Ironing (by Abraham Lincoln)

My mother used this iron and another one without the wood snap-on handle. You could set this on a screaming hot stove, snap the handle off, and let it get hot and then put the handle back on and use it to iron with. She used this iron and others to iron a bushel basket of clothes for Herb Hamel—after she had pumped the water, heated it, and washed the clothes and starched the shirts that needed to be starched. The irons were set on the hot cook stove and eventually got as hot as the stove. She had an old towel laying on the ironing board that she set the hot iron on just after removing it from the stove to get any dirt off. Then she would iron as long as the iron was hot. If the shirt was too wrinkled to iron and get them out, she would sprinkle them with water in a sprinkling bottle and roll them up and stick them away until the whole item was equally damp enough to iron. Ironing was a long process and it was a hot job in the summertime. To heat up the cook stove also heated up the entire kitchen and that made standing over an ironing board a real mental challenge. She got $3.00 for washing and ironing his bushel basket of clothes. ................... and for a shocking story from 1885 Greenville, click to continue reading.

HORRIBLE DISCOVERY

Last Saturday, while sawing up some logs in a clearing near Gordon, this county, the workmen came across a log that was hollow. They ran a pole into it and found that the hollow extended, apparently, only a few feet. They then sawed it off where they thought it was sound, and when the task was completed they made the horrible discovery that they had sawed through a dead man’s head just above the eyes. No one in the neighborhood I met him, and the body had evidently been in the log for some time, though it is an unsolved mystery how he got there. A sum of money amounting to about four hundred dollars was found in the dead stranger’s pockets. The find created a good deal of excitement in the city (1885 Greenville newspaper account).