Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 35, Number 99, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 August 1903 — The Lightning’s Queer Freak. [ARTICLE]

The Lightning’s Queer Freak.

Judge S. P. Thompson was up to his territorial possessions in Union tp., yesterday, and found that the lightning had been prospecting around there lately as though it might have been looking for him. It didn’t find him, however, and would have found him a hard man to down, if it had. It did take a poke at one of his houses, however, and at one of his barns on another farm, a mile distant. At the house it knooked off two or three yards of plastering, but otherwise did no damage. The house was occupied by Isaao Brubaker. At the barn one of the queerest of the lightning’s many queer freaks was perpetrated. The bolt passed straight down through about 6 or 8 feet thickness of hay in a mow, and bored a hole through it nearly as large as a stove pipe. And anyone oan stand under the mow asd look up the hole dear through the hay. Yet it never set the hay on fire.