ot bring to
the New England coast a truer motive or a purer purpose. They were willing
to put into the enterprise their lives and their fortunes. They stamped
the new community that they founded with the impress of their ideals, and
that stamp has persisted.

These modern Pilgrims repeated with some modification the experiences of
their New England prototypes. After a long and stormy voyage on the Great
Lakes they landed in the late autumn on an inhospitable coast, built them
some rough shanties that their descendants would not consider worthy to
shelter their cattle, and there they passed a severe winter. They explored
the northwestern Michigan woods, and finally, with a strange indifference
to the importance of a railway to the development of a town, they lighted
upon a level plateau on the top of a high hill, two hundred feet above the
placid waters of beautiful Lake Crystal, and eight miles from Lake
Michigan, and there they pitched their tents. Like Abraham, their first
work after entering the Promised Land was to build an altar to Jehovah,
and like him and their New England ancestors, they built it on the highest
elevation that they could find. One of the first things they did was to
select a site for a church and for a school, and, standing under the tall
maples and beeches, with hymn and prayer, to dedicate that high hilltop to
the cause of Christian education.

The church that they planted, the first in all the Grand Traverse region,
celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its organization in 1910. It has
now a membership of about three hundred, and is the center of the
religious and social life, not only of the immediate community but also of
the territory known as "The Larger Parish," twelve miles long and ten
miles wide. It has been the mother of churches, and now stands encircled
by a number of younger organizations that are growing strong and sturdy
under its cherishing influence.

Benzonia, the village that they founded, never became the populous center
that they hoped it would be. There are now but about four hundred people
living on the hilltop, and nearly as many more in the village of Beulah,
which, at the bottom of the hill nestles around the head of the Lake, half
a mile away. The two villages of Benzonia and Beulah form one corporation,
and contain together about seven hundred inhabitants. The school which
they established is still doing business, though not exactly in the way
that they anticipate