Excerpt from Centennial Address Delivered at Trenton, N. Y: July 4, 1876 Dear Sir - In behalf of the ladies of Trenton, who invited you to give the Centennial Address on the Fourth of July, we respectfully request that you will grant us the pleasure of having this address in a more permanent form; believing as we do, that its facts and incidents and reflections are worthy of perpetual preservation among the people of Trenton. Gentlemen - Pursuant to your request, I send you my Centennial Address. You will find with it and as a part of it, a letter from John Adams, under date of March 4th, 1804, and a letter from Hibernicus, under date of 1820, and also some incidents additional to those given on the 4th of July. Appended to the address is a copy of Judge Van der Kemp's narrative, under date of 1792, of his journey on horseback from Kingston to Albany, and thence up the Mohawk Valley to Fort Stanwix, and by canoe and batteau through Oneida Lake to Lake Ontario. This narrative is in the form of letters to Col. Mappa, and it is to the first of these letters that DeWitt Clinton refers when he writes "Your letter to Col. Mappa, on the canal, written in 1792, is really a curiosity. It gives you the original invention of the Erie route, and I shall lay it by as a subject of momentous reference on some future occasion." The other letters in this narrative will be found still more interesting, and from them we learn that the romance of the "Frenchman's Island" in Oneida Lake is not a myth, as is generally supposed, but a reality, which Judge Van der Kemp describes with something of the charm of Paul and Virginia. Although the size of this appendix makes my address seem like a mere "rill of matter," yet I consider Judge Van der Kemp's narrative of so much greater interest, that I would rather omit the address than the appendix. 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.