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 declaration that "them Hodges is maintainin' a 'pent-up Uticky.'" When Mr. Hodge heard of the meeting, he relented and offered to give the people the lane on condition that the town government would lay out a street. The offer was accepted and the new thoroughfare was called Utica Street in commemoration of the schoolmaster's speech.

The inevitable newspaper appeared on the 3d of October, 1811, when the Buffalo Gazette issued its first number. The Gazette was the forerunner of journals which to-day recognize as their only competitors the Metropolitan press.

On the 26th of June, 1812, the tidings of war with Great Britain reached Buffalo, and on August 13th the first gun of the struggle is said to have been fired by the battery at Black Rock, then a rival, now a suburb, of Buffalo. The excitement was intense; for all recognized that the growing town, because of its frontier situation, was sure to be one of the theatres of hostilities. Nor was this a mistaken idea, as subsequent events proved. Immediately after the declaration of war, the British soldiers from the Canadian garrison at Fort Erie, directly across the river from Buffalo, made an incur