Small Town News: Looking in Little Places Can Turn Up Big Results
I picked up the Sunday paper not long ago and found an interesting article on one of Wisconsin’s pioneers and first scientists, Increase A. Lapham. The article repeatedly emphasized the magnitude of Lapham’s acccomplishments, particularly in light of how little formal education he had. As I read on, however, I saw a disparaging reference regarding Latham’s poor choice of appointees. I found one appointee particularly intriguing: a seemingly unknown man named O. W. Wight, who just happens to be my third-cousin five-times-removed. The article said that Wight was a “political appointee whose sole recommendation for the position of State Geologist and Surgeon General was political services, no one ever having heard of him before as being acquainted with geology or any other science.”Because I am an amateur genealogist and related to Dr. O. W. Wight, I knew nothing could have been further from the truth. I fired off a letter to the editor immediately to set the record straight and exonerate my venerable relation. In actuality, Dr. O. W. Wight, appointed to the position of State Geologist and Surgeon General for the State of Wisconsin, was a physician who held degrees in medicine, law, theology, mathematics, Latin, and Greek.
He also built a hospital for the treatment of contagious diseases, served as Milwaukee’s Health Commissioner, and renovated the Detroit sewage system. He not only wrote twelve published books and edited thirty-eight others, he had even served as an editorial writer for the same newspaper company that was now disparaging him a hundred years later—by the very person who was currently holding the job he used to have.
Why Small Town News Is Good News
I love small town news, regardless of the source. Newspapers, letters, conversations, they all serve my purpose, and they enlighten me on the juicy details of matters I might not have known about otherwise.For a genealogist like me, that’s good, because two of the most readily-accessible forms of entertainment on the frontier back in the 1800s were newspapers and letter writing. That makes both of them prime candidates for direct research and small town news.Today, local newspapers make a wonderful genealogical starting source. They keep excellent records by way of back copies, usually on microfilm/microfiche, and, since news traveled slowly years ago, editors filled the paper with mundane local news and big obituaries that contain more information than a dozen official record books.
Obituaries, for example, usually reported the names of everyone who attended a specific funeral and each person’s relationship to the deceased, every place the deceased ever lived, the schools attended, jobs held, and dates, dates, and more dates. They tended to tell a story about the deceased’s life and lifestyle, offered intimate details about the person’s death, and sometimes even dug up old quotes from him or her.
Researching small town news sources is relatively simple—newspapers are almost always more than happy to let you peruse their files. And, if the newspaper you’re looking for is now defunct, there’s a good chance it was bought out by a rival who kept copies of the original publication’s papers.
Case in point, my great-granduncle, Emmett Lott. I found Lott’s obituary in the Chippewa Falls News (Wisconsin), and it delivered far more personal information than I could have ever found in just about any other source. Lott, said the obituary, was a railroad man who bought a three-story, wood-frame house in 1859 with a $100 mortgage. His monthly payments, said the paper, were a scant $1.
But one month, continued the obituary, Lott was fifteen minutes late with his payment because he had trouble finding a dollar. The bank immediately foreclosed and threw him and his family out of their house. (It’s for reasons like this that Wisconsin and other enlightened states enacted laws to give homeowners a payment grace period.)
What intrigued me even more was that on the exact same page of that newspaper sat an advertisement for a pair of store-bought-Sunday-going-to-meeting men’s trousers, at the bargain price of “only $50”—the equivalent of half of my great-granduncle’s entire mortgage. Imagine if today a pair of pants cost half a mortgage. Imagine how many more people were foreclosed on for not producing their dollar.
While looking through a 1950s issue of the Stevens Point, Wisconsin, newspaper, I happened upon another interesting story. Shortly after the murder of Stevens Point’s sheriff, said the paper, the townspeople got “liquored up” in the tavern across from the sheriff’s jailhouse, got the deputy drunk, too, and then broke into the jail across the town square to take matters into their own hands. They dragged the sheriff’s murderer into the square, used a rope from the local hardware store, enlisted the wagon of my great-great-grandfather, Joseph E. Ross, hoisted the desperado up, fashioned a noose around his neck, and hung him from the highest limb on the town square’s old oak tree.
When the circuit judge rode horseback into town on his rounds, he found the body still hanging from the tree. Since capital punishment has never been legal in Wisconsin, the judge held a one-man grand jury to fix the blame, asking first who was responsible. When no one stepped forward, the judge decided to indict the hardware store owner and my great-great-grandfather whose guilt was determined because he had the only wagon in town. But when the judge arrested the pair for trial, every man in town stepped up and volunteered that he, too, was the guilt y culprit. The judge, outnumbered and unable to prosecute the entire town, let everyone off with an admonition to never have a lynch mob again and hurriedly rode out of town.
Interestingly enough, about fifty years later the same paper offered additional insight into my great-great-grandpa Ross’s life, via the following obituary:
Saturday, July 24, 1909, Joseph E. Ross, one of the earliest settlers in the county dropped dead at his home at 237 Plover Street at 4 o’clock Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Ross had lived in retirement for a number of years at the above address and although well advanced in years he had always enjoyed very excellent health until a few months ago when he began to suffer with heart trouble.
