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We stand here today upon ground consecrated, not only in association of tenderest pioneer memories, but upon one of the most historic spots in our own great state, if not in the nation. The story of Port Orford goes back far beyond the discovery of the Columbia River by Captain Gray. It is blended with fiction, with romance and with all the stern realities of human life. Pioneer struggles in the settlement of new countries have seldom, if ever, been greater. To know what our ancestors endured in those trying times, and what they have transmitted to us in the Christian civilization we now enjoy, and the advantages we possess, should gratefully appeal to the remotest posterity. It has been well said that those who look forward to posterity will ever look backward to ancestry, and that to live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

We fondly cherish the memory of the nation's early pioneers on Plymouth Rock in 1620, by the "Mayflower;" and long later in 1850, with no less affection we recall today those heroic men on Battle Rock by the "Sea Gull." They were both advance guards in Anglo-Saxon migration to conquer the wilderness and to build an empire, and the latter to found a further civilization here on the Western confines of the Pacific.

Indeed the history of Port Orford is like a play upon the stage in its many parts. It is all a drama in real life, but the pioneer actors who played the parts have nearly all gone. Of them only a few gray heads are here today. But the history of which they are a part will go down as a rich legacy for those they leave behind.