1891

Pastor Martin J. Stover, 84, conducting services in the third church building, which, like the second one, was known as the "Church on the Rocks," because it sat on a rocky ledge overlooking the Sawkill (about ¾ mile east of our present location--that is, north of present-day Route 212, across from the country club). (To enlarge the picture, just click it.)

At the death of the treasurer, Morgan Lasher, his widow, Mary Helen Wolven Lasher, 46, was elected treasurer, the first woman officer of the CLC.

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Benjamin Harrison (Republican) was President. The newly elected 52nd Congress was in session. A dollar in that year would be worth $20.91 in 2006 for most consumable products.

Immigrants from the British Isles and western Europe (especially Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany)--the so-called "Old Immigrants," most of them boasting a comparatively high level of literacy and accustomed to some level of representative government, who were either Protestant (most of them) or Catholic, were arriving during this decade at an average annual rate of 111,000. The "New Immigrants," those from southern and eastern Europe (especially Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia), largely illiterate and impoverished, who tended to be either Catholic, Orthodox, or Jewish and who had little experience with representative government, were arriving at an annual rate of 184,700--two-thirds again as much as the Old Immigrants' rate, a fivefold proportionate increase from a decade earlier and twice as many in raw numbers. The New Immigrants huddled together in large cities, such as New York City and Chicago.

Solidly Democratic white supremacists held political power all over the South. Blacks (and poor whites as well) continued being forced into sharecropping and tenant farming; former slave masters were now bosses and landlords. Through the "crop-lien" system, the serflike small farmers could get food and supplies from storekeepers by agreeing to a lien on their expected crops, a lien they would never be able to fully pay off. The economically dependent blacks who tried to vote faced unemployment, eviction, and violence. The daily discrimination against blacks grew increasingly oppressive. "Jim Crow laws," systematic state-level legal codes of segregation, maintained a way of life for African Americans that was grotesquely inferior to that of whites. Blacks had inferior schools and assigned places on such public facilities as railroad cars, theaters, and restrooms. Blacks were continually assaulted by harsh reminders of their second-class citizenship, and the white supremacists dealt brutally with any black who dared to violate the customary racial code of conduct. Record numbers of blacks were lynched, often just for the "crime" of asserting themselves as equals.

The wheat crop that year was 612 million bushels, a fourfold increase in 25 years. The corn (maize) crop was 2 billion bushels, a 230% increase during the same period.

The food brokerage firm founded 26 years earlier by James K. Armby in Oakland, CA, became the Oakland Preserving Company.

L. (Lyman) Frank Baum, 34, publisher of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer in South Dakota and author of the "Baum's Bazaar" column in that paper, wrote an editorial on January 3, a few days after the Wounded Knee Massacre at the end of the preceding year, stating:

The peculiar policy of the government in employing so weak and vacillating a person as General Miles to look after the uneasy Indians, has resulted in a terrible loss of blood to our soldiers, and a battle which, at its best, is a disgrace to the war department. There has been plenty of time for prompt and decisive measures, the employment of which would have prevented this disaster.

The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.

An eastern contemporary, with a grain of wisdom in its wit, says that "when the whites win a fight, it is a victory, and when the Indians win it, it is a massacre."(3)

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Quoted from "L. Frank Baum's Editorials on the Sioux Nation" by A. Waller Hastings, Northern State University, Aberdeen, SD (http://www.northern.edu/hastingw/baumedts.htm) (Close)

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The population of Canada was 4.8 million, only a 30% increase over two decades earlier.

French poet Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud, who 15 years earlier had been disappointed in his hopes for a new, amoral society and for the lack of acceptance of his unconventional poetry, and had gone into business as a North African merchant and trader, died very wealthy at the age of 35.

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