Did you know
Did You Know?
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The following is another Did You Know? quiz about Fayette County history.
I’ll get to the questions a little later. First, I’d like to fully answer a question a couple of regular readers to this column have asked me.
A few weeks back, I posed a question based on an Oct. 3, 1930 story in the Uniontown Morning 无毛视频. According to that story, there were 20 “rated” high schools in Fayette County.
I only mentioned a few of those high schools. Those readers asked me for the complete of high schools. Well, here it is:
Georges Township, South Union Township, North Union Township, Perry Township, Point Marion, Fairchance, Masontown, Belle Vernon, Fayette City, Dunbar Borough, Brownsville, South Brownsville, South Connellsville, Smithfield, Ohiopyle, Redstone Township, German Township, Dunbar Township, Connellsvllle and Uniontown.
Also mentioned, but not listed as one of the 20 schools was All Saints High School of Masontown.
Now to this week’s questions.
2. In November of 1884, Uniontown played a small, but significant role in the world of sports. What was it?
A) The first ever professional football team played a game in Uniontown.
B) A correspondence was sent from Uniontown that would contribute to the first American boxing match ever to be fought under the Marquess of Queensberry rules.
C) World renowned multiple sports legend, Jim Thorpe, lost his first basketball game at the Gallatin Gardens.
D) Uniontown’s sandlot baseball team beat the Pittsburgh Pirates.
E) James Naismith, the inventor of the game of basketball, came to Uniontown to promote his new game.
3. In April of 1913, one of the most bizarre events in Fayette County history took place. What was it?
A) A dirigible landed near downtown Uniontown.
B) A U.S. president made a whistle-stop in Connellsville, but because his arrival wasn’t publicized, nobody showed up.
C) A man was hanged, but the rope was too long.
D) During a primary election, a mayoral candidate got caught engaging in voter fraud.
E) Two youngsters made off with a police car, and crashed it into the side of the Fayette County courthouse.
4. In 1991, a “kidnapping” in Fayette County was the subject of news around the world. Why?
A) The kidnappers were in their mid-teens.
B) The victim turned the tables on the kidnappers.
C) The victim was a statue.
D) The mother of a young woman, who was left at the altar, kidnapped her daughter’s fianc茅.
E) The kidnappers were caught in a church.
THE ANSWERS
2. B, A correspondence was sent from Uniontown that would contribute to the first American boxing match ever to be fought under the Marquess of Queensberry rules.
If you’re a fan of “the sweet science” of boxing, you already know that the last words a referee says before the opening bell is to “shake hands and come out fighting.”
Those kinds of calls to sportsmanship and fair play belong to the boxing etiquette known as the Marquess of Queensberry rules. They were named after the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, John Douglass, who publically endorsed them during the mid-1860’s in London.
They were not employed in America until the late mid-1880s. It was reported that the manager of the Pittsburgh fighter, Dominick McCaffrey, contacted the manager of John L. Sullivan about staging a fight in November of 1884.
The fight request was sent by way of a telegram sent from Uniontown.
The first American prize fight employing the Marquess of Queesnberry rules was staged in Cincinnati, Ohio in early 1885.
Sullivan beat McCaffrey in six rounds.
3. C, A man was hanged, but the rope was too long.
Convicted murderer John “Buffalo” Harris was the 12th person scheduled to face the hangman’s noose in Fayette County history.
According to the Uniontown Daily News Standard, Harris walked to the gallows with a “remarkable fearlessness of death.”
However, his eventual demise was beset with a snag. According to the Frederick, Md., Evening Post, after the rope was placed around Harris’ neck, and the scaffold was sprung, it was discovered that “the rope was about three feet too long.”
The county sheriff and his deputies rushed to a man who’d simply fallen to his knees with a rope around his neck. They dragged him up by the rope until his feet dangled in mid-air.
Published reports around the country, spared none of the grizzly details, by recounting how Harris “struggled and twisted” for 18 minutes until he was pronounced dead.
4. C, The victim was a statue.
According to the March 21, 1991 edition of the Pacific edition of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes (Japan), bandits made off with a seven-foot tall plastic Big Boy statue from the top of the Elby’s Big Boy restaurant on Route 40.
The culprits put it on their truck and dragged the head on the road for miles before they “released” it.
Police authorities used the tracks caused by the dragged head to find the statue and retrieve it.
Edward A. Owens can be reached by email at freedoms@bellatlantic.net
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