In 1858 a company of people from northern Ohio, who had lighted their torch of religious and educational enthusiasm at the flame of Oberlin, came into the vast wilderness of northern Michigan with the purpose of planting there Christian institutions. They were high-minded, sturdy people, with strong religious convictions. The Pilgrims did not bring to the New England coast a truer motive or a purer purpose. They were willing to put into the enterprise their lives and their fortunes. They stamped the new community that they founded with the impress of their ideals, and that stamp has persisted. These modern Pilgrims repeated with some modification the experiences of their New England prototypes. After a long and stormy voyage on the Great Lakes they landed in the late autumn on an inhospitable coast, built them some rough shanties that their descendants would not consider worthy to shelter their cattle, and there they passed a severe winter. They explored the northwestern Michigan woods, and finally, with a strange indifference to the importance of a railway to the development of a town, they lighted upon a level plateau on the top of a high hill, two hundred feet above the placid waters of beautiful Lake Crystal, and eight miles from Lake Michigan, and there they pitched their tents. Like Abraham, their first work after entering the Promised Land was to build an altar to Jehovah, and like him and their New England ancestors, they built it on the highest elevation that they could find. One of the first things they did was to select a site for a church and for a school, and, standing under the tall maples and beeches, with hymn and prayer, to dedicate that high hilltop to the cause of Christian education. The church that they planted, the first in all the Grand Traverse region, celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its organization in 1910. It has now a membership of about three hundred, and is the center of the religious and social life, not only of the immediate community but also of the territory known as "The Larger Parish," twelve miles long and ten miles wide. It has been the mother of churches, and now stands encircled by a number of younger organizations that are growing strong and sturdy under its cherishing influence.