Cambria Freeman, Ebensburg, Pa. Friday, February 13, 1903 LOCAL AND PERSONAL Saturday is Valentine day. Mr. Thomas Seymore, of Allegheny township, is confined to his home with smallpox. Mr. William G. Wilson, of Blacklick township, was a visitor to Ebensburg on Tuesday. Mrs. John Bowman, of Carroll township, who had been quite ill, is able to be about again. Dr. Olin G. A. Barker, of Pittsburg, spent Sunday with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. F. H. Barker, in this place. Messrs. John Barnett and Vincent Malloy, of Allegheny township, were visitors to Ebensburg on Tuesday. Lent begins on Ask Wednesday which occurs this year on February 25th and lasts for a period of forty days. Philip N. Shettig, Esq., of this place, attended a session of the Clearfield county court at Clearfield, Pa. this week. Fire on Wednesday afternoon of last week damaged a coal crusher of the Cambria Steel company, near Johnstown, to the amount of $25,000. Mr. Thomas A. Bradley, of Lilly, deputy factory inspector for this district, made his tour of inspections through Ebensburg on Monday. There will be a convention of coal miners of central Pennsylvania in Altoona on the second Tuesday of March. A new scale of wages is to be considered. A new machine for planing engine frames was placed in the Altoona shops last week. It will plane two engine frames at one time, and is said to be the biggest planer in the world. Ex-County treasurer, Samuel J. McClune, has purchased the real estate and insurance agency of Edgar O. Eisher of Johnstown and will continue the same business in that city. Solomon Suter, a wealthy farmer of Mt. Pleasant township in Westmoreland county, was held up by an unknown negro near Mt. Pleasant on Monday morning and relieved of his pocket book containing $25 in money and a check calling for $600. Mr. T. Stanton Davis purchased for himself, John L. Elder and B. F. James, the farm one mile west of Ebensburg belonging to J. L. and T. W. Jones, heirs of the late David Jones. The farm contains 141 acres and the consideration was $4,030 cash. Thursday morning of last week the Cherrytree accommodation encountered a landslide above Carrolltown. The engine and two cars were sideswiped and ruined and the passengers violently shaken up. The engineer and fireman jumped, probably saving their lives. Thomas T. Domley, of Cresson, a brakeman on the Cresson and Clearfield division was jolted from a car at Cresson on Friday and sustained an abrasion of the right shoulder and elbow and lacerations of the right hand. He was taken to the Altoona hospital were the injuries were dressed. An engine slipped from a crane in No. 2 erecting shop in Altoona on Saturday morning and went crashing to the floor, sustaining considerable damage. Several of the men who were working about the locomotive narrowly escaped being killed, fortunately receiving but slight injuries. Barney McClement, employed by the Vintondale Lumber Company at Vintondale, narrowly escaped death on Monday morning. He was riding a car of logs, when they started to roll. He was caught under one of them and sustained internal injuries. He was taken to the hospital at Altoona. Wednesday evening of last week the high winds blew a telephone pole across the tracks at Glen Campbell. The Glen Campbell accommodation coming along shortly afterward was thrown from the track and slightly injured. The passengers received a serve shaking up and the engine is ruined. Attachments for the arrest of the president, treasurer and officers of the Pittsburg, Johnstown, Ebensburg & Eastern Railroad company were issued out of the Blair county court Monday in contempt proceedings for failure to obey a decree of the State Supreme court. The officers of the corporations reside in Philadelphia. A cutting affray occurred at the east end of the Gallitzin tunnel on Sunday afternoon, in the same shanty in which Charles Irvin shot another colored man and for which he was sentenced to the penitentiary. One negro was cut in the side in the affray. Four negroes were arrested for the affair and were taken to jail on Tuesday. A call has been issued for a convention of sub-district No. 3, of district No. 2, United Mine Workers of America to be held in Benscreek on March 6th. The officers to be elected for the sub-district are a president, vice-president, secretary-treasurer, one member of the district board, six members of the executive board and two auditors. Mr. T. Stanton Davis, of the real estate firm of Larimer & Davis sold the timber off a tract of land in Jackson township, belonging to Captain Thomas Davis Lester. Larimer and T. Stanton Davis to Kuhn & Kough, of Winder to take possession immediately. The tract contains over 2,000,000 feet, three-fourths of which is hemlock, consideration $6,000. Three or four white men disguised as negroes broke into the home of Mrs. Sweitzer, living near Dumas, Somerset county, the other night. They bound the woman in a chair on the porch and threw a bed quilt over her head, after which they ransacked the house securing $2. Mrs. Switzer, who had been an invalid for years, was nearly frozen when discovered by her children upon their return from church. A bear’s fur is worth from $20 to $50. To bring this price the animal must be killed between September and March. The deer skin has small value as a fur. If tanned it will bring from $1 to $5 for a rug. An otter’s hid is worth from $10 to $15. A pelt of the unsavory skunk is worth 50 cents to $2 and the rat skins will bring from 5 to 20 cents each. The passing of the beaver hats left the rabbit’s fur without value. To facilitate the handling of the ore cars, the Cambria Steel company at Johnstown, will install an automatic car dumper, which, it is said, will perform three times the amount of work which can be accomplished under the present plan. The machinery will be placed in such position along the tracks that as the cars arrive they will be lifted up, turned upside down and the contents deposited in special self unloading cars, which travel to the furnaces. The cars, when empty, will be classified at once and returned to the Pennsylvania tracks, thus preventing congestion. Suits in which damages in the sum of $800,000 are claimed against the Pennsylvania Railroad company were entered in the Huntingdon county court last week by J. R. and W. H. Simpson, administrator of the estate of Robert E. Brown, a Broad Top coal operator and the Delta Coal Mining company, of