Lucy The Elephant Still Welcomes Visitors
To Jersey Shore

In my column in the December/January issue of Old Stuff, I mentioned a visit to an elephant named Lucy, and promised a picture to follow. Here she is, six stories high.

She was built by a real estate speculator in the 1880s. He owned a great deal of land on the New Jersey shore, a few miles south of Atlantic City, and he was very eager to sell some of these parcels. He built the elephant as an attraction to entice potential buyers to the town of Margate, where the land was located.

Lucy is six stories tall and beautifully finished inside. Today, the interior is used as a museum, but originally, it served as the real estate office. Following that, at one point, it was purchased by a family and used as their summer seaside home. To enter, you climb a spiral staircase in one back leg. The other back leg serves as an exit today. She faces the Atlantic Ocean, which you can see through her eyeballs.

In the early 20th century, Lucy the Elephant was a popular destination, visited by Presidents and royalty, who would stay at the nearby Elephant Hotel. Through the years, she survived hurricanes, ocean floods and fires, but eventually, by the 1960s, she was terminally ill from neglect.

When a developer purchased her lot, and determined that this wreck of an elephant had to go, a Save Lucy Committee was formed of local citizens and the decaying structure was moved two blocks to city property. She has now been restored, and is designated as a National Historic Landmark as the oldest existing example of “zoomorphic” architecture.
If you’re on the Jersey coast, don’t miss the chance to climb inside Lucy. You can view the Atlantic Ocean through her eyeballs and sights to the west through the pane in her “you know what.”

The pictures shown here do not show the howdah that belongs on top of Lucy’s back. She, and it, were hit by lightning last Spring, and it’s now on the ground beside her, waiting for repair.

Donna Miller

Lucy has her own web site: see www.lucytheelephant.org.

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'Mothering Day' Has Been Around For Many Years

Mother’s Day has been observed as a special day in many countries for a long time. In England, it was held in mid-Lent and was called Mothering Day.

The first known suggestion for Mother’s  Day in the United States was made by Julia Ward Howe in 1872. She suggested June 2 as the day, and proposed that it be a day dedicated to peace. Howe held an annual Mother’s Day meeting in Boston for several years.

In the first decade of the 1900s, Anna Jarvis began a campaign for a national observance of Mother’s Day. She chose the second Sunday of May and began the custom of wearing a carnation. On May 10, 1908, her home churches in Philadelphia and Grafton, West Virginia, conducted Mother’s Day celebrations.

Mother’s Day received national recognition on May 9, 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson signed a resolution of Congress recommending that Congress and the executive departments of the government observe Mother’s Day. The following year, the President was authorized to proclaim it as an annual national observance.

In 1976, a book entitled Mothers of Achievement in American History, 1776-1976, was compiled by a group called The American Mothers Committee, Inc. Bi Centennial Project. Several mothers of each of the 50 states were recognized in this volume.

Selected from Oregon were Marguerite Wadin McLoughlin, Melinda Miller Applegate, Tabitha Moffatt Brown, Clarissa Stein Birdseye, Rhoda Quick Johnson, Elizabeth Roe Cloud, Carrie B. Hervin, Dorothy Lawson McCall, Bertha Holt and Judge Mercedes F. Deiz.

From Washington, those selected were Minerva Jane Mayo Cline, Gina Pedersen, Ernestine Edith Millay, Edna Cathern Karlinsey, Mary Tooze Price, Bernice Gourley, Lora Wilkins Magnusson, Pearl Wall Zirker, Josephine Hasbrook Hoffman, Marge Lewis Owen and Shirley Haft Agranoff.

Biographies are included for each of these recognized women.  I’ll share an abbreviated version of a couple of them.

Minerva Jane Mayo Cline was one of the first mothers to settle in Sidney (now Port Orchard), Washington.

She was born in Illinois and married a Civil War soldier in 1865 at the age of 18. She and her husband, William, moved first to Nebraska and then to Kansas.

However, several years of drought convinced them to join a wagon train and head west. They took with them their seven children, one just a tiny baby.

After trying Portland, and then Olympia, and not finding either place the right spot for them, they boarded the steamship Messenger to Kitsap County where some relatives had previously settled. The boat landed them on the beach; their horses and cows were pushed overboard, to swim ashore.

With all their belonging, they walked several miles at night to their homestead at Long Lake. It was January of 1884.

In 1886, the Clines moved into Sidney, and purchased the hotel there. It was Minerva Jane, ÒAunt Jane,” who prepared the meals, baked the bread and pastry, and did the housekeeping in all the rooms, all the while also taking care of her seven children.

Minerva Jane Cline continued as a community leader throughout the rest of her life.

One of the featured mothers of Oregon had a somewhat more dramatic entrance to the North west. And she didn’t even start west until she was 66 years old, crippled and a widow.

Tabitha Moffatt Brown was the mother of Orus Brown, who had already settled in Oregon when he persuaded his mother to join a wagon train and come live with him in the Northwest.

Tabitha, crippled since childhood, spent nine months on the Oregon Trail. Her group was persuaded to try the Applegate Trail cut-off, which led to southern Oregon. This was a mistake. The cattle died of thirst and starvation, the mountains wrecked their wagons, and they had several Indian attacks to ward off.

They did finally reach the Umpqua Valley of southern Oregon, where she sent word to her son. Orus set out in haste to bring her north to his home in the Willamette Valley and on Christmas day Tabitha entered a house for the first time in nine months. Her entire capital when she arrived was a six-and-a-quarter cent piece, which she found in the end of a glove finger.

This, however, was enough to start the lady in business. With it, she purchased three needles. She traded some old clothes to the Indian women for buckskins and worked the leather into gloves for the Oregon ladies and gentlemen, which cleared her $30.

Mrs. Brown became greatly concerned about the suffering of the children orphaned en route on the Oregon Trail. She persuaded the Reverend Henry Clark to establish an orphanage. He donated 200 acres and "Grandma" Brown agreed to work a year with no pay.

The establishment started with 14 children, but grew fast; it soon was given the name of Tualatin Academy. This, in turn, soon received a charter to become a college, and Grandma Brown’s school continues to thrive today as Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.

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Unsuspecting Drinkers Subject To Problem

Many aspects of 20th century life seem to trace their origin to the activities of the ancient Romans. Just one of these is the connection of the first day of April with practical jokes and trickery.

Of course, practical jokes are not limited to this one day of the year, and for centuries barroom tricks have been a favorite kind. Probably the fact that one can easily fool a person who is already partially befuddled has spurred on this activity.

In 1666, diarist Samuel Pepys described a barroom wager in which a man was dared to drink his beer from a mug containing a live frog. By the 18th century, jugs made with ceramic toads, lizards or snakes firmly attached to the bottom were common; onlookers waited gleefully for the unsuspecting drinker to drain his cup and find a creature in the bottom.

The perforated puzzle mugs wee also favorite items. Holes ringed the top edge. If the drinker didn’t know where to place his fingers, there was no way to stop the ale form dribbling all over his clothes and hands.
 

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