In this day and age, newspapers rarely print fiction. Of course, there is the occasional magical story written by a third grade class that appears every once a week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the paper, but for the most part, fictional stories of real substance are not published in newspapers anymore. This was not the case in the 1800's. Appearing in The Valley Star each week was...
Six years after its foundation in 1881, The New York Times reported on the success of the Tuskegee Institution live from Tuskegee, Alabama. The Tuskegee Institution invited the black community to witness what work the school has turned out, how that work is accomplished, and what is the character of the general population in which the raw material comes. Gathered in the hall were, perhaps...
Mr. Mathews opened the letter. It was from his son who wrote of the upcoming exams he had in school. Included among those exams were Geometry, Rhetoric, Vergil and Latin Exercises, French Reading and Exercise, Latin Syntax, Algebra, and History. Among these exams, there was no break except for Sunday, a day for Church and rest. Mr. Mathews felt proud that his son was getting such a good education,...
Miss Lizzie D. Hutter was everything a southern, Virginia belle should be. She was accomplished, beautiful, from a good family, and very popular in the highest of social circles. She was known as a poetically perfect and symmetrically beautiful girl. She was the eldest daughter of the superintendent of the Houston mines, and both her mother's and father's side were distinguished families...
"Our crops are poor on account of too much wet in the summer which prevented us from working with them," John McClure, a resident of Albemarle County, wrote to his aunt and uncle. He went on to explain that "with what little (crops) we have to sell won't bring enough to pay for the expense of raising it." Other such maladies that McClure noted were that the livestock was not selling for a...
Observing the history of Winter Park, the Seminole Hotel which was built in 1886 is one location that is significant in many ways to the American Life, especially for African Americans. The Seminole Hotel was a grand resort in Lake Osceola and it was a vacation destination which attracted many wealthy northerners who were escaping the unpleasant weather from their home towns. While it is evident...
The Statue of Liberty is an icon of today, just as it was for immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th Century. The inauguration of the Statue of LIberty took place on Thursday, October 23, 1886. The day started with a military, naval and civil parade in New York City. After the parade, a signal was given for steamers in the bay to move in a particular and pre-calculated order towards the...
In 1887, a long-standing feud between the Tolliver family and the Martin family came to a bloody end in Rowan County, Kentucky. The feud began after the 1884 election when Cook Humphrey defeated Sam Goodson for the position of sheriff. John Day and Floyd Tolliver were accused of beating John Martin with a club after words were exchanged over the election of Humphrey. This incident was the beginning...
On a late April weekend, Chincoteague residents gathered to celebrate the one year anniversary of their local option legislation, which barred their community from devastating alcohol consumption. Crowded in the town's Temperance Hall, because of rain outside, Friday night witnessed the much anticipated literary and musical entertainment. Despite the weather, spirits remained high and prominent...
In a letter dated April 9, 1887 Isabella Maud Rittenhouse described a confrontation with her pastor. Rittenhouse, a teetotaler and member of the Temperance Movement, had demanded to know whether communion wine contained alcohol, to which her pastor dismissively replied that “it amused him to hear these WCTU people talking about unfermented wine; that there was no such thing in Christ’s time”.