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...
by Sharon Hall | Nov 24, 2015 | Tombstone Tuesday
Thomas Jefferson Pilgrim was born on December 4, 1804 in East Haddam, Connecticut, the first child of eleven born to Thomas and Dorcas (Ransom) Pilgrim. His family were devout Baptists and T.J. Pilgrim would spend a lifetime devoted to religious education. After...
by Sharon Hall | Nov 16, 2015 | Tombstone Tuesday
William D. Cobbledick was born in Whitley, Canada in 1849 and moved to Marshall, Michigan with his parents at the age of six months. While early records for William and his family are scarce, I believe his parents were John and Mary (Derbuiny?) Cobbledick. Other...
by Sharon Hall | Oct 30, 2015 | Far-Out Friday
October is the spookiest month of the year, so a story about gravesite dowsing seemed in order for Halloween Eve-Eve, I guess you could call it. The article title pretty much encompasses the range of opinion regarding the subject, although I have to say a brief...
by Sharon Hall | Oct 16, 2015 | Feisty Females
This headline introduced some fearless and celebrated women to the readers of the Milwaukee Journal in 1899: “What Man Has Done Women Can Do”. The author had written a recent article “about dependence being an old fashioned virtue and that the clinging ivy type of...
