(This article was clipped from an undated edition of the Walton Reporter.)

SEEING THE OLD HOME

Rev. C.C. Pierce Writes of His Impressions While East

Appreciative Words for Walton

Editors Reporter: Very few people can appreciate the feelings which come to those who from a distance come back to the familiar scenes of other years. To me it is a time of great pleasure and interest. After an absence of many years, broken only by brief and infrequent intervals, I come back to the old scenes to find great progress along many lines. The electric car, the telephone and the rural mail delivery are factors fast transforming past conditions and rapidly creating the "new east."

I am convinced that nowhere in this country are there better or safer values for investment than in the unparalleled dairying possibilities of this portion of New York state. It is a relief to know that most of the everlasting drudgery of butter making which once made each farmhouse a sort of prison for the overworked farmer's wife, is very largely a thing of the past.

Particularly noticable is the well-to-do appearance and sterling quality and character of the people who live in this part of the world. The farmers' boys and girls are reaching out into the world and are furnishing some of the finest men and women for our great educational institutions, and are going out into the larger and busier world as uplifting and leavening influences there. This has always been so to some degree, but seems to be so now more than ever. To one who has noticed the surrender of our great cities to the un-American and often irresponsible and uneducated foreign throngs, or who lives in a portion of the country where the cosmopolitan character of the people is especially marked as in California, this staid and sterling character of the rural population furnishes a source of comfort and congratulation.

Walton itself is one of the most beautifully located little towns on the continent. There is great room for improvement in the general appearance of the streets, walks, curbs and lawns, but when we remember the advancement in this particular over the condition prevailing in the past, there is ground to hope for better things in the future.

One needs to travel through the treeless plains of the great west, or spend some time in that portion of the world largely devoid of rain for many months of the year to be able to appreciate the glory and beauty of these matchless hills and their luxuriant green forests.

It was a great pleasure for me to go again to the church of my boyhood and look once more into the faces of the dear friends of the east.

California is a remarkable state, and southern California, of which Los Angeles is the gem, one of the favored corners of the continent, but it has not all the advantages nor all the beauty, and some of these two elements, I am glad to see, linger still in lovely old Delaware county.

C.C. PIERCE

Graphics courtesy Gini Schmitz and Susan E. Christoffersen.