Yet when the Old South young people went there on their first pilgrimage, Rutland had already become a name almost as familiar in our homes as Salem or Sudbury or Deerfield. The Old South young people themselves had been led to think very much about it. In 1893, the year of the World’s Fair at Chicago, the great capital of the great West, a place undreamed of a hundred years before, when Rutland was witnessing its one world-historical event, the Old South lectures were devoted to “The Opening of the West.” Two of the eight lectures were upon “The Northwest Territory and the Ordinance of 1787” and “Marietta and the Western Reserve”; two of the leaflets issued in connection were Manasseh Cutler’s _Description of Ohio in 1787_ and Garfield’s address on _The Northwest Territory and the Western Reserve_; and one of the subjects set for the Old South essays [Illustration: VIEW OF RUTLAND STREET.] was “The Part Taken by Massachusetts Men in Connection with the Ordinance of 1787.” These studies first kindled the imaginations of hundreds of young people and first roused them to the consciousness that _westward expansion_ had been the great fact in our history from the time of the Revolution to the time of the Civil War; that New England had had a controlling part in this great movement, which, by successive waves, has reached Ohio, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, Oregon, so that there is more good New England blood to-day west of the Hudson than there is east of it; and that this movement, which has transformed the United States from the little strip along the Atlantic coast which fought for independence to the great nation which stretches now from sea to sea, began at the old town of Rutland, Massachusetts. This Rutland on the hill is the cradle of Ohio, the cradle of the West. It was not, by any means, these Boston lectures on “The Opening of the West” which reawakened Massachusetts and the country to the forgotten historical significance of old Rutland. That awakening was done by Senator Hoar, in his great oration at the Marietta centennial, in 1888. Senator Hoar’s oration did not indeed awaken Massachusetts to the great part taken by Massachusetts men in connection with the Ordinance of 1787, or the part of New England in the settlement and shaping of the West. No awakening to these things was necessary. There is no New England household which has not kindred households in the West, ever in close communication with the old home; and the momentous significance of the Ordinance of 1787, and the decisive part taken by Massachusetts statesmen in securing it, the Massachusetts historian and orator were never likely to let the people forget.