By admin,Fred Fink
Copyright nhgazette
News and Notes
Jeremiah O’Neil, one of a gang of four white loafers who undertook to give two colored men an unprovoked thrashing in Providence, R.I., Sept. 15th, was fatally shot by one of the colored men.
There was a free fight in the Westminster Presbyterian church at St. Paul, Minn., Sept. 16th, over the alleged immorality of the late pastor. The police quelled the riot.
Charles Kinsel of Philadelphia is experimenting with an air-sailing ship.
The mugwump bosses of New York have ordered their followers to vote against Hill for governor.
A full-blooded negro testified in a rich Irish brogue before a Brooklyn court the other day. He was born in Ireland.
A good file is now a part of a tramp’s outfit. He finds it useful when there is a barbed wire fence between him and something desirable.
At Manchester, Mo., Andre Rhuel, a farmer, was thrashed by Fred Fink, for talking about Mrs. Annie Fink, Fred’s sister. Rhuel shot both the Finks dead, and then killed himself.
Large quantities of crude opium are imported into British Columbia, paying a small duty. It is then manufactured and sent to the Canadian border, and from there smuggled into the United States.
The Old Colony railroad officials are much exercised over several recent attempts to wreck trains by obstructing the tracks.
The doctors’ evidence in the matter of the Whitechapel murder gave it as his opinion that the mutilation was committed after the death of the victim, by a person having accurate anatomical knowledge, and for the purpose of obtaining possession of some parts which had disappeared.
The missionary societies are clamoring for an inquiry to be made into the charges against the late Maj. Barttelot and Henry M. Stanley. The charges are cruelty toward the natives and a readiness to shoot them for disobedience.
Patrick McCarthy, the Biddeford florist who left his green house and family so mysteriously more than a year ago, causing the community to believe him dead or temporarily insane, has returned. He says he went away to get rid of domestic complications.
Since the building of the big Deer street sewer the smelt fishing of the north millpond has revived, and the millbridge is now at favorable times of the tide lined with amateur fisherman of all ages, reminding one of old times, before the breweries polluted the pond and made the sewer a necessity.
There are but fifteen prisoners in the Portsmouth jail, and most of them are waiting the October term of the supreme court.
The long-talked-of meat refrigerator for Swift & Co., of Chicago, will be erected on the corner of Vaughan and Green streets in this city immediately. The contracts have been awarded, the mason work to Mr. Enoch J. Connor and the carpenter work to Mr. Joseph W. Marden.
Quite a large party of Gypsies were encamped on Lafayette road, just this side of the bridge over Sagamore creek, Monday evening.
The sun, or something which was taken to be the sun, was seen by several people in this city on Sunday; there was some doubt as to its identity, but the weight of opinion seemed to be in favor of the theory that it was the sun.
The weather the past week was of the most inferior quality, light rains alternating with heavy ones nearly all the time excepting on Wednesday, when it heldup long enough for the firement to parade. It was the week of the harvest moon, according to the almanacs, and possibly that moon was around; her presence could not be authoritatively determined, at all events, as the heavens were not to be seen. Of what use a harvest moon could be, with nothing but water to harvest, is not apparent.
A correspondent—one of our most prominent and respected citizens, by the way—in a communication makes complaint of the lack of energy displayed by the police. Having no fruit trees in our garden for the hoodlums to plunder, and no front steps on which loafers can conveniently congregate o’ nights, we cannot speak from experience in regard to the nuisances in those directions of which he complains, but we can assert that never within the past twenty years has the sidewalk-loafer nuisance been more prevalent and annoying than during the last few months.
A young American eagle is on exhibition at Michael J. Ryan’s place on Water street. The bird was captured off Thatcher’s island by one of the crew of a coal steamer which arrived in this port on Saturday, having been blown off the land by the gale of Friday, and settled in the steamer’s rigging for a rest that night. The bird eats beef with evident relish, and is now quite gentle, but when age comes on he may develop the same qualities as the nation of which he is the emblem, and show an uncomfortable readiness to engage in a row.
There were one barque, one coal-barge, one coal steamer, two four-masted schooners, a number of three-masted schooners, several brickers, lumber-loaded vessels, and a lot of fishing vessels, in the harbor during the storm of Monday and Tuesday.
“Old Dr. Baker,” as he is familiarly known in these parts, is on his annual circuit around here. The old gentleman has failed much since his last previous visit, judging from his looks as he wearily plods along under the heavy burdens of wares and weight of years. He seems an object of pity to all, though he does not ask it from any.
