Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
mile underground, which, like most such places, has its subterranean
river and its tale of woe. A young girl, stolen by gypsies, to escape
from them took refuge in this cave, and losing her way, perished, her
bones being found years afterwards. Explorers since have always
unwound balls of twine in this labyrinth, to be able to retrace their
steps.
In a good farming district of the Westmoreland region is Greensburg,
another railway junction where branches go southward to the
Monongahela coalfields. Robert Hanna built a house near here in the
eighteenth century, around which gathered some thirty log cabins, and
the place in course of time became known as Hannastown, prominent in
the early history of Western Pennsylvania. Here was held the first
court convened west of the Alleghenies, and here were passed the
patriotic resolutions of May 16, 1775, upon receipt of the news of the
battle of Lexington at the opening of the Revolution, which sounded
the keynote for the Declaration of Independence the following year.
Here also first appeared during the Revolution General Arthur St.
Clair, an immigrant from Scotland, the grandson of the Earl of
Roslyn, who lived in an humble house on Chestnut Ridge. He served in
the French and Indian wars, and was the British commander at Fort
Ligonier. Horrible Indian massacres and terrible retributions by the
settlers were the chief features of the Revolutionary War in
Westmoreland. At its close, the whites sent an expedition in 1782
against the Wyandottes, which was defeated. The savages soon wreaked
fearful vengeance, raiding the region in July of that year and burning
Hannastown, which was never rebuilt. Greensburg appeared soon
afterwards, however, and in 1875 it celebrated the centenary of the
Hannastown resolutions with patriotic spirit. In its Presbyterian
churchyard lie the remains of General St. Clair, who, after founding
and naming the city of Cincinnati, returned here, and died in 1818, at
the age of eighty-four, in his lonely cabin on Chestnut Ridge, in
unmerited poverty and obscurity. The stone over his grave has this
significant inscription: "The earthly remains of General Arthur St.
Clair are deposited beneath this humble monument, which is erected to
supply the place of a nobler one due from his country." Being in a
region of fine agriculture and prolific mines, Greensburg is a
prosperous and wealthy town.
BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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