer of the next year, Fort Brady had been almost denuded of its population, and as there was already one missionary on the ground, Mr. Porter sensi

bly decided that duty called him to Fort Dearborn.

To him, therefore, we turn for a picture of Chicago in May, 1833, two months before it became the town of Chicago: "Many families had fled from the surrounding country to Chicago for military protection from the Indians the previous year; some of these remained and others had come in from the east. Including the two companies in the fort, there were nearly three hundred people dwelling here. Conceive now, of Chicago, as it was in 1833, when the hand of man had hardly begun to form its streets;* a wide, wet prairie, as far as the eye could reach, on a muddy river winding south over a sand-bar to the lake, with a few scattered dwellings. Colonel J. B. Beaubien's trading post of the American Fur Company just outside of the reservation; a dwelling for the lighthouse keeper; with a single street on the river, from the fort to the point, near where Lake street bridge now is. A log cabin west of that bridge was the boarding-place of the merchants (Wolf Point Hotel). The dwellings were then all of logs,

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and there were only three framed stores. These had just been built for Newberry & Dole,† Philo Carpenter and P. F. W. Peck. Mr. John Wright had commenced the fourth store.

"No place for Sabbath worship had been built on the west side of Lake Michigan. The only place for worship was a log school-house over the bridge. On the north side of the river, opposite the, fort was the Kinzie house; a third of the way to the point was the dwelling of Col. Richard J. Hamilton, and still further west was the house of Dr. Harmong and his brother, Deacon Harmon.

Think of Chicago River as flowing between grassy banks, mak

During the previous year a bridge had been built over the North Branch, in the locality of the present Kinzie and Canal streets. The log school-house was over this bridge, and was jointly occupied by John Watkins, the teacher, and by Rev. Jesse Walker, a Methodist minister, who lived in his end of the building during week days and preached in the school-room on Sundays. During the preceding school term-the fall of 1832—Mr. Watkins had taught his eight Indian and four white scholars in Col. Hamilton's deserted horse stable, the benches and desks being made of old store boxes.

Dr. Elijah D. Harmon was an army surgeon, as well as general practitioner, coming to Chicago in 1830. Dr. Harmon had charge of the sick in the fort during the cholera epidemic, and performed the first acknowledged surgical operation in Chicago-upon the frozen feet of a half-breed mail carier-and may be called our first resident physician and surgeon. In 1834 he removed to Texas, where he died; but he visited Chicago many times, and left his impress upon it.

ing a half-circle around Fort Dearborn, flowing south a half mile, and then crossing a bar before it could. empty its sluggish waters into the lake."

When Mr. Porter began to inquire as to the religious status of Chicago, he found that Philo Carpenter had organized a Sabbath school, but was then absent in New York on business. Leaving his friend, the new commandant, to superintend the building of the government pier from the river to the lake, and the cutting of a channel through the sand-bar, Mr. Porter proceeded to take up the religious work where Mr. Carpenter, the brisk young druggist, had left it. When he went to take his dinner at the log boarding house, over the South Branch, upon the first day of his arrival, he was surprised to meet John Wright, once fellow-student at Williamstown, and from whom he had parted five years previously in the city of New York.

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Having learned that Mr. Porter came as a minister, not as an army surgeon-for surgery had once been the bent of his mind-Mr. Wright exclaimed: "Well, I do rejoice, for yesterday was the darkest day I ever saw. Captain Johnson, who had aided us in our meetings, was to leave us, and I was almost alone. I have been talking about, and writing for, a minister for months in vain, and yesterday, as we prayed with the Christians about to leave, I was almost ready to despair, as I feared the

troops coming in would all be utterly careless about religion. The fact that you and a little church were, at the hour of our meeting, riding at anchor within gunshot of the fort is like the bursting out of the sun from behind the darkest clouds."

"Until then," says Mr. Porter, in his narrative, "I was not fully decided as to my duty. There were three military posts, besides Fort Dearborn, west of Lake MichiganFort Crawford, at Prairie du Chien; Fort Winnebago, now Portage City, and Fort Howard, at Green Bay. Of these four I had reached the most important, and complying with the wishes of Major Fowle (the commandant), I followed the advice of Mr. Wright and Captain Johnson, remained here, and it was soon my privilege to organize the first church. ever formed in Chicago."*

Mr. Porter was, and is, a Presbyterian. For some years previous to his arrival, circuit and local missionaries of the Baptist and Methodist churches had preached in the fort, and in a log cabin on the 'west side" class meetings had also been held,

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* Not historically correct; for, upon petition to the Bishop of St. Louis by such men as T. J. V. Owen (Indian agent), J. B. Beaubien, Alexander Robinson, Antoine Ouilmette, B.. Caldwell, Mark Beaubien, John S. C. Hogan (postmaster) and the Laframboises, Father St. Cyr, a French priest just ordained, was sent to Chicago, and celebrated mass in a tiny log cabin belonging to Mark Beaubien, on the 5th of May. Mr. Porter arrived in Chicago on the 13th of May.

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