Shortly before starting on the long and dangerous journey to the military post at Detroit, which was to be the center of his new field of labor, he had married Alice Parks, aged eighteen years, who developed into a woman of rare qualities. Possessing the missionary spirit to an equal degree with her husband she combined great courage with good, practical sense, the latter quality being in him almost totally lacking. In reading the life of David Bacon, as portrayed by his illustrious son, Dr. Leonard Bacon, one cannot but feel that it was the mother who patiently bore the greater share of the burden of a hard life, not always buoyed up by the emotional optimism which never failed the father.

It was the misfortune of David Bacon always to plan larger than he could build. At Detroit he became involved in debt; his relations with the officers at the military post were not entirely satisfactory and for various reasons that cannot have a place here, after a service of nearly four years he was directed by the Connecticut Society to leave that part of the country and "without unnecessary delay, to repair to New Connecticut, there to itinerate as a missionary and improve himself in the Indian language." To most men this would have been a serious blow but soon after he received the order, which was nearly six months in reaching him, he wrote as follows:

As my mind was fully bent on prosecuting the objects of this mission, and as I had strong hopes that God would glorify Himself by granting success to it, notwithstanding present appearances, I was not thinking or wishing for a removal. But the information I have mentioned (the order for removal) gave a turn to my thoughts, and the more I contemplated the increasing discouragements attending this mission and the brighter prospects which were presented from another quarter, the more occasion I saw for joy and thankfulness.

Shortly we find him at Hudson, then a young and small settlement, destined to furnish one of his great disappointments, as the seat of the Western Reserve College.

An unfriendly message from Connecticut called him to New England to render an account of his mission in Detroit.

This journey he made alone and almost entirely on foot, though when he began it "he was just recovering from a very serious attack of intermittent fever and was pale and emaciated."

After being fully exonerated of all suspicions of dishonesty he was offered, on his return to Hudson, another appointment by the Missionary Society. But in the meantime there had developed in his mind a vision of an adventure of another sort; one which he believed would be of greater value to the "New Connecticut" to which he had become greatly attached, than anything he might accomplish as a missionary among the Indians.

Filled with enthusiasm for the new enterprise, he again journeyed to Connecticut, where he sought the proprietors of the twenty-five square miles of unoccupied land, upon which he afterwards bestowed the name of the principal owner, Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge of Litchfield, Connecticut.

Another of the proprietors was Roger Newberry, grandfather of Professor John S. Newberry, the distinguished geologist who, though born in Connecticut was brought, at the age of two years, to Cuyahoga Falls, where he grew up upon the estate inherited by his father.

With a characteristic recklessness Bacon purchased twenty of the twenty-five square miles of this tract with

out having a dollar to put down in payment. The remaining five mostly belonged to persons who might, and later did join in his enterprise.

His plan was to establish in this town a strictly Christian community, which should be a model in all of its affairs for other settlements in the Western Reserve. Farms or lots of land were to be sold only to members in good standing of the Congregational Church, for the support of which each purchaser, by special contract, agreed to pay a yearly tax in proportion to the value of his property.

It is related that for a time this condition of church membership was strictly adhered to, with a single exception. It was necessary to have a blacksmith in the community and in the discussion of this problem there was a general agreement that one competent and willing to shoe a kicking horse or a reluctant mule would probably find it necessary to use language of a strength and flavor not in perfect harmony with the decalogue! Almost without exception the earlier followers of Bacon were either directly from New England or New Englanders from earlier settlements in adjoining counties.

In the first roll of the inhabitants there is nothing to indicate the various occupations of the people, but in it there is found the name "Boosinger", belonging to a well-known German family which was among the first to settle in that part of the state, and there can be little doubt that in this instance it reveals the identity of the profane blacksmith.

There is a tradition that during one of the prolonged absences of the head of the community, engaged in a propaganda for increasing its numbers, his frail but heroic wife, alone with her small children in the log

cabin in the woods, was on the verge of starvation and when this fact was discovered by the blacksmith he went at night to the farm of a well-to-do settler, stole a bag of wheat, carried it to the mill to be ground, afterwards depositing the flour at her door, thus adding the crime of theft to that of profanity.

In his imagination Bacon saw the Town of Tallmadge as a civic and social unit, and to this end in its "laying out" it was a marked departure from the practice of other townships of the Western Reserve, indeed, in this respect it is, I believe, unique. Instead of following the usual practice by dividing his tract into blocks one mile square, with six hundred and forty acres in each, his five miles square town was divided into sixteen blocks, each being a mile and a quarter square and containing one thousand acres.

Public roads were located along all four sides of each block and from each of the corners of the town diagonal roads were constructed, meeting at the center, thus giving all parts of the tract comparatively easy access to the central réservation of some hundreds of acres, upon which the village was to grow, including the church, the academy or high school, and also, in the near future, what was closest to his heart, the "Yale" of New Connecticut.

So alluring a prospect as that offered by Bacon could not fail to attract those who were in sympathy with his theory of life in a Christian community and the result was a gathering of a group of families much above the average in intelligence, culture and the essentials of high character. Among them were some of the holders of that part of the town not purchased by Bacon, who gladly accepted his geographical and other limitations.

There were, for example, the two Elizur Wrights, father and son, the one already distinguished throughout New England for his scholarly attainments, the other destined to achieve an international reputation in many fields of intellectual activity.

After graduating at Yale the younger Wright returned to Ohio to serve for a few years as Professor of Mathematics at Western Reserve College which had only recently opened its doors at Hudson; the "Yale" of New Connecticut, which both Bacon and Elizur Wright, Sr., had hoped to see grow out of the Academy, conducted by the latter in the Town of Tallmadge ten years earlier. Elizur Wright, Jr., was one of the founders of the American Anti-slavery Society, a writer of eminence on a wide variety of topics, a distinguished mathematician, a poet, a newspaper man, internationally known as perhaps the first authority of his time in matters relating to Life Insurance, and an inventor of numerous valuable mechanical devices.

Indeed there are a few other men in our history who have successfully cultivated so varied an assortment of really serious occupations.

But from a material point of view the Christian community in Tallmadge was doomed to failure. Bacon had expected to pay the Connecticut proprietors out of the receipts from his sale of the tract to settlers, in smaller lots. But too few settlers came and some of those who did come had adopted the same financial policy as that of the founder of the community. Naturally disaster followed. Bacon was deeply involved in debt and much of the land became the property of the original owners.

From the log cabin, built with his own hands on the