Note: No name was shown! The Washington Post, 8 Oct 1908. "There died last week in Barren county, Ky., a most highly respected and venerated old woman in her ninety-eighth year, and in that community she was the last connecting link between the wagoner of the first half century and the "trainman" of threescore years and ten later. Her husband, more than twoscore years dead, with his six-horse team and immense, cumbrous, strong, tough, and servicable Conestoga wagon, made regular trips between the port on the Ohio at Louisville and the port on Big Barren at Bowling Green, carring tobacco and "country produce" from the south to exchange for the merchandise dealt in b the county storekeeper of his bailiwick. "What a hardy set they were! How strong of limb, how tough of fiber, how simple of mind, how kind of heart, how careless of the morrow! They worked hard, they drank hard, they fought hard. They loved and would have justice, and after a hard day's drive and the teams had been bounteously fed and well groomed, they laid themselves on mother earth under the canopy of heaven and slept the sleep of the man for whom conscience has no terrors. "Many of them were devout Christians that would allow nothing wicked or unseemly in their camp - men who would not "drive" on Sunday, but kept the day, holy, reading the Bible, or, if in reach, going to church. It is worthy of note that in that day the turnpike was the current octupus, and the toll each wagon had to pay was the source of the "predatory wealth" of the plutocrat. Hundreds of wagoners would have torn up, pikes and burned bridges if their passions had been given loose, and very some of them actually perpetrated those very things; but a day came when the pike gave way to the railroad and the wagon to the bus car, and these folk went to other work. "Some very delightful romance has come down to use of the caravan when the Damascus and Bagdad, were metropolises of the East. Pity it is that we have produced no genius who has perserved, to make vivid to posterity, the old wagoner of the fidrst half of the last century. "And it is not hazardous to predict that the sailor who nvigates the air will make the "trainmen" of the railroad as rare to our chldren's children as the old-fashioned wagoner is to their grandparents." When I get time, I'm going to look at the 1900 Barren Co census to see if I can find who this lady was! If anyone wants to check first - go for it! Sandi Sandi's Puzzlers: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~gensoup/gorin/puz.html SCKY Links: http://www.public.asu.edu/~moore/Gorin.html GGP: http://ggpublishing.tripod.com/