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Wilmot knew as a young man; but the place was very different when his father came there, or even when David himself was born. It was then scarcely a generation since General Sullivan's expedition had broken the Indian power over the adjoining region, by the defeat of the Six Nations. The settlements had scarcely yet displaced the wilderness. The seat of the new county of Wayne had been fixed somewhat arbitrarily by a geographical definition, and more specifically by a grant from Henry Drinker of a tract of a thousand acres, where from the trustees set apart certain lots for the public buildings, school, and church, selling the rest to obtain funds for the building of the courthouse and jail. When they went there, on May 16, 1800, to lay out the place, the stakes for the courthouse site were driven "in a virgin forest, at a point where the ground sloped gently in every direction except to the northwest." Logs could be had for the cutting, but there was yet no mill for the sawing of boards; and other building materials—nails, hardware, etc.—were brought from Philadelphia to Easton by boat and thence hauled by wagon. Common labor was paid fifty cents and expert workmen seventy-five cents and a dollar a day, and boarded in camps on the spot. Under these conditions the sheriff's house and a log jail were built, in 1801, and the courthouse (32 by 36 feet, a story and a half high) was completed in time to hold the first term, in 1805.

With such simple but temporarily sufficient efforts to establish homes and the machinery of organized social life in the forest, the town seems to have rested content for some time, at least up to and after the date when Randall and Polly Wilmot came to Bethany and began to rear their family. The change to the much gentler civilization witnessed by the houses that remain to-day, came, apparently rather swiftly, fifteen or twenty years later. David Wilmot's experience of life, therefore, must have run nearly the whole of the distinctively American gamut, beginning with the pioneer; and yet he belonged

Alfred Mathews, History of Wayne, Pike and Monroe Counties. See also the History of Wayne County, by Phineas G. Goodrich.

always to the settlements. The concepts by which he was surrounded and to which he reacted from the very first were of systematized society, settled institutions, established rights; and of the preservation or modification of this order by formal laws and definite sanctions.

It has not been possible to fix exactly the date of his parents' arrival in Bethany, but it was at least as early as 1812, for in that year Randall Wilmot appears as subscribing toward a fund for the support of a Congregational preacher, who was to divide half his time among three churches (of which Bethany was one), the other half being devoted to destitute, outlying districts. It is not recorded, either, under what roof David was born. His father (described in some of the deeds. as "Randall Willmot, merchant") bought and sold various pieces of property in Bethany, one as early as October 17, 1814, and all but one facing some part of the public square. Possibly David's birthplace was in a small house on one of these. Certainly it was not in the mansion (already mentioned) to which the honor is locally and generally attributed; for Randall Wilmot did not buy the lot on which that house stands until 1827, when David was thirteen years old, and he built the residence (and a store, since removed, but shown in old photographs as harmonizing with the architecture of the house) some time between 1827 and 1832. The pillared mansion-the most dignified and imposing in the town-was David's boyhood home, but not his cradle.

In the meantime, Mary Grant had died, November 14, 1820, at the age of twenty-eight, as attested by the headstone in the graveyard of the old Presbyterian Church next to the schoolhouse at Bethany-the church which she had joined on profession of faith in September, 1818. She left two childrenDavid, aged six, and his younger sister, Mary. Randall must have remarried very soon, for the first child by his second wife, Mary Carr, was born in 1822. Five other children, Jane, Lois, Maria, Edward and Celinda, were born of this later marriage,

It must have fallen to Mary Carr, rather than to Mary Grant, to mother little David during his most impressionable years; and from the very few unobtrusive notes, and the much more significant silences of her individual story, one glimpses the picture of a gentle, quiet, steadfast woman who nestled the baby stepson and daughter in her heart side by side with her own children, and went unfalteringly with her husband down the declining fortunes that followed those zenith years in the great house in Bethany. The spirit of this mother is suggested in the relations of the little mixed flock, in which there was no shadow of a "step" between any of the brothers and sisters. Indeed, David's companionship with some of the younger children, especially Maria (who later was Mrs. Giles Bleasdale Overton), was as close and sympathetic as with his own sister.

And yet she was no detached embodiment of serenity, walking unruffled and apart, but a most appealingly human person -this Mary Carr-as we see her in certain side lights. A present of silver coin, given to her to celebrate some shining anniversary or other occasion, had been turned over to the local silversmith to be fashioned into spoons; and when he returned them dainty, thin teaspoons with pointed bowls and fiddleshaped handles bearing a little basket of flowers-it was discovered that he had marked them all "P. W.," for Polly Wilmot-the familiar name by which he had always heard her called. And Mary Wilmot cried.

The problem of schooling was not as difficult as might have been expected. The very earliest settlers in Bethany had taken that up just as soon as they finished the jail, and even before they built the courthouse. "As far back as 1803," says Alfred Mathews in his History of Wayne, Pike and Monroe Counties, "Esquires John Bunting and Jason Torrey had engaged a teacher for their own children, and admitted their neighbors' on payment of two dollars per pupil per quarter. School was held first in a log house, and, in 1809, moved into a 'substantial frame building.'" But even before David's time, this primitive

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DAVID WILMOT'S BOYHOOD HOME IN BETHANY, PA. From an old lithograph

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