Monthly Archives: January 2004

1867: Pedestrian challenge

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From The Penin­su­lar Courier & Fam­ily Vis­i­tant of 19 Sep­tem­ber, 1867, page 8, col­umn 3

WESTON THE PEDESTRIAN.— Edward Payson Weston1, the pedes­trian, who cre­ated some­what of a sen­sa­tion in 1861 by walk­ing from Boston to Wash­ing­ton against time, aver­ag­ing fifty-​​one miles for the ten con­sec­u­tive days, has been pit­ted against his old antag­o­nist, to walk from Port­land, Me., to Chicago, Ill., a dis­tance of one thou­sand two hun­dred miles, in twenty-​​six walk­ing days, for the sum of ten thou­sand dol­lars a side. The arti­cles of agree­ment pro­vide that Weston is to per­form his ardu­ous labor in thirty days, with­out walk­ing between mid­night on Sat­ur­day and mid­night on Sun­day; and is to walk one hun­dred con­sec­u­tive miles inside of twenty-​​four con­sec­u­tive hours as a part of the feat. The start from Port­land will be made between the 1st and 15th of Octo­ber. On this trip Weston will pass through parts of ten dif­fer­ent States, and more than three hun­dred cities and towns.

1A num­ber of other pieces on Weston are in the stack wait­ing to be tran­scribed; he was appar­ently quite the celebrity of his day.

Ann Arbor Forteana

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[archive trans­fer from the old site]

Some years ago I started brows­ing the news­pa­per micro­films at our local library for the news­pa­pers from 1830–1900. Regard­less of the fact that Nicholas Baker is right, and they’re mainly illeg­i­ble and hon­estly sad repli­cas of what must have been beau­ti­ful tac­tile news­pa­pers full of char­ac­ter, there’s still a great deal in there that’s interesting.

In par­tic­u­lar, I started to col­lect and stash away a number—a book-​​full, actually—of odd­i­ties and fringe mate­ri­als, which I’m going to start tran­scrib­ing and pub­lish­ing here as time allows.

Do I believe this stuff is true? God, no. Don’t be ridicu­lous. And nei­ther should you.

As Forteana, though, these arti­cles are quite inter­est­ing. They’re anom­alies, folk­lore, crack­pot mate­r­ial, jokes… hard to say how best to describe them. Indeed, I think the most inter­est­ing thing about them is that they war­ranted pub­li­ca­tion in the news­pa­per of a mod­er­ately small col­lege town in the first place. They’re pretty dense in the stacks, too; I’ve accu­mu­lated well over a hun­dred in a mere three hours or so of brows­ing the micro­film archives at our local library. I’m sure you can find sim­i­lar items in your own local library (assum­ing they have copies of the 19th cen­tury news­pa­pers there).

A deeper ques­tion, of course, is how real these sto­ries are. By “real” I don’t mean whether they’re fac­tual accounts of ghosts and other strange occur­rences (I said that; weren’t you pay­ing atten­tion?), but rather whether the sto­ries them­selves were really sto­ries. They always seem to be located at the end of a col­umn on the last cou­ple of pages of a daily or weekly paper, and you never know… did this story come in over the wire, or was it merely said to have done so? Was in con­cocted to fill the column?

It’s an inter­est­ing and unan­swered ques­tion about jour­nal­ism and enter­tain­ment, frankly.

I’d be very happy to hear about sim­i­lar arti­cles from your own local news­pa­pers. Many pub­lic libraries can pro­vide access to either the orig­i­nal news­pa­pers (in which case you’re a very lucky per­son) or micro­film copies. It’s great fun to look them over and find things. If you send links or con­tent, I’d be happy to include it here!