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Michigan Select Michigan Counties
They had privations which their successors, on the cultivated fields, and in the thriving cities which their enterprise has been the means of producing, may some of them fail to appreciate, but the proud consciousness that their early trials and labors, and their once united and hopeful energies, gave the first impulse toward these magnificent changes which they now witness, is, of itself, something of a reward. They may have labored, and in some cases others may seem to reap the benefit, but we may be sure that the just and the wise will always award honor to men in proportion to the real benefits arising from what they have accomplished." Forty-five years ago the first log hut was built in Battle Creek, on land costing one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre; to-day the value of the same land is estimated at not less than ten thousand dollars per acre. Then there were no schools, no churches, no manufactories, no business; all was a wilderness peopled by the aborigines of the country. To-day eleven religious denominations meet in their respective churches and lay their supplications before the Throne of Grace. To-day there is invested in school buildings, libraries and apparatus, nearly or quite two hundred thousand dollars, and fifteen hundred and seventy-three scholars, between the ages of five and twenty years, receive an education sufficiently advanced to place them in good standing in the famous university of Michigan, free of cost. To-day fine brick blocks for business purposes, beautiful residences, vieing with the palaces of eastern cities in splendor; manufactories turning out their millions in value of manufactured articles of world-wide renown annually, have taken the place of the forests of forty-five years ago. Then, all the travel and all supplies for the infant colony were transported on wagons drawn by oxen. To-day two railroads transport annually to and from the city hundreds of thousands of pounds of freight, and tens of thousands of passengers over their iron ways at from twenty-five to forty miles per hour.
Michigan Counties
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