DESCRIPTIVE AND STATISTICAL GAZETTEER OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, CONTAINING A PARTICULAR DESCRIPTION OF THE STATES, TERRITORIES, COUNTIES, DISTRICTS, PARISHES, CITIES, TOWNS, AND WITH AN ABSTRACT OF THE CENSUS AND STATISTICS FOR 1840, EXHIBITING A COMPLETE VIEW OF THE AGRICULTURAL, COMMERCIAL, MANUFACTURING, AND LITERARY PREFACE. THE present is eminently a proper time in which to prepare a GAZETTEER of the UNITED STATES. The progress of the country in population, in agriculture, in commerce, in manufactures, and in education, has recently been ascertained with great labor and expense by the census, and it is important that this, and other continually accumulating information, should be widely diffused. All former gazetteers are rendered obsolete by the census, which has but recently become available, and by the rapid changes which the country is undergoing, particularly in its newer por tions. The progress of the United States is unexampled in the history of the world. A. little more than two hundred years since, the country was an unbroken forest, inhabited by a sparse population of savages, who camped on its streams or roamed through its woods, to obtain a precarious subsistence from fishing and the chase. No plough had furrowed the soil, no flocks and herds of domestic animals spread over its hills or grazed in its valleys, no fields of grain covered its fertile plains; no roads connected distant parts of the country, no bridges spanned its rivers, no mills plied on its waterfalls. Its large rivers rolled in mighty volume to the ocean, but they bore on their surface nothing but the clumsy raft and the frail canoe of the Indian. But what a change has two centuries wrought! The little bands of Jamestown and of Plymouth have become a mighty nation, whose commerce whitens every ocean and penetrates every sea, whose name is known and respected to the ends of the earth, and whose institutions and improvements attract the attention of the civilized world. Great have been the toil and privation and hardship which were necessary to fell this immensity of forest, to change the wilderness into cultivated fields, to rear villages and cities, and to overspread the country with its various and noble works of improvement. But the pioneers of civilization were a body of men who shrunk not from labor and suffering, that they might perpetuate their principles, and rear a country which should constitute a noble legacy to their posterity. The following work is designed to exhibit the present condition of the United States;-its progress in agriculture, in commerce, in manufactures, and in general improvement. To do this, the best sources of information have been resorted to. The materials of American geography have been accumulating for a long course of years, by the labor and research of many gifted minds; and he who should attempt to construct a gazetteer independently of the labors of his predecessors, would be chargeable with great folly. It would be a long and ostentatious catalogue to present the names of the authors who have been consulted in the preparation of the following work. It is sufficient to say that the best works on American geography have |