Cicadas and The Mercantile

We hear the cicadas are about to emerge from their 17-year nap, and that reminded us of a great little newspaper clipping our friend and local historian Greg Hand found. On July 19, 1885 — that’s eight cicada-cycles ago — the Commercial Tribune published this report about the insects from Mr. C.H. Newton, “the well-known and popular librarian” of the Young Men’s Mercantile Library. (The Library had been established 50 years before, in 1835.)

We know it’s hard to read, and we don’t want you to miss this gripping tale of cicada death and murder, so we transcribed the clipping for you:

“In talking with Mr. C. H. Newton, the well-known and popular librarian of the Y.M.M. Library, who resides at College Hill, he says the locusts have been quite numerous there, but they have now nearly all disappeared. He captured two of them and brought them to the city with him, one of them soon died. He met the other at liberty, but not being used to city life, flew direct against the walls of the Gibson House, and apparently butted his brains out and fell on the sidewalk, when several sparrows pounced on his carcass, making short work of it. He says the English sparrows were too much for them at College Hill. Mr. Newton went on to state that lots of the locusts were simply killed by the sparrows and left on the ground where the chickens fed on them. Last Sunday morning he says he witnessed a funny thing. One of the sparrows had caught a locust and was enjoying a good square meal over his remains when a half-grown chicken interfered and undertook to chase the sparrow away, and made a rush at him, but Mr. Sparrow didn’t frighten a bit, and turned on the chicken with beak and claws with such ferocity that the chick seemed glad enough to turn tail and run to cover.”

You can find more great Cincinnati history finds like this at Hand’s blog.