CHAPTER 1 - "UNCLE SAM"
THE gentleman who graced the gubernatorial arm-chair of our state
when this century was born happened to be an admirer of classic lore and
the sonorous names of antiquity.
It is owing to his weakness in bestowing pompous cognomens on our
embryo towns and villages that to-day names like Utica, Syracuse, and
Ithaca, instead of evoking visions of historic pomp and circumstance, raise
in the minds of most Americans the picture of cocky little cities, rich only
in trolley-cars and Methodist meeting-houses.
When, however, this cultured governor, in his ardor, christened one of
the cities Troy, and the hill in its vicinity Mount Ida, he little dreamed that
a youth was living on its slopes whose name was destined to become a
household word the world over, as the synonym for the proudest and
wealthiest republic yet known to history, a sobriquet that would be
familiar in the mouths of races to whose continents even the titles of
Jupiter or Mars had never penetrated.