AT THE DEDICATION OF THE MARKET STREET ENTRANCE TO THE CITY OF HARRISBURG, PA. APRIL TWENTIETH v' T?T1 I )Rpn ANE Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from The Library of Congress http://www.archive.org/details/proceedingsatdedOOcivi PROCEEDINGS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE MARKET STREET ENTRANCE TO THE CITY OF HARRISBURG, PA. QZfyt gift of tfje famtlp of tfje late Colonel ^tnvp ^cCormtcfe HELD UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE CIVIC CLUB OF HARRISBURG, APRIL 20, I906, AT 4 O'CLOCK P. M. Witi) tfje compliments! of tfje family of tfje late ^enrp ^cCormicfe Jl&ount Pleasant Prefix J. Horace McFarland Company Harrisburg-. Pa. Gift ^^^c^/YY\J^<^^ /Y^utfVYvueA. PROCEEDINGS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE MARKET STREET ENTRANCE TO THE CITY OF HARRISBURG, PA. ON the afternoon of Friday, April 20, 1906, the re- cently completed entrance to the City of Harrisburg, at the west end of Market street and the east end of the Harrisburg Bridge, was formally dedicated under the auspices of The Civic Club of Harrisburg. The sky was overcast, but no rain fell. Between the two ornamental electroliers at the end of the bridge, a platform, suitably decorated, had been erected, upon which were seated the Honorable Lyman D. Gilbert, who presided for the Civic Club ; the Honorable Edward Z. Gross, Mayor of Harrisburg; Mr. Christian Nauss, Presi- dent of Select Council; Mr. Edwin C. Thompson, President of Common Council; Henry B. McCormick, Esquire; the Right Reverend Doctor Darlington, the Reverend Doctor DeWitt, the Reverend Doctor Chambers; Mrs. Lyman D. Gilbert, President, and Miss Rachel Pollock, Mrs. Robert A. Lamberton, and Mrs. William Henderson, Vice-Presi- dents, of the Civic Club ; Mr. Charles A. Disbrow, Presi- dent, Messrs. John T. Brady, Joseph P. Luce, and J. Horace McFarland, members, V. Grant Forrer, Secretary, and Warren H. Manning, Landscape Architect, of the Harrisburg Park Commission; Mr. Albert Kelsey, of Philadelphia, who designed the entrance, and Mr. Elias Z. Wallower. The Honorable Samuel W. Pennypacker, Governor of the Commonwealth, not being able to be present owing to a previous engagement out of the city, designated as his 7 t^roceetungs at ttje Saturation of tfje Market Street representative General Thomas J. Stewart, Adjutant Gen- eral of Pennsylvania. In front of the platform were arranged park benches, extending back to Front street, where members of the family of Colonel McCormick, members of the Civic Club and of the Historical Society of Dauphin County, Pennsyl- vania, and others, were seated. About the southern column were grouped several hun- dred children from the public schools, members of the League of Good Citizenship, each having a small flag. The Steelton Band assisted with the music. The programme was as follows: — The Civic Club of Harrisburg J^ebtcatton of tfje Market Street Entrance to tfje Cttp of i|arrt£tmrg, Pa. April 20, 1906, 4 o'clock p. m. of Cfarrtfitfiurg, Penngplbama moved to as fittingly increase the city's adornments. Our developing parks need memorial entrances. Beautiful and appropriate fountains may be erected as enduring monuments to public-spirited liberality. A great public bath would do incalculable good, as well as cause honorable remembrance of its donor. May we have many such occasions as this, to the honor and glory of our city! May each of us justly claim, as did St. Paul, to be "a citizen of no mean city ! " May we soon live, in all respects, in Harrisburg the Beautiful ! The Chairman then introduced the Reverend John DeWitt, D.D , LL.D., a former resident of Harrisburg, and now Archibald Alexander Professor of Church History in the Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, at Princeton, New Jersey, who delivered the following address: — Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : You do not need to hear from me that the receipt of your invitation to assist at the dedication of this impressive and appropriate approach to the new Harrisburg bridge gave me a great deal of pleasure. I always have great happiness in visiting Harris- burg, in coming back to my home, the home of so many of my people for six generations. Nor is the happiness diminished in this instance by the duty you have devolved on me of making a brief address. For I am confident that however ill-organized the address shall prove to be, it will not be ill-received by old friends. Moreover, I am sure that, in circumstances like those which make up the present occasion, you will not expect me to speak in any but a free and unstudied way. I have been compelled to live away from Harrisburg for more years than I like to confess. It is true that the pain of exile has been tempered by many things ; among others by the fact that I have had the good fortune always to live in a place celebrated for its beauty, or for the beauty of its situation. But returning to Harrisburg whenever I have been able to do so, I have never walked along the river's bank without feeling that I was in the presence of a scene whose beauty is exceptional and eminent, and without congratulating myself that my childhood and youth were spent in a region " suffused and saturated with this element." And the picture made by the opening valley, the islands, the swelling hills, the higher mountains and the flowing and shining river, has been so impressed upon me that, absent from it as I have been for the most of my life, I have easily called it before me. And as often as I have done so it has been a refreshment and solace ; like the 19 I^roceetitngg at tfje I^ebtcatton of tfje