Justa Guy

Mostly photos from around VT and elsewhere

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A Century Ago, Cincinnatians Led A Movement to Abolish All Taxes, Except On Property

It is possible that Ohio voters may be asked this year to vote on eliminating property taxes. Ironically, a little more than a century ago, there was a nationwide movement to do the exact opposite – remove all taxes except for property taxes. The national headquarters for this Single Tax League were right here in Cincinnati.

The Single Tax League was an outgrowth of the writings of Henry George, an American political economist, social philosopher and journalist. George’s best-selling book, “Progress and Poverty” (1879), established the economic philosophy known as Georgism, based on the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land should belong equally to all members of society.

Georgism attracted some rather wealthy adherents, notably Joseph Fels of Philadelphia, who made his fortune selling Fels-Naptha Soap. Fels created a fund to finance Georgist publications and projects. The national headquarters for the Fels Fund was in Cincinnati, at the Main Street office of one Daniel Kiefer. Kiefer served as chairman of the Fels Fund Commission, the group that controlled expenditures from the fund.

Kiefer was born in Cincinnati in 1856. He joined the Fechheimer clothing company as a young man and eventually worked his way into a partnership in the firm. He resigned while still in his 40s to pursue a career in political advocacy, specifically on behalf of the Single Tax League. According to a platform promulgated by the League in 1890, this was the essence of their proposal regarding taxation:

“We hold that each man is entitled to all that his labor produces. Therefore no tax should be levied on the products of labor. To carry out these principles we are in favor of raising all public revenues for national, state, county and municipal purposes by a single tax upon land values, irrespective of Improvements, and of the abolition of all forms of direct and Indirect taxation. Since in all our states we now levy some tax on the value of land, the single tax can be instituted by the simple and easy way of abolishing, one after another all other taxes now levied, and commensurately increasing the tax on land values, until we draw upon that one source for all expenses of government, the revenue being divided between local governments, state governments and the general government, as the revenue from direct taxes is now divided between the local and state governments; or, a direct assessment being made by the general government upon the states and paid by them from revenues collected in this manner.”

Kiefer was just one of several Cincinnatians at the center of the Single Tax League. Also prominent was Herbert Seely Bigelow, socialist pastor of the non-denominational People’s Church (formerly the Vine Street Congregational Church and later the Empress Theater). According to historian Daniel Beaver, writing in the Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio [January 1960], Bigelow was converted to the Single Tax cause by reading Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty”:

“Though the work was of little value as an economic tract, the paradox implied in its title and the tone of moral outrage that permeated the book made the ‘Single Tax’ an attractive answer to the problem posed by the accumulation of money in the hands of the few. In 1897, two years after he had become associated with the Vine Street Congregational Church, Bigelow began to investigate the possibilities of this intriguing panacea. A meeting with Tom Johnson, Mayor of Cleveland and one of the leading advocates of the ‘Single Tax’ in America, confirmed the pastor's belief in the measure.”

Bigelow’s enthusiasm led to full-time employment by the Single Tax League as a traveling promoter. Although he is among the most colorful characters in all of Cincinnati’s long history, even Bigelow had to take a back seat to Doctor Benjamin Franklin Longstreet, who had done jail time following arrests at Single Tax demonstrations.

Longstreet’s pulpit was the intersection of Race and Eighth streets, at that time the location of the statue honoring U.S. President James A. Garfield, now located a block east on Vine Street. Under the glow of a single electric streetlamp, Longstreet cobbled together a couple of carpet-covered wood planks balanced on a pair of sawhorses to assemble his nightly stage. On a nearby rock, he laid out some cotton banners painted with explanatory diagrams. As the sun went down, Longstreet fired up, expounding in a cultured oratorical style that attracted crowds as curious about his show as they were about the theory. According to the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune [19 June 1899]:

“Dr. Longstreet is a very effective talker, adopting the colloquial style in preference to the declamatory. His illustrations are of a homely nature, but none the less to the point, and each climax falls with the weight of a trip hammer.”

It was a great loss to the Single Taxers when Longstreet died from a bad cold in 1901.

Mainstream Cincinnati media rejected the Single Tax idea. The Cincinnati Times-Star, essentially the newsletter of the Boss Cox political machine editorialized [6 September 1902] against the Georgist concept, citing Bigelow as well as Cleveland mayor Tom Loftin Johnson:

“Johnson and Bigelow have sought to advance the interest of the single tax under a mask; but in this they have failed. They have sought to wear the lamb’s skin, but will be exposed. They have sought to pose as the friend of the property owner, whereas they are his worst enemy, seeking to make him pay all the taxes. Before the end of the campaign just opening every property owner in the State will know their real purposes and will understand the fanaticism which has led at least one of them to abuse his cloth by abasing himself to so low a degree as to become a hypocrite.”

By linking Johnson and Bigelow, the Times-Star put its finger on the major reason the Single Tax idea did not evolve beyond niche appeal – it attracted a lot of truly eccentric and controversial adherents. Mayor Johnson, for example, was totally opposed to vaccination, leading one newspaper to claim he imagined smallpox as a blessing to be bestowed upon humanity.

Bigelow, although an avowed and quite vocal Socialist, was forced by the political realities of Cincinnati to disguise himself as a Democrat throughout his electoral career. Although he supported the United States entering World War I against Germany, Bigelow’s opposition to forced military conscription through the draft led to him being kidnapped and horsewhipped. It was at this time that thirteen Cincinnati Socialists demonstrating against the draft were arrested and charged with treason in a case that lingered in the courts for seven years until the charges were finally dropped by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Kiefer was not only opposed to the draft, but staunchly pacifist and opposed to American involvement in the war in any capacity. As a consequence, the Single Tax League essentially fired him in 1917 from all positions of responsibility in the organization. The League’s position held that the Single Tax would inevitably lead to the eradication of war and that quibbling about the draft would only delay its implementation. With Kiefer’s dismissal, Longstreet’s death and Bigelow’s shift to other causes, the Single Tax League disappeared from Cincinnati.

There are still Georgist and Single Tax organizations operating throughout the world, but none of them are headquartered in Cincinnati these days.

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The Rise & Fall of Viv Fagin, Boss Cox’s Tempestuous Mount Adams Minion

George Barnsdale “Boss” Cox ruled this city like a private business for more than 35 years from the 1880s into the 1920s. How did he get away with decades of corruption and graft? The short answer is minions.

All crime lords require legions of minor functionaries to perform the dirty work while the ringleader impersonates a respectable citizen. Cox had his chief lieutenants, of course, notably August “Garry” Herrmann, Rudolph “Rud” Hynicka, and Mike Mullen, but hundreds of lesser factotums kept the Cox Machine humming. Among this disreputable mob was Vivian J. Fagin. We ought to resuscitate some antique words to describe Viv Fagin: He was a bounder and a cad.

