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Let me whisper in your ear that it will soon be organized, and that the county-seat will not be Monterey Centre, but Lithopolis that classic municipality whose sonorous name will be the admiration of all true Americans and the despair of the spelling classes in our schools. Lithopolis! It has the cadence of Alexander, and Alcibiades, and Numa Pompilius, and Belisarius it reeks of greatness!
Within a month N.V. Creede had opened a law office in Monterey Centre, Dick McGill had begun the publication of the Monterey Centre Journal of fragrant memory, Lithopolis began to advertise its stone quarries, and Grizzly Reed, an old California prospector, who had had his ear torn off by a bear out in the mountains, began prospecting for gold along the creek, and talking mysteriously.
Between the Maquoketa and Independence I lost N.V. Creede, merely because I traded for some more lame cows and a young Alderney bull, and had to stop to break them. He stayed with me two days, and then caught a ride with one of Judge Horace Stone's teams which was making a quick trip to Lithopolis. "Good-by, Mr. Vandemark," said he at parting, "and good luck.
The sale of lots in Lithopolis went on faster than ever. When General Weaver was running for governor, a Populist worker called on my friend Wilbur Wheelock, who was then as now a stock buyer at our little town of Ploverdale, and asked him if he were a Populist. "No," said Wilbur, "but I have all the qualifications, sir!" "What do you regard as the qualifications?" asked the organizer.
"Locating over at our new town of Lithopolis, isn't he? See anybody you knew on the way?" "Yes," I said. "I saw your sister-in-law in Waterloo, She was with a minister and his wife a Mr. and Mrs. Thorndyke or something like that." "Yes," said Gowdy, trying to be calm. "Friends of ours of hers." "They're here in the city," said Henderson L. "He's going to be the new preacher."
There was a future county-seat fight in the rivalry between Monterey Centre and Lithopolis and not only these, but in the rival rivalries of Cole's Grove, Imperial City, Rocksylvania, New Baltimore, Cathedral Rock, Waynesville and I know not how many more projects, all ambitiously laid out in the still-unorganized county of Monterey, and all but one or two now quite lost to all human memory or thought, except as some diligent abstractor of titles or real-estate lawyer discovers something of them in the chain of title of a farm; the spires and gables of the 'fifties realized only in the towering silo, the spinning windmill, or the vine-clad porch of a substantial farm-house.
The editor acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Honorable N.V. Creede in the editing of the proofs of this and a few other passages. G.v.d.M. "I thought you were going to Monterey Centre," I said. "Not if the court knows itself," he said, "and it thinks it does. Lithopolis is the permanent town in Monterey County, and Monterey Centre is the mushroom."
I see in my own adopted city of Lithopolis, Iowa, a future Sparta or Athens or Rome, or anyhow, a Louisville or Cincinnati or Dubuque a place in which to achieve greatness or anyhow, a chance to deal in town lots, defend criminals, or prosecute them, and where the unsettled will have to be settled in the courts as well as on the farm. On to Lithopolis! G'lang, Whiteface, g'lang!"
The Lithopolis people gained one victory they elected Judge Horace Stone County Treasurer.
Monterey Centre ever been there? Ever seen that poverty-stricken, semi-hamlet, squatting on the open prairie, and inhabited by a parcel of dreaming Nimshies?" "No," said I; "have you?" "No," he replied. "What difference does it make? He that goeth up against Lithopolis and them that dwell therein, the same is a dreaming Nimshi."
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