the historic battlefields of
Bemis Heights and Stillwater.

=Ballston Spa=, thirty-one miles from Albany, is the county seat of
Saratoga. Here are several well-known mineral springs, with chemical
properties similar to the springs of Saratoga. Over ninety years ago
Benjamin Douglas, father of Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, built a log
house, near the "Old Spring," for the accommodation of invalids and
travelers, and at one time it looked as if Saratoga would have a
vigorous rival at her very doors; but its hotel glory has departed and
the old "Sans Souci" of the days of Washington Irving is a thing of
the past.

* * *

A gallant army formed their last array
Upon that field, in silence and deep gloom,
And at their conqueror's feet,
Laid their war-weapons down.

_Fitz-Greene Halleck._

* * *

=Saratoga=, thirty-eight miles north of Albany, one hundred and
eighty-two miles from New York, is the greatest watering place of the
continent. Its development has been wonderful, and puts, as it were,
in large italics, the prosperity of our country. The first white man
to visit the place was Sir William Johnson, who, in 1767, was conveyed
there by his Mohawk friends, in the hope that the waters might afford
relief from the serious effects of a gunshot wound in the thigh,
received eight years before in the battle of Lake George, at which
time his army defeated the French legions under Baron Dieskau. It was
not until the year 1773, six years after Sir William Johnson's initial
visit, that the first clearing was made and the first cabin erected
by Derick Scowten. Owing, however, to misunderstandings with his red
neighbors, he shortly afterwards left. A year later, George Arnold,
from Rhode Island, took possession of the vacated Scowten House, and
conducted it with some degree of success for about two years. Arnold
was in turn followed by Samuel Norton, who failed to make the venture
successful, owing to the outbreak of the Revolution. Norton was
succeeded in 1783 by his son, who sold out in 1787 to Gideon Morgan,
who, in the same year, made the property over to Alexander Bryan.
Bryan became the first permanent settler after the close of the war.
The prosperity of the village began in 1789, with the advent of Gideon
Putnam, but the wooden inns and hotels of 1830, which seemed palatial
in those days, would get lost even in one of the parlors of the
mammoth hotels which now line the main street of