In 1888, while being interviewed for a minor political plum job – assistant sergeant at arms for a City Council subcommittee – Fagin insulted the Councilman heading the hiring process. Someone on the committee calmly suggested Fagin show some respect. Fagin took offense, physically attacked the hiring committee and drew a pistol before he was overpowered and ejected from the room. Not surprisingly, he didn’t get the gig.

When a proposal to extend Court Street up into Mount Adams came before the Hamilton County Commissioners, Viv Fagin was very interested. He lived in Mount Adams, the heart of Cincinnati’s Fourth Ward. In that ward, Fagin was a force to be reckoned with, and he led a delegation of Mount Adams residents into the Courthouse to meet with the road planners. There, Fagin met John J. Rooney, City Council representative from the Fourth Ward. According to the Commercial-Gazette [25 February 1894]:

“Mr. Rooney and Mr. Fagin soon were using some very forcible language and did not desist until called to order by the Chairman. The fact that not one of the delegation was opposed to the proposed improvement struck everybody as humorous.”

In 1897, Fagin, by then luxuriating in one of his featherbed positions as deputy county treasurer, wandered into the Mecca on Walnut Street with a gang of his cronies. The Mecca was among the classiest saloons in Cincinnati and kept a table reserved for Boss Cox, whose office was located upstairs. After several rounds, Fagin and his friends prepared to depart. Bartender Billy Tahse reminded them it was time to settle the tab. Fagin replied with a “vile epithet” and Tahse agreed he could pay later. According to the Enquirer [9 July 1897]:

“This did not conciliate Fagin, who vigorously denied that he owned anyone in the place a cent. In fact the very idea of his owing for a few drinks seemed to terribly exasperate Mr. Cox’s henchman. The more he thought of it the hotter he got. Finally, with an oath, he picked up a silver ice water pitcher that was on the counter and hurled it at Tahse’s head.”

The projectile missed, so Fagin grabbed a crystal serving dish and chased Tahse around the barroom. Someone outside heard the disturbance and called the police who were very reluctant to arrest one of Boss Cox’s men. Instead, the officers escorted Fagin outside, exchanged a few words and let him walk.

Oddly, Viv Fagin was not entirely devoted to Boss Cox. His career reminds us that all politics is messy. This was especially true in the Cincinnati of the Boss Cox era. Frank Y. Grayson, chronicler of the Cox era, described Fagin as the “stormy petrel” of Hamilton County politics. He changed allegiances as the political winds shifted.

Fagin, son of a city policeman, completed high school and studied at one of Cincinnati’s several business schools. He began his professional life as a bookkeeper and returned to accountancy on those occasions when patronage jobs dried up. His business acumen served him well in the corrupt Cox morass – he could see where the money flowed.

Always chasing some political advantage, Fagin’s political life began as an anti-Cox Republican in the faction led by beer scion George Moerlein. With Moerlein’s help, Fagin represented the Fourth Ward on City Council for two terms. In return for the promise of a cushy appointment, Fagin abandoned Moerlein and threw his support to Cox. When a reform movement temporarily hobbled the Cox machine, Fagin signed on as a Democrat but reverted to the Republican fold after four years of frustration. In his 1912 apology letter, Fagin said he thought he had landed on a Democratic rose, but discovered it was only “fertilizer.”

Throughout these rotating allegiances, Fagin mostly landed on his feet, awarded various sinecures as assistant city treasurer, assistant county recorder, assistant county treasurer, and United States Marshal. Fagin’s nasty temper remained intact. According to Henry Wright’s 1905 book, “Bossism In Cincinnati”:

“United States Marshal Vivian Fagin has the reputation of a bully and a thug in his own neighborhood on Mt. Adams. One day he struck in the face one of our leading citizens, for no other offense than that he occupied a place upon the inclined plane truck that Fagin wanted. A warrant was asked for at the Police Court for his arrest, but the clerk assumed to prejudge the case and refused the warrant. Nothing was done.”

According to Grayson, writing in the Cincinnati Times-Star [5 June 1931], Fagin’s arrogance and ambition finally caused his downfall:

“Fagin dreamed of a new political empire and of a new local Republican party with himself as leader, but the dream faded.”

It was a bad move. Fagin’s scheme cratered when his closest allies revolted. For several years, Fagin ruled the Fourth Ward from his home on Celestial Street. As ward captain, it was Fagin’s job to produce the votes, which he did magnificently, assisted by precinct executives who knew they would be rewarded for the turnout with a beer and a pickled pig foot at Harry Hopkin’s saloon on St. Gregory Street. They called themselves the Pig Knuckle Gang.

In 1906, Fagin launched his coup, publicly attacking Cox’s golden boy, Mike Mullen. Suspecting that Fagin was getting a tad too big for his britches, Fagin’s own Pig Knuckle Gang turned against him. In a secret meeting with Mullen at William Degischer’s saloon on Lock Street, the Pig Knuckle Gang drew up a list of charges, real and imagined, against their former leader. Someone slipped a copy to Fagin, who had the whole lot arrested when he sued for libel. The trial captivated Cincinnati and resulted in two of the Pig Knuckle agitators, Theodore Zumstein and Harry Peet, referred to the grand jury on criminal charges. The damage, however, was done.

Testimony during the trial revealed that “Rud” Hynicka had asked Fagin to help topple Boss Cox. Fagin refused, but the fact that Hynicka even asked him made Fagin suspect among the Cox faithful. Hynicka eventually grabbed the controls of the Cox machine and Fagin’s refusal to back the new boss marked him as an outcast. For airing the Republican party’s dirty laundry in court, Fagin was removed as U.S. Marshal.

Fagin declared bankruptcy and retired from politics, operating a detective agency for a while, but ended his days as an accountant specializing in tax assessment disputes. His contacts among Republican officeholders were still useful.

When Fagin died in 1931, his “stormy petrel” days were almost forgotten. Al Segal, who built a career at the Cincinnati Post fighting the Cox machine and all its minions through his crusading “Cincinnatus” column, had nothing but compliments for the departed henchman.

“Cincinnatus salutes the passing Fagin. He was a likeable person.”

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Despite The Elephant Stampede, Cincinnati’s First Mardi Gras Was Deemed A Success

When Mayor George W. C. Johnston first proposed a Mardi Gras celebration for 1876, skepticism poured in from other cities who knew Cincinnati’s rather stuffy reputation. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat [26 February 1876] was typical:

“The people of Cincinnati are a good, honest race – a worthy people, every one of them; and we can not think of them, clad in pink tights, and paraded through the streets in crimson chariots in a snow storm, as a charming or amusing spectacle. We know that they would make the sacrifice if patriotism demanded, but that is not true patriotism that requires a man to catch a cold in his head. Even if the day were fine, there would be something incongruous in the spectacle of a Cincinnati man putting on a paste-board suit of armor or otherwise adorning himself for a procession.”

