Hooper’s Main Street looked different on a Tuesday morning in September 1914. During the early hours, unidentified people had pulled out its familiar hitching posts, gathered them up and deposited them at the old town hall.
The September 3 Hooper Sentinel described a job done thoroughly, neatly and quietly. The question of removing the posts had been debated for some time, but the overnight action surprised most residents. The newspaper did not identify the people who did it. [Sentinel, September 3, 1914, p. 1]
The last post standing
One post resisted the effort: an old, broken telephone post in front of Kusel & Ring’s jewelry store. It remained on Tuesday as a solitary reminder of the old arrangement.
Someone dressed it in mourning and added a flag. The little street-side memorial lasted only until that afternoon, when the remaining post was cut down. It is an unusually playful detail in a report about street maintenance, and the centennial history preserved it decades later under the same heading, “Hitching Posts Gone.” [Sentinel, p. 1] [Centennial History, p. 86]
Farm teams still needed somewhere to stop
The original newspaper continues beyond the passage reproduced in the centennial book. Those extra paragraphs explain what the change meant for people coming into town.
The Sentinel acknowledged that farmers driving teams might be inconvenienced for a while. It reported that the street commissioner had been instructed to put more and better hitching posts on side streets. The plan therefore still made provision for people arriving with horses; it changed where they would tie them.
The paper welcomed the prospect of a cleaner Main Street, mentioning rubbish and manure that troubled merchants on windy days. The commissioner also had orders to clean and level the street and repair the gutters. These were the reasons and next steps described in the contemporary report. It does not establish who authorized the overnight removal itself. [Sentinel, September 3, 1914, p. 1]
The horse-equipment trade appears clearly in an earlier Sentinel. On January 30, 1908, Herman Lindstadt advertised handmade harness with a four-year guarantee and machine-made harness from stock. Six years before the hitching-post removal, a Hooper business was inviting customers to order the equipment needed for horse-drawn work and travel.[3]
A town changing its public spaces
Immediately beside “Hitching Posts Gone,” the same newspaper printed “City Hall Finished.” Contractor W. J. Creedon had completed the new building, which the town council had accepted. Its upstairs room would accommodate elections and meetings; downstairs were the jail, council chambers, records vault and space for fire apparatus.
The two reports show Hooper attending to its public buildings and streets in the same week. Their placement does not prove the projects were connected. It does, however, let us see the hitching-post episode as residents first encountered it: a local surprise beside other news about a changing town. [Sentinel, p. 1]
The story the centennial book kept
Photo note: The Main Street postcard used with this story appears on page 86 of the centennial book without a date. It supplies a view of the business district, not a photograph of the post removal.
Have an old Main Street photograph with a date or a recognizable storefront? Send the Hooper History Project a copy and what you know about it. Details written on the back can be as useful as the picture.