Market Street daffodils of Wordsworth's lyric to the poet whenever they flashed " upon that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude." But, after all, it is its human associations which give to the scene, as well as to the image of it the memory retains, its consummate charm. Indeed, I am not sure that when attributing the element of beauty to a large and diver- sified natural object, like the scene that faces the city, we do not include some of the relations which man sustains to it. It is no doubt true that natural objects by themselves and utterly apart from their human relations are capa- ble, by their mere impact upon the senses, of producing painful or pleasurable reactions. There is a physiological connection between any striking scheme of form and color on the one hand and the nervous system on the other, which expresses itself in feelings of pleasure or pain ; and in this connection, doubtless, is to be found the physical basis of the esthetic judgment and its related feeling. But to build a theory of esthetics on these mere physical reactions would be crass animalism indeed. The complex relations of nature to man, at once the crown of nature and its priest and king, and to man's complex life, play a larger part subconsciously than sometimes we are disposed to think, not only in our enjoyment but even in our judgment of objects of beauty or even sub- limity. The greatest of modern philosophers, I think, was Immanuel Kant. And Kant, in unfolding the human judgment of the firmament by night as the palmary instance of the material sublime, points out the fact that the associa- tion of ourselves with the distant stars is an essential element both of the affirmation and the feeling of the firmament's sublimity. For, to quote his words, the starry Heaven "departs from the place I occupy in the outer world of sense, expands, beyond the bounds of imagination, this connection of myself with worlds lying beyond worlds and systems blended into systems, and protends myself also into the illimitable times of their periodic move- ment." Now if Kant is right in teaching that, before completing in ourselves the idea and the feeling of the sublime, we connect the object which awakens both the idea and feeling with ourselves as human, then, I think, we are justified in saying of a large and complex scene of natural beauty, like the one in whose constant presence you are so fortunate as to live, so rich in the variety of its charm, so inviting in all its changes and aspects, so unified by the coordination of its elements, and so moulded to the needs and uses of man, — I think we are justified in saying of such a scene, that, at least, we do not rise to an adequate appreciation of its beauty and are not thrilled by the emotion which the beauty awakens, until we associate its physical features with that human life of which from the beginning it was designed to be the theater and the instrument. It is just in this association of the life of your city with the scene in the 20 Entrance to tfje Cttp of ^arrtsburg, Pennfiplbanta presence of which we are gathered, that the significance of the monumental approach we have met to dedicate is to be found. For is it not true that two, at least, of the most striking features of the life of Harrisburg, the feature which has given it its greatest distinction and the feature which has con- tributed most abundantly to its material prosperity, are symbolized before us ? The prime distinction of the city is, that for more than ninety years it has been the seat of the Commonwealth's civil government, and this you com- memorate in the stately columns which aided in forming the porch of its Capitol. And what has so largely contributed to the city's development as that great system of constructed highways — the bridges with their connecting roads, the canal and the network of railways which displaced the inadequate natural avenues of communication like the river and its ferry — of which con- structed highways, the first in time, was the bridge of which this new avenue across the river is the successor ? It is thus a large and deeply interesting theme which the occasion that has brought us together suggests and which, if you had only secured an orator equal to its treatment, might well have engaged your attention. I mean the progressive development of these great highways under the protection and encouragement of the Commonwealth. Unfortunately, I have neither the ability nor the special knowledge needed for its unfolding. I must set it aside for another to which I am more nearly equal. But I cannot abandon it before at least expressing the hope that this monumental approach will always convey the final aspect of the truth it so finely symbolizes : that after all, the end, the final cause of the united efforts of men to conquer nature, to modify it and subdue it to their use is to destroy solitude, to bring men to- gether, to establish and increase the city life — the society in which the mem- bers of the race shall dwell together in harmony as brethren. This, after all, is the ultimate significance alike of the association of men in political govern- ments, and of the flinging of bridges across the isolating and separating rivers. Not only does Aristotle, in his great treatise on politics, point out that the ultimate explanation of the founding of political governments is "that man is an animal naturally formed for society, and that therefore even when he does not want any foreign assistance he will equally desire to live with others," but the same truth is strikingly taught in the Christian scriptures. It is true, indeed, that