I know not when I first planned this work, so inextricably is the idea
interwoven with a fading recollection of my earliest aims and
ambitions. However, had I not been resolutely determined to conclude
it at any cost--mental, physical, or pecuniary--the difficulties that
I have experienced at every stage might have led to its early
abandonment.

The greatest difficulty lay in procuring material which could not be
supplied by individual research and investigation. For this and other
valid reasons that will follow it may safely be said that more than
one-half the contents of this volume are in the strictest sense
original, the remarks and detail, for the most part, being the
products of my own personal observation and reflection. Correspondence
with individuals and the State and National authorities, though varied
and extensive, elicited not a half dozen important facts. I would
charge no one with discourtesy in this particular, and mention the
circumstance only because it will serve to emphasize what I shall
presently say _anent_ the scarcity of available material.

Likewise, a painstaking perusal of more than two hundred volumes
yielded only meagre results, and in most of these illusory references
I found not a single fact worth recording. This comparatively
prodigious number included gazeteers, encyclopedias, geographies,
military histories, general histories, State and National reports,
journals of legislative proceedings, biographies, genealogies,
reminiscences, travels, romances--in short, any and all books that I
had thought calculated to shed even the faintest glimmer of light on
the County's history, topographical features, etc.