Jasper County Democrat, Volume 7, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 March 1905 — STILL AN OBJECT OF INTEREST [ARTICLE]

STILL AN OBJECT OF INTEREST

T. J. McCoy’s Former Residence Attracts Many SightSeers. Presents Same Appearance It Did After Being Dynamited Last October.

The former fine residence of ex-banker T. J. McCoy is still an object of interest to many town people as well as all visitors to Rensselaer. The house presents about the same appearance that it did when first seen after the dynamite charge wrecked it on Sunday night, October 16, last, except that the tall chimney on the east was pulled down a day or two later and the household goods have been removed. The same desolate picture of wreck and ruin of the explosion is there, and the broken glass, splinters of wood and timbers is seen. Nothing has been done to clear away the wreck and there is no knowing when anything will be done. The walks and lawn is still littered with the fallen leaves of last season and the place is an eyesore to this otherwise handsome street. The familiar colored coachman and the fast horses and fine equippages that used to whirl np McCoy avenue and turn, with a flourish, into the driveway, with the debonair Tom puffing at a high-priced Havana, are seen no more, while the iron gates are rusting on their hinges. The large brick mansion of the elder McCoy is also vacant and has been vacant since the removal of the old folks to rooms up town, after selling the home place. This property also has a neglected and deserted appearance. Leaves lit-

ter the lawn and walks. We understand the property is for rent, but there is more of it than most people want and therefore it has not been rented as yet. The passing of the McCoys, to many people, seems more like romance than real facts. When one looks back and remembeis that only one short year ago they were practically the whole thing in Rensselaer and Jasper county and that the name “McCoy” carried with it great influence all through this section of the state, one is hardly able to realize that only a few days later they were the most generally cussed and unpopular people in the stat; that hundreds of those who had trusted their hard-earned dollars to their keeping were left to hold the sack; and that the tine house of 'the junior McCoy, where so many swell functions had been held, should be dynamited, it seems more like the story of some novelist than a real fact. To hundreds of people, however, who were the victims of these McCoys, it is a grim reality.