the primeval life of happiness as there presented is that not of the city but of the garden ; and it is also true, that after the great catastrophe the city life was forbidden. Yet the idea of the city and of social life is ever the ideal of scattered man subduing the earth in the isolation of country life. And this ideal is justified in the visions of the Hebrew prophets and the great Christian seer. Zion, the City of God, takes the place of Eden the Garden of the Lord in Hebrew prediction ; and in order that the glory of 21 Proceebtngsf at tfje ^eoicattcm of tfje Market street Jehovah may be so revealed that all men shall see it together, a highway is to be made, the valleys are to be exalted by the labors of men, and the hills are to be brought low, and the crooked made straight, and the rough places plain. And in the last book of the Bible, the picture of the consummate state of man on earth is that of dwellers in the city, is that of a perfect society in the city whose length and breadth and height are equal, and whose highest distinction is that therein dwelleth righteousness. This, if we could only realize it, is the final cause, the pre-destined end of all human association, by which government is organized and highways are built and nature is modi- fied and isolation is destroyed. But appropriate as reflections like these may be, we may better turn our thoughts to a subject more special. For it is not the bridge as a bridge, but as the first bridge of Harrisburg that we are thinking of today. And Harris- burg, its beginning and early development, and above all its first people, con- stitute for me, and I am sure for you, a theme of never-failing interest. And where better can we talk of our ancestors than here on the bank of our river, just at the point where the bridge and the town meet, with the im- memorial hills about us, in the middle of the valley which the river parts in two, in plain view of the sites of their dwellings, and with the Susquehanna below us moving with gentle and stately flow on its winding course to the bay and the embracing ocean? Here, certainly, I may speak of our town's earlier people. It is now within a decade of two centuries that the first settler made for himself a home on the Susquehanna, not far from the spot on which we are gathered ; having moved from Philadelphia, where he had married one who, like himself, was a native of Yorkshire. "John Harris lived for a brief period at a point above Columbia, where the village of Bainbridge now stands ; but was not satisfied with the location. Exploring upwards along the eastern bank of the Susquehanna, he advanced until he found the entrance opposite him of the great valley with two fine streams flowing into the river about five miles apart, and on the eastern side an elevated plateau with the little Paxtang pouring itself into the river at its southern edge." We can hardly suppose him to have known in its larger relations the place he chose for his home and trading point. He could not, of course, have been aware of the great stretch of the Cumberland valley to the Potomac and of its extension beyond that river through Virginia ; that eastward the same valley crossed the Schuylkill, the Delaware, the Hudson, and even the Connecticut; and that besides being the richest tract within the ranges of the Appalachian Mountains was the natural avenue between the Northeastern and Southwestern country owned or claimed by Great Britain. In all that valley not less than a thousand miles in length, it has been said by one who knew it all, John Harris 22 Entrance to tfje Cttp of iifarrtstourg, Pennsylvania "chose the point of greatest beauty, the spot where it is cloven by the Sus- quehanna." It would be interesting to follow the fortunes of the first John Harris, who, in his dealings with the red Indians, "did justice and loved mercy." But today we are properly more deeply interested in those who followed him to the neighborhood and gave its distinctive character to the town after- wards founded by his son and namesake. Not many English settlers followed the English John Harris to the region. They made their homes nearer to Philadelphia. But not many years after this settlement, just about the close of the first quarter of the eighteenth century, two streams of immigrants began to flow into the country around his home. One of these was German, originating largely in the Rhenish Palatinate. The other was Scottish, from the province of Ulster in Ireland. Some years since, in speaking at the Centennial celebration of the First Presbyterian Church, I had occasion to point out, in the names of well-known Harrisburg families, the union of these two streams. " So," — if I may repeat what I then said, — " So are united the Scotch Weir and the German Wiestling, so Beatty and Egle ; so Kerr and Orth ; so Kunkel and Rutherford ; so Ross and Halde- man ; so Haldeman and Cameron ; so Gross and Criswell ; so Fahnestock and McKinley," and, to refer to a union of special interest in connection with our gathering today, so Buehler and McCormick. I am not insensible to the greatness of the other early migrations from Europe to America, or to their enrichment of our civilization ; the English- man of New England and the Englishman of Maryland and Virginia, the Hollander of New Netherlands and the Huguenot who was so closely allied with him. But I am sure that the ultimate judgment of the historian will be, that the German and Ulster migrations have each bestowed upon the nation benefits as large, as various, and certainly as widespread, as those bestowed by any migration to this country. It is well