Ah, but the nay-sayers had not reconned with the festive obsessions of Cincinnati’s mayor. George Johnston’s reputation was built upon his lavish holidays and parades and this strategy had got him re-elected the year before. The Cincinnati Gazette [1 March 1876] had his number:

“Mayor Johnson delights in the pleasure of his subjects – we mean his constituents. He is never so happy as when they are glad.”

So, when Mayor Johnston said he wanted a Mardi Gras Carnival, the Queen City jumped to attention. The problem was, the mayor’s brainstorm rolled in rather late. He first broached the Mardi Gras concept in early January. Fat Tuesday that year was February 29, so plans evolved over seven weeks of chaos. A committee was formed, duties assigned and reality confronted. The Cincinnati Commercial [1 March 1876] described just one of the organizational hiccups:

“The getting of costumes from New York was also an embarrassment. The inexperienced committee, unaided with instructions as to what was wanted, the procession not being organized, didn’t know what to order. A costumer came here with a large lot of miscellaneous stuff, much of it not of the best quality or condition.”

Instead of arriving a week in advance, the costumer and costumes didn’t arrive until the night prior to the festival. The shipment got picked over like a pig’s carcass at a buzzard orgy. Meanwhile, two separate committees had mapped out two detailed but totally disconnected routes for the grand parade, with neighborhoods lobbying City Hall to be visited by Rex and his entourage.

Consequently, it was a bit of a miracle when, just a few minutes after 3:00 p.m., the Margi Gras king, Rex himself, descended the grand staircase from the Burnet House to his royal carriage on Third Street. We use here the term “carriage” in the loosest possible terms. The Cincinnati Commercial described the “fantastic car”:

“A hog’s head, painted to resemble it roasted, and representing Porkopolis, eight feet high and thirteen feet long, rested in a capacious gravy dish, garnished with pieces of lemon, carrots and other fixings. In a head of lettuce between the hog’s ears, was arranged the king’s seat, with seats for his pages on either ear. His jester, during the parade, sat astride the snout, and here cut up his monkey shines.”

Unfortunately, given the abbreviated schedule for planning and constructing the parade vehicles, no one had given much thought to precisely how King Rex, encumbered by ceremonial robes and tons of costume jewelry, was supposed to mount up to his porcine throne.

“The mounting of the King was attended with some difficulty, and was not the most dignified and courtly undertaking. With considerable effort he was boosted into the gravy dish, where, with his long train dangling down, he for a few moments stood irresolute before he essayed to clamber up the sleek jaws and snout of the hog to his perch between the ears.”

Anon, four nearby clowns grabbed Rex by his hands and feet and tossed him onto the throne, an effort requiring some muscle because Rex was embodied by William I. Torrence, a local capitalist whose substantial girth was as ponderous as his bank account.

Drawing the royal “carriage” were four of Old John Robinson’s elephants, preceded by a small herd of the Robinson Circus camels. With Rex finally seated, the procession marched east toward Main Street, up to Fifth and westward through Government Square where the “city gates,” proudly assembled from scrap wood and muslin, awaited His Highness, there to receive the keys to the city from Mayor Johnstone. Alas, the mayor was detained by real business and Rex, nothing loath, marched on toward the Exposition Buildings, soon to be demolished to make way for the construction of Music Hall.

While crossing the canal, the King’s carriage bumped into the trailing elephant, who bumped the elephant ahead and sent all the pachyderms charging toward their winter quarters in the basement of the Exposition Buildings, tossing King Rex nearly out of his throne while his pages landed in the streetside shrubbery.

At length, order was restored and many of the spectators adjourned to the interior of the Exposition Hall where a masked ball occupied the hours until just shortly before dawn. Like all good Cincinnati events of the day, it was briefly interrupted when a couple of attendees commenced shooting at one another. No one was injured and the dancing resumed.

Throughout the festivities, a major, nearly disastrous flaw in the planning was uncovered. Mayor Johnston ordered the entire police force to march in the parade, meaning that some officers lined up after patrolling all day and some lined up hours before they were scheduled to patrol all night, so no one patrolled the streets for most of the day. Pickpockets ran rampant, fights erupted without interruption, a few stores were looted and drunks wandered in undisturbed flocks.

There was one Mardi Gras related death. Mary A. Thornton, a 72-year-old dowager from the West End, took an elevator to the upstairs of a pharmacy warehouse on Main Street. On her way down, she fell out of the elevator, plummeting to the floor ten feet below. She fractured her skull and died.

Despite all the missteps, the event was considered a triumph for the Queen City. The Cincinnati Commercial [1 March 1876] summed it up:

“Altogether it was a grand success, and furnishes additional testimony to the already fixed fact, that when Cincinnati starts in a big thing, she goes the ‘whole hog,’ and then smothers in glory.”

Still, the experiment was not repeated the next year. In 1877 there was no parade and only a few smaller balls. Perhaps because of the absence of citywide celebrations, Mayor Johnston was defeated at the polls.

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John King Donated Thousands Of Books To Cincinnati’s Library But Took A Secret To His Grave

By 1879, after less than a quarter-century of operation, Cincinnati boasted a substantial Public Library housing more than 100,000 books and 10,000 pamphlets. Still, it made national news when a donor gifted some 2,500 more books to the library. This generous patron was not a wealthy bibliophile, nor a scholar bequeathing his professional archive. No, the benefactor was a crippled newsboy named John King.

It must be explained that “newsboy” was the accepted term for any person who sold newspapers and magazines on the streets, regardless of age. John King, at the time of his substantial gift was, in fact, 39 years old.

According to the newspapers, King was born in Cass County, Michigan, just over the border from South Bend, Indiana. His family were farmers, and John intended to till the land as his ancestors had done, but for a tragic accident. The Cincinnati Commercial [3 June 1879] provided a detailed biography:

“At the age of seventeen a kick on the left thigh crippled him for life. For three years he hobbled around on crutches, when he was attacked by rheumatism, and his limbs so drawn up that he could get around only by crawling on his hands and knees. One day, while crawling about the room, he struck his right knee against a sharp object, which, with the help of a blundering surgical operation, stiffened the limb for life. Both legs were now useless, and for five years the poor boy was bedridden.”

While confined to bed, King developed a passion for reading. He read anything he could get his hands on, which, in rural Cass County was not much more than agricultural bulletins, the Bible and a variety of farmers’ almanacs. Useless on the farm, King sought work in Detroit and then moved to Cincinnati, where he found a job in the Spencer Brothers tobacco factory.

Within months, King faced a new challenge. He contracted smallpox and was admitted to the city’s pesthouse, an institution created to isolate contagious and incurable patients. Miraculously, he survived and was discharged after six months, finding work as a newsboy.

