Haw River Museum

05/30/2026

Interesting bit of history!

05/30/2026

Did you know this?

February 1906. Chicago, Illinois.
Upton Sinclair published The Jungle — a novel that depicted the inside of Chicago's meatpacking industry with enough specificity to make readers across America and Europe push their plates away. Meat sales plummeted. The public outcry was immediate.
The meatpacking syndicates — Armour, Swift, Morris — responded swiftly. They deployed lawyers, press agents, and lobbyists. J. Ogden Armour published a defense in the Saturday Evening Post insisting his plants were cleaner than most domestic kitchens. Sinclair was dismissed as a socialist agitator. Politicians in Washington wanted the economic disruption to end.
The USDA sent investigators. Their report came back: Sinclair's allegations were mostly lies and exaggerations.
But President Roosevelt, who distrusted the Department of Agriculture's close ties to the industry, wasn't satisfied. He secretly commissioned two additional, independent investigators — Labor Commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds — and sent them to Chicago.
At the same time, Sinclair had a collaborator the industry knew nothing about.
Her name was Ella Reeve Bloor — a Socialist Party organizer from New Jersey, known to her colleagues simply as "Mother Bloor." She was not an investigator by training. She was an organizer by vocation: someone who knew how to find the people institutions wanted invisible, and how to get them to speak.
She did not take the official tour that the meatpacking plants had choreographed for journalists and government men. She went to the neighborhoods where the workers lived. To the back rooms, the tenement steps, the places where exhausted men spoke in Polish and Lithuanian and Slovak to anyone who would sit long enough to listen. She found bilingual intermediaries — priests, community members, children who had grown up between languages — and she listened.
She gathered testimony. She gathered names. She gathered the details of what happened on the night shifts, long after the government men had returned to their hotels: the condemned carcasses quietly moved from the disposal rooms to the production floors, the chemical preservatives rubbed onto spoiled meat to remove the smell, the practices that were invisible to anyone who arrived on schedule and left on schedule.
Armed with this material, Neill and Reynolds stopped following their handlers. They found meat being shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts, gathering dirt, splinters, floor filth, and the expectorations of tuberculous and other diseased workers. They found conditions that did not merely confirm Sinclair's book. They suggested that The Jungle had actually understated the severity of the problem. The Neill-Reynolds report landed on Roosevelt's desk, and he was disgusted.
What followed was not a simple triumph. Roosevelt initially used the report as private leverage — threatening to release it publicly if the meatpackers refused new regulations. The industry fought back through allies in Congress. But eventually the report was leaked, and the political deadlock broke.
On June 30, 1906, Roosevelt signed the first comprehensive federal food safety laws in American history: the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which created the foundation for what would become the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The story has a final irony worth noting. The major meat packers — knowing the new law would allay public fears, bring smaller competitors under federal regulation, and put a government stamp of approval on their products — ultimately endorsed the act. And Upton Sinclair himself opposed the final legislation, because he had aimed at something far larger than food safety reform. "I aimed at the public's heart," he wrote, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Ella Reeve Bloor left Chicago and spent the next four decades organizing coal miners, textile workers, and farm laborers across America. She became one of the most important labor organizers of the twentieth century — known everywhere in her movement, invisible in the official history of the laws her work helped create.
The federal inspection standards that protect American food today were built partly on the foundation of testimony gathered by a woman who went where the official tours didn't go, listened to people the inspectors never spoke to, and refused to let an industry's carefully prepared performance stand as the truth.
Her name does not appear on any of the packaging in your refrigerator.
It should.

05/30/2026

More history we should have learned about in school!

In 1900, an underpaid Chicago school teacher was told the city was too poor to pay her. She didn't complain. She audited them.

Five public utility monopolies. Streetcars. Gas lines. Electric grids. Telephone wires. Controlled by millionaires. Backed by the state legislature. Untouchable.

The Board of Education had frozen wages for more than 5,000 teachers. The treasury, they explained, was simply empty. There was no money to collect.

Margaret Haley walked into the county clerk’s office. She asked to see the tax rolls for the corporations operating within city limits. She spent weeks copying numbers by hand.

She checked the People’s Gas Light and Coke Company. They paid taxes on physical pipes, but nothing on their operating franchise value.

She checked the Chicago Union Traction Company. They paid taxes on physical rail cars, but nothing on their right-of-way agreements.

She checked three more monopolies. The pattern was identical.

