7. The State
that rivals Virginia as a "Mother of Presidents" has evidently other
titles to distinction of the same nature. For picturesque detail it
would not be easy to find any story excelling that of the Edison family
before it reached the Western Reserve. The story epitomizes American
idealism, restlessness, freedom of individual opinion, and ready
adjustment to the surrounding conditions of pioneer life. The ancestral
Edisons who came over from Holland, as nearly as can be determined, in
1730, were descendants of extensive millers on the Zuyder Zee, and took
up patents of land along the Passaic River, New Jersey, close to the
home that Mr. Edison established in the Orange Mountains a hundred and
sixty years later. They landed at Elizabethport, New Jersey, and first
settled near Caldwell in that State, where some graves of the family may
still be found. President Cleveland was born in that quiet hamlet. It is
a curious fact that in the Edison family the pronunciation of the name
has always been with the long "e" sound, as it would naturally be in
the Dutch language. The family prospered and must have enjoyed public
confidence, for we find the name of Thomas Edison, as a bank official on
Manhattan Island, signed to Continental currency in 1778. According
to the family records this Edison, great-grandfather of Thomas Alva,
reached the extreme old age of 104 years. But all was not well, and,
as has happened so often before, the politics of father and son were
violently different. The Loyalist movement that took to Nova Scotia so
many Americans after the War of Independence carried with it John, the
son of this stalwart Continental. Thus it came about that Samuel Edison,
son of John, was born at Digby, Nova Scotia, in 1804. Seven years later
John Edison who, as a Loyalist or United Empire emigrant, had become
entitled under the laws of Canada to a grant of six hundred acres of
land, moved westward to take possession of this property. He made his
way through the State of New York in wagons drawn by oxen to the remote
and primitive township of Bayfield, in Upper Canada, on Lake Huron.
Although the journey occurred in balmy June, it was necessarily attended
with difficulty and privation; but the new home was situated in good
farming country, and once again this interesting nomadic family settled
down.

John Edison moved from Bayfield to Vienna, Ontario, on the northern bank
of Lake Erie. Mr. Edison supplies an interesting