for us, today, to refresh our knowledge of these, the two elements of Harrisburg's earliest population. But before doing so, let us not fail to remember gratefully the proprietor of the Province, who in virtue of his constitution, "the Holy Experiment," became the founder of the Commonwealth and welcomed alike the Palatine and the Irish Scot, and made his province theirs. All of us have our ethical limitations, and no doubt William Penn had his. If Lord Macaulay is to be believed, they were serious enough. Yet I do not know where to look for an example, among the founders of states, of greater magnanimity or wiser foresight in his dealings with the people. To the Province of Pennsylvania the Germans and the Ulster men came in great numbers and with high hopes. Speaking broadly, they came about the same time and spread themselves through the valley and throughout the region south and east of us. This was one of the points at which the two met and mingled. 23 Proceeding* at tfje j^ebtcatton of tfje Market street Of these two classes of early settlers, the Germans were in number the greater. They represented a larger district of Europe and a greater variety of religious belief. We Pennsylvanians are to be congratulated that the early history in our State of its German settlers has, at last, been the subject of serious study. We had hoped to be honored by the presence of one such student in His Excellency the Governor of the Commonwealth ; and only a week ago, I had the satisfaction, as editor of "The Princeton Review," of accepting for its pages, a deeply interesting article by a Pennsylvanian, himself not a German, on "The Influence of German Thought and Literature in the United States during the Colonial Period." I wish that time permitted me to dwell on this subject as it deserves. All that I can do is to bring before you the character of this element of our population in its outstanding features. And here, rather than employ my own words, I shall use those of a Harrisburger in whose veins ran no German blood, yet a scholar and lover of German literature ; words written forty-four years ago. These words of Dr. Benjamin Wallace may well be read on the bank of the river he loved so well. "One would think," he wrote, "the German character might by this time be understood, and yet it is plain that it is not ; for when it is attempted either to eulogize or censure, men frequently shoot wide of the mark. The German character, to be understood, must be studied in the structure of its language ; in its literature as developed in its original seats ; in its manifestations in Europe among crowned kings, skilful diplomatists, profound scholars, eminent statesmen, imagina- tive authors. It must be studied in Luther's Bible, in Gesenius' Lexicon, in Schiller's Wallenstein, in Herder, and Goethe, in Tholuck, in Arndt, in Spener, in Kant and Schelling. You must go to the printing room of Gutenberg ; to the cell where Luther prayed to God ; to the study of Lessing ; to the common schools of Prussia and Saxony. And now, these are the same people that cover the valleys of our State, and bring from the bosom of the earth its exuberant fertility ; the same people, with the same untiring perse- verance ; the same steadfast devotion to an object ; the same household quiet- ness that breathes from every page of German song; the same love of music and of flowers ; the same attachment to order ; the same aversion to unquiet change; the same love of abstract thought; the same weird imagination. Doubt it not, the deeper elements of the unextinguishable Teutonic character will develop themselves here. And here will be a new union of the peculiar Anglo-Saxonism of England with that original stream from which it came in the Fatherland. It is not," he continues, "until we have been absent from Pennsylvania, till we have known other characters and mingled with other men, that we are prepared to appreciate the solidity, the steadiness, the hon- esty, the trustworthiness which live in the heart of our German people." 2 4 Entrance to tfje Cttp of ^arrisfturg, Pennspluama These are the racial traits which the German from the beginning brought to enrich the life of our town. The other element was the Scottish immigrants from the North of Ireland. They migrated to Ireland from the lowlands of Scotland, and were therefore as Teutonic in blood as the people of South Britain. They were encouraged to move to Ireland by James VI, who desired to plant in Ulster a people whom the vigorous Irish Celt could not absorb as he had absorbed both the Norman and the English of the Pale. Some of their earlier traits these Scottish people lost in their first migration, as the gift of poetry. But their intense patriotism, their devotion to their form of Christianity, their independence and courage in asserting their civil rights, their quick perception, their acuteness in dialectic, their polemic spirit shown alike in the forum, in theological debate and in battle, and their capacity for enthusiasm — the per- fervldum ingeniutn Scotorum — which carried them undaunted through a suc- cession of conflicts with kings and nobles ; these they brought from Scotland to Ireland, and from Ireland to Pennsylvania. They pushed forward to the frontiers. They contested with fierce vigor the Indians' alleged rights to hold arable lands as hunting grounds. They were by eminence the pioneers, who by their struggles made peaceful settlements a possibility ; and they had the gift of political construction. If they were not so rich in sentiment or so variously endowed in intellect as the German, yet from the first they had