Excerpt from History of the Town of Montpelier From the Time It Was First Chartered in 1781 to the Year 1860 A Preface. which can only be necessary for explanation of matters which otherwise might not be clear to the reader, or of matters which might not otherwise be so fully appreciated, to be good for anything, should never be touched till the last line of the book to which it is attached has been written. And having completed our task of writing a History of Montpelier, according to the best of our humble abilities, with our means of information and the time we could bestow upon it, we now sit down to write a brief preface, both explanatory and apologetic - to explain and designate our means of information on the subjects introduced and discussed, and render our excuse for having per formed the literary part of our task so imperfectly. Having, when Zadoek Thompson had his Gazetteer of Vermont in preparation, undertaken, at his request, to furnish a brief history of Montpelier, we visited, for the purpose of collecting materials for that task, the most intelligent survivors of the first settlers of Montpelier and the neighboring towns, and made minutes of the facts and incidents which we condensed into the brief sketch of the town that appears in that work, together with many more which the space allowed us would not permit of being introduced. Among the best informed of the men thus consulted were James Sawyer, Col. Cyrus Johnson, Zachariah Perrin, and others of the first settlers of Berlin; Hon. Seth Putnam of Middlesex, and John Taplin, Esq., Clark Stevens, and Gen. Pearly Davis of Montpelier, who were considered the best historians of the first settlement then living. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.