We have been co-operators with our respective parents in producing all the articles of food and raiment for our own subsistence, and when we wanted a few articles we could not make, such as salt, iron, &c., we had to travel to the store of Nathaniel Owen, 22 miles distant or to the store of Cornelius Wynkoop, 40 miles distant, to procure the same. After this the ingenuity of some of our citizens produced machinery for manufacturing all the cloth we wanted for our use with much less cost and labor than what we could formerly manufacture the same; and these are now so abundantly transported into all parts of our country, that our little town of Deerpark now has more stores in it than the whole county of Orange had at the close of the Revolutionary War, and probably as many as there were in both the counties of Orange and Ulster. These goods, by an exchange of commodities for the same, can now be procured so much easier than formerly that our former apparatus for manufacturing flax, wool and cotton into cloth has become useless. And these stores now contain such a variety of articles, that as a certain man once said "Many necessaries unnecessary." We have taken wheat, rye and corn to New Windsor and Newburgh when these were very small places and when Goshen was a very small village, and have passed through the time in which all the other villages in Orange County had their origin and growth and in which the whole country west of the valley in which we reside, has become numerously populated throughout its present settled parts, in which many handsome and magnificent villages and cities have been built and now adorn those parts which, in our early days, were a vast wilderness. We have seen the time when news traveled from the printing presses to us on horseback, and when the same became conveyed in light one and two horse wagons, and in progressing, stage wagons and steam boats became the swiftest carrier of news, and after the meridian of our lives the swiftest traveler ever before known came into operation, in which news, passengers and different commodities were conveyed to and from distant parts of our country, and in the last part of our life's journey originated the wonderful discovery of giving instantaneous information of any matter or occurrence for any distance to which telegraph wires can be extended.