The New Hampshire Gazette, September 27, 1888
The Champion Bigamist
James W. Brown of Detroit, Mich., was on Sept. 25th found guilty of bigamy, the jury taking only four minutes to consider. Mr. Brown has been a very enterprising scoundrel, having since 1883 married thirty-three women, fifteen of whom were in court to testify against him, though only five of them, with five clergymen, were called on for testimony. It was shown that Brown’s method was to advertise for a housekeeper, select as a victim the one from among the applicants who pleased him most, and marry her as soon as possible. He would desert her after a few days.
The Texas notorious “lone highwayman” was shot and killed by a woman a few days ago.
Two more women were murdered in Whitechapel, London, on the night of Sept. 29th. They were both dissolute characters, and as in the case of the former mysterious murders of women in that locality their throats were cut, and they were disembowelled. The wildest terror exists in Whitechapel over the repeated crimes, while the police seem to be paralyzed.
Green cucumber rind cut thin is an efficient destroyer of cockroaches. They suck the juice from it with avidity, and it acts as a fatal poison with them.
The southern democrats in the house, who were so strongly opposed to the conferring of a pension upon Mrs. Sheridan, last Friday allowed to pass without objection a bill appropriating $25,000 [The equivalent of $850,126 today.] to the widow of a southern man, notwithstanding that the files of the southern claims commission, which had been called to their attention, furnished conclusive evidence of her husband’s disloyalty during the war. [Ten years after the end of the war, General Philip “Little Phil” Sheridan, 44, married Irene Rucker, 22. They had four children. Irene died in 1936, at 81, having never remarried. She said, “I would rather be the widow of Phil Sheridan than the wife of any man living.”]
Democratic Courtesy
Hon. Henry W. Blair, Unites States senator from New Hampshire, on Monday by special invitation addressed the republicans of Charlottesville, Albert county, Virginia, on the political issues of the campaign. As he commenced speaking, a democrat in the audience threw four rotten eggs at him, one after the other. The fellow was quickly arrested, and Gen. Blair, who years ago heard rebel bullets whistle around his head too often to be scared by a few democratic rotten eggs, after a brief and dignified reference to the outrage continued his discussion of the tariff.
There was a lively row in Dover on Sunday evening, between a number of the Italian laborers engaged on the new water works, and a party of Irishmen, in which several persons received ugly cuts and bruises. The evidence offered in the Dover police court Monday tended to show that the fight was due to an unprovoked attack upon a few of the Italians by some Irishmen.
Thomas Lynch, a tramp aged thirty years, who while drunk was breaking down the door of a house in Greenfield, Mass., in which there were only women, Sept. 26th, had his skull broken by a stone thrown at him by Michael Dorsey, aged seventy.
Two Irish priests have been sentenced each to six weeks’ imprisonment under the crimes act.
James Winsley, a young butcher of Ottawa, Ont., fell 1000 feet from a balloon on Sept. 27th, and was dashed to pieces.
Police Court
William Clark and Edward Pitts Philbrook, for drunkenness, were each fined $5, costs $6.90. From long practice, the parties named are able to get away with a $5 drunk every time they try, the average drunk being only a $3 one.
Ice was to be seen in shallow puddles in the roads and streets in this vicinity, Sunday morning.
The baby of farmer William Beattie, who lives on the banks of the Cimmaron river, Kansas, was carried off by an eagle. A search party found the infant dead and terribly mutilated.
A Tidal Water Wheel
The water wheel that runs the works of the Sagadahoc Fertilizer company, at Bowdoinham, Me., is probably the only one of its kind in existence. It is twenty-seven feet in diameter, with a foot of its rim out of water at high tide. The spokes are wide, and set diagonally, like the vanes of a windmill. It turns eighteen hours of the day by tide power, running one way with the flow, the other with the ebb. With one footfall of the tide this wheel gives about fifty horse power. – Industrial Journal
Mr. Wm. F. Fernald is getting out, in York, timber for the only ship that is likely to be built, the present season, on the Piscataqua. She will be a coastwise vessel of the famous “Gondola” type, and will be apt to do active service under command of Capt. Cheney, unless prevented by President Cleveland’s complications with the British government.
The New Hampshire Gazette, October 4, 1888
Our thanks to the Portsmouth Athenaeum, holder of the newspapers from which the items above were excerpted. – The Ed.
