Do you know the history of the town you live in?
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OpryLeigh (
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September 21st, 2012
I am currently in Glenwood, Aspen and whilst looking for something to eat we passed a shop that had a sign saying ‘Doc Holliday died here’ this made me read a little about Doc Holliday and inspired this question!
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28 Answers
Yes, I do.
Founded by a large family named Spencer in the mid 18th century. Dairy farmers, by and large.
Today pop.1600.
Here’s the town hall, which along with the Country Store, St. Peter’s Church, the little K-12 school house and the village green, make up the hamlet.
Here’s the church, across the green from the town hall.
We are officially a hamlet in the town of Austerlitz, NY but consider ourselves a tiny village.
Yes. Fishermen smugglers, Greek immigrant spongers, one bad ass sheriff by the name of Rube, and a real old-fashioned feud and massacreee in Tarpon Springs, Florida.
Yes. I live in a town that used to be a type of amusement park. We still have a street called Huff and Puff Road in it where the people would board the train that travelled around the lake. There were some other rides and a drag strip. Back then not many people lived in the town. It still is a rather small population, about 12,000. Houses are built around the lake now, the little train is gone and some business are on Huff and Puff. There are plans for a big mixed use new community to built near where the drag strips were.
PS. And here is the country store
(And some of the local populace here.)
Oh, and they lynched a bunch of Union soldiers during the Civil War. The site later became a favorite picnic ground for unsuspecting Yankee tourists. About the only people who behaved themselves were the Greeks.
My neighborhood is called Bucktown because Polish immigrants had a lot of goats.
The clothing company Lands End was originally a sailing supply company in my neighborhood, beside the Chicago River.
NFL footballs are made from leather from the nearby Horween tannery.
Boston, MA? Yes, there have been a few histories touching on the subject. :-)
And I live a couple of Doors from the Old North Church, the one where the lantern signal “One if by land and 2 if sea was given.
Given all that they faced and triumphed over here in New England toward the end of the mini-ice-age, it amazes me that the colonialist were able to do it. It makes me wonder what’s happened to us.
Yes, I’m very interested in history, including how streets got their names and various other tidbits.
I am in the subburbs a bit now, but I loved reading about the history of the city that was once the capital of Norway. There is hundreds of years of history in every farm name in the surrounding area and this area has been populated since pre-Christian times, so there more history than you could shake a bishops crosier at.
http://folk.ntnu.no/ragnvald/trondheim/historie-eng.html
@ETpro One of my (many far back) great grandfathers, Joseph Talcott, owned a piece of land in Boston. When he moved to Hartford, CT, they town down his house and built that lil’ ol North Church you’re talking about . . .
The city of Tampa has a little bit of history around it, but not much.
Further to the North was Fort Dade, one of the Seminole Battle sites. A little further South was Fort DeSoto… I can’t remember whether anything particularly significant happened there.
There was quite a cigar trade here, until Cubans were made illegal.
The town I live in had a paper factory. That’s about it.
@Seek_Kolinahr Tampa has a little history. There is the history of the Italian & Cuban cultures in the neighborhood of Ybor City including the anti-Spanish revolutionary underground established to smuggle guns and revolutionaries to Cuba from the Ten Years War through the finish in 1898. Tampa was the debarkation point to Cuba during for the Spanish American War—the American general staff had their headquarters at the Tampa Bay Hotel (now the University of Tampa’s Plant Hall). The attempted murder of the great Cuban patriot Jose Marti by poisoning happened in Ybor. There is a rich history of worker strife and unions in Tampa. There is a long, violent Mafia history in Tampa from around WWI through the 1980s (see Santos Trafficante and his predecessors). The city wasn’t asleep during the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. There was political corruption fueled by drug smuggling in the 1970s and 80s, resulting in murders and the suicide of one prosecutor. The Civil War history: the Union soldiers who were tracked down and lynched by civilians in Tarpon Springs escaped from the stockade at Fort Brooke, Tampa during its short time under Confederate control.
Every town as a story. Tampa’s is quite interesting, but like in most towns, you have to dig for it. Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce isn’t interested in bringing certain things to light—such as Tampa’s fourteen lynchings between 1858 and 1940. Each one of those lynchings come with a story long buried, but still capable of disinterment. There are families who still carry these stories deep in their breasts to the consternation of those Urban League ladies down at the Historical Society.
The town I lived in was a farming community up until about World War II, mostly walnuts and pears and lettuces and strawberries. There was a small train line that ran through it that is now a great bike trail.
The town was originally part of the Joaquin Moraga Spanish Land Grant. It got broken up into three towns in the 1850s.
Our biggest claim to history is that there was an alternative Pony Express stop here. They stopped about a dozen times.
The town I live in now? No.
I actually live on the border of two towns. I’m very much a commuter resident and, frankly, don’t care.
The city I grew up in is right outside of Boston and is famous for its ship building after the revolution. Tufts University was founded there in the 1800s. ‘Jingle Bells’ was written there, Amelia Earhart lived there for a time, and we’ve had our share of semi-famous mobsters and crooks.
@ETpro: I walked past the Old North Church today – shopping for goodies in the North End.
Seeing as our town is only about 35 to 40 years old, it is an easy history to remember. They basically brought in dredger ships to suck up sand and make a fake beach, then built hotels and houses by it.
The one I live in now? No. @JLeslie If you are talking about where you live now, that is just fascinating.
The one I plan to live in one day is another matter. While the surface has barely been scratched, the history of this small English town is so beautiful that it practically makes me weep. It’s an area known for manufacturing, including textiles. Gandhi visited there when desiring to learn how to create a textile industry in India so that they would not be reliant on Great Britain for cloth.
The Romans built a road through this town, and part of their stone wall still stands and can be seen from our front rooms.
One of the locals created a Facebook group where members post photos of the town and its residents from days of yore. What’s amazing is that not much has changed. This doesn’t happen in the US.
@cookieman I never knew that that town was famous for all of those things.
I currently live in Boston now so my town has got a rich history. A very old settlement and tons of tourists and duck tours. A historical fact that I like about Boston is that it used to be (pretty much) an island. A section that we call “Back Bay” now was filled in manually to make it part of the mainland. The roads in the older section are still the original paths so they’re windy and some are still pretty narrow (especially around the north end), but once you hit Back Bay they’re in a grid pattern and alphabetic.
@dxs: Hello to another fellow Bostonian. Three in one thread even.
@Kayak8 Amazing. The Old North Church is so old (pre-Revolutionary War) that I just assumed it was the first structure to stand there.
Yep, both the history of the town I grew up in and the town I live in now (Los Angeles). While Los Angeles is famous for tearing down its history (think Bunker Hill), there’s quite a bit that’s still around here, if you look closely enough.
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