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: Hard times hit Hendricks County in late 1883. A man named McCaslin near Lizton lost $28,000 “by the late decline of Chicago options.” That would be almost $746,000 today. Others in Danville and the county’s south side had lost in the neighborhood of $90,000, which in today’s dollars is about $2.4 million. “’Tis better to bear the poverty we have than to fly unto riches we know not of,” The

Republican opined. As winter neared that winter, the paper advised “it might be well to perfect a benevolent association of some kind to provide for the poor and needy.” Many in town were in “a hard and protracted struggle with the wolf” due to sickness,

“bad management, hard drinking or laziness.”

The household head “may be and no doubt is responsible” for those hard luck and poverty cases. It was up to Danville’s “prosperous and provident” citizens to protect the wives and children of those ne’er-do-wells “from hunger and cold.”

I could never count the no-counts and bad businessmen, or number Danville’s dipsomaniacs. I read per capita annual consumption during that era was 7.1 gallons of pure alcohol.

I deduce most drank less, and many consumed much more. Don’t know about beer. Indiana had 70 large breweries in 1879, and a number of distilleries.

The paper shared an observation: “Poverty is the only burden which grows heavier in proportion to the number of dear ones who have to help bear it.” A fellow named Richter was credited with that pith. I think he was a German Romantic writer who had died more than 50 years earlier.

The Republican was sympathetic to poor, destitute women in March 1882. “You, reader, who are blessed with a comfortable home” and not missing meals was called upon to consider the plight of those wretched women who were “delicate, cultured, refined, and all unused to physical labor.”

Many were “nursed in the lap of luxury, but thrown suddenly and helplessly upon the world by some social or domestic volcano that engulfed home and friends and left them stranded and alone to struggle with the hard conditions of cruel and relentless poverty.”

Their “more fortunate sisters” could only imagine themselves in such straits, replete with woe, possibly tempted “into a gilded life of sin.”

Society was “out of joint” and The Republican wondered whether “the favored of earth” had any clue that there was “little virtue in the goodness of one who has never been sorely tempted.”

The following month, the paper offered this thought provoker: “Most people know something about the discipline of poverty, and feel quite ready to experience some of the awful responsibilities of wealth.”

Readers also were advised to distrust anyone who “talks much of his honesty.” That reminds me of a truck salesman who chased after me as I drove off a lot.

“We all know the result of an aimless, thriftless life,” a reprinted article declared in December 1884, “working only when the necessity or inclination prompts.”

It was a work or starve life, “with the final remorse of having nothing to show for a life’s labor, but errors, distress and poverty; health and manhood gone and nothing left but neglected opportunities.”

“The essential qualities of self-denial, perseverance and determination,” on the other hand, “cannot fail to produce good results.”

Some were “kept in poverty through their own fault,” sermonized the Rev. Thomas De Witt Talmadge from the Brooklyn Tabernacle in June 1886, which The Republican dutifully reprinted. “They might have been well off, but they smoked or chewed up their earnings, or they lived beyond their means.” He overlooked illness, laziness, hard drinking, and economic downturns. North Salem correspondent Bob O Link condemned young shiftless townsmen content to “idle away their precious moments” while their mothers and sisters were “in pressing need at home. “They seem to think that to live and move is all that is necessary.” Once charity was exhausted and when “the last morsel is taken from the shelf,” and when mothers are “haggard and worn from constant toil, we ask you, young men, where is your manhood to give up work entirely, be nothing but a drone and allow such a calamity to come in our midst?”

Paul Miner Lizton ______________________________________________________________________