Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 18.djvu/25



Hall Jackson Kelley 9

the divergence of the meridian lines ; nevertheless their bound- aries will be distinctly marked, and their contents exactly known. A country thus surveyed, gives the advantage of ascertaining, without admeasurement, the relative position or distance of any one place from another, consequently the lati- tude and longitude of the metropolis being determined, those of any other place are known."^

Confident that the principle he advocated would be of g^eat public utility if generally adopted and practiced, he presented his system to the national government in the form of a petition to congress on April 10, 1830.^

It was as a surveyor that Kelley in 1828 became interested in the affairs of the Three Rivers Manufacturing company, which had been incorporated in 1826 to build and operate a textile mill in the village of Three Rivers in the town of Palmer, Massachusetts. This village, which was then but a hamlet, lies at the point where the combined waters of the Ware and Swift rivers join the Quaboag and form the Chic- opee, which is one of the branches of the Connecticut. The company had met with unexpected difficulties in digging a canal, for its engineers were unable to make much progress on account of the solid granite rock near the dam which they had built. Kelley put his money as well as his efforts into the project. He made surveys and prepared a comprehensive plan, including the manufacturing plant, the water power, and the village itself. One of his hobbies was straight streets and rectangular blocks (a natural reaction in a Boston engineer).

23 Kelley, Gtn^rai Circular, 13.

24 **The [senate] committee [on naval affairs] to which the subject was referred, for a n)od and obyioos reason, saTc the investigation of the subject to General [Simon] Bernard, then at the heaa of the corps of civil engineers.

"This profound mathematician carefully examined the papers and the formula I had prepared for their illustration, reported an opinion highly creditable to his own talent, liberally estimating the talents of the memorialist. Notwithstanding the system was recommended as being worthy of public adoption, yet nothing was oone to bring it into practice. President Jackson promised to adopt it, whoiever 'a book, giving directions for its practice and a proper apparatus, should be pre- pared. Ihad described minutely the iipparatus and the manner of using it, and had begun the toblo of dtflocHons necessary for the book, and this was all my Oregon enterprise afforded me time to do. The tables might require for their preparanon one or two years of assiduous attention of some learned mathematician." — Settle- mont of Oregon, lo-i; ai cong. i sess. S. jour., 236, 275.