The Homer Greene Museum
The Homer Greene Museum of the Little Greene Schoolhouse is dedicated to the memory of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, poet and lawyer, Homer Greene, author of the poem below, his most famous. This poem was written around 1904 or so. Hail to our Homer, from the Pocono Mountains.
Look what we bought on Ebay! Homer's bestselling book, The Blind Brother, for which, as the title page states, he received fifteen hundred dollars from Youth Companion Magazine in 1886. That must have been a ton of money in those days. Jesus, our own Homer Greene writing his way to $1500...a book that went through 24 printings when Homer signed this copy to Mrs. Clarence R. Callaway, with a kind of a clever note to this classy lady. Homer wrote tons of kids books, plus, I think, maybe a serious Civil War novel (I saw it on Ebay, but I let it go thinking it might not be the Homer I know and love, but I bet it was.
BINGO-ED AGAIN ON EBAY...ANOTHER HOMER GREENE NOVEL
Yes, it's Burnham Breaker, published by Thomas Crowell in 1887, a story about a certain breaker in a coal field around Scranton, Pennsylvania, especially about the young boys who sat high up in the breaker alongside the conveyor belt bringing the coal up from the breaker itself...their job, to pick the slate and other rock out of the chunks of coal as it flowed by them hanging from the perches down over the belt. Just think, no light except the sunlight that managed to get through the breaker sides, and the thick black dust from the coal clogging up the foul breaker air. However, Homer starts his novel off pro-mining operator...saying the manager of Burnham Breaker was uniquely kind to his miners and the breaker boys...so kind, he let them off for the circus and gave each of them a shiny quarter...the price of admission...except one boy, and he asks permission to keep the quarter and not go to the circus...why?, because...he wants to find his parents...he has been living with a character named Uncle Billy since he was a baby...but now he decides he wants to find his parents...he needs the quarter to hire an investigator. I will not spill any more of this thrilling piece "boy's" literature...but maybe I am wrong. I have to give Homer a chance...but I want spill his beans here in case you by great, great chance happen to come across a copy of this Homer Greene classic. Notice, this book was given as an 1887 Xmas gift to Miss Mary Cronin from someone whose initials are N-K-G. I assume the "G" stands for "Greene," so it was probably a gift from Mrs. Greene to a Honesdale local girl.
Ebay, September 2003.
Another Homer Greene book. This one is: Whispering Tongues, published in 1902 by Thomas Crowell, in their Golden Hour Series. This book is dedicated to Professor William Wells LLD, one of Greene's professors at Union College.
And here is yet another Homer Greene book, this one A Lincoln Conscript, published in 1909 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Homer has switched publishers. He was with Crowell originally. Illustrations by T. De Thulstrup.
November 2003
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THE INTERESTING DOCTOR C.A. GREENE ENTERS THE MUSEUM
Here is a letter from Dr. C.A. Greene, the originator of Omnipathy, addressed March 25th, 1891, from Boston to a Mr. Beal with the Pennsylvania Railroad who are evidently wanted to purchase a quarry he owns in Pennsylvania--Dr. Greene seems pretty pissed at their offer and doesn't want his quarry destroyed, to boot.
W. B. GREENE & MUTUAL BANKING
William Batchelder Greene (b. April 4, 1818 at Haverhill, Massachusetts; d. May 30, 1878 in Weston-Super-Mare, England) (wrong dates given in Introduction to this edition) was a "prominent Massachusetts idealist during the middle of the nineteenth century." He was a cadet at West Point, but didn't graduate. He fought in the Florida Indian Wars with Andy Jackson (that great cultured American) and was medically discharged. There is a possibility he lived at the Brook Farm for a while. In 1845, he graduated from the Harvard Divinity School. He then became a Unitarian minister (appropriate "religion" for a Greene) in West Brookfield, Mass. From late 1850s to 186?, he lived in Paris, coming back to the states at the beginning of the Civil War, in which he was a colonel in the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery. He fought with this outfit at Fairfax, Virginia, where there is proof that he led that regiment in a skirmish with the Confederate forces led by Stonewall Jackson as reenforcements to the Union General Gustav Waagner and the New York Heavy Artillery at the Battle of Manassas. He resigned his commission on October 11, 1862. In the 1860s he was vice-president of the New England Labor Reform League and president of the Massachusetts Labor Union and a member of the International Workingmen's Association. In 1872, he debated Edward Atkinson at the Brookline, Mass., City Hall. In 1873, he moved to England, where he died in 1878. He was also a freemason and anarchist. In 1850-51, he petitioned the Massachusetts State Legislature for a mutual bank. This book, his masterpiece, was the result of a series of newspaper articles he began publishing in 1849. Colonel Greene (where have we heard that name before--go to the Schoolhouse Library for the book on the Copper King, Colonel William C. Greene) hated interest and profit-making banks and exchange based on government issued species. He believed people's credit, based on their land holdings or something substantial like that, was as good as money. Thus, based on Proudhon's constitution for his Bank of Exchange and People's Bank. The only interest a bank should charge is that necessary to do its day-t0-day functioning. This interest would be obtained from loaning money at 1% interest.
[For a bibliography of all W.B. Greene's writings, go to http://www.wcnet.org/~swilbur/liblab/wbgreene1818.html ]
I obtained my copy of Mutual Banking on eBay from the current owner of the rights to the book, I assume. The book I have is a 1974 reprint of an India reprint of 1946 by the Gordon Press of New York City (Libertarians, I think). This is a shortened version of the original compilation. Interesting to note on the Library of Congress information page of this book, Greene's actual birth and death dates are given, 1819-1878.
Three pages
from book.
In the museum will be the treasures Professor Mike Greene has accumulated over eleven years of collecting. Since Honesdale, PA, claims to be the home of the first steam railroad engine in the U.S., it declares itself the cradle of the American railroads, so why not open the museum with a showing of the Professor's vast collection of railroad artifacts.