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Health & Fitness

Phalanx for the Memories, General Putnam!

An historic find: A 1889 Railway ticket book comes home to a local museum.

It is amazing what people hang onto or believes is valuable that wasn’t originally theirs. I mean, when you remove the sentimentality from a picture frame, or the necessity of a pocket watch, what else is it about an item that causes someone to hang on to it?

For most diggers it is the specter of great riches, for me the answer is, “Because, I found it!”  I admit that most weekends I go looking not for things that were lost, but that were forgotten. When I do, it feels like a found item.

Think of how you feel when you find forgotten money; Coins in between the seat cushions, a dollar as a bookmark, $10 wadded up in the bottom of the washer – that feeling you get when you discover the unexpected. I live for that feeling.

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I wrote a few weeks ago about a friend who’d brought me some old paper while digging in a family member’s basement. I appreciated the gift and will enjoy it for its local landmark references. A second item he loaned to me had been socked away in the hopes that it would be worth something and hadn’t seen the light of day since it had surfaced when discovered it in a dumpster several years ago. Before then it had likely been forgotten for decades. 

When I first saw the leather bound ticket book, it was a true mystery, the gold leaf lettering on the curled and dried out cover was strong but the title unfamiliar. Inside, the tickets were essentially undisturbed and as detailed as currency. Tracing the stops printed on each custom ticket described a journey from Springfield, Massachusetts to Niagara Falls, New York and back.

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What was the Putnam Phalanx and why was this ticket book sending at least one of them to Niagara Falls in 1889?  Continue reading the rest of the story here.
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