A New Account of an Old Story

Thanks to Mehoopany Public Library librarian Ina Hunter for sending me a clipping from the Wednesday, February 10, 2010 Wyoming County Press Examiner. Here is the text, taken from their website (follow this link to read it from their site):

"Mehoopany was visited by a disastrous fire on Sunday night, which the citizens had to fight with buckets in below zero temperature and a strong wind blowing. The fire started in the Gaylord House, owned by a Pole named Laborinski and run by his son-in-law, a man named Blazes. Before the fire was checked it had spread to the residence of John Gaylord and thence to the store of Charles E. Jennings, with Odd Fellows hall overhead, then to two dwelling houses owned by Frank Jennings and occupied by Frank Hobbs and Henry June: next to a house belonging to F. C. Denison, estate and occupied by Grant Krewson, a Liveryman. A two story wash house at the rear of the hotel, a wagon shed, the hotel barn and a barn belonging to Frank Jennings were also burned. The total loss will reach nearly $20,000."

Commemoration

We remember the family of my Great-Grandparents, Charles Jennings and Mary Grist Jennings, and the frigid night their world caught on fire -- one hundred years ago this weekend.

Two in a Valley

by Frederic Brush

(from Songs of the Susquehanna)

We toiled for years together by the streams

That wear and shift the glittering sands of gain.

I called him friend, thinking I knew him, well --

His pleasure and his pain.

So like the variant seasons we passed on

Through vales of gloom and radiant avatars;

Wed, buried, quarreled, fell and rose again

With the abiding scars.

Till, in one hour of flame-lit flood and fear,

Where chance and choice and destiny had part,

I broke through all that I had known to feel,

The red bands of his heart.