The Syracuse Journal, Volume 28, Number 23, Syracuse, Kosciusko County, 3 October 1935 — Page 5

PAGE 4

f : : HISTORY OF SYRACUSE SETTLED IN 1835 | I —1 The following is taken from the history of Syracuse and Lake Wawasee, cdmpjled by George W. Miles, and printed in the Syracuse Journal weekly, in 1909: If anyone of the old boys of Syracuse would renew his youth and live over again the dear old days of the long ago he can do no better than to' wander along what once, was Turkey Creek. The creek it/ self he will not find. It has departed, never to return; and cuttingin a straight line through its winding' x course is an unsightly and offensive ditch, that considers naught of beauty nor of virtue, jjor of swimming holes; intruded there by the spirit of gain that scorns all tender sentiments; and he will have to shut his eyes to this offensive intruder and follow the old bed. which he may still trace put, and let his memory rehabilitate it as it was in the days of yore. As you come to the bridge that crcws.es the mill race at Henry street just to your left is the old swimming hole; the logs gone that used ' the race over it. but otherwise unchanged; but it is-iij the very center of the town now and is a swimming hole no more. , In fancy you will see the old logs there again, and fifty young and care free fellows diving off them, and fifty pairs of heels disappearing beneath the water ~ heels the owneirs of which you could name if you had the tniie; scattered now from California to New England (and. many of them aie dead Aaron Stoy‘S Jerry Niles, Wils Dillop, Eph Landis, Frisky Landis, Joe Landis. Bill Widner, Ves, Widner and two score more, and you wander how the fates have dealt with them all.) Farther up the creek you will come to the 'waste gates;” still there, bht not so strong nor so large and imposing as the old ones were, and below them is the round hole, the head of the creek, much as you remember it; but you will miss the water snakes that used to poke their heads from every crack in the planking on the warm spring days. And you'll wish for a line and a tamarack pole to try again if the bullheads will bite in the pool. Farther down, just above where Skinner ditch joined the creek, a bridge now spansothe ditch on "Boston Street,” and the creek is dry. Rut there was water in it there once . — water enough to enable to swim therein the biggest base that -two certain boys had ever soon in all the creek; a baas that must have weighed four pounds. These boys were Frank Sloan, now of this place and Al Acker, of Jackson, Tennessee. And each of them had a spear. And both of them succeeded in plunging their spears into the baass at nearly the same Mime. And each one claimed it as his own. There was a battle at the mouth of Skinner ditch, and another near the Sloan residence at the cor- ' ner of Huntington and Pearl streets, where Alf Roberta now lives, and there were numerous hand to hand encounters in between. I believe Frank landed the prise safely over the fence and behind his own breast- * *rk» in the end. Underneath the sod that projects out high above a gravely hollow that was the creek bed the suckers used to dart and hide from us. And just below, where the stream narrowed, I fell off a rail into it on a winter day—a Sunday, too, 1 remember that! I never did have any faith in my ability to ffalk a rail, and my doubts were ever my undoing, as doubts always are. I was soaked to the skin from my neck to my toes; but the sun shone bright land the day was warm. What though the ground was covered with snow! My clothes would be dry long enough before I would be ready to go home. On the bank, above there, I see the very spot where I sat and washed my face in the creek while the blood flowed from a gash just below nty ey«, cut by a piece of a bursting cap that flew from a trigerless pistol that belonged to Al Acker, and that I had sighted at a grass pike with murderous intent. The pistol having no trigger we had to put our thumb under the hammer of it and pry up on that to make it go off. We always expected to kill something with it, but we never did. The nearest I ever knew of it doing serious damage to any animal was when the piece of cap came within a quarter of an inch of going into my eye that day. And. too, from the , manner of discharging it I had a blackened thumb nail that was likely to come off later, that night When 1 went homo. When I wont home! It was hardly a cheerful home-going. That I would ever have to go home at all came upon me like a shock when I observed that darkness was falling and the sun had gone down. I suppose Al aiKl Milt HiilaboM. who were with me, had similar sensations, for Al shouldered the spear he had been using (Mih and I had taken turns shooting the pistol, for which Al had generously furnished the powder and shot) and as though by a common impulse we started for town. 1 then remembered that I had had neither dinner nor supper. And after that my memory went back

Scenes and Persons in the Current News j ' ~~ - ( -iwa > /I* Mt i I iViiiar tT iii lb t ‘ Sb ■F t;-" /TF I—View of the Ri»ck of Gibraltar, where Great Britain assembled a powerful fleet of warships. 2—Lieut. Fells. Waltkus of Chicago, who started from New York on a solo nonstop flight to Kaunas, Lithuania, and made a forced landing In Ireland B—Blc vessels of the French war Bret on their way from Toulon to Djibouti, French Somaliland eastern terminus of the railway to Addis Ababa.

