Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twelfth Annual Meeting | Page 5

S. A., and some right here in Pennsylvania and in Lancaster County.
I cannot help but think of the chestnut blight that has worked havoc throughout our state and some other states. It has occasioned a big material loss. Yet I think too of another side of the loss and that is the spiritual side because our "chestnut parties" are now becoming a past memory. It is up to men like you to retrieve that loss and to bring back to our youth the chance of experiencing that innocent pleasure the gathering of chestnuts.
As I look into your faces here this morning (and while you are not numerous you make up in quality what you lack in quantity), I cannot help but congratulate you on showing the spirit that means progress. I cannot help but feel also that you are optimists, and they are what we need at the present time.
I will not trespass upon your time any longer. I again bid you a most warm welcome to our city and on behalf of the Mayor hand you the symbolic key of this city to enable you to go where you please.
THE PRESIDENT: Working with us unselfishly for the past two or three years has been a Michigan man who has had in mind the benefit of his locality, the State of Michigan and the United States. It was his privilege to introduce the first bill into a state legislature that became a law making it obligatory upon state authorities to plant useful trees along the roadside throughout the entire state that he represented so well in the Senate. I take pleasure in calling upon that member to respond to the eloquent words of the Mayor's representative. I would ask Senator Penney to reply to Mr. Schaeffer.
HON. HARVEY A. PENNEY: Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of this Convention, and Mr. Mayor: We all appreciate this warm and hospitable greeting. Some of us are a long way from home. Mr. Linton, and I come from a town somewhat the size of this. We have about sixty-five thousand people, a large and growing city with a lot of prosperous and very wealthy men in it. We feel that in coming here we are coming to a city something like our own. We have been very much impressed with your city since we have been here. I am glad to see that colonial spirit, the spirit of '76, which permeates your people here. Up in Saginaw, of course, we do not have the same things to remind us of the past that you have. You have your monuments and those things that call your attention continually to it; but I am sure that our people are as patriotic as your people. However, I think that the spirit of '76 which still permeates the East helps to keep the whole country in line for the patriotic upholding of our governmental institutions.
While most of the men here are interested especially in the scientific investigation and promotion of the nut industry, my friend Mr. Linton and I have been more particularly interested in road-side planting. Along with the promotion and building of good highways we fell into the idea of beautifying those highways. At the time the people in the East were having their trouble in the colonial days, the revolutionary days, our town was unheard of. It was simply way back in the forest and the wilderness and it was not until very early in this past century that Saginaw was even thought of. Mr. Linton and I talked last night about different things connected with the history of our country and we spoke of De Tocqueville, the great French traveler and explorer who came to America way back in 1831. He wished to go into the wilds of this country and see for himself what was here. He went to Buffalo and crossed the lakes to Detroit. Detroit was then a city of about two thousand inhabitants. And then he had the desire to go up into the wilds where nothing but wild animals and wild people lived; so he went up on a trail that led to what is now Pontiac perhaps thirty or forty miles northwest of Saginaw; that was about the end of the trail. There were one or two settlers who lived there. He picked up a couple of Indian guides and started through the trackless forest, sixty or seventy miles up through the northwest to what is now Saginaw. He had his desire fully satisfied. He was eaten up by mosquitoes and rattlesnakes in the swamps and marshes; he could not sleep nor anything else; so he came back. That was away back in 1831, fifty years or more after your people were fighting and struggling for the liberty of this