Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 38, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 January 1906 — Where The Delinquent List Flourishes Mightily. [ARTICLE]

Where The Delinquent List Flourishes Mightily.

Lake county is the place where “life is one long sweet song,” as Mrs. Cleveland said when'she had clinched her i rover and lived in clover, for the editor man who gets the delinquent tax list to print, and that of late year is the Crown Point ‘Register. The list is the largest in the state, it is said, and it fills six complete pnges ot the paper and slops over a little onto another page. And. they are big. pages too, having seven columns, justead of the usual number of six. So many towns as Lake county has would naturally produce a large de linquent list in any case, but the real goose which-lays this big golden egg every year for the printers, is an heirloom that has come down from the boom days which preceded the aforementioned Uncle Grover’s big panic, of 1893. In the boom days the craze for. speculating in town and city lots, especially Chicago suburban lots, had caused the laying out of hundreds and probably thousands of acres into new towns and new additions to old towns in Lake county and many of these speculative lots were in remote and inaccessible places, and on land that would not produce even a poor quality of ramrod hay. When the panic came and the boom busied thousand of these lots became worthless and the taxes have been accumulating on them ever since, and they are advertised year year, but the land itself, is no worth the taxes due on them and so they cannot be sold. There are hundreds of these lots advertised on which the yearly tax is only a few cents, often only six or eight, bat the back taxes, penalties and accumulated advertising fees often amounts to several dollars more than the land is worth.