Perhaps the great American novel, the great Pennsylvania novel at any rate, will be a story laid about one of the baronial estates of the old Ironmasters. Was ever a more delightful, or perennially interesting book written than Georges Ohnet’s novel, “Le Maitre des Forges”, translated into English as “The Ironmaster”? It was even more popular some years ago than today, for it was dramatized and played all over the United States, rivaling “The Lights o’ London” as a melodramatic success, and was also the name of a noted race horse. Surely this great novel of Pennsylvania will take its plot from the lives of our early Ironmasters, or in some sketch of Indian forays along the Blue Mountains of Berks County during the French and Indian War. If marking these old furnaces begets the great novel, then those devoted souls concerned in marking this historic spot today have builded better than they knew. It will serve as a landmark to link the earlier days of this part of Centre County, with its busy, teeming present, the great intense life of State College, and the industry of the olden times. They have one point in common. Old Nittany Mountain looks down on both, impartial in shedding her glories of sunlight and shade. Nittany Mountain is feminine, for she is named not for an Indian chief, but for two beautiful Indian maidens named Nita-nee, one a great war queen of the very long ago, the other a humbler maiden who lived not far from Penn’s Cave, and was loved and lost by Malachi Boyer, a Huguenot pioneer from Lancaster County. And in closing let us say we hear a lot about a so-called Nittany Lion. Do we not mean “Mountain Lion” or panther, for in the old days the panther, or Pennsylvania lion, was very much in evidence hereabouts, roaring terribly at night from the mountain tops, answering one another from Tussey Knob, the Bald Top and Mount Nittany. It is the noble supple animal, the Pennsylvania king of beasts, and not the shaggy African man-eater, that should be the patron of the courage, force and persistence of our State College youth. If you are not sure of what it looked like, there is a finely mounted specimen in old “College Hall”. Let us follow in history’s paths, marking the worthy footsteps of our predecessors where they have builded wisely, and always conforming to local color, local traditions, local pride, so that we may in our turn re-enact the splendid chain of destiny from redmen to pioneers, from farms, furnaces and mills, down to the great day of this locality when State College shall have realized the ideal of her founders, as the foremost inland school of learning. And every step made in that direction should be marked, as her leading friends and sons have done with the scene of this old-time industrial plant and furnace. All these are mile-stones in the greatness of Centre County and Penn State, in the creation of a definite tradition and legend, which shall be her crown. [Illustration]