As early as 1783, about the time of the breaking up of the army at Newburgh on the Hudson, General Putnam and nearly three hundred army officers had proposed to form a new State beyond the Ohio, and Washington warmly endorsed their memorial to Congress asking for a grant of land; but the plan miscarried. As soon as the Ordinance was passed, the Ohio Company, of which Putnam was the president, bought from the government five or six million acres, and the first great movement of emigration west of the Ohio at once began. Within a year following the organization of the territory, twenty thousand people became settlers upon the banks of the Ohio. But the Pilgrim Fathers of the thousands and the millions, the pioneers to whom belongs the praise, were the forty or fifty farmers who from old Rutland pushed on with Putnam through the snows of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, coming to Pittsburgh just as the spring of 1788 came, and dropping down the river to Marietta in the little boat which they had named, by a beautiful fatality, the _Mayflower_. “Forever honored be Marietta as another Plymouth!” The men who first settled the Northwest Territory,--as President Hayes, following Mr. Hoar at Marietta, well called it, “the most fortunate colonization that ever occurred on earth,”--and who set the seal of their character and institutions upon it, were of the best blood of New England. “Look for a moment,” said Mr. Hoar, “at the forty-eight men who came here a hundred years ago to found the first American civil government whose jurisdiction did not touch tide-water. See what manner of men they were; in what school they had been trained; what traditions they had inherited. I think that you must agree [Illustration: SITE OF MARIETTA AND HARMAR, 1788.] that of all the men who ever lived on earth fit to perform ‘that ancient, primitive and heroical work,’ the founding of a State, they were the fittest.” Here we remember too the words of Washington. “No colony in America,” said Washington, the warm friend of Putnam, who was deeply concerned that the development of the West should begin in the right way, in the hands of the right men, “was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at the Muskingum. Information, property and strength will be its characteristics. I know many of the settlers personally, and there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a community.” We honor old Rutland not only because she sent men to open the West, but because she sent her best, because she pitched the tone for the great West high.