August Gleanings from Coffeyville: Loose hogs, Emancipation Celebrations and the Joy of Ice

 

If you read any of the other “ Gleanings,” posts, you might recall that these “seen-around-town” sort of items were a regular column in the Coffeyville, Kansas newspapers, and many newspapers, in the 1870s and 1880s. I am compiling samples from Coffeyville for each month.

12 August 1876

                               Getting a free chunk of ice from the iceman was a great treat.

Ice 5 cents per pound.

Prepare for prairie fires.

Whooping cough season past.

And still the hogs run at large.

The law prohibited the keeping of saloons open on Sundays. 

And yet the new church is not seated. Why is it thus?

Oh the Hog, the Hog, the beautiful hog, that wanders and grunts all over our streets.

Hay making is in full blast.

It is not good policy for boys to be running the streets carousing and hollering at night. 

In this school district last year there were 290 children; 209 were enrolled in the schools, average attendance was 105. 

That five cent price for a pound of ice looks like nothing. But in rough equivalency to 2023 dollars, one pound cost $14.25. A luxury! No wonder a chip of ice from the ice man's wagon was a big deal.

In my January 2023 "Gleanings" I wrote about the ice harvest. It was an amazing industry that employed thousands of men in New York alone. In Kansas and in other rural communities, it came at a time when farm work dried up and was a welcome source of income. As the ice industry grew, it changed American's eating habits. Food quality and public health improved as a result. Doctors began using ice in hospitals to lower body temperature. In cities like New York, city hospitals issued tickets to the poor for free ice. Temperance workers started free ice water give-aways as a counter to the ice-cold beer. The ice wagon was a ubiquitous sight in cities in summer.

Incidentally, in Everett, Washington, this was one of my grandfather's first jobs. Ray Krause drove an ice truck delivering 50 pound blocks of ice for people's "ice box."

See my post, "Hogs and Dogs" for more information about why the editor noted that hogs were running the streets of Coffeyville.

6 Aug 1881

Grapes are getting ripe.

The mercury ranged from 95 degrees to 105 degrees this week. 

Potatoes are about the only vegetable in the market right now.

A number of men from the Nation, with some of the men from Coffeyville, got on a drunk Monday night…Their program consisted chiefly in hollering and firing off pistols. 

It is expected that a moonlight picnic will be given east of the river some night next week. 

Seven covered wagons were on the square at one time last Saturday.

Quite a number of colored people from this city attended the Emancipation celebration in Independence Thursday. 

      Emancipation Day was celebrated in the West Indies and in U.S. abolitionist communities on August 1st even before the Civil War. It of course was in commemoration of the emancipation of enslaved people in the West Indies, and in the antebellum days, in hopes of manumission in the United States.

After the Civil War, the date shifted to September 22 as Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862.

Emancipation celebrations were once a big deal in Kansas. They did not have a set date and were celebrated at the end of July, early in August or in September, depending on the community. In the 1880s they were quasi-religious affairs with programs beginning with a procession from the town square to a grove or park, opening with prayer, reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, and an oration by a special speaker and lectures, largely by ministers. This was interspersed with singing performances and typically a cornet band. The 1883 celebration in Blue Rapids, Kansas, population about 820, featured Charles Henry Langston, an abolitionist and civil rights leader in Kansas. He would become poet Langston Hughes’ grandfather. In the evening, the “colored” glee club gave “an entertainment” at the Blue Rapids opera house with a 25 cent admission fee. 

     By the 1890s, the celebration became more of a festival or small fair with baseball games, horse races, sack races, free barbecue dinners and parades. One small community had a float with 50 little girls dressed in white and singing. Trains offered excursion prices. But they were more than just a fun gathering with the reading of Lincoln's words. They were also, as one historian said, "political forums to protest against the numerous forms of overt and covert racism perpetrated against them."

     By the 1950s a newspaper described the celebrations as “almost forgotten” history.

28 Aug 1886

Money is scarce.

There is a dearth of news.

The stonecutters on the Verdigris bridge of the D, M & A quit work on Monday until their claim of pay could be adjusted. 

The dust has been so dense recently as to send terror to the heart of the average young man  who contemplated a buggy ride with his best girl. Let us pray for rain. 

Farmers and teamsters complain of a lack of accommodations for hitching and watering on the Plaza. The matter ought to be looked after.

Ben Earnest brought four ears of corn in…on Saturday.. The four ears  weighed an even five pounds. 

A small boy was severely kicked by a horse that was hitched in front of one of the stores on the Plaza on Tuesday evening….there is hardly another town…in the state where small children are allowed to roam the business thoroughfares alone and unattended and unprotected to the extent that they are here. Our people seem to have forgotten that Coffeyville is no longer a quiet little village….Keep the little ones off the Plaza. 

A view of the Coffeyville plaza

27 Aug 1887

New moon.

Glorious rains.

There promises to be a plentiful quail crop this year.

There is a demand for hands to cut corn.

We made a visit to the high school building yesterday to see the improvements…The ceilings are painted, walls kalsomined, blackboards made new, woodwork cleaned, floors scrubbed, the whole building thoroughly renovated….citizens are invited to inspect the building.

We hope that with the opening of school on the 4th …the parents of our city will see that their children are started to school, and will keep them there every day…unless sickness prevents. There is no worse school for boys than the streets.

The colored people of this city are arranging for a grand celebration on the 22nd of September in remembrance of Abraham Lincoln’s first proclamation of emancipation. 

Sources:

LaRue, Paul. "Emancipation Day," Black History Bulletin, Vol. 75, No. 2, Theme: "At the Crossroads of Freedom and Equality: The Emancipation Proclamation and the March on Washington," (Fall 2012), pp. 20-23.

White, Richard. "Civil Rights Agitation: Emancipation Days in Central New York in the 1880s," The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 78 No. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 16-24.

Newspapers:

"Program for Aug. 4," Blue Rapids Times (Blue Rapids, Kansas), 2 Aug 1883, p. 3.

"Emancipation Day Schedule," Garnett Republican-Plaindealer (Garnett, Kansas), 26 Sept. 1884, p. 1.

"Emancipation Celebration," Wichita Beacon, 15 July 1885, p. 4.

Largest Gathering of Black People in Kansas: Wichita Beacon, 28 July 1885, p. 5.

"Hip! Hip! Hurrah! Emancipation Celebration," Fort Scott Weekly Monitor (Fort Scott, Kansas), 26 Aug 1886, p. 8.

"Celebration By Colored Citizens," Coffeyville Weekly Journal (Coffeyville, Kansas), 27 Aug 1887, p. 3.

Preparations for Emancipation Day: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 25 Aug 1888, p. 5.

"Emancipation Celebration, Aims, Aug. 1st," Topeka State Journal 25 July 1896, p. 4.

"John S. Dawson Delivers an Historical Address Before the Colored Citizens of Nicodemus, Kas., August 1," The Topeka Plaindealer, 4 Aug 1899, p. 1.

Successful Program: Western Herald (Jetmore, Kansas), 28 Sept 1899, p. 4.

O'Donnell, Edward T. "City Lore: The Dawn of New York's Ice Age," New York Times, 31 July 2005.

Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023