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Churches in Granville, Ohio.
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ways been men. One finds even so far from railroads a drum factory which employs surplus labor and maintains a reputation for thoroughness in making drums of all sorts. But in other ways than by the beating of drums has the sound of Granville gone out through all the earth. The descendants of the early settlers include such men as President Hitchcock of Amherst, President Austin Scott of Rutgers, Judge T. M. Cooley of Michigan, Senator Isaac Bates, the Gillettes of Westfield and Northampton, Dr. Edward B. Coe and Dr. David B. Coe of New York, Hubert Howe Bancroft, the historian, and many others. And if to this partial list of distinguished men were added the name of Rev. Gurdon Hall, the debt of the world to Granville might be calculated in vain; for when in Williams
Rev. Jacob Little.
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College, the prospective valedictorian of his class, he was one of the company of choice spirits who used to retire for prayer to the bottom of the valley south of the west college on Wednesday afternoons, and on Saturdays to the more remote meadows on the bank of the Hoosack, where, under the haystacks as President Griffin put it, "these young Elijahs prayed into existence the embryo of American missions to the heathen."
But the rest of this story must be with another influence which sprang from Granville. Perhaps the interest in western emigration began when a well known citizen of the town, named Oliver Phelps, turned his attention to the Genesee country. During the Revolutionary War his services were so important as to win from General Washington a personal letter of thanks. The commissariat general in Revolutionary times was a man of many duties, and Granville was always proud to claim the citizenship of Oliver Phelps. In 1787, in connection with Nathaniel Gorham, he bought the preemptive rights of the state in
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