In April Mr. Ross suffered an attack of heart failure when out in the yard and, in falling, injured his arm and side and lay helpless on the ground for upwards of an hour. He finally succeeded in calling loudly enough to attract attention and was helped into the house, but had been in a more or less feeble condition ever since.
Tuesday, he and Mrs. Ross entertained several callers while sitting on the front porch. After they left, Mr. Ross went into the house and, sitting on the bed, said to his wife, “This is the hottest day I ever saw. I feel sick to my stomach. I believe I’ll have to take my coat off and lie down a while.”
Mrs. Ross joked with him a little about taking off his coat on account of the heat because under ordinary circumstances he never removed his coat for any reason. After helping him remove the coat, she went back to the porch, but soon was attracted by his peculiar breathing.
She found him almost unconscious, scarcely able to speak, but after the application of camphor and restoratives to his head he roused up and said he felt quite comfortable. She then summoned her neighbors, but soon after they came in he had another sinking spell and passed away.
Enlisting the Town “Historian”
Small town news doesn’t just come from printed sources. Sometimes self-appointed “historians” or “reporters” make great sources of obscure details as well.Just about every small town in American has one: a kindly old lady who has the inside scoop on everything and everyone. If you prefer a cup of hot tea and gossip to musty books and time-consuming records searches, a phone call will usually be all you need to get an invitation to visit. You can get the “historian’s” name and a networking reference from any number of sources, even the local newspaper editor or the local librarian.One such little old lady told me that my grandmother’s first cousin, Ruth Bauer, was alive and well, at age ninety-two, and living twenty miles down the road in Weyauwega. When I decided to visit, I found out that, yes, she was alive, and though only 4’ 9”, she was still able to almost kick my 6’ frame off of her porch.
“A relative, you say? You don’t look like a relative. Too tall. Well, just don’t stand there, come in if you want to, but don’t forget to wipe your feet,” she bellowed, as she whacked me in the shins with her cane.
I had inherited two albums of tinty pes from my grandmother twenty years earlier, but none of the people pictured were identified, nor were the tintypes dated. I had done most of the work myself already, but there were a few identities that had escaped me. I asked Ruth if she could help.
Ruth nodded and led me into her Victorian parlor. On the wall was what she called her “Rogues Gallery”—pictures of family members—all the same tintypes I had. Hers, however, were named and dated.
“That,” she said, pointing to a picture of a previously-unidentified man, “was my uncle. I remember he used to have crying fits. They called it ‘Melancholy,’ but we’d call it depression these days. It all started when he came back from the war.”
“The war?” I asked.
“You know, the War of the Rebellion. The one they call the Civil War,” she said. “I remember as a little girl sitting on his lap and him having these crying fits every once in a while. Seems he and my father’s older brother were in the Second Wisconsin Volunteers and were prisoners at Andersonville.
“That was a terrible place,” she continued. “They starved the prisoners. There was a no-man’s-land area between the compound and the fort walls. The prisoners were starved as a matter of daily routine. But the guards would put out tables of food in the no-man’s-land area with the threat if any prisoner crossed the line he would be shot.
“When one of my father’s brothers finally broke and ran for the food,” she continued, “my uncle panicked and ran after him. He tackled his brother just feet from the line, but when the two of them went down, his brother’s hand fell across the line and the guards shot him dead. My uncle never got over the feeling of guilt for having failed his brother.”
Power of Paper
I have found letters, wills, Bibles, wedding certificates, memberships in the SAR and DAR (Sons of the American Revolution and Daughters of the American Revolution, respectively), and other memorabilia during my genealogical research. Much of it comes from these distant cousins whom I visit whenever I’m in a different part of the country. I carry my genealogy along and look them up in the local phone book whenever I’m in that area on business.My family tree is dotted with hundreds of former soldiers—ancestors who served in every war in which America was ever engaged. But the majority of them served in the Civil War—some Union, some Confederate. From privates to generals, from sea captains to horse raiders, from those killed in action to those who stood at Appomattox for the surrender. Of the dozens of stories in existence, none is more poignant than this one gleaned from a small town newspaper:Letter home from Lieutenant Fredrick Dearborn Wight whose Division, the First Division of the Fifth Army Corps, being first in line when the enemy was headed off at Appomattox was given the distinction of receiving the enemy’s arms.
“I had the pleasure that day of being in line with my company and witnessing the tattered remnant of Lee’s veterans stack their arms and deposit their worn and ragged, but cherished banners. The ranks of Lee’s army were so decimated that their division and brigade colors were nearer together than our regimental flags. One color bearer who stood directly before me, hugged closely, with his one remaining arm, his bullet-scarred staff, u pon which still remained a piece of a flag. I can see that man now with his old, patched, ragged butternut suit, his lank, but erect body, his long sandy hair, his pinched, famished face, struggling to restrain his tears. But restrain them he could not; and they were not unmanly tears–they did him honor.”
More proof—small town news can be a genealogist’s greatest resource for digging up not only ancestral facts, but wonderfully rich stories of our ancestors’ lives and personalities.
William Thomas Tucker is an amateur genealogist who has been researching his family tree for over 50 years. So far he has identified 65,000 ancestors and continues to collect their life stories.
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