Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 246, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1919 — TOWNS NOT FATED TO LIVE [ARTICLE]

TOWNS NOT FATED TO LIVE

Communities East and West, Founded In High Hopes, Are Now Practically Things Forgotten. Western papers tell their readers that the town of Emerson, pkla., is shortly to be a thing forgotten, remarks the Hartford Courant. It was "mapped out as ~a" town site shortly after the territory was opened for settlement, and the promoters had dreams of a metropolis. In 1907 the plan was abandoned, and now the district court has been asked to vacate the land for town Bite purposes, when what might have been a town will become farm land. The story of Emerson suggests what came near happening to a Connecticut town in the beginnings of the colony. Those interested in It showed rare sense in their choice of a site, and in their dreams planned not for a town but for a city. Hampden and Cromwell were to be among its citizens; the cream of England, so its promoters hoped, were to become Its citizens. Fate ordered otherwise, and the early days of this dream town are remembered now largely through Lion Gardiner’s, account of his struggle to hqld the site against the attacks of the Indians. Other states, notably the raining pllcate the story from Oklahoma, but few can equal the romance of the Connecticut settlement.