brick by master workmen from Spain, the Alcazar has Romanesque windows, with stone Gothic seats or poyos against the walls. Festooned and multiple Isabeline-style arches are numerous, along with Doric arches whose capitals are of tile in accordance with the Renaissance fashion. Over the portals are raised designs, filagree work, in the form of vines and leaves.

In the early 1500’s, using the Alcazar as a jumping-off base, Balboa discovered the Pacific, Ponce de Leon colonized Puerto Rico and discovered Florida, Pizarro conquered Peru, and Cortez settled Mexico. The palace saw the rise and fall of the great Spanish empire, and in its heyday was an imposing flower-surrounded showplace. The historian, Ganzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, wrote then that he had never seen anything to compare with it in Spain.

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With headquarters in the James Monroe Law Office and Museum in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the James Monroe Memorial Foundation is conducting a campaign which will establish a complete reference library on James Monroe and the Monroe Doctrine. The library, on a smaller scale, will be similar to the Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and proposed Harry S. Truman libraries.

A museum since 1927, the Law Office is filled with mementoes of Monroe’s career. In the course of his travels in this country and abroad, he accumulated beautiful furniture, silver, china, porcelains, portraits, and statuary, much of which has now come to the museum. A new wing will be added to the building to house the library. In addition to thousands of books relating to Monroe, there will be a large portion of Monroe’s original correspondence with other prominent men of his day on important issues of that period. The library will be made available to students of history of both this country and the South American republics.

The James Monroe Memorial Foundation hopes this work will be completed by April 28, 1958, the bi-centennial of James Monroe’s birth.

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Interested citizens in and around Towanda, Pennsylvania, have formed French Azilum, Inc., to restore the French refugee village of Azilum, which was in existence from 1793 to 1803. The corporation will purchase property, erect buildings, and otherwise carry on the restoration. Plans are being made for the production of pageants and the publication of books and pamphlets.

The first attempt at restoration probably will be in connection with La Grande Maison, or “Queen’s House,” which was intended as a home for Queen Marie Antoinette. Two stories high and eighty feet long, this was reported to have been the largest log house ever constructed in America.

The site of Azilum is already a popular point of historic interest.

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Vermont has established a Memorial House at North Fairfield marking the site of the birthplace of President Chester A. Arthur. The house is not an exact reconstruction of the original but is based on an old photograph which gives a clue as to its size and shape. A park

of some twenty acres surrounds the house.

Arthur was born in Fairfield, October 5, 1830, but his family moved to New York state when he was quite young. As a young man, however, the future President returned to Vermont to serve for a time as principal of an academy in Williston.

A monument was erected in 1903 at the site of the birthplace and was the sole reminder of the importance of the spot until the present house was erected. It will be furnished with items of Arthur’s early period. No written description of the original house exists and no one is living who can remember it.

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A minor historical feud began recently when restoration of the “first iron works in this country” at Saugus, Massachusetts, was announced. Some eighty men, it was reported, operated the iron works from about 1646 to 1670 and the restoration has cost a million and a half dollars.

George H. Kernodle, of Washington, D.C., an antique dealer who does occasional historical research for the National Park Service, registered his objection to Massachusetts’ claim in the Washington Post and Times Herald . The country’s first iron works, Kernodle maintains, were established in 1621 at Falling Creek, six miles south of Richmond, Virginia. The Falling Creek iron works, 66 miles from Jamestown, was an operation of the Virginia Company which founded the Jamestown colony. Among the victims of the Indian massacre of March 22, 1622, Kernodle points out, were 25 iron workers at Falling Creek.

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The Lincoln-Free Press Memorial Association has completed its share of the project of restoring the first newspaper plant in the Indiana Territory at Vincennes. The building has now been turned over to the Indiana Department of Conservation for maintenance and visitor reception. Elihu Stout established the Indiana Gazette at Vincennes in the summer of 1804. His printing office was burned out in April, 1806, and in 1807 he began the publication of the Western Sun which continued until about 1925.