presented and by a variation of vowels, Lyme was transformed into Lima and by the Act of 1808 to which reference has been made, it was enacted "that from and after the first day of August next the town of Charleston shall be named Lima:" the Indian name of the site of the present village was Ska-hase-ga-o, once a long creek, preserving a local legend of the changed course of a streamlet. Ke-int-he, the signification of which is lost, first mentioned by Greenhalgh in his Observations among the Iroquois in 1677, has by recent discoveries been located about a mile northwest of the village.

Livonia was formed in 1808 and it is said that Hon. George Smith proposed the name, that of a province of Russia, which was adopted when the inhabitants petitioned the Legislature for the formation of the town: a part of Hemlock Lake which is the source of the water supply of the City of Rochester, is situated in this town and the present name of the lake is merely an English translation of the primitive O-neh-da.

Mt. Morris was named from the fact that Robert Morris, the financier of the American Revolution, at one time owned the northern part of the town, including the site of the Village: the Indian name of the Village was So-no-jo-wau-ga, big kettle, the name of a Seneca chief.

Sparta has retained its original name which seems to have been arbitrarily given; Sparta and West Sparta are the only instances of classical names in our County.

Springwater is one of the hilly towns, well watered by springs and its expressive name was very properly chosen by the inhabitants when assembled to make a petition for its formation.

York was so named in recognition of the services of Hon. Joseph York, Assemblyman from St. Lawrence County, who, as chairman of his committee, had favorably reported the bill for the erection of the town.

Dansville was named in honor of Daniel P. Faulkner, one of the first settlers, familiarly known as "Captain Dan:" the Indian name varied, the earlier being Can-e-sa-ra-ga, among the slippery elms, the latter, Ga-nus-ga-o, among the milk weed.

Nunda was the name taken by the town at its formation in 1808 and was the Indian Nundao, hilly, sometimes spelled in the earlier records Nundey or Nundow.

Ossian was the name assigned to the town in the Act by which it was formed in 1808, but what connection there was with the heroic Gaelic poet does not appear.

Portage, the most picturesque town in our County, is most appropriately named as the carrying place around the falls of the Genesee River.

Of the names of the seventeen towns which have been mentioned, four were apparently chosen without reason or meaning, Livonia, Sparta, West Sparta and Ossian: three were bestowed by early settlers to perpetuate the memory of the localities whence they came, Avon, Caledonia and Lima: four were selected from personal or historical asociations and were intended to commemorate the names of individuals in some way connected with the town, Leicester, Mt. Morris, York and Dansville: while six are purely descriptive and tell us somethnig of the natural features of the country, Groveland, Springwater, Portage, Conesus, Geneseo and Nunda: in the last three of which we can still hear the voices "that noble race and brave," that has vanished from our land: and the eloquent words of a well known Sachem of the Senecas, a native of an adjoining County and intimately acquainted with the scenes which surround us seem peculiarly fitting: "If my race shall disappear from this continent, I have the consoling hope that our memory will not perish. If the deeds of my ancestors shall not live in story, their memories will remain in the names of our lakes and rivers, your towns and cities and will call up memories otherwise forgotten."

Odd Fellowship in Livingston County.

By A. O. Bunnell, P. G. M.

Mr. President, Members of Livingston County Historical Society, Ladies and Gentlemen: By special request of President Van Allen, I present a sketch of Odd Fellowship in Livingston County known in the order as Livingston District. The first lodges in this District were instituted sixty-eight years ago. That you may appreciate the strenuous conditions under which the order had its birth here, and in keeping with one expressed objects of this Society, "to procure and preserve whatever may relate to the history of Western New York in general," I will go back a few years to recall a tragedy which caused the very foundations of civil society to rack and reel. Western New York was the theatre of an abduction act most notorious and mysterious in the history of the country.

In 1839 the first lodge of Odd Fellowship in this State west of Albany, was instituted in Buffalo. Shortly previous to that time there was not an organized working secret society in all this territory. The Anti-Masonic furore, consequent upon the disappearance of William Morgan, the proceedings instituted, and the investigations in the courts, had not only driven Masonic lodges out of active existence, but had aroused such a hostility to all secret organizations as to render it quite perilous for any one to avow himself allied to any secret society or to take part in the organization of one.

I will briefly outline the tragic tale, now but a fading memory, then on every tongue. In Batavia, William Morgan, a mason, in the summer of 1826 commenced the preparation of the work disclosing the secrets of freemasonry, to be published by David C. Miller, a printer of the same place. A civil suit was trumped up against Morgan who was arrested and taken to jail in Canandaigua. Released Sept. 12, without any legal proceeding, as he passed out of jail, he was seized, gagged, put into a carriage, and driven toward Rochester. An investigation resulted in tracing the abductors and their victim to Fort Niagara, near Lewis

ton, where it ultimately appeared that Morgan had been forcibly taken out upon Lake Ontario in a boat and sunk in its depths.

