1908

Recently I was looking for a couple items in the microfilm rolls of The Rensselaer Republican. As I scrolled through the roll for 1908, I found a couple of items unrelated to what I was searching for but which I thought interesting.

Rensselaer has had quite a number of newspapers in its history. In 1908 two of them merged.



On the same page as the article above was a report of a basketball game. (There was no separate sports section back then. ) The way that the play was described was a lot different from how games are reported today.



Rensselaer once had two bus companies. It is unclear from the article if the vehicles were horse drawn or motorized; the early 20th Century saw the transition from animal to machine. My guess is that these were still horse drawn. The readers must have known where the route was. I assume the guests were traveling from the train depot and the hotels.

I do not know if the sale described below went through. Various sites say that the Gifford railroad was sold to the Monon after Gifford's death in 1913. The track was abandoned in 1935 and few traces of it remain. Note the comment at the end saying that the railroad would have made more sense if it had started from Rensselaer rather than McCoysburg. However, the railroad mostly was built on land that Benjamin Gifford owned and he did not own the land directly north of Rensselaer.



Every few years the Iroquois River has a serious flood. What is interesting in this account is how hard it is to make sense of the landmarks that the people of the day all knew.

Between 1900 and 1910 many people from Rensselaer moved west. Most were farmers looking for land and there was still cheap land available in Plains of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Below are two accounts a people who moved to South Dakota that were published on the same page of the Rensselaer Republican.

Many of these people wanted to keep in touch with what was happening back in Rensselaer so they subscribed to one of the Rensselaer papers and they often sent accounts back of how things were going.