and of the Lotos.  The law of the day was represented by such men as Mayor Hall, until he resigned as a result of the criticism of fellow-members growing out of the exposures of the Tammany frauds in the summer and autumn of 1871, W.M.  Evarts, Judge Garvin, Judge Gunning S. Bedford, Eli P. Norton, and John E. Burrill.  Of men prominent in political and municipal life were August Belmont, Samuel J. Tilden, Peter B. Sweeny, former Mayor George Opdyke, Isaac Bell, and Andrew H. Green, later to become the “Father of Greater New York.”  Among the dominant financial figures, in addition to August Belmont, were A.T.  Stewart, John J. Cisco, Henry Clews, and John Jacob Astor.  From the Army were U.S.  Grant, then the nation’s President, John H. Coster, George W. Cullom, Samuel W. Crawford, Howard Stockton, Rufus Ingalls, J.L.  Rathbone, I.U.D.  Reeve, and Stewart Van Vliet.  From the Navy, James B. Breese, James Alden, Edward C. Gratton, Thomas M. Potter, Henry O. Mayo, James Glynn, W.C.  Leroy, L.M.  Powell, and John H. Wright.

By virtue of its descent from the Sketch and the Column, the Century Association might lay claim to seniority among the clubs of Fifth Avenue.  The Sketch Club was the result of the union of the literary and artistic elements of New York, which, in 1829, were producing an annual called “The Talisman.”  Among the writers in the Sketch were Bryant, Verplanck, and Sands, and later Washington Irving and J.K.  Paulding joined it.  There was no regular home, the club meeting at the houses of members in turn.  For six months, during 1830, it did not exist, having been dissolved in May of that year, and reorganized in December.  Thereafter, for a few years, it met in the Council Room of the National Academy of Design, and then returned to the custom of meeting at the homes of the members.  That organization was the embryo Century.  The Sketch Club had first taken form in 1829.  Four years before that a society called the Column had been established by graduates of Columbia College.  That organization, too, had a share in the moulding of the new club.

The meeting that brought the Century into being was held the evening of January 13, 1847, in the rotunda of the New York Gallery of Fine Arts in the City Hall Park.  The call for the meeting had been sent out a few weeks before, the men composing the signing committee being John G. Chapman, A.B.  Burand, C.C.  Ingham, A.M.  Cozzens, F.W.  Edmonds, and H.T.  Tuckerman.  The original Centurions were forty-two in number, of whom twenty-five came from the Sketch, and six from the Column.  There were ten artists, ten merchants, four authors, three bankers, three physicians, two clergymen, two lawyers, one editor, one diplomat, and three men of leisure.  All were more or less representative men of the city, which had grown from the town of three hundred and fifty thousand of the day of the Union’s formation, to a young metropolis of six hundred thousand.  Gulian C. Verplanck was the club’s first president,