by Sharon Hall | Mar 4, 2016 | Feisty Females
March is Women’s History Month and what better way to kick it off than to highlight the accomplishments of first female newspaper columnist and highest paid nineteenth century newspaper writer Sara Payson Willis, a.k.a. “Fanny Fern”. Sara was born in Portland, Maine...
by Sharon Hall | Feb 22, 2016 | Tombstone Tuesday
She was born on September 8, 1796 in Virginia and moved with her family to Spartanburg, South Carolina at the age of three, an event she remembered vividly in 1902 when interviewed by the Dallas Morning News. John Scott was a farmer and the father of three sons and...
by Sharon Hall | Feb 12, 2016 | Feisty Females
If ever a person of the fairer sex could be called a “renaissance woman” it may have been Sarah Jane Ames. When Sarah died in 1926 she was hailed as one of Boone County, Illinois’s “most virile, energetic, and withal most interesting citizens”. She was born Sarah Jane...
by Sharon Hall | Feb 3, 2016 | Ghost Town Wednesday
This ghost town in northeast Cherokee County was first known as “Skin Tight”. According to legend the community got that name after cattle buyer and merchant Henry L. Reeves opened a store. It’s believed the name was due either to Reeves’ “close trading tactics”...
by Sharon Hall | Jan 18, 2016 | Tombstone Tuesday
Carbon Petroleum Dubbs was born in Franklin, Pennsylvania to parents Jesse and Jennie (Chapin) Dubbs on June 24, 1881. Jesse was born in the same county (Venango) in 1856, around the time the country’s first oil was discovered, and grew up during the early boom...