Jackson Purchase Historical Society

Stories of Interest from the Hickman Courier from September 11, 1874

• The coming trade year was predicted to be “necessarily hard on businessmen of small capital” since many farmers would be forced to carry over their debts into the next year due to the serious drought.
• The Hickman Young Men’s Christian Association met on September 10^th and elected Reverend J. D. Bush as President and James Wearn as Secretary. The Association was to meet again on September 11^th.
• The Hickman Circuit Court met on September 7^th where the newly elected Judge W. W. Robertson and Commonwealth Attorney Bernard Neale assumed their duties of their offices.
• A large number of Hickman citizens invited Emerson Etheridge to deliver an address in the city to be scheduled in the near future.
• The semi-annual meeting of the Southwest Kentucky Medical Association was to be held in Fulton on October 14^th.
• Buck Cook, Lum Carter, and Matt Kimberland stated they would accept a wager made by a Madisonville, Kentucky company which would pay any man that could consume thirty partridges in thirty days. One stated he would also eat sixty squirrels during the same thirty-day period.
• The three Democratic candidates for Congress met at Clinton on September 7^th. Oscar Turner, A. R. Boon and Caswell Bennett gave speeches.
• Hickman County voters were reported largely in favor of a Democratic Convention in the District.
• The Democratic candidates for Congress met in Paducah on the evening of September 8th where the audience was “very demonstrative in favor of a Convention.”
• The Democratic Executive Committee of the First Congressional District met on the evening of September 8^th in Paducah and resolved to hold a Convention on October 15^th to nominate a Democratic candidate for Congress. Boon and Bennett have agreed to participate, but Turner had yet to respond.
• President Ulysses S. Grant and former Confederate President Jefferson Davis condemned the murders of 15 black prisoners in Trenton, Tennessee. Federal troops were ordered to the district and to be “stationed at different and convenient points” and give “needful aid in the discharge of [local] official duties.”
• One of the members of the mob that killed 15 black men, a man by the name of Lassiter, accidently shot and killed himself with a shotgun earlier in the week in Gibson County, Tennessee.
• Alex W. Campbell, a prominent attorney from Jackson, Tennessee, had been rumored to have been retained at a fee of $30,000 to defend certain parties involved in the murder of prisoners in Trenton.
• One black man was killed, and two others were shot and wounded in New Madrid, Missouri. Five or six white men were imprisoned and awaiting trial.