On its bank is Columbia, a town of busy iron and steel manufacture, as the whole range of towns are for miles up to and beyond Harrisburg. At Columbia first appeared, about 1804, that mysterious agency known as the "Underground Railroad," whereby fugitive slaves were secretly passed from one "station" to another from "Mason and Dixon's Line" to Canada, mainly through the aid and active exertions of philanthropic Quakers. All through Chester and Lancaster Counties and northward were laid the routes of this peculiar line, whose ramifications became more and more extensive as time passed, making the Fugitive Slave Law almost a nullity during the decade before the Civil War. There were hundreds of good people engaged in facilitating the unfortunate travellers who fled for freedom, and many have been the escapades with the slave-hunters, whose traffic long ago happily ended. At Middletown the Swatara River flows in from the hills of Lebanon County, there being all along the Susquehanna a prodigious development of the steel industry as well as rich farms on the fertile bottom lands. Here is the historic estate of Lochiel, which was the home of Simon Cameron, who for many years ruled the political destinies of Pennsylvania. He was born in 1799 at Maytown, near Marietta, on the Susquehanna, a few miles above Columbia, in humble circumstances, and came as a poor printer's boy to Harrisburg, rose to wealth and power, and when he was full of years and honors placed the mantle of the United States Senatorship upon his son. Their "Clan Cameron" which ruled Pennsylvania for two generations has been regarded as the best managed political "machine" in the Union, having in its ranks and among its allies not only politicians, but bankers, railway managers, merchants, manufacturers and capitalists, and men in every walk of life, ramifying throughout the Keystone State.