Did you know?
“Aeroplane will fly over Shady Grove tomorrow,” was the headline for a story in a local paper just over a hundred years ago today. (Aug. 22, 1911)
That flight would mark the first flight ever of an aircraft over Fayette County.
It would become more than just the featured attraction of that year’s Uniontown Merchant Picnic. It was the dawn of an era that still exists today.
Two days later, there was a rather odd story in the Aug. 24 edition of the same paper.
You might think I’m taking a bit of editorial license by using the term “rather odd,” until you consider one of the sentences in that story.
“…the latest report Fayette County produced more insane people than any other,” it said.
It seems that a study of the admissions information for the Dixmont State Hospital (officially known as the Department of the Insane in the Western Pennsylvania Hospital of Pittsburgh), showed that Fayette County had sent more people to that institution that any other county.
For the period between September 1909 and September 1910, Fayette County sent 66 people to the Dixmont facility.
The following day, on Aug.25, there was yet another unusual story on the front page of the paper.
“The Harem Skirt First Appears Here,” chronicled how a member of an “alleged” burlesque company “paraded” through downtown Connellsville wearing a supposedly risqué costume that was all the rage in those days.
In fact, in March of 1911, there was even a silent movie released called “The Harem Skirt.”
However, according to the local story, the harem skirt didn’t seem to have its desired (“naughty”) effect.
Despite the fact that the company management had sent one of its female troupe members out wearing her harem skirt, it was reported that the show “seems to have fallen flat as standing room was not crowded in the theatre last night.”
Just over 75 years ago, in mid-August of 1936, a local controversy erupted over free speech in Fayette County.
A local contingent of communists had been prevented from using the Fayette County courthouse for a meeting.
They then tried to use a hall owned by the German Beneficial Union, but were refused access to that venue too.
The communists took their grievance to Fayette County court, where Judge H.S. Dumbauld dismissed the communists’ appeal.
However, Judge Dumbauld spoke openly in the large, crowded courtroom about what he felt were the “superheated patriotism” exhibited by citizens who wanted to prevent the communists from assembling.
Meanwhile, on Aug. 24, 1936, the Uniontown Morning Herald reported that “Many Fayette Countians greet next president.”
There had been carloads of voters who joined an estimated 120,000 cheering supporters of presidential hopeful Kansas Gov. Alf Landon when he returned to speak at his hometown of West Middlesex in Mercer County.
In the end, however, Landon only won 8 electoral votes, compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 523.
It was also announced that week that Olympic gold medalist John Woodruff would be taking part in the upcoming Labor Day events in Connellsville.
Woodruff had not only taken home the gold at the Olympic Games, but on Aug. 15 he was part of the United States’ world-record-setting, 2-mile relay team that had competed in London after the Olympics.
Nearly 50 years ago today, on Aug. 31, 1961, it was reported that at midnight towns all over Pennsylvania would be making an important change. There would be 949 mayors, instead of burgesses across the state.
It seems hardly anybody knew why the heads of local municipalities in Pennsylvania were still called burgesses, so a law was passed that ended the use of the “archaic” title.
A local paper revealed that Pennsylvania was one of the last states to abandon the term, which some people thought got its origins from the “House of Burgesses” in colonial Virginia.