Meeting Monday February 20, 2006

There will be a meeting of the Elgin Historical Association next Monday evening at 7 pm in the Whitten Fellowship Hall of the First Baptist Church in Elgin. The topic for discussion by Donna Snowden and Marc Holm is the restoration of the log cabin in Memorial Park. It has been badly vandalized in the past. Marc will also present some new fund-raising ideas. I assume there will be a Board Meeting at 6 pm as usual.

Meeting in Rockne

Several of us drove down to Rockne to a meeting of the Bastrop County coordinating committee for historical societies. For such a small community they have a very impressive park with two pioneer log cabins, a dogtrot and the recently assembled John Lehmann cabin. Their museum is in a new building adjoining the cabins. The museum was completely financed by contributions from people with roots in Rockne from all over the country. We're impressed.


See the Rockne Historical Society website

Railroad Time Signal Device

Charlie Oden came out from Austin this afternoon and brought us this Time Device to add to our railroad collection. This one was used to receive and transmit the correct time in the "N" telegraph office of the Southern Pacific Railroad in San Antonio. It transmitted the time to other stations on the Southern Pacific, the Missouri Pacific and the MKT in the area. It received the signal from a national observatory, according to Charlie. At every station they had to be within 30 seconds of the correct time. In Elgin they received the correct time signal in the Telegraph Tower (now sadly gone) and people from town would call to get the correct time. Charlie said "We answered with something like this: It is now nine thirty one and fifteen seconds right (pause)......now" Charlie and many other Elgin men learned to operate the telegraph in the Elgin tower under N R Radke.

1916 Elgin Courier CD available

Well, here I sit on Super Bowl Sunday. The game is about to begin and I am not expecting too many museum visitors.

So I'll spend the time reading the 1916 Elgin Courier. As many Dustpan readers know, our project to photograph every page of our weekly newspaper, has been going for some months now. Lucille takes the pictures and others (the factotum, Barbara and soon we hope, Judy) work them up into readable .pdf files. The 1916 edition has just been published on CD and is available for purchase in the museum for a measly 10 bucks (+$2 to mail it to you.)

As usual the 1916 newspaper is filled with news of Elgin doings as well as those in surrounding rural communities: Siloam, McDade, the Knobbs, Manor, Kimbro, New Sweden, Lawhon, Fair Oaks, Pee Le and other places. 1916 was the year compulsory education was instituted in Texas and the details are all in the Courier (May 6 p4). Every child between 8 and 14 was required to attend school. Exceptions included those who lived more than 2.5 miles from a school for children of the same race and color. That little phrase says a lot. In that same issue an announcement was made that J O Smith, the Courier editor, was putting his name forward for a position in the Texas Legislature. It was a national election year too and the Courier reports the national results in November. Captain F S Wade celebrated his 80th birthday on November 5.

Not much else for today. How are the Seahawks doing, I wonder?

An interesting visitor

Tuesday Ruth Ellen Gruber came into the Depot. She is related to Joe Simon, the much missed proprietor of Simon's Department store, and was looking for details for her family genealogy. We showed her a picture we have in our collection of Joe back in the 1940s and found a little bit of printed material about him and his store.

Ruth is a writer and a very accomplished one. She writes travel pieces and other articles for the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and other newspapers and has written at least two books on Jewish heritage in Europe. She lives in Italy. Read more about her at her web site:www.ruthellengruber.com

She is currently working on a project/book that looks into European images of the American West. Our little museum does have interesting visitors!