1860s: January 2009 Archives

When we are living through worrisome economic periods we tend to ignore that throughout the history of our country we have had many similar slumps and that we have always recovered to new prosperity.

There have been different complicated causes for economic recession and depression over the years. One of the contributing factors to the Great Depression is said to be the 1930 Hawley-Smoot Tariff which was meant to help keep U.S. industries competitive. The higher tax on imports instead led to less foreign trade, which at this time was with European countries, and less of a market for U.S. goods.

Tariffs had been called for, and enacted as an attempt to help local industry, long before the 1930s. The December 31, 1867 York Gazette carried the following item from the Columbia Herald:

The Musical Berger Family: Anna, Fred, Louisa and Henry

York County has a rich musical background, both in spawning home-grown musicians and as a regular stop for traveling musical performers for the last hundred years or two.

I just received an email from Robyn Card, who is working on her dissertation on professional women classical trumpet players from the late nineteenth century on up to 1993. Ms. Card contacted me because of a York Sunday News article I did on the musical Berger family from York. She plans to include Anna Theresa Berger, a member of the Berger family group and later an acclaimed solo coronet player. (See below for the whole Sunday News article.)

Ms. Card would like to hear about any other professional women trumpet players you might know about from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century. She in interested in their opportunities, their music, their performances and the groups in which they performed. She can be contacted at joscard@gmail.com .

In my recent post on Jonathan Jessop and his York Imperial apple I mentioned that his son Edward raised a large family at Springwood farm. In 1930, one of those children, Little Rock, Arkansas businessman Alfred Jessop, wrote back to York to his brother Jonathan. He recounted his memory of Confederate soldiers visiting the farm in 1863.

Click here for previous Jessop post.

The letter reads in part: