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another family crisis
Now and then we climb into the time machine and look at the Dayton of a century ago. Here is another excerpt from “Family Crisis” (Reynal & Hitchcock) by Sherlock Bronson Gass. He lived in Dayton during the 1890’s.
“The wagon had been facing east on the south side of the street. One block ahead was the bridge over the canal. The bridge was not a turnbridge like those at Jefferson, and Main, and Ludlow, but a high one taking off from an embankment. Along the canal at this point and below the embankment and the bridge were narrow wharves where a string of canal boats were usually tied up for loading and unloading. The tow-path went under the bridge on the far side of the canal. The bridge took off just where Canal Street came into Fifth from the north. The slope curved steeply up from canal level to bridge level, with a rail or fence along the brink made of cast-iron panels between iron posts.”
“What Arthur saw when he came out of the drug-store was the back of the wagon disappearing eastward and the flotsam of the street crowd sucked in behind it. Not exactly eastward, either, for there was no one in the wagon to keep the right rein taut. And Dolly, going at racing speed, was cutting a diagonal down the block through the traffic toward the railing that guarded the brink of the embankment, What had apparently happened, Arthur calculated, was that someone had exploded a firecracker under Dolly’s heels, and she was living up to someone’s expectations.”
“As for Arthur, he acted like a man. There wasn’t much he could do, but what there was could not have been done better. He lost sight of the wagon. The crowd closed up behind it so that he couldn’t follow at his usual needle-prick speed, but he did his best. Toward the bridge the crowd thickened so that he had to worm his way to the front. When he got to the paling to which, by calculation, Dolly would have sidled, he saw that there was one panel gone. He pushed to the gap, and there, beyond the narrow wharf below, and beyond a canal-boat tied up to the wharf, was Dolly up to her withers in midstream. The wreck of the wagon was behind her, and pieces of it, laundry hampers, bundles of linen, and stray shirts and collars were floating away downstream in the sluggish current.”
That’s how horse and wagon ended up in the canal back in the 1890’s. You might be be wondering, “was there a leap at the brink? But Dolly was blind, and there was nothing but the paling to warn her that there was a brink.”
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