Granby Drummer (https://granbydrummer.com/category/history/page/9/)
In 1872, the first Arbor Day was celebrated in Nebraska. J. Sterling Morton, a resident of Nebraska City, was a tree enthusiast who recognized that the lack of trees, and all their benefits, in tree-bare Nebraska Territory was a serious deficit to the land and its people. When he became secretary of the territory, he was in a position to advocate strongly for the widespread planting of trees and is credited for bringing the holiday into being.
Although spring is in the near future, we can almost certainly expect another winter storm in late February or March. There is always the possibility of an April Fool’s Day blizzard as we had in 1997. While we have television and radio meteorologists as well as the National Weather Service to alert us to incoming storms, that was not the case in the first half of the twentieth century.
From The Archives: Historic Footnotes by the late Carol Laun (1934 – 2021)
From The Archives: Remember iceboxes?
On Monday, Feb. 14, more than 151 million Valentine’s Day cards will be sent to and received from husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers and significant others across the country.
“I think we fussed more about Christmas in those days (c.1895). On Christmas Eve, Dad would hitch two horses to the bob sled and we would ride to church, the Copper Hill Methodist Church in East Granby. There was always a church entertainment; the children would recite appropriate pieces.”
Had kids been selling newspapers in Granby in 1906, as they did in the major cities such as New York or Boston, that February they would have been yelling “Read all about it! White Cappers drag Willis Griffin out of town!”
When I was in the sixth grade at Kelly Lane, I had Mrs. Cowper for English. However, months later, her husband accepted a job transfer to Baltimore and they moved away.
A day set aside for giving thanks has been a part of New England tradition since 1621, when the Plymouth Colony survivors celebrated their first harvest.
In the June edition of the Granby Drummer, I wrote about Eva Dewey, the curator and archivist for the Salmon Brook Historical Society from 1959 to 1986, who saved much of Granby’s history. In her final nine years she had an invaluable assistant in the archives—Carol Laun, who would go on to transform the Salmon Brook Historical Society into what it is today.