With the terrible drouth of '60 this realization did not come; for the town was young, and the people were young; only Ezra Lane was a graybeard in all the town in the sixties; and youth is so sure; there is no hazard under thirty.

In the war they fought and marched and sang and starved and died, and were still young.

But when the financial panic of '73 spread its dread and its trouble over the land, youth in Sycamore Ridge was gone; it was manhood that faced these things in the Ridge, and manhood had cares, had given hostages to fortune, and life was serious and hard; and big on the horizon was the fear of failure.
General Hendricks swayed in the panic of '73; and the time marked him, took the best of the light from his eye, and put the slightest perceptible hobble on his feet.

To Martin Culpepper and Watts McHurdie and Philemon Ward and Jacob Dolan and Oscar Fernald, the panic came in their late thirties and early forties, a flash of lightning that prophesied the coming of the storm and stress of an inexorable fate.
The wedding of John Barclay and Jane Mason occurred in September, 1873, two days after he had stood on the high stone steps of the Exchange National Bank and made a speech to the crowd, telling them he was the largest depositor in the bank, and begging them to stop the run.

But the run did not stop, and the day before John's wedding the bank did not open; the short crop and the panic in the East were more than Garrison County people could stand.