Thursday, November 23, 1899
Joseph McNeel’s choice herd of calves has been seriously depleted by six from black leg. The disease has also appeared on Col. Gay’s farm adjoining, and two have died.
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Bright Farrier, secretary of the Farmer’s Home Fire Insurance Company, was in Marlinton last week adjusting the loss on Col. Levi Gay’s barn. Charles Arbuckle accompanied him.
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The name of the Indian Princess Pocahontas is popular with Marlinton enterprises. We have already The Pocahontas Times, the Pocahontas Bank, The Pocahontas Hotel, the Pocahontas Bargain House, the Pocahontas Furniture Company and the Pocahontas Development Company.
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A magazine used by the Bradford nitroglycerine factory to store the explosive, located at Gibonsburg, Ohio, exploded Monday afternoon. The shock was felt within a radius of 40 miles, and the effect of the explosion in the immediate vicinity was terrific.
The magazine is located in the woods a quarter of a mile from any dwelling and this alone prevented great loss of life. Benjamin Card, a driver of a stock wagon, had brought a load of 720 quarts of nitroglycerine from the factory at Bradford and was unloading it when the explosion occurred. Just how it happened will never be learned. Card and two horses driven by him received the full effect of the explosion. He was blown almost to atoms, only a few shreds of his body being found and pieces of horseflesh were hurled several miles.
It is supposed that Card had a companion, but this is not positively known. The explosion made a hole seven feet deep in the solid rock, and trees in the vicinity were torn to pieces. People within a mile of the place were knocked down, pictures fell from the walls, dishes were thrown from cupboards and houses moved from their foundation. All the windows in Gibsonburg were broken. There were about 1,500 quarts of glycerin in the magazine and on the wagon. – Baltimore Sun
THE HOG LAW
We print on the front page a copy of the Harrison County hog law enacted by the legislature of 1872-73, but which for some inexplicable reason has never been embodied in the Code, as it is pronounced by good law-yers to be the law of the land.
This will be the law in Edray district after the next meeting of the county court, the necessary petition having been signed and made ready for presentation.
A more radical measure to put down the hog nuisance could not be imagined, and the owner of the hog which has gotten out and done damage seems absolutely helpless under the law. A hog can destroy in a short time many times its own worth and make the owner liable for all damage to real and personal property.
There is apparently one defect in the law in that it does not provide anyway of fixing the amount of damage done. The damage a hog might do in rooting up and or tearing down growing corn is hard to reduce to dollars and cents, and when the hogs are proceeded against in the summary manner provided, it will make the plaintiff put on his thinking cap to know how much of the proceeds to keep and how much to pay into the school fund.
THE TEA CREEK HOUSE
By the courtesy of Forest and Stream we are able this week to reproduce a cut of the Tea Creek Club House, which in former years was the Mecca of visiting sportsmen.
It is the last house in Pocahontas county on Williams River. Formerly there was nothing beyond it for fifteen or twenty miles except a wilderness. A blazed trail turned off short around the corner and led over Yew Mountain, by which half the distance could be saved on the sixty-mile journey from Marlinton to Addison, but that it was never in general use speaks eloquently of the hardships to be experienced on the cut.
It was down this trail that Quince Harris came one day. He was the only noted moonshiner we ever knew in Pocahontas. He had determined never to be taken, and always went armed to the teeth. He afterwards died a horrible death in this county from gangrene. He amputated a toe with a chisel, fearing that to call a doctor would lead to his detection.
On the day we speak of, he came walking around the Tea Creek House upon four or five hunters sitting in front of it with repeating rifles in their hands. He was visibly affected for several moments, and a painful silence was broken by one of the party remarking: “Why, how are you, Quince?” A distinguished lawyer who had defended him in the federal court recognized him and put him at his ease.
He had thought that he had walked into a trap…
