The Great Historical Scenes Enacted in Lancaster's First Court House, 1739-1784
The Great Historical Scenes Enacted in Lancaster's First Court House, 1739-1784. It is my purpose to draw forth and exhibit before you, in their chronologi- cal order, for a little while, this after- noon, a few pictures from the archives, the ancient records and treasuries of our county's primitive days. So strange and grotesque will some of them be that they will stand forth like crea- tures of imagination, and seem not to be founded on fact at all. Some will bear such immediate and important re- lations to our great country's strug- gles and growth as to make it diffi- cult to conceive that the events set forth in them ever occurred in modest little Lancaster town; and all of them, when set down on the real stage where the stormy events recorded in them happened, not more than 600 feet from where we stand, in the now busy, surging, centre of our active city, all of them, when thus quietly set in order, there, where, from 165 to 120 years ago, they were produced, in- vested with their strange men, strange manners, strange dress, quaint, scat- tered dwellings, and modest little red brick building and theatre, where it was all enacted, will entirely displace the new and statlier scenes that claim that stage to-day; will annihilate the 165 years that intervene between us and those memorable times; and will stand out, not as something of past and distant ages and of remote rela- tionship to us, but as scenes of the present and part and parcel of our very community life.
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