THE RILED BUNCH

Every September, the citizens of Northfield, Minnesota, put on a civic extravaganza. It includes men’s and women’s arm wrestling, a beard contest, a softball tournament, an arts fair, an antique collector’s show, a kiddie parade, a drum and bugle corps, the Minnesota Street Rod Association Show, a beer garden, several dances, and a Grande Parade (which two years ago featured a team of live llamas and Miss Pork Queen of Rice County).

Above all, it includes several reenactments of a very special moment in the city’s history. For Northfield is the town that defeated Jesse James.

On the morning of September 7, 1876, Frank and Jesse James, Cole, Bob, and Jim Younger, and three lesserknown thugs rode into Northfield intent on making a withdrawal from the farming deposits kept in the First National Bank on the corner of Bridge Square and Division Street. The attempt was a bloody disaster.

Unlike the citizens of the town in High Noon, who fled to the church and left Gary Cooper to deal with the bad guys utterly alone, the people of Northfield displayed remarkable backbone in the face of “the greatest revolver fighters in the world. ” One of them, seized by a robber on the sidewalk in front of the bank, tore away and ran off, shouting, “Get your guns, boys! They’re robbing the bank!” Inside, one of the three men on duty, Joseph Lee Heywood, steadfastly refused to open the bank’s vault; he was shot and killed on the spot. Another, Alonzo E. Bunker, threw himself through a glass door at the back of the bank and, although wounded, ran to spread the alarm.

Thwarted, the bandits left the bank’s deposits untouched and began riding up and down Division Street, shooting up everything in sight. Fire was returned by Henry M. Wheeler, a medical student home on vacation, and Anselm R. Manning, owner of a hardware store. Other men stood in the street and pelted the gang with rocks and bottles. In the end, two robbers were killed, Bob and Cole Younger were wounded, and the bunch was driven out of town. Later, some one thousand armed men tracked the gang down, killed one more of them, and captured the Younger brothers. Only Frank and Jesse managed to escape, sneaking back to their home county in Missouri through Dakota Territory. The Younger brothers were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Reason enough for celebration, as a reporter of the time summed it up: “On the one side was a band of heavily armed and thoroughly trained and organized banditti, carrying out a carefully made plan, in their own line of business, after weeks of preparation. On the other side was a quiet, law-abiding community, unused to scenes of violence, taken utterly by surprise and at a fearful disadvantage. … Yet the banditti were beaten at their own game. ”

THOMAS ALVA EDISON AND THE CONCRETE PIANO

As his biographer Robert Conot has pointed out, some of Thomas Alva Edison’s most important inventions were serendipitous offshoots of research into something altogether different. Thus, experiments in the development of a musical telephone led to the phonograph, work on a zootropic device to motion pictures, and chemical research for an automatic telegraph to the mimeograph. “If I had not had so much ambition and had not tried to do so many things,” he said shortly before his death, “I probably would have been happier, but less useful.”

Which is not to say that things always worked out. Take the cement business, for example. In 1897 Edison developed a new process for concentrating iron ore in a mill he built outside of Ogdensburg, New Jersey. One of the by-products of this operation was an extremely fine sand, which the mill’s manager had no trouble selling to those engaged in the making of Portland cement. Well, Edison reasoned, why not go into the cement business himself?

And so he did. In 1898, with seven partners, he organized the Edison Portland Cement Company, then built a massive plant in the Delaware River valley of western New Jersey featuring 150-foot rotating kilns, the largest in the world at that time. His ultimate dream in all this was the mass production of concrete houses, each of them to be three stories high, contain six rooms, and sell for just twelve hundred dollars. Financially, however, the dream proved hopeless. “The project,” Conot writes, “dragged on for seven years before Edison, unable to stimulate a scintilla of interest from builders or real estate men, abandoned it without pouring the cement for a single concrete house. Before the end came, however, Edison developed the idea that a conrete house should have concrete furniture. He proposed making concrete refrigerators and concrete pianos, and did, in fact, cast several concrete phonograph cabinets. To mark the final resting place of the inhabitants of the concrete world, he devised a concrete tombstone. ”

Edison nursed the cement plant itself through several reorganizations and bankruptcies before letting the New Jersey jungle cover it over in 1930.

Forty-nine years later, Mrs. Sally Johnson Franz of Florham Park found it—or what was left of it—and was stricken with her own idea: to market the bricks from the enormous kilns as mementos of Edison. With a bulldozer, acetylene cutting equipment, and several workers, Mrs. Franz managed to salvage somewhere between twentyfive hundred and three thousand bricks. These were then registered with the Warren County Court House as having come from the Edison plant site, hauled to her back yard in Florham Park, cleaned up, numbered with brass plaques, and offered for sale at $12.95. For his money, each purchaser not only got the brick, but also had his name recorded in a ledger kept on display in the Edison Birthplace Museum in Milan, Ohio. There are plenty of bricks left, Mrs. Franz assures us—although it is difficult to imagine what one is supposed to do with an Edison brick. Perhaps it would add a nice decorative touch, propped up on your concrete piano.

THE CATTON VIEW

Several months after his death, a letter was addressed to Brace Catton, founding editor of this magazine, from Jeffery Sherrill, a seventh grader from Social Circle, Georgia. William B. Catton, Bruce’s son (and co-author with him of The Glory and the Dream), answered the young man’s letter and was kind enough to pass along the correspondence to us. Portions of both letters follow:

“Dear Mr. Bruce Catton:

“I admire you for your Civil War books. I have five of them. When I was young I loved the Civil War more than anything! I always looked at your books the most. I tried to write my own book about the Civil War but I got to the First Bull Run and quit. If I finished I said I would dedicate it to you. The title was The Silver Book of the Civil War. …

“My favorite battles during the Civil War were the battles of the Wilderness, Shiloh, and Chickamauga. They all are very bloody, aren’t they? I used to love the North. … Then I saw Gone With the Wind and found out whose side I was on. Sheer hatred of the North grew in me. …”

“Dear Jeff:

“I’m afraid I must begin with the sad news that my father died a few months ago after a brief illness. I’m sorry he never got to read your letter.… Letters from young people were always his favorites, and I know he would have liked yours. He would have answered it, too.

“I hope you don’t mind my trying to answer it for him. Certainly I appreciate—as he would have appreciated- the nice things you said about his books. He would have been impressed, as I am, by the great amount of work you have done on the Civil War, and by your efforts to write a book about it. Writing a book is one of the hardest jobs there is.

“My father would have been unhappy to hear that you have come to hate the North. The war was of course a great tragedy for many of the people who fought in it or were hurt by it, and it is understandable that some of them—in the South, and in the North—came to hate their enemies. It was General Sherman who said, ‘War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.’

“But over one hundred years have gone by and in looking back upon the Civil War we can find better emotions than hatred. We can admire the bravery and the devotion with which both sides fought. We can find—as you have found—favorite battles and favorite leaders to study. We can learn to appreciate just how terrible war is, which is worth remembering.

“And above all, we can be thankful that, for all its pain and destruction, the war ended with the Union preserved and the slaves free. We can regret that it took a bloody war to accomplish these goals, but we should continue to be grateful that the United States is still one country and that all of its people are free. My father certainly felt this way, and he would have said something about it in answering your letter. …”