I was doing my early morning search for more information on the Nequa crew and hit on a great site. The site url is http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/   It is a site where newspapers that have been digitized are available and better yet you can type in a persons name and it will search for the name in the newspapers that have been digitized. So I put in A. O. Grigsby and then spent a couple of hours looking through the notations that have been found by the search system. A lot of the items I have already seen. But there were two real, real interesting notations.
    In 1892  Mr. and Mrs A.O. Grigsby are listed as members of the welcoming committee for the Inauguration of the Governor of Kansas. I wasn’t surprised that a political operative with Populist connections would be involved in that Inauguration as it was for the Populist Governor that had been elected.
    What made this surprising is the fact that I had found NO notation of there being a new Mrs. A. O. Grigsby after the death of Mrs. A. O. Grigsby in Hubbard county.  I spent today at the National Archives looking for marriage licenses. didn’t find any so the story  takes a new turn and might just come out the way I predicted. No I will not reveal the prediction until the book comes out.

 

    The second notation appeared in the St. Paul Daily Globe on Novenber 11, 1888. I copied it out of the newspaper so you can read the original.

    Now for those of us who have always been happy in the middle of the road doing what the Republicans say or the Democrats suggest, the above newspaper item doesn’t mean much. It is just a meeting to commemorate the death of some men with principals  in Chicago. But the fact that these men were asking for an eight hour work day.  Their Labor Unions were calling for a boycott. The powers that ruled were afraid that they would lose a little money, so it all ended with violence and people getting killed and eight men being hung, (actually they choked to death because the nooses were loose and so the usual breaking of the neck could not take place, they swung until they choked to death, a very gruesome way to die, according to the witnesses.)  They were labeled Anarchists. They did not follow the Republican or Democrat party line. Thus, Judicial Murder.

   So that is the reason for this “Festival of Sorrow”at which A. O. Grigsby is listed as one of the speakers.

    I first learned a little about the Haymarket Affair while at a conference of the  National Association of Gravestone Studies. They had their conference in Chicago which I attended.  We toured cemeteries in Chicago and one was the cemetery where Emma Goldman and some other nefarious characters were buried. The first thing that the guide told us was that NO cemetery in Chicago would accept the bodies of  the men who were hanged as Anarchists responsible for the Haymarket riots. Finally the German Waldheim Cemetery allowed the burial of these men. There is a  Haymarket Martyrs' Monument in the center of where these men are buried, which has been placed on the National Historical Monument list. The dead men were pardoned.
    One of the men on the Gravestone Association tour was the grandchild of one of the Haymarket Riot martyrs. His grandfathers envolvement was that he printed circulars to announce the protest. Seems strange that printing a poster could get you hung by the Police.