The newsboys of Cincinnati had organized a union for mutual protection and King was elected secretary of the organization, publishing extensive minutes of union meetings, usually containing some of his own editorial comments, in the local newspapers. For example, the minutes of an 1876 meeting, as published in the Cincinnati Star [9 September 1876], include this observation:

“As our Union is not incorporated, and from present appearances never will be, it has probably accomplished all that, in the nature of things, it can; and all that can be done in the future is to keep what has already been gained.”

As an officer of the newsboys union, King had occasion to visit many of the news vendors and booksellers throughout Cincinnati and he often discovered good bargains. Eventually, he accumulated a substantial library, packed up in boxes in a small rented room at the corner of Third Street and Sycamore.

While carefully building his library, King suffered two more calamities. An acquaintance, a blind man, induced King to invest in a broom-making machine, but the cost of materials and fierce competition left him $600 in debt. Then, the bank holding all of his savings collapsed in the “Long Depression” of the 1870s rendering him almost penniless.

A major fire nearby led King to worry about his precious books and he sent a letter to Thomas Vickers, director of the Cincinnati Library, offering 1,000 books to that institution so they would be kept safe. When library officials arrived at King’s modest little room, they found he had underestimated his collection, and that more than 2,500 volumes would be loaded onto the shelves of the then five-year-old Public Library building on Vine Street, south of Seventh. According to the Cincinnati Star [3 June 1879], King’s gift was eclectic:

“The collection consists of history and philosophy, some of the best specimens of ancient and modern literature, biography, legal and medical works, religious works, public documents, &c.”

The donation was reported by national media, notably Harper’s Weekly, which ran a substantial account on 9 August 1879. On reading about King’s generosity and poverty, people around the country sent money and checks to King, who turned these gifts over to the Cincinnati Children’s home.

A year after his famous gift, King married Nancy Rodgers, a very accomplished 23-year-old. Although Nancy was educated at Miami University, the death of her parents robbed her of financial security, and she was scraping by as a seamstress. Still, she loved to read and frequented the Public Library. One day, she was unable to find the second volume of a book she was reading. A librarian noted that the book was part of King’s donation and he might have retained the second volume. King had, and he gladly loaned it to Miss Rodgers. Within months they were married. King left the streets behind and opened a small newsstand and candy shop on Twelfth Street. Sadly, Nancy died from tuberculosis in 1883.

King closed up his shop and took a position as an assistant in the reading room of the Library. His health was never robust and, when he died in 1886, the coroner ruled that heart failure was the cause.

In death, King revealed that almost everything publicly reported about his life had been, if not an outright lie, substantially removed from reality. The revelation emerged with the delivery of his tombstone, paid for by the U.S. government to reward King for his military service. It turns out that King had served three years as a Union soldier during the Civil War, being regularly promoted and surviving several major battles when he was reportedly lying on his back in Michigan.

According to official U.S. military records, King enlisted with the 64th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment at Mansfield, Ohio, on 21 October 1861. He was promoted to corporal even before the regiment left training camp on 27 November 1861. He was promoted to sergeant a year later, in September 1862, and to First Sergeant shortly before he was mustered out at the end of his enlistment in 1864. Nothing in his military record mentions anything about disability or being wounded. His incapacitating injuries could only have occurred between the time of his discharge in 1864 and his arrival as a disabled person in Cincinnati in 1868, meaning he was somewhere between 24 and 28 when he was crippled, not a teenager.

Where did the story about teenage injuries come from? Why did the newspapers ignore King’s military service? Did they believe childhood injuries made a better story? Or did King intentionally not reveal that he had a successful career with a decorated Ohio regiment? Why did he cover up his Civil War years? Did he never apply for a pension?

Even the Cincinnati Post’s Leo Hirtl, who reminded readers about King’s generosity in a 1954 column, made no mention of King’s military service. Hirtl did check with the Public Library, however, to confirm that many of King’s donated books were still in circulation almost 80 years after they were unpacked at “Old Main.”

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Photographer Patrick McCormack

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A Pioneering Photographer Captured 1866 Cincinnati In Three Stunning Panoramas

Over the course of the spring and summer of 1866, a Cincinnati photographer named John Wildman Winder climbed to some of the highest elevations around the Queen City and created three breathtaking panoramas, preserving a record of our city as it existed in a long-lost age.

Unlike the far more famous daguerreotype panorama by Charles Fontayne and William S. Porter, documented to have been photographed on September 24, 1848, we do not know precisely when Winder exposed his images. We know the earliest possible date is March 25, because there is a huge gap in the skyline where Pike’s Opera House once stood. That venerable edifice burned on March 24. We may assume he finished the series around August 15, 1866, because the Library of Congress assigned a copyright to one of the panoramas on that date. In each of the panoramas, the Roebling Suspension Bridge, which did not open until later that year, appears near completion, but lacks its essential deck and roadbed.

Since we don’t know the exact order in which Winder captured his images, labelling them in order is entirely arbitrary. Let us begin with the images collected from atop the Suspension Bridge itself. The four albumen prints that constitute this panorama are preserved at the Library of Congress.

To create this spectacular series, Winder positioned his camera on the summit of the south tower of the bridge. From that vantage point, he made four images encompassing the entire riverfront from the Gas Works at the foot of Rose Street in the West End to the Water Works at the base of Mount Adams. Far in the distance to the east, we can see the hillsides of Mount Lookout and Columbia-Tusculum, with Bellevue, Kentucky peeking in from the other shore. To the west, we see Ludlow, Kentucky, with Price Hill in the background.

Looking due north, to the west of the bridge, we see the foot of Vine Street and to the east of the bridge we get a good view up Walnut Street. There we identify the College Building, home to the Mercantile Library. On the Vine Street side, what appears to be another church steeple is, in fact, the city’s fire tower. Installed on the roof of the old Ohio Mechanics Institute on the corner of Sixth and Vine, Cincinnati’s relatively new professional fire department kept watch from this tower and assigned steam fire engines to respond by lighting color-coded lamps on the pole above the tower, while ringing the fire bell. To the west of Vine Street, we see some familiar spires that are still around today – St. Peter In Chains Cathedral and the Isaac M. Wise Temple. Their present-day neighbor, today’s City Hall, had not yet been constructed. Each of the four albumen prints is approximately 10 inches tall and 15 inches wide. Stitched together, the whole panorama is about five feet in width.

Almost simultaneously with the bridge panorama, Winder climbed up on the roof of Mozart Hall, located on Vine Street just south of Sixth and created another panorama by swiveling his camera a full 360 degrees to take in the totality of Cincinnati at that time. Writing in the Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin [October 1967], Walter S. Glaser summarized the comprehensive nature of the 10 images that comprise this encompassing view:

“The panorama shows the entire Cincinnati basin and surrounding hilltops; eastward across Deer Creek to Mt. Adams, southward across the Ohio River to Covington and Newport, westward across the Mill Creek Valley to Price Hill, and northward across the Miami and Erie Canal to the Vine Street Hill and Mt. Auburn. Indeed, the field of the panorama includes over half of the entire corporate area of the city and most of the places where Cincinnatians lived, worked, and carried out their daily affairs a century ago.”

