Fire Concerns - Railway Management - Giant Turtle - Bridge Aftermath
25 MAY 1885. Austin Daily Statesman.
The ghost of the late fire still haunts the debris on Pecan street. It took the hose and a good pressure of water to down it again yesterday.
A match carelessly dropped by some passer-by yesterday fell among a lot of old papers in the basement under the shoe store of Messrs. Lewis & Peacock. Had it been night, or Sunday, a calamitous conflagration might have ensued.
The colored people who did not hold a big picnic at Brueggerhoff yesterday can tell a tale about how a soulless narrow gauge railway management uncouples and leaves a whole excursion train standing on a side track simply because the money for the excursion was not paid.
The Texas express bought a large green turtle in from Galveston yesterday morning. It weighed three hundred and fifty pounds, and is at Frank's restaurant. To-day the curfew rings, as it were, and "Basil Underwood" or the green turtle, must die, that all may enjoy turtle in all styles.
River Notes. The ferries yesterday and the day before, after the fall of the bridge, did an immense business.
To see the rotten condition of the timbers one wonders why the bridge did not give way long ago.
Every progressive county in the state, as far as heard from, has one or more free iron bridges over important streams, except Waco and Austin.
It now costs the citizens living south of town fifty cents a day to visit the city in a buggy. Horseback it is twenty cents, and with wagon from fifty cents to one dollar. Will this benefit the city?