Podunk

Did I tell you our town is having its bicentennial this year? Yelp - on February 6th we'll be 200 years old. To celebrate we're having a big "do" on Sunday afternoon complete with chicken BBQ - and that's chicken BBQ done over coals in the great out-of-doors. The high on Sunday is supposed to be about 10 F. so let's hope those chickens go on early.

In conjunction with the bicentennial, I was asked to do some of my folk art note cards for the committee to sell to help raise funds for some of the planned activities. It wasn't until a couple of weeks ago that I got the final pictures to use so I've been busy painting. (...a PLEASANT change from working on those beastly seats!) Today I went to the library to scrounge up some local history to add to the back of each card.

Local history is rather addictive which is why I spent MUCH longer there than I intended. Some things you might find interesting...
- Lebanon was way ahead of the times - the high school kids from Lebanon used to take the train to go to high school in Earlville (and you thought only city kids commuted by train!).
- The town didn't get its first snow plow until 1930 and even then, roads weren't plowed on a regular basis for another 3 years - people either had to shovel themselves or go around the drifts.
- Kids went to school eight months of the year - 3 months in the winter and 5 months in the summer. There were never snow days and of course they walked to school.
- Spring was called the "thawy" time of year.
- When the town fathers proposed putting a new road straight to Hamilton, two mill owners, whose mills it would bypass, dug up some graves in the middle of the night and created an "instant" cemetery in its path thus forcing the new road to go past the mills. (I always wondered why that road took such a crazy turn!)
- And, my favorite bit of all, "South Lebanon was known by one and all as Podunk".