PIONEER DAY EXERCISES.

Ladies'

Library

Association.

SCHOOLCRAFT, MICH.

April 26, 1898.

L. L. A. PIONEER DAY.

At the meeting of the Ladies' Library Association on April 26, the following program was carried out, the papers having been prepared for the occasion by some of the survivors of the early settlers of Schoolcraft and Prairie Ronde:

PROGRAM:

THANKSGIVING HYMN.

WRITTEN BY E. LAKIN BROWN,

And sung at a Thanksgiving dinner given by James Smith, at his home in Schoolcraft, November, 1835.

THE BEGINNING of SCHOOLCRAFT

Written and read by E. Lakin Brown.

Ladies of the Association:

At the urgent request of your committee, but with much fear of failure of any good result, I have consented to write a brief article upon the early history of Schoolcraft, and the character and peculiarities of its first settlers; and by Schoolcraft, I mean not merely the village, but the township; or rather, Prairie Ronde and Gourdneck prairies. And first, of who constituted the Vermont colony, who first came to Schoolcraft, and how they happened to come here; and I fear this will necessarily be too brief and sketchy to be interesting, and too long for the occasion.

In the winter of 1829-30, I was teaching the district school in Cavendish, Vt., where my brother-in-law, James Smith, Jr., resided. I was to be 21 years old in the spring, and a life to be spent upon a hard, rough farm in the mountainous town of Plymouth, where my father lived, with a large family of boys and girls, did not seem to me to offer very attractive prospects.

My father's brother, Daniel Brown, had removed with his family to the state of New York when I was about four years old, and after various chances and changes, had finally settled at Ann Arbor, Mich., one of the very earliest settlers of that place. Occasional letters from him had set forth in glowing colors the beauty and advantages of that place and vicinity, and in casting about as to what I should do when "of age," I decided that I would go to Michigan as soon as the Erie canal should be open in the spring. I communicated my intention to Smith, and before my school was finished he too, declared his intention of going. When I went home in the spring, I met Hosea B. Huston, a young man who had grown up, a near neighbor of ours, in the family of one John Lakin, and who had not, so far as I know, a living relative in the world. He too, had just finished teaching a winter's school, and learning my intentions, decided at once to become a third member of the party to Michigan. We left on the 18th of April, 1830, our destination Ann Arbor, Michigan. Anything beyond that was an unknown land. Of the incidents of our journey, though tedious and somewhat eventful, this is not the time nor the occasion to relate them. It is only important to say that on arriving at Buffalo, where we were aware that Mr. Thaddeus Smith was then living, we stopped and looked him up, and remained with him and family two days. Thaddeus Smith was not a relative of the Smith family of Cavendish, Vt., but a neighbor and intimate friend of theirs, and his wife was a cousin of mine, and of course, of my sister Mrs. James Smith. The year before, in 1829, Thaddeus had made a trip to Michigan, looking for a place to locate, and had come to Prairie Ronde, where he found a few settlers, Bazel Harrison and family, who had come to the prairie in the fall of 1828, and several who had come the next year. He described Prairie Ronde in glowing terms, said it was the garden of the world, and we must on no account fail to go