by Sharon Hall | Feb 1, 2018 | Digging History Magazine
The February issue of Digging History Magazine has been posted and is available for purchase here: February 2018 It’s winter and it’s all (mostly) about snow. Who knew snow had so much history — 52 pages packed with lots of history, footnotes and...
by Sharon Hall | Mar 29, 2016 | Ghost Town Wednesday
This area of Texas is home to just a handful of residents these days, but once boasted a population of four thousand. The town was named for Colonel (later General) William R. Shafter, commander at Fort Davis, and located about eighteen miles north of Presidio. It...
by Sharon Hall | Mar 24, 2016 | Far-Out Friday
I ran across this intriguing subject while researching an early Surname Saturday article about the Pimple surname. I found several references to so-called “death by pimple” and researched further. Clearly, the problem was due to lack of an effective way to treat...
by Sharon Hall | Mar 14, 2016 | Military History Monday
During World War I they were officially known as the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit, but more informally known as “Hello Girls”. The United States had been reluctant to join its European allies in the conflict, but when Germany began an all-out effort...
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...
by Sharon Hall | Nov 24, 2015 | Ghost Town Wednesday
Gold was first discovered near the Idaho border in eastern Oregon in 1884 by Lon Simmons. The town of Cornucopia, which in Latin means “Horn of Plenty”, sprung up – said to have been named after the mining town of Cornucopia, Nevada. In July of 1885 five hundred men...