to the morning, when my mother had started me for Sunday school at the Church of God; and how, around behind George Shaffer’s blacksmith shop that stood on the corner of what is now the school yard, (she could watch me that far) 1 had met Milt, who had his pistol with him, and some shot and caps and powder (how he had acquired this “ammunition” 1 do not know to this day) and how we had forgotten all about the Sunday school, and had hiked across the lake into Ott’s woods, and later around to* the creek, and how Al had slipped up a back alley stolen out his spear. It all came to me like a forgotten dream. And then I realized my bedragul&i state, and I wondered what would happen when I got home. Or I thought I wondered. But if I had made three guesses they would have been all alike. More and more slowly did I move along the fence as I neared the house. The sunlight I had long forgotten, and it was quite dark. But I finally pulled myself along until I could see in through a window, and oh joy we“had company' Samuel Akers and his good wife, with their two daughters, Frances and Clemmy, had come over to spend the evening' I flew to the kitchen, I carried the wood box “piled full” of wood, and then, regardless of my great hunger, 1 hurried to bed, to sleep the sleep of the innocent. I arose early in the morning and did my chores well, observing as 1 combed my hair that the wound under my eye was hardly noticeable, devastated the breakfast table and hurried off to school; and up to the time of her death: my mother--God bleas her!—never thought to ask me where I had been tl it Sunday. Somewhere over toward the mill where now there is a potato patch there was a spring. A magnetic spring it was, so some old men asserted, but I never could make it charge my knife so that it would pick up a pin, though I spent many hours trying. But many’s the time I have lain flat on my stomach and drank my fill of its pure, sw*eet, cod water. The old mill is gone—the mill of Crosson A Ward and Defrees and Mann and the Kindigs, that I have told you about, and afterward of Louis Lepe, and Natty Crow, and then of hia son Ben Crow, who was the owner of it when fire destroyed it nearly twenty years ago. The foundation walls are there yet, and between them is the water running as it used to when, bare legged, we waded over the stones below; a half dozen of us, once on a time, each of whom in turn ran over to a corner and stood on a moss-covered stone much larger than all the rest that raised him almost out of the water. And presently — consternation!— thievery stone raised up and turned about and went scooting down the creek—a monster snapping turtle. No one of us was near it, nor in any danger then but gracious* how we went flying out of the water. Oh, yes! On the bank just below the waste gates it was that Perry Miles tried the experiment of snapping the head off a snake, a feat ho had heard was possible of accomplishment. A fair sised water snake it was and he had first broken its back, and then sneaked cautiously around to grab it by the tail, while open-mouthed I stood directly behind him, wondering what he was up to. I learned presently when the snake came flying directly at my face. I had time to dodge sufficiently that it only swiped my ear. A fight would probably have followed, only I knew 6hat my strength was not equal to Perry’s. And near thh same spot I had about the mort serious trouble I ever had with Doug Miles, who was just my age and was at once my cousin and my brother. I was roasting a grass pike on a stick when he slipped up behind me and tossed a stone over my shoulder that knocked the fish off into the ashes, and started to run away. Playfully . I threw the stick after

him. It had a red coal on the end of it that burned a blister from his ear to his forehead. If I should set down here the language that he ' used on that occasion the Journal this week would not be admitted in the mails. And then, below Main street bridge! Oh. the orny nosed chubs and shiners there used to be in the hole just below the old water.saw mill! And there was a boat in the creek, too, below this old mill, and the men used to float in it down the stream and shoot ducks that sat in the water around the bends — ' never on the wing; they hadn’t yet learned that they could kill them in the air. I have ofter heard Jim Benner tell of sighting his shotgun at a large wild turkey that flew I above him across the creek one day, hoping it would light on a tree within range, and allowing it to fly away unharmed because it did not. Later Mr. Benner became one of the beet wing shots in the town. And the ducks that used to fly across the road (there was no South Main street then) just south of the bridge on their way from the creek below to their roosting places in the marshes around the lake! • Our fathers used to go down there of an evening and kill a dozen or more of i them as they flew over, while we boys ran and picked them up. . There is scarcely a spot along the banks of the old creek, now dead, i but has been kissed a thousand * limes by gladsome feet. And, as I ; follow its dried and withered course I feel myself to be something near I a criminal because of the part I had 'in its desecration. I 1 often wonder if the boys of Syracuse now enjoy their environment j to the full as did we of other days. 1 They have not the creek as we had it, but they have the lake, which has changed but little. And their swimming hole at Indian Hill possibly they enjoy as much as we ' did the old one. Os course 1 don’t ' know whether they do or not, I neither do you; we are not in their ' confidence. But 1 strongly suspect that when they shall have grown | older many of them will have stors ies to tell similar to those 1 am relating. We had our troubles, too, in the I old times. Potato bugs, for ini stance! I well remember when they first ! came, and they seemed to come all at once. Strangers to «us they , were and all unbidden, but they | swarmed into the potato patches i I and destroyed them ere we Were

