A Little New Year’s Reading

As we celebrate the first days of 2015, we hope all of our Ohio Memory visitors and readers have had a restful and happy holiday season. This week’s post offers a bit of light reading celebrating the new year, although the words come to us from over 150 years ago!

On January 1, 1859, the Daily Ohio State Journal published a “Story for the New Year,” written by William Turner Coggeshall. Coggeshall periodically worked as a reporter for the Ohio State Journal, and was in the midst of serving his term as State Librarian of Ohio (1856-1862) at the time this feature was published. Quite the renaissance man, Coggeshall is also remembered as an author, a publisher, a diplomat, and even a personal bodyguard to President Lincoln! As the introduction to the article states, this piece was published in Coggeshall’s 1859 book Home Hits and Hints: A Book for the Fireside shortly after being featured in the Journal. It is also appeared in his earlier book, Easy Warren and His Cotemporaries, which included numerous “sketches” designed (like this story) “to point a moral.”

Titled “Pay As You Go,” this “admirable little story” gives a redemptive and instructional account of a merchant and his wife who lived beyond their means, but who learned their lesson and mended their ways. And as Coggeshall states, “There can be no better time for opening a clean page than on the opening of a new year.”

We hope you’ll take time to explore this and other interesting finds within our digital collections, and we wish you a happy New Year from Ohio Memory!

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Thanks to Lily Birkhimer, Digital Projects Coordinator at the Ohio History Connection, for this week’s post!