World War I Centennial

The Jasper County Historical Society is celebrating the centennial of the ending of WWI this year. Currently they have a display of WWI items with local connections at their Museum. Most of the items are paper items and documents, but there are a few exceptions, such as the uniform and trunk shown below.

 They also have a gas mask that a local soldier brought back from the war.

 One of their WWI treasures is this cabinet.

The card explains why the local historical society is proud of this cabinet and the records it contained.

 At one time there were hundreds of thousands of these cards, but almost all were destroyed after the war. For some reason, no one bothered to destroy ours.

 As mentioned in a previous post, the Jasper County Historical Society has scheduled a three part series called "World War I at Home and Abroad." Part 1 will be part of the monthly meeting at the Historical Society Museum on Tuesday, February 20 at 6:30 pm. Part 2 will be held at the Rensselaer Library on March 7 at 6:00 pm and will focus on food and rationing during WWI. The last part will also be at the Rensselaer Library. It will discuss how the men and women of Jasper County served in the war. Its date is April 24 at 6:00 pm. Everyone is welcome and refreshments will be served.

Our roller-coaster weather continues. Most of the snow melted late last week, but on Saturday evening we got a couple inches of wet snow, ideal for making snowmen.

 By Sunday afternoon much of it had melted and today (Monday) the rain is melting most of the rest.

A couple post ago I posted a picture of the fog that we had on Thursday. Below is the same view without the fog. Can you tell that it was taken from the parking lot in front of the hospital?

I had been visiting Maple Street on the north side of the railroad tracks every few days to view the cleanup from the train derailment. This week I was surprised to find that in the block to the west of the train derailment cleanup a new building was going up. It looks like it will be for storage and will probably look much like the building to its west.

 The second of the Elza Street apartment buildings is almost framed in. Soon there will be no progress that shows on the outside.

The Internet keeps changing life as we know it. I have finally started downloading books and reading them on a device. Brick and mortar stores are closing because people are buying more on-line. I recently read that banking is being impacted, as people increasingly use on-line banking and as a result branch banks are being closed in record numbers.

Addendum: Both yesterday and today I heard and then saw sandhill cranes flying overhead.

The days are getting longer and the angle of the sun is getting noticeably higher.