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Show 1836- 1837] F/ agg's Far West 301 village of Whitehall, a flourishing settlement in the prairie's edge, from the centre of which, some miles distant, it may be seen. 194 Three years ago the spot was an uncultivated waste; the town has now two houses of worship, a school, an incorporation for a seminary, two taverns, six hundred inhabitants, and a steam mill to feed them withal. A few miles from this place, on the outskirts of another small settlement, I was met by a company of emigrants from Western New- York. The women and children were piled upon the top of the household stuff with about as much ceremony as if they constituted a portion thereof, in a huge lumbering baggage- wagon, around which dangled suspended pots and kettles, dutch- ovens and tin- kitchens, cheese- roasters and bread- toasters, all in admired confusion, jangling harsh discord. The cart- wheels themselves, as they gyrated upon the parched axles, like the gates of Milton's hell on their hinges, " grated harsh thunder." In the van of the cavalcade strode soberly on the patriarch of the family, with his elder sons, axe upon shoulder, rifle in hand, a veritable Israel Bush. For six weeks had the wanderers been travelling, and a weary, bedusted- looking race were they, that emigrant family. The rapidity with which a Western village goes forward, and begins to assume importance among the nations, after having once been born and [ 47] christened, is amazing. The mushrooms of a summer's night, the wondrous gourd of Jonah, the astonishing bean of the giant- killer, or the enchantments of the Arabian Nights, are but fit parallels to the growth of the prairie- village of the Far West. Of all this I was forcibly reminded in passing through quite m Whitehall, in Greene County, forty- five miles north of Alton, was laid out by David Barrow in 183a. Pottery was first made there in 1835, and has since become an important industry, contributing largely to the rapid progress of which Flagg speaks.- ED. |