s Alden, Edward C. Gratton, Thomas M.
Potter, Henry O. Mayo, James Glynn, W.C. Leroy, L.M. Powell, and John H.
Wright.

By virtue of its descent from the Sketch and the Column, the Century
Association might lay claim to seniority among the clubs of Fifth
Avenue. The Sketch Club was the result of the union of the literary and
artistic elements of New York, which, in 1829, were producing an annual
called "The Talisman." Among the writers in the Sketch were Bryant,
Verplanck, and Sands, and later Washington Irving and J.K. Paulding
joined it. There was no regular home, the club meeting at the houses of
members in turn. For six months, during 1830, it did not exist, having
been dissolved in May of that year, and reorganized in December.
Thereafter, for a few years, it met in the Council Room of the National
Academy of Design, and then returned to the custom of meeting at the
homes of the members. That organization was the embryo Century. The
Sketch Club had first taken form in 1829. Four years before that a
society called the Column had been established by graduates of Columbia
College. That organization, too, had a share in the moulding of the new
club.

The meeting that brought the Century into being was held the evening of
January 13, 1847, in the rotunda of the New York Gallery of Fine Arts in
the City Hall Park. The call for the meeting had been sent out a few
weeks before, the men composing the signing committee being John G.
Chapman, A.B. Burand, C.C. Ingham, A.M. Cozzens, F.W. Edmonds, and H.T.
Tuckerman. The original Centurions were forty-two in number, of whom
twenty-five came from the Sketch, and six from the Column. There were
ten artists, ten merchants, four authors, three bankers, three
physicians, two clergymen, two lawyers, one editor, one diplomat, and
three men of leisure. All were more or less representative men of the
city, which had grown from the town of three hundred and fifty thousand
of the day of the Union's formation, to a young metropolis of six
hundred thousand. Gulian C. Verplanck was the club's first president,
and back in his day began the Century's peculiar Twelfth Night Festival,
which has been continued ever since. Twelfth Night with the Centurions
is distinctive in that it is not an annual event nor the event of any
given year. The very uncertainty of the ceremonial has added zest to the
revel, which usually ends with an old-fashioned Virginia Reel. A few
years ago the reel was led by T