November Gleanings in Coffeyville: Singing Schools, Chautauquas, and Standard Time
27 Nov 1880
A little snow fell Tuesday night.
Venison, from the Nation, is in market.
Ice thick enough for skating.
Prof. Lewis, of Indiana, is conducting a singing school in the schoolhouse.
Twenty-four teams, driven by Osage, came in Thursday for supplies. Ten years ago these same Osage were the proprietors of all the region round about Coffeyville.
No one here remembers such a cold snap. We have been here ten years and never knew it as cold in this month.
The police court was occupied all one day this week in the trial of a lewd woman keeping a bawdy house. She was convicted, and refused to pay the fine. It was too cold to put her in the city jail, so she had to be guarded in the courtroom.
The city council, at a meeting held last Wednesday, resolved to erect a [new] city jail as soon as possible. It was also resolved that if the woman Newman would leave town her fine would be remitted.
The winter of 1880-81 became known as “The Long Winter,” and it was the one Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about in the book of the same name. The Coffeeville newspaper editor was correct in that there hadn’t been a winter in his ten years in town that was as cold. It also came to be known as the “Hard Winter” and the “Starvation Winter.” However, the winter of 1886 would have a greater impact on Kansas, with thousands of cattle freezing to death on the prairies.
The item about the bawdy house notwithstanding….the hottest place a respectable girl could be was the singing school. This was one of the few acceptable ways for young people to mingle with the opposite sex and without parental presence. It was all the rage in the nineteenth century; in fact, Almanzo Wilder courted Laura Ingalls at a singing school.
The singing school met for a set number of weeks and participants indeed learned music. Traveling teachers, such as “Prof. Lewis of Indiana,” taught the basics of music theory and sight singing with ‘shape notes’ - such as triangles, half-circles and rectangles - which was thought to make it easier to read music. Participants scraped up 75 cents or so to attend. The idea was to improve singing in church, but secular songs were also learned. After Prof. Lewis led a performance of children in December the Coffeeville editor was hoping he would stay and continue his work in town.
5 Nov 1881
Politics are lively.
Eggs are very scarce.
Election next Tuesday.
Winter wheat all sewn.
Those who attended the mush and milk social at Mrs. Read’s Monday night report a large attendance and general good time.
Died at the home of her parents, Miss Missouri Cockeril, aged 19 years, 1 month and 19 days.
I have a blogpost from December 2022 about the mush and milk parties.
You have to love a name like “Missouri.” There was a girl named Iowa Geddes living in Fawn Creek Township. Missouri worked at a hotel in Coffeyville “for many years,” young as she was, and was described as an intelligent and modest girl. Unfortunately, the death of young adults was all-too-common.
3 November 1883
Thanksgiving is coming.
Wild duck shooting good.
Buckwheat cakes are in order.
Holiday goods will soon be coming in.
Just received a lot of notions, bustles and hoop skirts at Kauffman & Co.
Thanksgiving rarely got much of a "write-up" in the Coffeyville newspaper in this era, other than reminders that it was coming. The president announced the date of the holiday each year. In the December 1st 1883 edition of the newspaper, the editor, William A. Peffer, Jr., joked that the reason Thanksgiving came in the latter part of November was that elections were finally over with.
Some items in the Coffeyville paper hint that Thanksgiving wasn't quite the family feast celebrated today. That year, Thanksgiving meant a day off from school for kids, but businesses were reported to operate normal hours. The ladies of the Methodist Episcopal Church gave a "New England Supper and entertainment" at Well's Hall. A New England supper was a long-time traditional church fundraiser and featured baked beans and brown bread. The People's Protection Society ("Colored") also organized a festival in the Talbot building that evening. I could not find more information about this organization.
17 Nov 1883
Turkeys are fattening.
Lots of corn coming in.
This November air is good to “brace up” on.
Watches are now being made of the 24 o’clock system, soon to be adopted by some of the leading railroads.
It would appear that horse thieves are becoming somewhat numerous.
The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, which was recently organized in Coffeyville, is reported to be in a flourishing condition, with a good number of members.
It has been said that several young couples have been sitting up to see the comet.That’s the way they “comet over” the old folks, for the celestial wanderer is not expected to be visible until about Christmas.
Did the Coffeyville editor know that the time change he spoke of would take place the very next day, November 18, 1883? On that day, the nation’s railroads began using a standard time system using four time zones. Within each zone, clocks were synchronized. Prior to this, each town set their own time by when the sun was directly overhead mid-day. Once train travel was common, this created problems. Going to a train station one might need to read a number of schedules to determine when to catch a train. Within Indiana alone there were 23 local times; there were over 144 local time zones from coast to coast.
In the 15 November 1879 Coffeyville Weekly, there was this item: “The railroad time has been turned back twenty minutes. They were running on Hannibal time and changed to Kansas City time.” This is a small example that was probably a minor inconvenience, but there were serious consequences, such as train collisions, that were caused by time differentials.
Most of the country adopted railroad time, but it did not become official until 1918 with the passage of federal legislation.
The Chautauqua Movement began in the 1870s when two Methodist ministers rented a campsite to start a summer school for Sunday school teachers. The intent was educational, not religious. It expanded to include a correspondence class intended for the working and middle class called the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. Many towns, especially those with no secondary education, created “chautauquas,” where people met for learning and self-improvement. It was called “the people’s college.” One could travel to the Chautauqua Institute in New York, but especially in the Midwest there were traveling chautauquas known as assemblies. In Kansas, the first and longest-lasting assembly was in Ottawa, about 120 miles away. Coffeyville eventually hosted an assembly for four years.
An article in the Ottawa paper explained that the “scheme” consisted of a four-year reading plan embracing the “principal subjects of a College curriculum,” yet would only require 40 minutes of reading daily. The local circle, such as the one that formed in Coffeyville, gave participants a chance to work on the course together. It included written reports and exams. Participants would receive a “diploma.” How exciting this must have seemed to many with five or six years at the one-room schoolhouse.
Those who attended the Chautauqua in Ottawa could rent tents or rooms. In addition to lectures and orations from nationally-known figures, there were stirring daily concerts. In the summer of 1883 the Ottawa Chautauqua cost ten cents a day, with four lectures given daily and plenty of musical performances. The newspaper described three thousand people enthralled by a lecture on hydrogen.
Chautauquas began to wane in the 1920s, with more competition for people’s time. They continued into the 1930s.
I’m not sure what comet was expected in December 1883. There was a particularly bright comet in 1882, and a comet noted in Mexico in August 1883. Maybe this was just a good way of hoodwinking parents into allowing one to sit up late with a “beau or belle,” which seems to be what the editor implied.
Sources:
Blakemore, Erin. “The Hottest Social Scene in the 19th Century American South,” History Channel, 22 Aug, 2018, https://www.history.com/news/the-hottest-social-scene-in-the-19th-century-american-south
Bousted, Barbara Mayes, Martha D. Shulski and Steven D. Hilberg. “The Long Winter of 1880/81,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 101, No. 6 (1 June 2020), https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/101/6/bamsD190014.xml
Ramirez, Ainissa. “The Day Clocks Changed Across America: What Happened When the U.S. Adopted Standardized Time,” Time, 18 Nov 2019, https://time.com/5730146/standardized-time/
Robinson, W. Stitt. “Chautauqua Then and Now,” Kansas History, Summer 1999, https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/1999summer_robinson.pdf
“The Assembly,” Ottawa Weekly Republic 5 July 1883, p. 1.
“History of Time Zones,” Bureau of Transportation Statistics, U.S. Department of Transportation, https://www.bts.gov/geospatial/time-zones
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