The first public demonstration of widespread condemnation was political.

An Anti-Masonic party boomed in Western New York, rapidly spread throughout the United States, and Anti-Masonic state and presidential tickets were supported in many if not most of the free states. Vermont cast her seven electoral votes for William Wirt and Amos Ellmaker, candidates of the party, for President and Vice-Presdient. In this state the Anti-Masonic vote rose in 1830 to 128,000 for Francis Granger for Governor.

Of this tragic episode in Western New York, Grand Master Fairman said in an anniversary address at Rochester in 1879: "The best kept secret in the history of the world is the fate of William Morgan. There have been professed statements and pretended revelations, but there has never been authentic demon

Individuals of the highest stations in society brought all their influence and all their genius to bear and failed. The thunders of the press and pulpit shed no light on the subject. Courts and juries plied their power in vain. Jails opened their ponderous jaws and embraced within their dark and dreary cells men who made themselves willing martyrs to an allegiance which they neither confessed nor denied and would not speak. To-day not one remains. Death has gathered them all. Oblivion sits upon their tombs and no mortal will ever know the secret they so faithfully kept."

The mystery of 1826 is the mystery of 1912.

I am called upon for the local history of an organization near akin to the one through the action of whose members neighbor was arrayed against neighbor, brother against brother, father against son, and all society against secrecy. I have an instance of this in my own family. The reporter at the funeral of an uncle of mine, a Mason, who died in Lima, during the period of this stress, signed his laudatory article, "A spectator but not a Mason." At a distance in time from the terrible strife society rendered its verdict from which, probably, none will dissent. The Masonic farternity as an order was not responsible for the crime, but sorely did it suffer for a quarter of a century the penalty of condemnation by public opinion. It was an experience never to be repeated, albeit a book was put forth as Morgan's soon after his disappearance. No one to-day doubts the loyalty of the Masonic order to the laws of the land. Like

the order of Odd Fellowship its deeds speak for its beneficient sway in no undertones.

The first lodge in Livingston District was Genesee Valley Lodge No. 118, instituted at Mt. Morris June, 26, 1844, by William L. G. Smith, of Buffalo, District Deputy Grand Master, of Erie District. The petitioners were John VanNortwick, Scott Lord, Abram Vernam, Charles E. Leonard, Hiram P. Mills, O. N. Reynolds. The next, Canaseraga Lodge No. 123, instituted at Dansville Nov. 15, 1844, by Scott Lord, the first District Deputy of Livingston District. Petitioners: John A. Van Derlip, John B. Smith, Herman Kingsbury, Peter S. Lema, William Hallister, John C. Williams, William G. Thompson. Number three, Big Tree Lodge No. 252, Geneseo instituted by Scott Lord, District Deputy Grand Master, Jan. 5, 1847. Charter granted to William J. Hamilton, Y. J. Shankland, A. C. Kemble, M. F. Wright, A. A. Hendee. Number four, Nunda No. 316 at Nunda, charter granted Aug. 6, 1847. Number five, Yonnondio at Lima, instituted May 2, 1848. Number six, Red Jacket No. 216, at East Avon, instituted May 23, 1849; name changed to Caledonia in 1851 and permission given to remove to Mumford, Monroe District. Number seven, Hemlock Lake No. 310 at Hemlock Lake, instituted March 4, 1850. Number eight, Livingston Lodge No. 322 instituted at Dansville, April 3, 1850. Shortly thereafter Genesee Encampment was instituted at Dansville.

These lodges and this encampment were all connected with the Grand Lodge and Grand Encampment of Northern New York. When the re-union of the Grand Lodges and Encampments of Northern and Southern New York took place in 1866, the records of both, with the exception of the printed journals, were destroyed. The order was in a state of chaos for several years prior to the re-union and lodges went out of existence in great numbers without surrendering their charters and record books. They simply died and no one certified to their death. (I can certify that the cause of death of Livingston Lodge and Genesee Encampment was the burning of their entire equipment in the great Dansville fire of March 31, which destroyed half of the business blocks of Main Street.) By 1858 all the lodges in Livingston District had ceased to exist with the exception of Canaseraga Lodge No. 123, which for nearly a score of years stood alone in Livingston and last November celebrated its sixty-seventh anniversary in its own fraternal Temple.

The refluent tide of fraternity set in in Livingson District in 1877 by the institution of Avon Lodge No. 455 at Avon, Jan.