Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 September 1879 — FORTY YEARS AGO. [ARTICLE]

FORTY YEARS AGO.

The Way Things Were Done in 1840 or Thereabouts. [From the New York Graphic.] “ Yep,” said the man who wasn’t afraid of telling his age, “ .you young fellows of 35 don’t really know how old we of 45 are. You can’t realize the changes which have come over this land in so short a time. Look at our railroad system, even that in our neighborhoods. Forty-one years ago I traveled with my father up the whole north side of Long island from Greenport in a carriage. The mail was three days getting to New York. A single railroad track extended from Jamaica into Brooklyn. We crossed from Brooklyn to New York in a horse-ferryboat. They , were playing ‘ King John ’ in the old Park Theater. Fanny Ellsler was the star of the ballet, and one-horse cabs, with a step and door behind, plied on Broadway. The Astor House was in its glory, and I saw the unfinished walls of Trinity Church. My father took a paper called the Express and the Journal of Commerce, out of which I vainly sought for something to interest a 4-year-old boy. I can recollect but one sentence in either of those papers. It read at intervals in very big letters, ‘ Arrival of the Great Western from Europe,’ and it seemed to me as if no ocean steamer, save the Great Western, crossed the Atlantic for years and years. Beside these headlines, they used, on each arrival, to get out a wood-cut of the vessel. A man who had been to Europe in those days was somebody. Noted ministers used to go, and they always on returning wrqte books of their travels. It would be a good plan to compile a ministerial library of travel in Europe and Asia. A man with beard and mustache then was at once a curiosity and monstrosity. I well recollect hearing one of our village magnates gravely advising a young New York doctor to shave off these appendages. They were clean shavers in those days, and almost everybody shaved themselves. The razor-case and strop formed part of every man’s traveling equipment. Illinois was the farthest Western State, letter postage was 10 cents, the Knickerbocker was the sterling magazine of the time, Sam Slick’s and Maj. Jack Downing’s letters the only very funny reading, gentlemen wore swallow-tailed coats at all hours, tomatoes were called ‘ love apples,’ and suspected of being poisonous, all temperance people were known as ‘Washingtonians,’ circuses traveled with very small negro-miustrel bands who sung ‘Jump, Jim Crow,’ fiddles made a row among the older people when introduced in the country church choirs, the Methodists wouldn’t tolerate a cross in evergreens on Christmas, or anything else, or at any other time, everybody chewed and spit, and built their houses with Grecian porticos, photographs were daguerreotypes, and would rub off the plates, whale oil was the only lighting fluid, all shirt-collars stood up, doctors bled and giwe calomel for almost everything, lung-fever hadn’t turned into pneumonia, everybody had a barrel of rum or hard cider in the cellar, nobody had put a caudal appendage on our first parents, all schoolmasters came from Connecticut and licked with a cowhide, girls hadn’t learned to skate, a man worth a million was rich, the Democrats were called ‘ Loco-focos,’ and so were the matches, the Presbyterians preached sown the Methodists and Episcopalians, the country papers abounded in advertisements of runaway apprentice-boys bound out to serve until of age, represented pictorially by a young man makiug tracks, with his bundle slung on a stick over his shoulder. Good butter was only a, shilling a pound, good cigars 3 cents apiece. Rum was the favorite drink, the best of liquor 6 cents a glass. Infant damnation, predestination, and election were the favorite pulpit topics, Eclipse the fastest horse in America, Bunker hill monument a big thing just done, nobody lectured, round dances hadn’t come over, lager-beer was unknown, general trainings were held yearly, the muskets had flint locks, every householder was required by law to keep two leather buckets in case of fire, ladies wore bustles, gentlemen strapped their pantaloons under their boots, trousers were cut with horizontal instead of perpendicular flaps in front, and Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were the greatest men in the United States. I tell you those were times, now.”