The Historical Meeting of Monday afternoon, the next important event in the Bi-Centennial Celebration, was presided over by Frederic M. Williams. Mr. Williams, after a few genial words of greeting, introduced, as the first speaker, Dr. Samuel Hart, President of the Connecticut Historical Society, explaining, as he did so, that New Milford welcomes her guests, not only with the best that she has, but with the best that there is. Dr. Hart spoke as follows: “The recurring anniversaries of the towns of our ancient State are bringing before us, as in a series of living pictures, the history of the whole commonwealth and of all its parts. Beginning, within the easy memory of many now living, with the quarter-millennials of the first settled towns, Hartford and its sister towns on the Great River, Saybrook at its mouth, New Haven on its fair harbor at the mouth of the Quinnipiac, and then its allied towns, Guilford to the east and Milford, your mother-city, to the west, we are passing now to the bi-centennials of those, the history of which begins in the opening years of the eighteenth century. Our origins have been brought before us, and we have studied again the men and the times, the founders of our first colonies and the foundations which they laid, the early history of two differently ordered federations or groups of organized communities, and their union into one government under a charter from the English king which made them almost independent of his authority. We are passing on now to another period, when, under varied influences and in changed circumstances, many of our most beautiful and prosperous towns were founded. Two years ago Newtown, which once had part of its boundary-line in common with you, observed its bi-centennial; and the two-hundredth anniversaries of Derby and Woodbury and Waterbury and Danbury--to mention only those in this neighborhood--were earlier than that.