by landing at Castle Garden, in New York
City. My parents were sturdy "come-outers" who, after the manner called
"heresy", even among Protestants, worshipped the God of their fathers.
They came from what in orthodox parlance was known as the "Smwtyn Du"
the heretical "black-spot" in Wales. I am the third Jenkin Jones to
preach that liberal interpretation of Christianity generally known as
Unitarianism. The first Jenkin Jones preached his first heretical sermon
in his mother's garden way back in 1726, ninety-three years before
Channing preached his Baltimore sermon (1819), from which latter event
American Unitarianism generally dates its beginning.

My father was a prosperous hatter-farmer--making hats for the local
markets during the winter months, tilling his little ten-acre farm
during the summer time. My parents were lured to America by the
democracy here promised. In our family, freedom was a word to conjure
by. Hoping for larger privileges for the growing family of children,
they brought them to the New World, the world of many intellectual as
well as material advantages. The long sea voyage of six weeks in a
sailing vessel, interrupted by a dismantling storm which compelled the
ship to return for repairs after two weeks sailing, brought them into
the teeth of winter, too late in the season to reach their objective
point in the West. So the journey was suspended and the first winter
spent in a Welsh settlement near Steuben, New York.

May, 1845, found us in the then territory of Wisconsin. The broad,
fertile, and hospitable open prairie country in southern Wisconsin was
visited and shunned as a desert land, "a country so poor that it would
not grow a horse-switch." And so, three "forties" of government land
were entered in the heavy woods of Rock River valley, forty miles west
of Milwaukee, midway between Oconomowoc and Watertown, which then were
pioneer villages. The land was bought at $1.20 an acre, then were
purchased a yoke of oxen and two cows; and when these were paid for,
there remained one gold sovereign ($5) to start life with--father,
mother, and six children.

Trees were felled for the log house which for the first six months was
roofed with basswood bark, for the shingles had not only to be made, but
the art of making them had to be acquired. In this log house were spent
the first twelve remembered years of my life. In it four more children
were born. In the log school-house, built in the middle of t