125 years ago

april 23, 1886

How We Grow

Trustee Bates has nearly completed his census taking, and informs us that the population of Marion if over twenty-one hundred, an increase of about five hundred during the year! That is certainly a gratifying showing. And, when next year’s enumeration is made we want to predict that there will be at least three thousand people within the corporate limits of Marion. Verily, the Queen of the Cottonwood groweth grandly.

Five hundred and sixty-eight prisoners are now confined within the walls of the military prison at Fort Leavenworth.

Weather prophets are predicting a cold wave next week, which is to extend as far south as southern Kansas. The Record is out of the weather business since the groundhog days are over, and doesn’t pretend to know anything about this matter, but it might be well for people to be ready to set up stoves in their gardens and blanket their flower beds on short notice.

A runaway team, drawing a covered wagon, dashed down Main street Monday afternoon creating considerable of a sensation, but fortunately no one was killed and no particular damage was done.

Messrs. J.M. Phillips and N.E. Farley, representing the old reliable Vinland nursery, a Kansas institution of thirty odd years of age, delivered about six thousand trees, fifty-five thousand hedge plants and whole oodles of small fruits, in Marion the past week.

A Fine Building

We have been kindly shown by Mr. Case the architect’s draft of the fine store building he is preparing to erect on Main street.

The building will have a frontage of fifty-five feet, and a depth of 100 feet. It will have a handsome iron front, with French-plate glass, the upper front being of brick, ornamented with cut stone, the whole surmounted with an elegant iron cornice.

The whole of the first floor will be made into one mammoth store-room, and is to be occupied, we understand, by Messrs. Loveless and Sacket, who sold $75,000 of goods last year in a room not half as large.

The ceiling of this great room will be fifteen feet high, and the whole building, thirty-nine feet high.

There will be fourteen rooms on the second floor.

The excavation for a cellar under the whole building is now nearly completed.

When completed, this magnificent building will be one of the finest in Central Kansas, and worthy of any city.

Jerry Phillips, the excellent barber, has concluded to move to Topeka; in fact, he has already sent his family there and will himself follow next Monday. They are worthy representatives of Marion’s many excellent colored people, and we are sorry to see them leave the town.