Solomon Garfield, brother of Abraham, and great-grandfather of the subject of this history, had married Sarah Stimpson in 1766, and was living at Weston, Massachusetts, when the war broke out. Little is known of him except that he was a soldier of the Revolution, and came out of the war alive, but impoverished by the loss of his property. He soon moved to Otsego County, New York, where one of his sons, Thomas Garfield, married. It was on the latter’s farm, in December, 1799, that was born Abram Garfield, the ninth lineal descendant of the Puritan, and father of the man whose name and fame are henceforth the heritage of all mankind. Two years after the birth of Abram, his father died suddenly and tragically, leaving his young widow and several children in most adverse circumstances. When about twelve years old, Abram, a stout sun-burnt little fellow, fell in with a playmate two years younger than himself, named Eliza Ballou, also a widow’s child whose mother had recently moved to Worcester, Otsego County, New York, where the Garfields were living. In that childhood friendship lay the germ of a romantic love, of which the fruit was to be more important to men and to history than that of the most splendid nuptials ever negotiated in the courts of kings. James Ballou, Eliza’s older brother, impatient of the wretched poverty in which they dwelt, persuaded his mother to emigrate to Ohio. The emigrant wagon, with its jaded horses, its muddy white cover, its much jostled load of household articles, and its sad-eyed and forlorn occupants! How the picture rises before the eyes! What a history it tells of poverty and misfortune; of disappointment and hardship; of a wretched home left behind, yet dear to memory because left behind; of a still harder life ahead in the western wilderness toward which it wends its weary way! More showy equipages there have been. The Roman chariot, the English stage-coach, and the palace railway train, have each been taken up and embalmed in literature. But the emigrant wagon, richer in association, closer to the heart-throb, more familiar with tears than smiles, has found no poet who would stoop to the lowly theme. In a few years the emigrant wagon will be a thing of the past, and forgotten; but though we bid it farewell forever, let it have a high place in the American heart and history, as the precursor of our cities and our civilization. Thus the boy and girl were separated. Abram Garfield was brought up as a “bound boy” by a farmer named Stone. While he was filling the place of chore boy on the New York farm, Eliza Ballou, having something more than an ordinary education, taught a summer school in the Ohio wilderness. It is said that one day, in a terrific storm, a red bolt of lightning shot through the cabin roof, smiting teacher and scholars to the floor, thus breaking up the school. The spirit of tragedy seems to have hovered over her entire life.