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PAPERS OF 1889 FOUND IN CHEST
[Welland –Port Colborne Evening Tribune, 24 March 1947]
A report on immigration by Sir Charles Tupper, one of the Fathers of Confederation, was amongst items printed in an edition of the Welland Telegraph, of March 14, 1889, found by Jess Barnhart, Humberstone, in the bottom of an old chest owned by his father, the late Ben Barnhart of Bertie township. The Dominion, said Sir Charles, was not a country for loafers and idlers.
Noted as one of the harbingers of spring was “a superabundance of soft, slimy, sticky liquid mud that sticketh closer than a mortgage.”
One advertisement announced a special meeting of the country council to consider erection of a jailer’s and turnkey’s residence.
A news item told of a Presbyterian congregational meeting to hear a report of a committee to devise ways and means for the erection of a new church. The report was read by the late T.D. Cowper, who was later to become Crown Attorney.
There were advertisements in those days for roadsters, but they didn’t refer to the horseless carriage.
An 1888 edition, reporting a Welland county council meeting showed cost of maintenance for inmates at the Home for the Aged to be $1.85 per week. The report also gave details of the construction of barns and buildings.
Cheese in those days was 12 ½ c a pound and there no shortages of sugar or lard. Merchants invited customers to buy “sugar by the barrel and lard by the tub.”
News was personal, as may be gathered from the following: “A case of domestic infidelity in a local family occasioned some exaggerated rumors this week, but as the parties are again caroled under one roof, vowing eternal constancy, there is no occasion for further gossip.”
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