According to Glaser, The Cincinnati Historical Society displayed a 30-foot-long enlargement of all 10 panels of this panorama at the opening of Cincinnati's Convention and Exposition Center in 1967.

Among the ten constituent images, we can see Mount Adams, the African-American enclave known as Bucktown and the East End with Kentucky behind. Looking southward down Vine Street, we see the nearly completed Suspension Bridge. Turning clockwise westward, we see the densely packed West End, the spires of St. Peter’s and the Wise Temple (which was not formally dedicated until November of that year) and the imposing Sixth Street Market.

Winder’s third panorama of 1866, also preserved at the Library of Congress, involves seven albumen prints, each 9 inches high, of varying widths totaling 96.5 inches, or just over eight feet in width. The images were copyrighted on 23 July 1866 and were already on display at Winder’s gallery that week. The Cincinnati Gazette [21 July 1866] describes the series:

“We saw, yesterday, at the photographic gallery of J.W. Winder & Co., a photographic view of Cincinnati and Covington taken from a point on the Kentucky side, opposite the Gas Works. It was taken in sections, but so well joined as to form one complete picture eight feet long. The sweep of the river is well shown, the suspension bridge appearing as an airy cobweb, while many of the prominent buildings in the city can be distinctly seen.”

Photographer Winder was not a Cincinnati native. He was born in 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio, to a somewhat prominent Quaker family. He relocated to Cincinnati by 1855, setting up shop as a daguerreotypist at various studios around the city. Soon after arrival, Winder married Martha Adams and they had two sons, Lewis and Albert.

Photography was a relatively new technology at that time, having been invented just 15 years earlier in France. Winder advertised his studios with appropriately fanciful names such as “Winder’s Sky Light Gallery” and later the “National Art Palace.”

In addition to his trio of remarkable 1866 panoramas, Winder is the unsung documenter of the early days of Spring Grove Cemetery. Many of the iconic views of the cemetery prior to 1873 are his work, especially the stereoscopic cards prized by collectors. Early in his Cincinnati career, Winder had a contract with the city to photograph criminals for the police department.

Although he was an exceptional artist, Winder seemed to lack business savvy. He had to relocate his studio frequently, apparently for nonpayment of rent. He was also a tad absent-minded. On one occasion, the Enquirer reported that someone stole Winder’s camera while he was photographing Spring Grove Cemetery but, three days later, Winder placed a classified advertisement in the same paper, asking for help finding the camera he had lost. During the Civil War, he paid a substitute to enlist in his place when he was drafted, perhaps a reflection of his Quaker upbringing. Winder left Cincinnati and spent the rest of his life in the South, where he took up beekeeping and honey production. He died in New Orleans in 1900 at the age of 71.

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Cincinnati’s Fascination With Charm Strings Lasted Decades And Produced Heirlooms

What’s on your gift list this year? If you were a young lady (or, rarely, a young man) in Cincinnati from the 1860s to the mid-1880s, your wish list might have included rare or fancy buttons because you would have been busy assembling a “charm string.” The ancestor of today’s charm bracelets, the venerable charm string is all but forgotten these days but was once ubiquitous and could – even today – be quite valuable. The Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune [25 August 1907] remembered charm strings as an activity from “thirty and forty years ago”:

“Some of the older folk remember the charm string. They remember how they used to be begging buttons of all their friends and how they importuned the shopkeepers to give them the odd buttons, for there could be no two buttons alike on the charm-string, which was simply a long string of buttons of great variety. There was a good deal of rivalry as to who should have the greatest number of buttons on his or her string, but just why it was called a charm-string is beyond my knowledge.”

If the Commercial-Tribune’s writer had visited the library and reviewed some of the more obscure ethnographic literature of the time, they might have discovered a clue. It seems that anthropologists studying the indigenous peoples of North America observed among several tribes the custom of stringing objects imbued with magical potency onto a leather thong. The ethnologists called these talismans “charm strings.”

The magic a button collector sought was far more domestic. As legend had it, if a young woman collected 999 unique buttons on her charm string, the 1,000th would be added by her fiancée. According to Bernardine Rathmell, quoted in the Cincinnati Times-Star [28 November 1940], that legend had been passed along for decades:

“Old ladies have told me how belles of the 1880s used to string 999 buttons on a ‘charm string,’ then wait for the right man to supply the thousandth.”

(Curiously, there was an alternate legend that, if a woman achieved a charm string of 1,000 buttons, she would be condemned to spinsterhood for all her days.)

Throughout their heyday, charm strings were the focus of parties in which young ladies exchanged buttons and regaled their friends and relatives with stories associated with each one. The informal rules dictated it was prohibited to purchase buttons. Each exclusive button could be acquired only through exchange with other collectors or as a gift from suitors, friends or family. The gift of a button was considered lucky and the activity of stringing of the buttons amplified the good luck. Button collectors did not squirrel their charm strings away but displayed them prominently in the family parlor both to brag about their hoard and to advertise that contributions were welcome. Exceptional charm strings could earn ribbons at the Ohio and Indiana state fairs throughout the 1860s and 1870s.

It wasn’t long before “charm string” became a metaphor for any list of accomplishments. When a young woman in Covington announced her engagement, the Cincinnati Enquirer [18 October 1891] suggested that her personal charm string involved something other than buttons:

“The wedding of Miss Retta Boyd, of Covington, and Mr. Russell C. Johnson takes place November 11. Miss Boyd is a great favorite in society, not only in Covington, but in Cincinnati and suburbs. Any number of hearts have been wrecked with her beauty and hang captured on her charm string.”

And that metaphor wasted no time wandering onto the sports pages. By the 1890s, the assembly of button-laden charm strings had become passé, but reference to that erstwhile pastime served to brighten many a baseball lede, as demonstrated by the Cincinnati Times-Star [22 September 1894]:

“Thus far Cincinnati has the Louisville, Washington and St. Louis series on its charm string, while Chicago has broken even.”

While the fashion for charm strings waned, interest in unusual specimens persisted. In 1888, Kohl & Middleton’s Dime Museum, a sort of long-running freak show at the corner of Sixth and Vine streets, featured Bully the Wizard (real name possibly Calvin Morris) who had, over many years, assembled a charm string measuring 208 feet long, incorporating some 20,000 buttons.

It appears, as charm strings faded in popularity, the initial button focus diversified to include a variety of objects, with almost anything fair game so long as it offered a hole through which to string it. A writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer [9 November 1949] found one such miscellaneous string in one of the local antique shops:

“I was wandering about in an antique shop a few years ago and noticed a long loop of buttons, beads, coins and other trinkets hanging from a spinning wheel. The fine old lady running the shop willingly answered my questions as to what it was. She told me that years ago many people collected small articles, strung them and hung them up as charm strings.”

