When I began these notes, I intended to confine myself to my own recollections of Wharton as it was before World War I. But I soon found that I was not able to hold rigidly to the narrow course I had planned.

Things which happened both before I was born and after the outbreak of the 1914-18 war persisted in luring me in their direction, so that I am hoping that what has at last emerged, a mingling of personal recollection and local history research, is something resembling a word-picture of an appreciable part of the Wharton story. Moreover, it is, I venture to hope, a flesh-andblood account dealing with Wharton people themselves rather than with events, dates, statistics and the like with which conventional history concerns itself.

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