The Hamilton family came first to Loughton, it would seem, in 1746, when Alexander Hamilton married, as his third wife, Charlotte Stiles, a niece and co-heiress of Ady Collard, whose ancestors had held land in the parish, at any rate since the 16th century. Through that marriage Debden Hall and Holyfield Hall (in Waltham) came into the Hamilton family. Mr. Alexander Hamilton, we may note in passing, was an uncle of the famous ‘Single Speech’ Hamilton. By his second wife he left a son, William, who succeeded him at Debden Hall, where one of his daughters, who married Mr. Nicholas Pearse, afterwards lived. To her memory there is a window in the chancel of the parish church, and it is in illustration of her works of charity that the subject of it is Christ surrounded by little children. Of Alexander Hamilton’s great-great-grandsons one succeeded in establishing his claim to the ancient Scotch barony of Belhaven and Stenton; and another is the well-known friend of the late Mr. Gladstone. On the whole the Hamiltons have been our most distinguished family. There was, however, until a few years ago, a family whose hereditary connexion with Loughton had remained unbroken for well-nigh three hundred years. I will not weary you with a long pedigree, but will merely tell you that Robert Dawges paid taxes here in 1546; that by a marriage his estate passed to the Eyres a century or so later; that a century after that, by another marriage, it passed to the Whalley’s, with whom a part of it remained until 1866. The Eyres owned Uplands, or Slyders as it then was called: the land last remaining to the Whalleys was Algors House and the fields on the other side of the main road. Until the coming of the railway these small copyhold and freehold estates remained in much the same condition as in earlier times. Then the speculator saw his chance, and the immemorial elms and oaks—mainly pollards these latter, and in some cases of enormous size—came down, hedge-rows were levelled, and roads laid out. The village would have been an ideal site for a ‘garden-city,’ and models of domestic architecture were not far to seek—Algors House, The White House, Alderton Hall, and others outside the parish but not far off, might have served. But it is only now that people are beginning to realise that a plain, roomy, old-fashioned cottage is better art than a smart new villa: and even now, after all that Ruskin and Morris have done, it is only among the more highly cultivated that saner views are beginning to prevail. But they will filter down, for on every side we see signs of awakening among the members of the architectural profession, though the process is often retarded by the necessity of satisfying inartistic clients.