"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))

Monday, September 16, 2024

Times Remembered - Algona: 1854-2004 (2003)

(163 pages)

This was a gift from my parents received shortly after the book was released.

It isn't a history book per se; it includes numerous vignettes extending across the named years. 

Useful reminder of conditions being pretty primitive in northern Iowa in the pre-Civil War period. I see that the railroad ("The Milwaukee Railroad" - same line on which I commuted from Glenview to downtown Chicago in the early 1980s) first reached Algona in 1870.

Carnegie library.

For my taste, a bit too much of the content is one-pagers about various retail establishments - maybe this is what the Algona Upper Des Moines was familiar with?  Hutzell's, Hub, Chrischilles, etc.

Easy read, worth the brief time required.

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