19-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Tuesday, November 24, 1914: <<no entry>>
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Sometimes when Grandma didn’t write anything, I wish that she’d told us mundane things– like what her family discussed over the dinner table that day.
Maybe a hundred-years-ago today,the Muffly’s were talking about the recent accident in the nearby town of Watsontown.
What excitement! Thank goodness the accident wasn’t any worse than it was.
A Hundred Years Ago 
I love the wording ~ Mr. Kitchen had “an exciting experience” and it made me smile when I read “the horses ran away”….how times have changed! I’m sure grandma’s family would have had something to say on the matter. I wonder if they knew Mr. Kitchen or the dairyman? Interesting. 🙂
My guess is that they would have known him. It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it always seems like everyone knows everyone in rural areas.
So true!
I would think that story definitely made “dinner table conversation”! That was probably huge news for a small town. I was also glad to read that the farmer nor his horses were badly hurt.
My thoughts exactly. This seems like the type of thing that people would talk about for days afterwards.
I wonder if these accidents happened often during this time of change while the horse carts and motorized vehicles still shared the roadways? Milk delivery – another era alright!
Motorized vehicles may have spooked the horses.
Those danged horseless carriages! They cause all kinds of trouble.
New technology always seems to cause problems.:)
It’s funny how what she probably thought was too boring to write about in her dairy is what we would consider interesting and insightful – not only about her own life & family, but also about that time period. It kind of makes us wonder what we should include in our own journals & diaries. If we think of it as a peek into this time, we’d probably include many things from our “everyday routine”. Perhaps our own grandchildren may want to know about them someday.
It is an intriguing thought to think about how things might change in the future, and what future generations might find interesting about our daily routines.
I agree with adaisygarden–reading Helena’s diary has made me approach my own journal a little differently. Of course, no one will ever read mine because I do it in an on-line app and it’s password protected!
It is interesting to think about what to record in a journal. Sometimes I also wonder whether more or fewer journals and other artifacts will survive across the years now that they are typically electronic..
A great story for dinner discourse…. and how interesting about the horses running away. It was a time of real big change on the roadways for sure.
My father used to always talk about how dangerous runaway horses could be.
Thankful for safety glass. We saw a team of horses that got loose from a tractor-pull at a county fair one year. They went through the parking lot, up onto people’s cars…quite scary.
Whew, that does sound really scary. Horses are so strong and powerful–and when they are frightened can do so much harm to themselves and others.
Aren’t local newspapers brilliant? Its such a shame we have to lose them. glad the horses weren’t hurt; that seems more important, somehow.
I love to read old newspaper stories. The old-time journalists had such a wonderful way making the stories come alive–though the author’s perspectives and biases often are readily dicscernible (which makes the stories even more fun to read). 🙂
When I worked in a famous funeral home in the downtown Los Angeles area, I would typically work solo on the night shift (as an embalmer). I really enjoyed taking my lunch break up on the third floor of this old place in the old archives room—I would pull 100-yr-old death records books down to read about the fascinating people and their (often untimely) demises back in 1907-1918 (never made it past those records because my stint there was over once I’d graduated Mortuary College). Very common causes of death in those days were indeed collisions of trolley and horseless carriage drivers…there were still a lot of horse-drawn buggies and delivery vans, as well. I read of many accidents involving spooked horses breaking off of the wagons and causing terrible crushing deaths. There were a lot of 1918 deaths caused from the Spanish influenza — I was surprised to see that it was the folks in their late 20’s to late 30’s who were commonly victim of the deadly disease; not babies, or elderly, as one expects…BTW, there were a great number of really terrible accidents involving coupling of rail cars (crushed between cars) and on elevators ( a few decapitations) befell workmen who repaired them, etc.