At the time, the Illinois state tax code explicitly required corporations to be taxed on their "capital stock and franchise" value. The State Board of Equalization had simply ignored this provision for the city's largest utilities for decades, creating an invisible, institutional tax shelter. Women in 1900 could not legally vote, making political pressure impossible.

The city wasn't poor. It was choosing not to collect millions from its wealthiest residents while freezing the wages of the women teaching its children.

Haley didn't petition the mayor. She hired lawyers and filed a writ of mandamus against the State Board of Equalization.

To fund the legal filings, she asked the teachers to donate a portion of their frozen wages. She was suing five of the wealthiest corporations in America using money collected in nickels and dimes from elementary school classrooms.

The companies sent teams of corporate attorneys. Haley sat at the plaintiff's table with handwritten ledgers.

They couldn't vote. But they could read a ledger.

In 1901, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in her favor. The state was ordered to reassess the monopolies. The utilities were forced to pay nearly $600,000 in immediate back taxes, permanently adding over $2 million in taxable value to the city's rolls.

The money flowed directly into the city treasury.

The Board of Education did not immediately give it to the teachers. They voted to use the newly discovered funds to pay the city’s outstanding coal bills and fix broken sidewalks. Haley had to file a second lawsuit just to force the board to honor the original wage contracts. The court eventually ordered the teachers paid.

The school district's accounting offices are now digitized. The modern teachers' union still reviews the city's corporate tax subsidies every fiscal year.

Margaret Haley: the teacher who audited the monopolies.

Source: Margaret Haley, Battleground: The Autobiography of Margaret A. Haley.
Verified via: The Chicago History Museum, The Illinois Supreme Court Archives.
(Some details summarized for brevity.)

05/29/2026

On Tuesday, June 9, at 7:00 come learn about the historical preservation and architecture you see here.

It is absolutely amazing how this house was saved and restored in the Glencoe Mill Village (1880-1954), Alamance County, North Carolina!

05/28/2026

Hmmm

05/25/2026

I still believed, those balloons killed no one! Interesting!

05/24/2026

I still like visiting old cemeteries. The Trollinger cemetery needs some TLC.

Before folks started callin’ it Memorial Day,
back before plastic flowers from Walmart and little solar lights blinkin’ on graves all night,

around these parts it was called , Decoration Day.

And buddy, Decoration Day in Appalachia wasn’t just some holiday.
It was near about a homecoming, a family reunion, a church meetin’, and a grieving day all rolled into one.

You could tell it was comin’ for weeks.

Women would already be fussin’ over mason jars full of peonies, iris blooms, and snowball flowers.
Kids would be sent out through fence rows and hollers huntin’ wildflowers.
Men would be weed-eatin’ and mowin’ around family plots while mutterin’,
“Well… reckon Papaw wouldn’t want this place lookin’ like a jungle.”

Old folks would start tellin’ stories again too.

Stories about who was buried where.
Who fought in the wars.
Who got snakebit.
Who died too young.
Who married wrong.
And who still haunted the creek bend after dark.

Then come Decoration Day mornin’,

the roads across Appalachia would fill up with dusty pickups, old Chevrolets, and cousins you ain’t seen since the Carter administration.

People would come home from Ohio.
Michigan.
Indiana.
Florida.

Some hadn’t stepped foot in the holler all year,
but they came for Decoration Day.

Because around here,
you don’t forget your people.

Little country cemeteries up on ridges would suddenly bloom like gardens.
Every grave cleaned.
Every stone washed off.
Fresh flowers laid down with care.

And if you listened close enough,
between the bumblebees buzzin’ and church bells ringin’,
you could hear generations talkin’.

Kids runnin’ between tombstones playin’ tag while mamaws hollered,
“Don’t you dare step on that grave!”

Old men standin’ with their hands hooked in their overalls quietly starin’ at names carved in rock.

Women settin’ out enough food to feed half the county.

Lord have mercy-
the food.

Fried chicken.
Country ham.
Green beans cooked to death.
Macaroni salad.
Deviled eggs.
Banana puddin’.
Coconut cake.
And enough sweet tea to float a bass boat down the Nolichucky.

And after the cemetery was decorated,
folks would gather under shade trees and eat till buttons started surrenderin’.

Then the singin’ would start.

Old hymns driftin' across the hills.

“Shall We Gather at the River.”
“I’ll Fly Away.”
“If I could hear my mother pray again”

Some cried.
Some laughed.
Some sat quiet.

