CHAPTER VIII.
COUNTY SEATS AND COUNTY SEAT CONTESTS. (CONT'D)
From History of Audubon Co., Iowa (1915)
by H. F. Andrews
It appears that Kimball stirred up Elder Crocker in his paper; but we are unable to discover what he said about the elder, which moved the reverend gentleman to wrath. But here is what Crocker said about Kimball:
"SKINNING A SKUNK!
"The Audubon Daily Times, which was probaljly already in process of incubation, bursts its shell and comes to life immediately after the warmth of the Oakfield discussion. The first issue of the daily wreaks its vengeance upon one J. M. Crocker, and merits only silent and supreme contempt, but, for the sake of the respectability whom he disgraces, by being their representative, we consent to answer. He proceeds to answer our arguments by his well-known method of warfare, by vomiting upon their author. He has not time to expose our fallacies but will after election; until then we must be silent by the ipsi dixit of a man who was never known before to tell the truth, when a lie would serve as well. For proof of my statements in the Defender, I refer to any correct county map. He states that in that article signed 'Goose Quill' I assailed him in an uncalled-for and ungentlemanly manner. Far from it. Everyone knows our attack was upon the only worthy and able editor in Audubon, the editor of the Advocate. We knew before that he could tell a lie; we know now that he can't tell anything else. He says the loan agents have trouble to get their papers promptly. Anyone who knows anything about the office work of the recorder knows that the supply of work is irregular, sometimes nothing to do for days at a time, then a rush and an overwhelming amount of it for a few days. It not unfrequently happens that amid this rush of work a half dozen long loan mortgages are handed in by nearly as many different firms, each wanting his work first. Now to do all this with entire satisfaction to all is perhaps an impossibility. But I apprehend that the firm to whom we have given the greatest dissatisfaction is the one we have most frecpiently and fruitlessly dunned for their long-standing arrears. But my chief sin is in making county speeches. Ah, that's the rub. I was not aware that it was any worse for the recorder to attend a meeting at Oakfield (leaving Exira at dark), than it was for editors, bankers, real estate agents, et al., from Audubon; and if their unconcealed ill-humor was an index to their moral consciousness they were guilty of a greater sin than those of Exira, who seemed to be well satisfied and in good humor. 'He has always been our friend.' That is the most disgraceful thing he says or could say. I flatter myself that this is also false. But at least whatever contumely we have been entitled to in the past by his friendship, we are at last relieved.
"He says we sold out to J. B. White. This is an infamous falsehood, that would stain the character of a demon. J. B. White lost his cause in Audubon county, as everyone knows, by his affiliations with the edtior of the Times. But bad and imbecile as I am, I only lack one thing of being a saint, a scholar and a gentleman, and that one thing needful is to sell out to Audubon, body and suffrage; it is a transformation process. The idiotic editor of theSentinel became a sane and sensible man; the violent Anti M. Nop, against the most scathing vindictives were already in type, surrenders his manhood in time to save his character, the type is distributed and the editorials do not appear and he becomes at once the spokesman for the removal cause, and their orator on high occasions. Indeed it is a transforming process. It would cover all our remissness and convert the viper to the dove. But, alas, we are not susceptible of the change; our evil is incurable because we cannot be bought, intimidated, nor bulldozed into favor with their lofty measures that involve our county in the liability for thousands of dollars; because we will not pander to their whims nor be awed into silence concerning their selfish schemes; because we dare to look with suspicion upon their proposed offers and expose the emptiness of their gulled gifts. But to sum it all up, he has told who and what we are. We will not attempt a like favor in his behalf for two reasons: First, the people of this county know him of old; second, no language is equal to the emergency; decomposition has proceeded so far in his case as to render dissection impossible; we can only trim him off a little around the eyes. Who is he? The man (forgive the false appellation) whose only aversion to farming is that his wife can't do the work; who was once recorder of Audubon county, to the sorrow of all who shall search the records, to the end of time; who left a fair picture of himself upon the records, in which the back ground of illegibility is only relieved by the abundance of palpable and glaring blunders, and but for his industrious wife, who did most and best of his work that outlived his official career, would only have been equalled by his moral lustre; who sold out J. B. White by staining the garments of a pure man by his own putrid impurity; who is a vulture of old upon the county treasury; who is now seeking to leap into the realization of his long-cherished desires for rapine and plunder upon the county; who has sold himself at every opportunity and never failed cheat the purchaser out of the full price paid; who is now spreading his feathers over his newly hatched daily, and would like to write an article for it if he had sufficient sense; in whom the vacuum of intelligence and refinement is filled with vileness and vulgarity; whose hatred of all that is lovely, excellent and pure, is only equalled by his ardent love of all that is villainous, vicious and mean; in whose estimation the sum of infancy is the freedom of unfettered manhood; whose papers, daily and weekly, are a mass of maggotty rottenness, that the vultures would disdain; a stain on the history of barbarism, an insult to civilization, and a stench amid the breezes from the bottomless pit; as an encomium and abuse as our highest praise.
"J. M. Crocker."
The local newspapers of that period were filled with this style of effusions by the respective editors, sometimes better and often worse. These samples will suffice to indicate the abuses by which people were afflicted during that unhappy period.
During the campaign one of the Audubon papers gave out the following statement: "Captain Stuart authorizes us to state that if the people of Audubon county want the county seat at Audubon he will furnish a good, subsantial building for court house purposes, much better than the county ever had, free of any expense to the county or taxpayers, and that he will enter into writings to that effect. He further says that the building shall be provided with fire-proof vaults for the county records."
But we have seen that the railroad company built the present court house for use of the county before the county-seat election came off. At the election the contest was decided by a vote of eight hundred and forty-one votes against six hundred and twenty, in favor of removal to Audubon. And the county records were immediately transferred to Audubon. In 1905 an election was ordered to test the proposition of issuing bonds in the amount of sixty-five thousand dollars for the erection of a new court house at Audubon. It brought out violent opposition from people of various parts of the county. A number of business men of Exira executed a bond in the sum of forty thousand dollars, binding themselves to build a new court house at Exira, if the people of the county would re-locate the county seat there. The movement indicated that the memory of the old fights lingered in the breasts of the sons of the old contestants who were defeated in 1879. The bond operated as a bluff and the bond issue was defeated by nearly four hundred votes. The present year, Exira has built a costlv new school house at their own expense. It is not clear what position the people of Exira may take when the time arrives for building a new court house.
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Transcribed by Cheryl Siebrass, July 2022, from History of Audubon Co., Iowa (1915), by H. F. Andrews, page 156-158.
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