George Washington’s patriotic influence on America still impacts America. Daniel Webster recognized this, on Feb. 22, 1832, when he spoke of Constitutional Liberty at Washington’s centennial birthday at Washington City, with these words:
“Other misfortunes may be borne, or their effects overcome. If war should sweep our commerce from the ocean, another generation may renew it; if it exhaust our treasury, future industry may replenish it; if it desolate and lay waste our fields, still, under a new cultivation, they will grow green again, and ripen to future harvest. It were but a trifle, even, if the walls of yonder capitol were to crumble, if its lofty pillars should fall, and its gorgeous decorations be covered by the dust of the valley.
“All these might be rebuilt. But who shall reconstruct the fabric of demolished government? Who shall rear again the well- proportioned columns of constitutional liberty? Who shall frame together the skilful architecture which unites national sovereignty with State rights, individual security, and public prosperity? No, if these columns fall, they will be raised not again. Like the Coliseum and the Parthenon, they will be destined to a mournful, a melancholy immortality. Bitterer tears, however, will flow over them, than were ever shed on the monuments of the Roman or Grecian Art, for they will be the remnants of a more glorious edifice than Greece or Rome ever saw, the edifice of constitutional American liberty.”
Newburg, New York
Who can forget George Washington, at Newburg, on March 15, 1783, when the General had to face down a troop rebellion, caused by agitators, who had fed flames of disloyalty. The impoverished condition of the federal treasury, was insufficient to pay troop salaries. This sower of seeds of discord and separation was scuttled by action that all Americans now appreciate.
Orange Park
The POW/MIA Flag was conceived by a North Florida lady, Mary Helen Hoff, of Orange Park, near Jacksonville. While awaiting the return of her husband, Lt. Comdr. Michael Hoff, Mary Helen Hoff developed the flag, in honor of her husband and others she had heard about.
Her husband was a Navy pilot, shot down over Laos in 1970 and was listed by the Pentagon as missing in action in 1973. The flag was adopted by the National League of POW/MIA Families in Washington. Then in 1990, Congress designated the POW/MIA flag “as the symbol of our Nation’s concern and commitment to resolving as fully as possible the fate of Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for in South East Asia.”
Mrs. Mary Helen Hoff, 84, just passed away, according to the January 3, 2016 Florida Times-Union.
Madison
A bell was found in Lake Sampala in Madison County in 1840. It was 18 inches in height, and measured four feet around the base and was made in 1758. That bell, under the possession of Judge Enoch J. Vann, whose law office was in the vacant lot across from the present Madison Post Office, was purchased in 1906 by the Florida Historical Society. At one time it was housed at the Historical Society’s Jacksonville office. Beth Sims, a Madison County historian, discovered that it had been removed to the University of Florida in Gainesville.
The bell, since 2001, has been on display at the Old Statehouse in Tallahassee.
We Are America
Every locality has something of interest. Madison has many stories. They need the retelling.