But everybody remembered.

That’s what Decoration Day really was.

Not perfection.
Not fancy wreaths.
Not social media posts.

It was simple, common people makin’ sure the dead were still loved.

And truth be told-
a lotta us still feel closest to our people standin’ in those old cemeteries,
readin’ names on weathered stones,
listenin’ to the wind move through the trees they once walked under too.

Share your memories of Decoration Day.

~~banjo~~

05/23/2026

Why do we have government agencies charged with the protection of citizens? We need them because humans seldom admit they made a mistake.

By 1937 sulfanilamide was known to be an effective treatment for streptococcal infections (strep throat). But because sulfanilamide was extremely difficult to dissolve, the drug was only available in tablet or powdered form, and children resisted taking it.

In response to requests from salesmen and physicians, the S. E. Massengill Company, a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Bristol Tennessee, set about trying to create a kid-friendly liquid form of the drug. After Massengill chemist Harold Watkins discovered that it dissolved easily in diethylene glycol, he mixed raspberry flavoring into powdered sulfanilamide, dissolved it in diethylene glycol, and called his creation “Elixir Sulfanilamide.” In September 1937 Massengill shipped 633 bottles of the new product to salesmen across the country, who distributed it to physicians, who immediately began prescribing it to patients.

But Watkins had made a tragic mistake. There was no law requiring animal testing of the drug and none had been done. Diethylene glycol is a powerful solvent, used today as a component of, among other things, brake fluid, lubricants, antifreeze, and wallpaper stripper. Unbeknownst to Watkins at the time, diethylene glycol is toxic to humans.

Within a couple of weeks physicians in Tulsa Oklahoma began reporting the deaths of patients who had taken the drug. The president of the Tulsa Medical Society notified the American Medical Association, which in turn contacted Massengill demanding the chemical composition of the elixir. Claiming the composition was proprietary, Massengill released it to the AMA but only on the condition that it be kept confidential. The company admitted that there had been no toxicity testing of the product but insisted it was safe and that any adverse effects must have been from improper combinations with other drugs. To demonstrate his belief, Watkins took a dose of the drug himself, with no ill effects.

Watkins turned out to be among the approximately 75% of those who took the drug without suffering any adverse consequences. The other 25% would not be so lucky.

The AMA quickly determined that the diethylene glycol in the elixir was toxic and issued urgent warnings through radio and newspapers, while working frantically with the FDA and the company to try to track down the shipments. They were able to locate and destroy a little over 236 gallons of the 240 gallons that were manufactured and shipped. The remainder was consumed, killing 105 people, painfully and horrifically. Thirty-four of the victims were children.

Six-year-old Joan Niddifer became one of the public faces of the tragedy. After the little girl’s death from taking the drug, her mother sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, enclosing a photo of her daughter, and pleading with the president to take action to prevent such tragedies in the future. “All that is left to us is the caring for her little grave,” the grieving mother wrote. “Even the memory of her is mixed with sorrow for we can see her little body tossing to and fro and hear that little voice screaming with pain and it seems as though it would drive me insane. ... It is my plea that you will take steps to prevent such sales of drugs that will take little lives and leave such suffering behind and such a bleak outlook on the future as I have tonight...” The photo of Joan appeared in numerous newspaper stories, helping fuel public outrage and demand for action.

Massengill refused to acknowledge any responsibility for the tragedy. Samuel Massengill, the company’s owner, issued a statement that read: ““My chemists and I deeply regret the fatal results, but there was no error in the manufacture of the product. We have been supplying a legitimate professional demand and not once could have foreseen the unlooked-for results. I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part.” But Harold Watkins, the chemist who developed the formula, was overwhelmed with remorse. On January 17, 1939, he shot himself in the heart, taking his own life.

Under U.S. law at the time, pharmaceutical manufacturers were required to label their products accurately, but no safety testing was required. Finding that the word “elixir” implied that the solvent in its product was ethyl alcohol, Massengill was fined $16,800 for false labeling (about $450,000 in today’s money), the maximum fine permitted by law. For the failure to test the product, and for the deaths of those who died from it, the company was not held accountable. Only six civil lawsuits were brought against the company, and all were settled for between $300 and $3,000 (between $7,000 and $70,000 in today’s money).

In the aftermath of the disaster, Congress enacted the Federal Food Drugs and Cosmetics Act of 1938, which required that any new drug be tested for safety and that all results of the tests be reported to the FDA.