By that time, authentic charm strings were rare and mysterious because so many had been cut apart and redistributed, or lost, or eaten by a cow. Really. The Enquirer [26 July 1887] reported the good luck of Peter Funk, a local butcher, who found a gold coin worth $2.50 in the stomach of a cow he had just butchered. Because the coin had a hole punched in it, and because that cow’s stomach also yielded a small pile of miscellaneous relics, Mr. Funk believed he must have discovered the remains of a charm string that had slipped off into a slop bucket and slurped up by the cow.

It is no surprise the Enquirer writer found a surviving charm string in an antique shop. The classified advertisement pages frequently displayed pleas for old charm strings. In some cases, dealers sought entire assemblages, still hanging from their original strings. In other cases, the strings held buttons worth a lot of money to button collectors. Here’s a typical advertisement from the Enquirer [9 October 1953]:

“Have you an old button charm string? Why not turn it into Christmas cash? Excellent prices paid for the right kind.”

The Cincinnati chapter of the Early American Glass Club hosted Professor George E. Gould of Purdue University at one of its meetings. Dr. Gould was, by trade, an entomologist known for his dazzling photographs of insects, but he was also a dedicated buttoner who employed the same photographic techniques to illustrate his lectures on buttons. His talk, according to the Enquirer [16 April 1953] featured a variety of buttons:

“The ‘Charm String Buttons,’ so popular some 75 years ago, will be shown in color radiated, dewdrop and glory specimens.”

Remember the old game: “Button, button, who’s got the button?” Allegedly, that game emerged at charm string parties, back in the day.

[nasr-44]

In Gaza, even after the planes go silent, the echo of bombing still lingers in the sky — and the echo of loss remains in the heart. The war didn’t just destroy our homes; it stole parts of our souls. I am one of thousands who lived under the bombs, dreaming of peace like any other human being — to wake up without fear, to see my loved ones safe and alive. And even now, the memories of war follow us in every corner of the street, in every child’s eyes filled with questions and pain.

But my pain is different… because I lost my mother and my sister in a single moment, in a single house — between walls that once echoed with laughter and warmth. There is no pain like searching through rubble for a voice you used to hear every morning. There is no heartbreak like reaching for a hand that once held yours, only to find emptiness. Today, the war may seem to be ending, but its scars remain. The occupation still strikes from time to time, and we are still trying to gather the pieces of our lives — to rebuild the house that became a memory, to take one more step toward normal life, to continue the path we started. I want to return to my studies… to lift my mother’s memory from the ruins and tell her, “I made it, Mom, just like I promised.” I want to plant a flower where our house once stood — a symbol that life is stronger than war, that we, the people of Gaza, never give up no matter how many times we are hit. We are not asking for pity. We are asking for a chance — a chance to live, to rebuild, to open the books that were closed under the ashes. Help us come back… help us continue what our mothers began before they left. Help us plant hope again in this land that thirsts for life. 🇵🇸❤️

Naser’s Hope: A Teen Survivor Trying to Begin Again

My name is Naser AbuThaher. I’m 18 years old, and I live in Gaza.

To everyone reading this, to every heart that feels our pain, to every person who shared, donated, or prayed — thank you, from the depths of my soul. Your support is not just financial; it’s a message — a reminder that humanity still listens, that kindness still exists. Every word, every share, every dollar means the world to us. It tells us that somewhere out there, people still believe Gaza deserves to live. On behalf of my small family that remains, and in memory of my mother and sister who are gone — thank you for giving us a reason to keep going. ❤️ From Gaza, from the rubble — we still believe that goodness is stronger than war

[callen77]

It's my 12 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

[dispelzine]

Walls / Post Road, Wells, Maine.

[callen77]

It's my 12 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

[handeaux]

Tales From The Blackberry Patch: A Cincinnati Man’s Sojourn Among The Shakers

The Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, near Harrodsburg, Kentucky, is now a historic site and museum, but was a thriving community from 1805 to 1910, the third-largest Shaker settlement in the United States. Like many communal and utopian communities, Pleasant Hill faced abundant challenges. Among the most fraught was the sect’s commitment to pacifism during the Civil War. Sketchy applicants for admission who were not fully committed to the Shaker principles were another. According to the landmark’s website:

“After the Civil War, the community’s population remained fairly stable at more than 300, and the economy somewhat improved. However, with a vacuum of leadership, by 1886 the community was $14,000 in debt, and membership was composed of the very young and very old. New converts were often widowed women with small children or freeloading men.”

Among those freeloading men was a Cincinnatian named Joel Gibbs. He applied for membership at Pleasant Hill around 1869 and spent most of the next couple years supposedly living under the covenants of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, the formal name of the sect.

Founded in England in 1747 and introduced to the United States in 1780 the United Society believed that the end of the world was imminent and that Christianity had drifted apart from the original teachings of Jesus. They believed in communalism, confession of sin, separation from the world, and celibacy. Whatever he believed about common property, isolation and confession, Joel Gibbs was no fan of celibacy.

Born in 1805 in New Jersey, Gibbs arrived in Cincinnati as a young man and found work as a drayman. Today, he’d be a truck driver. Back then, he drove a team of sturdy horses pulling a good-sized wagon around town, making deliveries. He was married and had four children. Joel’s first wife died and he married a seamstress named Susanna Turner in 1849. They had a son together named James.

By the 1860s, that marriage was all but legally kaput. Susanna lived in a very nice house in Walnut Hills. Joel and the younger children were consigned to a house next door. In 1864, Susanna had Joel arrested because he was beating her and the children with his teamster’s whip. On another occasion, Susanna called a watchman into the house. He discovered Joel and son James in a heated argument with Susanna. James held a dirk in his hand. Although Susanna pleaded for assistance, the watchman left the family to sort things out for themselves. Neighbors described fights spilling out of the house into the streets and Joel, during one such incident, threatening his wife with a cudgel. According to the Cincinnati Commercial [11 January 1872]:

“The parties have been living in a condition for many years that was not agreeable. They had separated and got together again, but each time failed to live in harmony. One was excitable, and the other what might be termed ‘immobile.’ No doubt, taking the parties separately from each other, they were respectable people.”

In 1869, Joel Gibbs, claiming Susanna threatened to kill him if he did not leave, departed Cincinnati and found his way to Pleasant Hill. He remained in that community for most of the next three years. Sometime during that extended stay, Susanna discovered Joel’s whereabouts and visited Pleasant Hill, apparently to invite him to return home. She said she was worried and thought he might have committed suicide. Joel rejected her offer, but did make a brief trip to Cincinnati to pick up some additional clothing.