Cambria county. The plaintiff’s claim that they were the victims of unjust freight discrimination in the transportation of coal from 1893 to 1900, inasmuch as a few favorite shippers were allowed a rebate of 60 cents per ton of coal, as against 30 cents the rebate which obtains generally. It is further claimed that because of this discrimination Robert E. Brown was forced to make an assignment, while the Delta company went into bankruptcy. An entertainment for the benefit of the Catholic Church at Vintondale will be given in the church at that place on Thursday evening, March 19th, 1903, under the direction of Rev. Father Hurton, by the New York Entertainment company. The entertainment will be accompanied by a lecture explaining Catholic doctrines, by Prof. Starkweather of Boston. Also by five vocal solos by Prof. George Trewella Martin, of Boston and New York. Also by the history of Joan of Arc in moving pictures, and a series of beautiful moving pictures illustrating the songs. The entertainment will close with a magnificent spectacle, the eruption of Mt. Pelee and the destruction of St. Pierre. Admission 50 cents. Do not fail to attend as the entertainment is of a high class and the opportunity of witnessing it may not again occur. BOARDING HOUSE BLOWS UP A dastardly attempt to hide robbery and murder resulted in the wrecking by dynamite of an Italian boarding house at Portage early Monday morning. Two persons are dead, two are injured and a score of others had miraculous escapes from death when the explosion let go. The concussion broke the windows in all the buildings for nearly a square and did some other damage. The dead are Tony Grillo, aged 44 years, and Mrs. Tony Grillo, aged 40 years. The injured are Ralph Tellilido, a shoemaker, thumb pierced by a splinter; Joe Deslavo, injured about the shoulder. The scene of the affair was the boarding house of Tony Grillo and his wife on Railroad street, not far from the old Pennsylvania railroad station, in a store building owned by the Doran brothers of Wilmore. In this building which is a large frame structure, two stories high, they kept a score of boarders, the latter for the most part sleeping in the store room and the room back of it, which had been fitted up with cots. Grillo, his wife and three daughters—-Lucy, aged 9; Mary. Aged 7 and Rosie, aged 5-—occupied the ground floor adjoining the store room part of the building. Immediately over this room was another in which Tellilido and Charlie Grillo, aged 13 slept. Michael Grillo, the oldest of the five children, slept with some of the boarders in the other part of the house. When the frightened people of Portage reached the scene they found the Grillo building badly wrecked, the walls bulging and parts of the joists and timbers lying out in the street. They also found that some of the inmates of the house were in the cellar, under piles of debris. The boarders in their night clothes, rushed out of their sleeping quarters in affright. Patrolman Henry Plummer took charge of affairs. Under his direction a search of the ruins began, groans being heard from the cellar. The first and second floors had been torn loose, the plaster, lath and flooring lying in a pile in the cellar and under this heavy mass came cries for help. Willing hands soon pulled the stuff away and the body of Mrs. Grillo, clad in her night clothes and with a cut on her neck was found. She was dead and as soon as this fact was established, she was laid to one side and the work of rescuing the living went on. Soon the workers found little Rosie and strange to say, she was not injured, as far as they could se. Shortly afterward more workmen brought to the outer air, Mary and Lucy Grillo, neither of whom seemed to be hurt, except for a few scratches. They were in their nightgowns and were covered with the dust from plaster. When taken out they were carried into the Union Hotel near by and given attention. Satisfying themselves that no more were alive under the mass the searchers soon had Mrs. Grillo’s body and that of her husband lying side by side. The latter had a gash on the head but whether the wounds were received through the explosion and subsequent fall into the cellar and the awful mass of debris no one knew. Many were of the opinion that murder had been done and the explosion was to hide the crime. The house is a wreck. The first and second floors in the part where Grillo and his wife lived were torn loose and hurled upward, then falling into the cellar, the debris of the second floor falling on top of the occupants of the first floor and covering them up. The roof of the house was left on and the walls were standing somewhat bulged. Quite a lot of stuff was thrown into the streets by the force of the explosion. Of the men injured Deslavo was hurt by the explosion forcing a partition with great force against the cot upon which he was sleeping, but his injuries are not serious. Tellilido and young Charles Grillo were thrown from their beds in the second story against the ceiling of the room and the marks where their bodies dented the plastering can be plainly seen. The boarders are all Italians employed about the railroad at Portage. They had no occasion to use dynamite and none of the explosive was known to be in the house, yet persons familiar with its use say that at least twenty-five pounds must have been put off under the room where Grillo and his three little girls slept. It was stated that Grillo had between $600 and $700 and his wife $200 more in the house, but none of the money has yet been found and the theory is that it was stolen by some one who killed the couple and then exploded the dynamite to cover the crime and who did not scruple to place in jeopardy the lives of nearly a score and a half of people, including five children. Dr. Miller’s examination of Grillo’s body showed him that his head was crushed in as if by some heavy instrument and his ribs were all caved in. Mrs. Grillo, according to Dr. Miller, was suffocated, as the injuries she sustained would not be sufficient to cause death. Grillo had been a resident of Portage for twelve years. He conducted a fruit store in a room in the Exchange Hotel building, where he did a thriving business. He and his wife were hard working people and were well thought of in Portage. _________________________________________________________________ Get more out of the Web. 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