Did you know?
While I’m always fascinated when I find big local news stories that took place many years ago, I’m equally interested when I find little items that help give me a better understanding of what life was like in previous centuries.
Today, I’m taking a look at some of the minor news events I’ve found from the 1860s and 1870s.
I learned that justice was swift back in 1862, from an item I found in the Indiana (Pa) Weekly Democrat published on June 12 of that year.
It was reported that a Uniontown attorney and state legislator, Daniel Kaine, had been shot by an assailant while he was in his “sleeping room.”
The perpetrator was found, arrested, tried, convicted and was sent on a seven-year prison term the following day.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees a “speedy trial.” That case obviously satisfied that part of the Constitution.
The March 3, 1870 edition of the Indiana (Pa) Progress carried a story about a five year-old in Uniontown who’d had an unusual experience.
He’d complained for a few days about a severe pain in his side – and especially when he was being lifted.
“Dr. Gordon was called to see the case, and after a careful examination, discovered over the liver, a foreign substance, which upon being extracted, proved to be a sewing needle about two and a half inches in length,” it was reported.
Sewing needles, it seems, showed up in a number of unusual places in Fayette County during the 1870s.
The same newspaper (The Indiana Progress) carried an item in its Aug. 3, 1871 edition about a Georges Township man who sat down for dinner and when he cut into a “cucumber pickle,” one of his children “observed a dark straight streak running through it, appearing more like a worm than anything else, but upon close examination proved to be a needle perfectly imbedded in it.”
The mystery of where the misplaced needle came from was solved immediately. The man’s wife said she’d lost a needle about the same size when she was out planting cucumber seeds.
However, there was still a bit of a mystery about how the cucumber had grown around the needle.
The Greenville (Pa) Shenango Valley Argus reported in its Jan. 5, 1872 edition that a “wealthy philanthropic gentleman” in Uniontown had set aside ten thousand dollars in a fund that would be distributed among deserving students in the local school.
The principal and the man giving out the money would determine which students would be rewarded.
It was a program designed “to give the recipients a starting point in life.”
Newspapers of the 1870’s seemed quite willing to publicize everybody’s matchmaking efforts.
I found this item in the Aug. 25, 1870 edition of the Indiana Progress: “As an inducement for immigrants of the feminine gender, we suppose a letter writer from Masontown, near Uniontown says: ‘We have three widowers in this place, that we put against any other widowers west of the Alleghenies, for good looks, enterprise and gentility of manners.”
It’s not known if there were any takers.
It was known that there were no takers regarding another item I found in the May 10, 1870 edition of the Indiana (Pa) Messenger. “Civilization must be in a fine state in Fayette County. The Uniontown Genius says that a man in North Union Township, offered his daughter, a beautiful blond, to any man who would keep the family in flour during the winter,” it said.
Fortunately, it ended with the words, “Nobody accepted the proposition.”
They say history repeats itself. Well, sometimes newspapers repeated each other in 1870s.
In the Aug. 18, 1874 edition of the Huntington (Pa) Journal, there was a humorous account of a Uniontown woman who’d been called on by a peddler who was “disposing of some goods.”
The peddler asked the woman “if she could tell him of any road on which no peddler had traveled.
The woman, obviously not missing a beat, replied, “Yes, I know of one, and it’s the road to Heaven.”
Whether that story was true, is unknown. But it was worth repeating in another newspaper nearly two years later.
According to the Bucks County (Pa) Gazette’s March 30, 1876 edition, the peddler and the woman had the same encounter – and with the same outcome.
I’m supposing it was either a good joke – or news traveled mighty slowly in those days.
Yet, I may have found the answer. “The Encyclopedia of Wit and Wisdom: A Collection of Over Nine Thousand Anecdotes,” published the story of the woman and the peddler on page 812.
Although there were no references to it ever taking place in Uniontown.