Paul Minor

Delving Into Yester~Year

Local historian and writer Paul Miner takes items from The Republican’s Yester-Year column to develop an interesting, informative and often humorous article.

To the Editor: Country folk had fun a century ago. Take Leslie Goodwin of New Winchester early in

May 1921 when friends helped kill 152 rats in his barn. Yet they let one escape. Perhaps kindness prompted their moderation. “Hundreds of rats of the voracious kind” infested the barns and buildings of farms near Anderson in 1890. Nearly twice the size of “the common wharf rat,” they resembled muskrats. Although heavily trapped, their numbers were undiminished.

Harvey G. Moore north of Montclair killed 96 rats in May 1899. All he had to do is move corn and rubbish around in his barn. Didn’t anyone have terriers and cats back then in those pestilent sheds? My brother and I enjoyed killing mice while shoveling corn from cribs. We’d slam them with our scoop shovels. Insatiate barn cats and a murderous terrier were arrayed around the perimeter. None escaped. We’d see rats occasionally.

There were “armies of rats” swarming across Warrick County in the spring of 1890, and the Pleasant Hill Lodge of the Farmers’ Mutual Benefit Association laid siege. Two weeks later, 9,967 rats lay dead on the field of battle, their tails taken as trophy proof.

I rather hope those farmers left their shotguns at home. Close quarters fighting could end up with feet blown off. Sledge hammers? Axes?

Rooster Cogburn used a .45. Any of the aforementioned weapons likely would necessitate extensive barn repairs. I’d use a terrier. Bite, kill, on to the next rat.

Millions of rats infested World War I trenches, feeding on death. Terriers were effective then.

Rats caused as much mayhem during the Great War as 200,000 German soldiers, the government reported in 1918. The U.S., alone, had 200 million rats. Each pair could have 20,155,392 descendants in three years. Rat damage hurt the U.S. war effort. Rats ate animal food, eggs and even baby pigs. The Republican reported in 1898 a Chinese man, a former Yale scholar, promoted rats for human consumption. “What a carrot is to a horse’s coat, a rat is to the human hair,” he declared.

Chinese women, he continued, ate rats to stop their hair from falling out and “make the locks soft, silky and beautiful.”

I think I’ve come up with a great new pick-up line. Something like, “Do you eat rats? Your hair is so lustrous.”

Rat, rabbit and squirrel skins were used for fur linings in the late 1880s, but in 1884, more than 1.5 million cats were killed in Liverpool because their skins were “more serviceable.”

Rough on Rats was a popular poison invented by a druggist in 1872. Its main ingredient was arsenic. To sell the product, the company used a racist illustration of a Chinese man preparing to eat a rat.

That likely resulted in a rat and mouse population boom.

One of Danville’s “professors” experimented with tricking rats to death in 1880. He placed a block of wood on the center of a plate, laid bread on the block, and then poured enough sulfuric acid on the plate toform what he believed was an impenetrable moat.

He left, returning some hours later to find a corn cob bridging the acid and the bread gone.

“He verily believes rats to be the original bridge builders.”

The Egyptian Rat Destroyer was “the best preparation ever devised,” in 1881 for not only snuffing that “troublesome vermin,” but for exterminating all bugs, insects and roaches as well.

But something was terribly wrong. I don’t know whether drunken itinerant printer Colonel Hargett made a mistake in setting type, or the old Union paper meant to confuse credulous locals, but the ad immediately swept into a pledge that Hegeman’s Camphor Ice was the best thing for chapped hands and worked as an aftershave.

In August 1889, Uncle Lige, “an old citizen familiarly known on the public square as a graphic delineator of tragic scenes,” claimed he’d caught 38 rats the first night with a new trap.

“Not satisfied with this enormous haul,” he chased down yet another, “catching him foul and choking the life out of him.”

Uncle Lige was bitten in the struggle, and in a sling claimed he’d contracted rabies. The Republican doubted the declaration. After all, there were “hundreds of recorded instances of rat bites being cured by the juice of the cornbug.”

Uncle Lige’s hydrophobia “manifestations” more likely were not that rat’s fault, but rather “a jug-full.”

Paul Miner Lizton

[Editor’s Note: We hope the writer and his brother took the precaution of tying binder twine snuggly around their pantlegs before the assault on the corn crib. We have a childhood memory of an uncle who didn’t batten down and a rodent attempted to exit what it thought to be an escape tunnel. We also remember the attending dogs and cats during crib cleaning. One mama barn cat in particular would catch a mouse, disappear, then return shortly. When we checked later, we found she was taking them to an old empty wooden crib and had them stacked like cordwood for her latest litter of kittens. Affidavits available on request.]