Welcome to Livingston County’s Bicentennial GeoTrail!
My name is Find R. Fox. I’ll be your guide to super-sleuthing the hides at these amazing, historical locations all around our beautiful 200-year-old county!
To make your travel through history a bit easier, imagine yourself in a Time Machine (your best mode of transportation will do). Set the dial (your gps unit) to the first year (coordinates) listed below, check the waypoints for Parking and push the navigate button! Whirl your way there then switch your coordinates as needed to navigate to the geocache to sniff out the container and sign the log sheet. Good Luck & Enjoy the journey!!
Park hours 8 AM - 10 PM. Park is BUSY! STEALTH REQUIRED!
This is a replacement cache for the previous one. This is a cammoed pill bottle.
Francis Julius Bellamy (1855-1931) son of Baptist minister, Rev. David Bellamy and Lucy Clark, was an author, editor, and publicity director born in Mount Morris, New York. He was best known for writing the original version of the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. The Bellamy family left Mt. Morris when Francis was five years old and relocated to Rome, New York.
Francis Bellamy attended Rome Free Academy, the University of Rochester and the Rochester Theological Seminary. After serving as a Baptist minister from 1880-1891, he began working as a writer at the Youth's Companion, a magazine in Boston. There he helped plan a National Public School Celebration for Columbus Day in 1892, for which the Pledge of Allegiance was written.
At the time the Pledge was written no specific individual was credited as its author. As the Pledge gained fame many were eager to claim credit for its authorship; the controversy focused primarily on James Upham and Francis Bellamy, who were editor and associate editor of the Youth Companion at the time. Francis Bellamy’s son David spent years substantiating his father's claim and gaining public recognition for him as author of the Pledge.
A committee of historians appointed by the United States Flag Association in 1939 ruled that Bellamy was the author. The controversy arose again in 1956 and the Library of Congress Legislative Reference Service affirmed Francis Bellamy as the author of the Pledge in 1957.
Francis Bellamy’s original Pledge read as follows: I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all
In 1954, in response to the perceived threat of secular Communism, President Eisenhower encouraged Congress to add the words "under God," creating the 31-word pledge that is recited today.
Please approach from the park side, second tree, box elder that has leaf groupings of 3, 5, or 7 and can look similar to poison ivy - but it's not.
This cache is 1 of 36 caches comprising the Livingston County Bicentennial GeoTrail (LivCo200) placed in the summer of 2021 in honor of Livingston County’s Bicentennial by members of the local geocaching group called the Bee Hive. For more information about Livingston County’s Bicentennial, visit the County Historian’s Bicentennial web page on the Livingston County New York website at https://www.livingstoncounty.us/1115/County-Bicentennial