their powers well in hand ; they developed earlier in the new conditions ; and they were ready always to employ their powers both in battle and in con- structive work, for God, for the Church, for civil rights, for the school and the home. These were the two great elements of the early population of the country of which your city became the center, and no richer or better elements could they have been. Nor, as I read the early history of the region, could the union have been more real. How well and how unitedly they met the crises of the settlements as they arose ! How brave and determined in their conflicts with the Indian! How loyal to the mother country in the French war! And, when the war of Independence began, and the question of revolt had to be answered, there was no division. The sentiment of the settlement was unanimous. It was for the Colonies. And it proved itself to be deep and stern conviction on many a battlefield of the war. Organized of elements so admirable, the town began its corporate life in 1785. Its growth at the beginning was not a rapid one. But its life was healthy and its homes were abodes of comfort. I think it a great thing to say of the place, that the earliest institutions established here by associated activity were the churches ; and that next to them came into being the Harris- burg Academy. We can confidently prophesy great things for a people 25 Proceeding* at tfje Pebicatton of tije Market Street whose first cares and united labors are in the interest of religion and edu- cation. From these they proceeded to the organization of the bank ; and con- temporary with the bank was the beginning of the construction of the bridge. When the bridge was built, the first of the artificial highways which have brought the town into easy communication with the world was completed. And so began that career of prosperity which still continues, and which is so full of promise for the coming years. It would be interesting to dwell on the enrichment and enlargement of the life of the town wrought by the building of the bridge. It increased its trade and brought strangers in larger numbers to its doors. Especially must it have made more intimate business and social exchanges between the town and the nearer settlements of the Cumberland Valley. I cannot dwell on this. But, remembering as we do the family to whose generosity and public spirit the city owes this memorial approach, and coming as I do from Princeton, it is singularly appropriate that I recall the fact that among those who crossed the bridge soon after its completion was a youth approaching manhood — James McCormick, of Silver's Spring — who passed over it to take the stage at Harrisburg (for then there was neither railway nor canal) on his long journey to Princeton College, where he studied and was graduated with honor in the class of 1822. Something in Harrisburg attracted him, for here he made his home and became one of the great lawyers of the Commonwealth — one of the ablest, as I have heard both Judge Black and Judge Pearson say — a great man of business also, developing the banking and industrial interests of the city. The only public office he held, among the many he might have filled, was a seat in the borough council. His public spirit and municipal patriotism have been inherited by his descendants ; and it is for me a great pleasure to join with you today in the hearty recognition of the great value of this spirit to the city, in many ways besides the construction of this memorial approach. A native of Harrisburg, returning to the city, sees with delight the natural features which do not change and which are endeared to him by the most sacred associations. But his pride in the place is stimulated, as he sees the town transfigured. He rejoices with you in the civic spirit now so finely organized and so admirably efficient, which, with fine intelligence, is using the beauty of its situation and its office as the seat of government to make it still more worthy of its great function as the capital of the great Common- wealth. There are many motives which must unite to awaken enthusiasm and secure persistence in this good work. There is one which ought always to be strong in its force and distinct in consciousness. In the great speech of Pericles, commemorating the dead who first fell in the Peloponnesian war, the orator, who himself did so much to secure the adornment of Athens, pronounces a eulogy on the founders of the city, the ancestors of those whom 26 Entrance to tfje Cttp of i^arrteimrg, Pennsplbama he addressed. In their characters and careers, he found one of the strongest and highest motives to his own beneficent activity. And I am sure that, among the motives which should determine you to continue and complete the adornment of Harrisburg, there is none higher or more sacred than your own appreciation of the noble racial qualities, the moral virtues, the piety, the intelligence and the wisdom of your ancestors and predecessors, who first gave character to this settlement on the Susquehanna. At the conclusion of the address, "America" was sung, and the benediction was pronounced by the Right Reverend James Henry Darlington, Ph.D., D.D., LL.D., Bishop of Harrisburg : Now the GOD of peace, that brought again from the dead our LORD JESUS, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlast- ing covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that which is well pleasing in His sight ; through JESUS CHRIST, to Whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen. CORNER-STONE OF THE OLD BRIDGE, NOW BUILT INTO THE WALL OF THE NEW TOLLHOUSE 2 7 JG 9 1906