A DDRESS.



   WE meet under circumstances of peculiar felicitation.
From various parts of our beloved Commonwealth, we
have come up to the place which has been known in past,
as it will continue to be known in all future time, as the
first permanent residence of those extraordinary men,
who, with fortitude and perseverance unexampled in the
history of the human race, dislodged the aborigines of
the soil we inhabit, and prepared it, under the pressure
of almost incredible hardships and sufferings, for the
abode of free and intelligent man. The descendants of
the pioneers have assembled to discharge pious obligra-
tions of high and solemn import, to their memory. On
the spot where we now are, there was convened, sixty-
five years ago, the first Legislative Assembly of the great
Valley of the West. It was composed of seventeen del-
egates or representatives of not more than one hundred
and fifty constituents, then the probable number of the
people of Kentucky. The day on which they began
their perilous labors, in an uninhabited and savage wil-
derness, of which the red man and the buffalo had until
then been the sole and unmolested possessors,-a middle
point of time, between the commencement and comple-.
tion of the first rude fortress built by our ancestors for
protection and defence-has been selected as the one
most appropriately to be dedicated by the citizens of
Kentucky to the commemoration of the earliest and
inost interesting event of their his.torY