The first governors and law-givers were distinctly not of the bucolic type; and it is an interesting fact of Indiana history that in an agricultural State, where the “farmer’s vote” has been essential to the winning party, farmers have rarely found their way to the governor’s chair. James D. Williams, familiarly known as “Blue Jeans,” who was elected over Benjamin Harrison in 1876, was the first farmer pure and simple to hold the office of governor; and this was not until Indiana had been sixty years a State, and had passed beyond the period in which an appeal to “Jeffersonian simplicity” would naturally have been most potent. The second farmer to be elected governor was Claude Matthews, who was a candidate in the year of Mr. Cleveland’s second success, and he was a college graduate and a man of affairs, and not really of the farmer type. When, in 1896, for the third time, the State went to the country for a governor, James A. Mount, a scientific farmer and reformer of farm methods, was chosen. The name of Posey County has long been used as a synonym for any dark and forbidding land; but the public services of Thomas Posey, the last of Indiana’s territorial governors, for whom the district was named, were of marked variety and value, so that the name can hardly be used as a term of opprobrium, particularly of the county that harbored the New Harmony settlement. After Indiana had gained the dignity of statehood, and throughout her earlier years, she continued fortunate in the class of men to whom she gave her highest honors. Jennings, the first governor, was a native of New Jersey. He was a fair scholar and wrote creditable English. The Hendricks family came from Pennsylvania and contributed two governors to the State, and a vice-president to the nation; and the name remains after a century locally significant of character and attainment. David Wallace, the father of General Lew Wallace, and Joseph A. Wright, who was prominent in affairs in the earlier half of the century, were natives of Pennsylvania. Wallace had been educated at West Point, but resigned from the army to take up the law; he became noted as an orator and was governor of the State. Wright, who paid his way through Indiana University by acting as janitor, became governor, sat in the United States Senate, and was minister to Prussia. Governor Whitcomb was a native of Vermont, Governor Willard of New York, and Morton, the foremost man of the Civil War period in the State, was a native Indianian.