Which brings us to the blackberry patch. The Shakers lived, worked, ate and worshipped communally; men usually being strictly segregated from women. Among the few circumstances in which men and women worked together was berrying. It was the custom to send four or five “sisters” out to the blackberry patch, accompanied by one “brother” to protect them.

On one fateful June day in 1871, Joel was recruited to participate in a berrying crew along with five sisters, among whom were Ella Huston, Maggie Link and Susan Paine. As Ella later recounted, after the women had filled their baskets, Joel said there were larger berries in another nearby field and took Maggie and Susan over yonder. Ella, having heard some rumors, decided to investigate and found Joel and Susan in flagrante, while Maggie sat alone under a tree. The next year, Ella testified in court:

“I had heard remarks of an improper intimacy between them before, but had supposed he was too much of a gentleman to be guilty of anything wrong. I watched them, however, on this occasion, and saw them commit adultery. He cautioned me not to tell what I saw near the blackberry fence, and said, ‘If you do, you will be sorry to the end of your days.’"

This sordid tale emerged in January 1872 as Joel sued Susanna for divorce on the grounds of cruelty and abandonment and she countersued on grounds of cruelty, abandonment and adultery. The court, and the local newspapers, relished the blackberry patch story, Susanna’s attorney asking Ella if she was aware of other incidents of licentiousness among the supposedly celibate commune. Although the judge rejected the question, he wasn’t fast enough, and Ella replied that she knew several “sisters” sent away because of sexual behavior.

As an aside, between the blackberry incident in June and the divorce proceedings in January, Ella Huston had become Ella Gibbs because she had left the Shakers and married Susanna’s and Joel’s son, James. She was, in other words, a witness against her father-in-law.

Although enjoying the salacious testimony no end, the court ruled that Joel had no grounds for divorce. He was unable to produce any credible witnesses to Susanna’s alleged cruelty and, since it was he who had left home to join the Shakers, she had not abandoned him. This was a great disappointment to Joel because he had primarily sued for divorce to impel Susanna to sell the property she owned in Walnut Hills and give half to him as alimony.

The judge ruled that Susanna had not sufficiently proven cruelty, that adultery was an unnecessary addition to the charges and that Joel’s departure to join a celibate sect constituted all the proof that was necessary to prove abandonment. Susanna got the divorce and Joel got nothing.

Three years later, in 1875, a neighbor told Susanna there was an old man in apparent distress at the Walnut Hills train station. From the description, she knew it was Joel. She rushed to the station, where she found her ex-husband in a stupor. Joel told her he was not drunk but had taken poison. Susanna had him brought back to her house and called a doctor. Joel asked her to get a book out of the nightstand drawer and he showed her the recipe for his fatal concoction. There was no antidote and he died shortly thereafter.

[handeaux]

A Merciful Death? In 1906, Cincinnatians Would Have None Of Anna Hall’s Euthanasia

In 1906, Cincinnatians were forgiven if they crossed to the other side of the street when they saw Anna S. Hall walking toward them. The daughter of a famous explorer, Miss Hall was known as an outspoken advocate for merciful deaths, and she carried the tools to perform euthanasia wherever she went.

According to psychiatrist Jacob M. Appel, in a paper titled “A Duty to Kill? A Duty to Die? Rethinking the Euthanasia Controversy of 1906” [Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Fall 2004]:

“The driving force behind placing the legalization of euthanasia on the public agenda in the first years of the twentieth century was Cincinnati heiress Anna S. Hall. Miss Hall’s father, the noted Arctic explorer Charles F. Hall, had disappeared on his third government-sponsored expedition in 1879; when her mother died in 1901 after a ‘harrowing’ eighteen-month battle with liver cancer, Miss Hall found herself in possession of a small fortune – what remained of the $25,000 awarded to her family upon her father’s demise – and a desire to make certain nobody else would have to endure suffering to the degree that her mother had.”

Indeed, on 24 January 1906, Miss Hall prevailed upon Democratic Representative Henry T. Hunt (later mayor of Cincinnati) to introduce a bill she drafted to the Ohio General Assembly. If passed into law, Hall’s act would have allowed incurably ill patients to request a merciful death and would have required attending physicians to consider the request and provide such a death if they agreed.

Hunt asked only that the bill “not be treated lightly” and be “given fair consideration” but, as soon as he presented the matter, a delegate from East Liverpool leapt to his feet to denounce the measure as “an insult to the intelligence of every member of the house.” The chamber erupted into laughter, but that was widely interpreted not as derision for the proposed bill, but skepticism that it was even possible to insult the intelligence of the Ohio General Assembly. Miss Hall was present that day in the gallery and returned the next day to testify. As reported in the Ohio State Journal [25 January 1906], Miss Hall claimed her proposal had nothing to do with cruelty or murder:

“I belong to the Audubon Society and to the Humane Society at home. I can’t bear to see any person or animal suffer. Why, I wouldn’t even use a piece of flypaper in my house. I think it is cruel to the flies. Didn’t you ever notice the distress of the fly when it was caught on the paper? I believe in soothing all agony. Isn’t that as much the mission of a physician as anything else?”

Although her bill died in committee, it inspired several other similar bills in other state legislatures. Although none were passed into law, they generated widespread debate, and Miss Hall soon earned a national reputation.

That reputation dragged Miss Hall back into the spotlight two years later when a Cleveland musician named Charles Kuppe chloroformed his “imbecile” daughter Amalia and then hanged himself. Kuppe left a note claiming he committed the deed for fear he would die and leave his daughter as a burden on her mother or, worse, see her institutionalized.

Newspapers around the country chased down Miss Hall for reaction. She said her only disappointment was that Kuppe, by committing suicide, eliminated a judicial test of her beliefs. The Cincinnati Post [7 May 1908] published a point-counterpoint article with Kuppe’s widow, Dorette, strongly disagreeing with Miss Hall’s position. In her statement, Miss Hall defended the mercy killing.

“Charles Kuppe, of Cleveland, whose tragic end touches sympathetic hearts, loved the unfortunate daughter to whom parents had ministered for more than a quarter of a century. Let not the world condemn the father’s act.”

Mrs. Kuppe would have none of that, in her riposte, she claimed:

“I am a mother. And the pain is all the greater because that poor child was as much entitled to life as the most perfect person. Her helplessness made her dearer to me even than if she had been like other children.”

Interestingly, as Jacob Appel noted in his scholarly paper, many practicing doctors at the time commented that, although they were personally opposed to euthanasia and believed it should remain illegal, they all knew of medical colleagues who had ended a patient’s life when they believed any hope for recovery had been lost.