I i Don't Give i Fire A Chance To Wipe You Out Don’t gamble on fire. You can insure what you own for its real value at little additional cost. Don’t Be Under Insured .... Against Fire Don’t forget to revalue what you own on the basis of higher prices existing today.... Don’t forget the ad- ' ditional improvements you have made.... and don’t forget that in case of fire, you may have to replace t everything—including furniture. | Telephone Call Upon Write Yonr Insurance Co. George Xanders Emphasize the Importance of Fire Pretention Week

SYRACUSE JOURNAL

aware. Fondly we hoped that they would disappear the next year or the next, as they had come, but instead of that they each year vastly increased in numbers. Now, it had been hard enough for the boys to be compelled, just when fishing was best every spring, to spend large portions of thei. most valuable time hoeing the potatoes and keeping the weeds from them, the added burden of going Through them, day after day, with a pan and a stick, in futile efforts to capture and destroy the pests, was cause sufficient to have justified open reI bellion.. Nor did we learn for several years, and until asmanypromjsing potato crops had been destroyed despite the added burden and indignity that had been placed on the boys, that Paris green would kill them. And then, our fathers used to bring from the nearby woods, where they could be had for taking them away, long poles, and pile them in the street near our homes, and these the boys were compelled to chop or saw into firewood for their mothers. And it did seem, that the pile of wood always ran out exactly at the time when there was an important fishing excursion at hand. I have in mind now some events of most momentous importance that come about because of the necessity of stopping to make some hard poles, into fire wood while the fish were waiting for us, but I have exhausted the space alloted to me this week and must postpone telling you about them till a future lime. Babies, Nonagenarians Are Flying These Days Chicago.—An age limit for air travelers? There is none, say traffic officials of United Air Lines, who report that on consecutive daya the company's planes carried a fonr-day old baby boy (world’s youngest air passenger) and a ninety-hve-year-old woman. Karren Snow boarded a plane at Seattle with his mother four days after his birth and flew to San Francisco i to greet his father, staff member nf a ' trans Pacific steamer. ] The following day, Mrs. Mary Oliver. | In her ninety-fifth year, was a Vhleagcv I Cleveland passenger aboard a cvast | coast flyer. ' ’Widespread observance of Const!tution day indicates that many citizens still retain a firm belief in the value of that horse-and-buggy document. — Indianapolis Star. toy a‘Journal "want ad

.STATE HIGHWAY’S | - WORK. PROGRAM TO EMPLOY fc.m MEN - Employment for at least six thousand men for a year will be provided by the .ten-million-dollar state highway improvement program now being prepared for contract, James ;D. Adams, chairmen of the State Highway Commission, announced today. First bids on projects included in this program are to be received by the State Highway Commission on Oct. 22 and additional lettings will be held as rapidly as projects are approved. Funds to finance this program were allocated to Indiana for highway construction and improvement by the Works Bill passed during the recent session of congress, the money to be divided almost equally between grade separation and other highway construction. The first four projects advertised ’ for bids are grade separation, one on Road 41 in Highland over the Grand Trunk railroad; one on Road 40 east of Terre Haute over the Pennsylvania railroad; and two on the new by-pass for Road 52 around Lafayette, one over the Monon and one over the Belt and the Wabash railroads. Award of contracts on these and other projects on the Works Pro- • gram list will be advanced as rapidly as possible with work to start immediately. Work will be in progress through the late fail and winter months as many of the projects will permit construction except in the most adverse weather. { ’ This employment will be in addition to the thousands of jobs provided by the six-million-dollar Fed-eral-Aid highway program, a major part of which is already under contract. Work on many of the projects in this program will be carried on during the fall and winter months, adding to the employment to be provided by highway operations. MINISTERS^RECEIVE LETTERS Several of the ministers of churches in Syracuse, but not all, received letters from President Roosevelt, last week, described in daily newspapers as the president inquiring of them, as leaders of thought in the community, what the thought was concerning the “accomplishments” of the present administration.. None of the ministers here have answered the letters; and the daily papers Sunday described the indignation of negro pastors that none of this race had been so honored as to be consulted. More unemployment thSn ever indicates that Roosevelt’s “pump priming” must suffer the fate of the usual wild-Cat promotion.—lndianapolis Star.

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THURSDAY, OCT 3, 1935

“VISITOR” NAMED. Mrs. Grgce Zimmerman, case work supervisor of Cass county for the past eighteen months, has arrived in Warsaw to serve as Senior (Visitor for the PWA office. Mrs. . Zimmerman will certify men and women from families on relief who are eligible for WPA jobs. She will have no part in the administration of relief. The administration of all poor relief will be in the hands of the township trustees. As was officially announced some time ago all | work of accepting and investigating j applications for poor relief will be ! handled by the various township ! trustees. 0 j Harry L. Hopkins, who is undoubtedly the great boondoggler the j country ever produced, will now proceed to show the taxpayers some .boondoggling as is boondoggling—lndianapolis News.