Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 July 1876 — CENTENNIALITIES. [ARTICLE]

CENTENNIALITIES.

• —Fifty-two thousand five hundred and sixty-two persons visited the grounds on the 6th, the receipt® being $23,025.50. —One erf the most life-like pictuses to be seen in Memorial Hall is a full-sized portrait of Abraham Lincoln, which stands at tlie right of the main en>l trance. —The United States Marine Band is to receive $7,000 for one months’ services in the Exposition. It will give two enter, tainments each day at the pavilion in Landsdowne Valley. —Tlie Michigan State building was formally opened on the 6th, Gov. Bagley delivering the address. But as the building had been open to visitors for some weeks, tlie formal opening was of little moment. —There is a display of potatoes and onions from Bermuda in Agricultural Hall worth looking at. The vegetables are of the largest size and the finest quality, showing tlie productiveness of the soil in that fertile little island. A good many of the potatoes would weigh a ton, while the largest of the onions is so immense that sixteen persons could stand around it and shed tears together. —The commissioners had another very knotty question on hand the other morning. It was proposed to thank VicePresident Ferry for attending the Fourth of July ceremonies, but the feeling against it was so evident that the motion was withdrawn. One of the members said that it was simply in the line of his duty to attend, and that he was paid to be there, just as much as the band or the policemen. —The Centennial lodging-house agencies are on the verge of starvation. They say that they nevw expected any business until the overcrowded hotels swept a myriad of sleepy victims into their hands, but as the hotels have not l»een full their business has been minus. Tlie largest of them is about to move its office into an obscure street, from which it can step gracefully down and out without attracting any attention. —The bust of Abraham Lincoln, has arrived at the Illinois Headquarters, and has been placed on a handsome pedestal, eight feet high, in front of the State Building, and a few yards from the main entrance. It is a large, handsome bust, made of galvanized iron, and a remarkably fine representation of the head and face of the murdered President. A handsome bronze eagle has also been placed over the main entrance of the building. —ln Agricultural Hall there is a windmill, said to be a sac simile of an old mill still standing on Long Island, at East Hampton, about eighty miles from New York, which was a representative flouring mill for that period—loo years ago. The mill had a capacity for grinding out eight barrels of flour per day, when the wind happened to be favorable. The sac simile is exhibited by a New York milling firm, whose steam flouring mill in that metropolis has a capacity of 2,500 barrels per day. ~

—A new style of refrigerator is on exhibition in the United States Government Building. Tlie sides are principally of glass, and through them may be seen several large fresh fish (one of them being a sturgeon nearly four feet long), some strawberries frozen into the ice, a cake of ice from which not a drop of water is seen to run, and several other objects indicating that the temperature within the “cabinet” is very cold. Indeed, there is a large thermometer showing tlie mercury to be twenty degrees below zero, notwithstanding that it is from ninety-five to 100 outside. If sweltering visitors could be permitted to crawl into that refrigerator only for a few moments, they would soon sigh for summer again. —At the crossing of the narrow-gauge railroad near the north center of Machinery Hall, a telegraphic alarm has been constructed, similar to the alarms used in the “block system” on the Pennsylvania Railroad. A telegraphic wire laid under the track, and extending about a hundred yards in each direction from the station, communicates with a gong bell at the station platform. Whenever a train is approaching, from either direction, the alarm is thus rung automatically, and kept ringing till the train stops. If, with this rattling and jingling of the alarm, any person persists in being run over and killed, his or her death will not be a “ mysterious dispensation of Providence,” but a clear case of inexcusable recklessness.