ew State and
needed attractions.

I think that my eldest brother, Orion, my sisters Pamela and Margaret,
and my brother Benjamin were born in Jamestown. There may have been
others, but as to that I am not sure. It was a great lift for that
little village to have my parents come there. It was hoped that they
would stay, so that it would become a city. It was supposed that they
would stay. And so there was a boom; but by and by they went away, and
prices went down, and it was many years before Jamestown got another
start. I have written about Jamestown in the "Gilded Age," a book of
mine, but it was from hearsay, not from personal knowledge. My father
left a fine estate behind him in the region round about
Jamestown--75,000 acres.[2] When he died in 1847 he had owned it about
twenty years. The taxes were almost nothing (five dollars a year for the
whole), and he had always paid them regularly and kept his title
perfect. He had always said that the land would not become valuable in
his time, but that it would be a commodious provision for his children
some day. It contained coal, copper, iron and timber, and he said that
in the course of time railways would pierce to that region, and then the
property would be property in fact as well as in name. It also produced
a wild grape of a promising sort. He had sent some samples to Nicholas
Longworth, of Cincinnati, to get his judgment upon them, and Mr.
Longworth had said that they would make as good wine as his Catawbas.
The land contained all these riches; and also oil, but my father did not
know that, and of course in those early days he would have cared nothing
about it if he had known it. The oil was not discovered until about
1895. I wish I owned a couple of acres of the land now. In which case I
would not be writing Autobiographies for a living. My father's dying
charge was, "Cling to the land and wait; let nothing beguile it away
from you." My mother's favorite cousin, James Lampton, who figures in
the "Gilded Age" as "Colonel Sellers," always said of that land--and
said it with blazing enthusiasm, too,--"There's millions in
it--millions!" It is true that he always said that about everything--and
was always mistaken, too; but this time he was right; which shows that a
man who goes around with a prophecy-gun ought never to get discouraged;
if he will keep up his heart and fire at everything he sees, he is bound
to hit something by and by.

Many persons regarded "Colonel