The Post [30 January 1906] went out to St. Francis Hospital in Lick Run to look for other incurables to inquire whether they would be interested in euthanasia as a way out of their condition. Every last patient was strongly opposed to Miss Hall’s proposal. John Foley, suffering from tuberculosis and hospitalized for 14 years, provided a typical response:

“Chloroform me! Well, I should say not! I’m not a sick cat, if I am in a hospital. A live man is better than a dead one any day. You talk to any of these fellows here and see if they want to be chloroformed. A man may groan and say, ‘I wish I was dead,’ but he changes his mind when the time comes.”

Miss Hall remained the go-to source for comment on mercy killing in 1911 when two elderly Shakers chloroformed an ill and elderly resident of their community. She fired off a telegram in defense of the Shakers to the judge handling their arraignment in Kissimmee, Florida.

So committed to her position was Miss Hall, that she carried a sort of euthanasia kit with her and occasionally visited people in extreme suffering, offering the possibility of painless surcease. She told the Cincinnati Post [4 April 1907]:

“I always carry a bottle of chloroform with me when I travel. It was given to me by a physician in sympathy with my beliefs, with instructions as to its use. I have never had it open. Should an accident occur I should give enough to make the sufferer insensible to pain until medical aid arrived.”

Anna S. Hall died in 1926 and left the bulk of her estate to the Smithsonian Institution to create a research fund in honor of her father who, ironically enough, was apparently poisoned by his own crew.

[callen77]

100 likes!

[handeaux]

Olly-Olly-In-Come-Free!, Or, Your Grandparents Had Way More Fun Than You Do

It is an ironclad rule with no exceptions: We all believe our own childhood was a lot more fun than that endured by kids these days. Whether that old dictum is valid or not, its corollary is most certainly true: Kids back then sure had some bizarre ideas for what constituted fun.

An anonymous writer for the Cincinnati Post [29 May 1906] bemoaned the quality of contemporary childhood fun, compared to the jolly exuberance of his day:

“’They don’t play the old games!’ You cannot avoid the sad comment, you Grown-Up Boy, if you watch a group of city children trying to imagine they are young. That’s the way you feel about it; at least, that the children are only imagining their youth. They don’t seem young with the youth we possessed in our small town.”

His biggest complaint? Kids in 1906 didn’t play the good old games like, for instance, shinny. A sort of street hockey, shinny involved groups of boys armed with curved sticks, swatting either a wooden block or a tin can toward a goal down the block. It was as dangerous and destructive as it sounds. Broken windows abounded and injuries could be fatal or maiming. Here’s the Cincinnati Daily Press [5 February 1862] on a shinny casualty:

“A few days since a student . . . had his eye knocked out while playing the game. The eye was completely knocked from the socket, and hung down on the check of the sufferer. It was replaced, but had to be finally taken out entirely.”

Our Post correspondent knew all about the mayhem inextricably tied to a good round of shinny:

“How long would it take a riot call to reach Headquarters if a real, live game of shinny got under way somewhere downtown?”

Another forgotten game was “Duck On Davy,” also known as “Boulder On A Nag,” in which a boulder, pillar, stairway landing or such was chosen as the “Davy” and a selection of stones constituted the “Ducks.” One player, chosen as the guard, sets his duck on the Davy. The other players, positioned 25 or 30 feet away, attempt to knock it off. If they miss, they must try to retrieve their duck before the guard can tag them. If they knock off the guard’s duck, the guard can’t tag them until he retrieves his own duck. Surely nothing could go awry with a gang of boys hurling rocks!

Games with potentially lethal projectiles have always been popular with boys. One such is the innocently named “Hat Ball.” In this game, each boy lays his hat on the ground along a line. The boys take turns tossing a ball into the prostrate hats. If the tosser misses, the ball is tossed back but, if the ball lands in a hat, all the boys scatter except for the owner of the hat with the ball. He tries to hit any of the other running boys by throwing the ball at him. If he misses, the players return to their places and a lump of coal is dropped in the hat where the ball landed. If he hits a player, that player has to hit one of the other scattering players.

As if flying projectiles wasn’t dangerous enough, popular boys’ games included sharp blades. One of these games was “Mumblety-Peg.” Do parents still buy pocket knives for their children (usually boys) as soon as they turn six or seven? Basic Mumblety-Peg was essentially a game of nerves as two players stood an arm’s length apart and took turns throwing a pocket knife into the ground as near to their opponent’s feet as they could. If a player’s knife didn’t stick, he lost that round. Expert players agreed to increasingly more difficult trick tosses, among them tossing the knife while it was balanced on an open palm, or flipping the knife as it was held between two fingers, or somersaulted off a fingertip. The “peg” in Mumblety-Peg was the loser’s penalty – a peg or matchstick pounded into the ground that the loser had to pull out with his teeth.

Among the variations of Hide And Seek, the most popular – among both boys and girls – in the bygone days was called “Go, Sheepy, Go!” The game was popular despite, or perhaps because of, its complexity. A group of children divided into teams and mapped out the boundaries of their territory, usually three or four city blocks. One team, the Sheep, were sent to various hiding places chosen by their captain, who also assigned coded signals to be used by that team. For example, “apples” might mean “stay where you are” and “raindrops” might mean “go around the trees to your right.” The codes were necessary because, after hiding all of her sheep, the captain returned to the other team and accompanied them as they tried to locate and capture the sheep. Using her codes, the captain directed her sheep away from the pursuers and toward home base. When it looked as if all or most of her sheep had a good shot at reaching home base, the captain yelled, “Go, Sheepy, Go!”

A similar, long-lost hide-and-seek game was “Chalk The Rabbit.” This was another team game, in which one team, armed with pieces of chalk, got a head start of five minutes or so, and then the other team followed, trying to determine, based on clues chalked along their route, where the first team had hidden. The final chalked clue – usually a circle with four arrows – signaled that the first team was all in nearby hiding places. “Chalk The Rabbit” games could extend over miles of city streets.

Lest it be claimed that only boys’ games were chaotic, disruptive or dangerous, we must relate the sad tale of six-year-old Ada Seltzer as reported in the Cincinnati Daily Star [23 June 1877]. Young Ada was an endurance champ with the jumping rope, which in those days was often a length of wild grape vine. According to the Star, she:

“ . . . fell down exhausted day before yesterday, after ‘scoring’ five hundred and fifty continuous jumps over a rope, which she swung over her head, the blood gushing from her ears, nose and mouth. Everything possible was done to restore her, but today she is in her grave – a victim of too much exercise.”

Some of the games mentioned by the Post in 1906 were so rare, or so regional, that it is difficult today to find a description of the rules by which they were played. For example, who knows how to play “Break for the Window Light'' or “One Foot Off and You Haft t’ Go?” or “Devil In The Hole'' or “Finger In The Ice Box.” I confess that I am uncertain whether I want to know.

[callen77]

Humanity has finally found a way to communicate with crabs, we realize they're smarter than us. Now that they know we know, what are they going to do?

[callen77]

Too good not to steal. https://www.instagram.com/p/CbLlm-tOpNC/?utm_medium=tumblr