Pioneer history of Ingham County, compiled and arranged by Mrs. Franc L. Adams, secretary of the Ingham County pioneer and historical society.

INGHIAIA COUNTY HIlSTORY

151

the bird, and as deliberately shouldered his gun and trudged off
homeward.
The school was kept in an old dilapidated rookery, standing
down near the marsh, surrounded by stables and pigpens, where
numerous hired pedagogues whaled the rising generations of Mason
six months of the year, at a salary of from $16 to $25 per month,
and "board 'round."
Notwithstanding the unprecedented littleness of Mason, the
News was not the first paper printed there. Long before the Republican party was organized a Whig paper, called the Ingham
County Herald, was published there by D. W. C. Smith, late
county clerk of Jackson county. Afterward the Ingham Democrat was published in Mason by a Mr. Danforth. We believe Dr.
McRobert was also connected with the latter publication. These
pioneer papers were supported principally by the income from
publishing the "tax sales," which at that time yielded a handsome
revenue.
It was in Mason where the celebrated Wilber F. Storey, present
proprietor of the Chicago Times, started in his editorial career,
once publishing a Democratic paper there. Other celebrities
have also plied the quill for the Mason press. Hon. Morton S.
Wilkinson, one of the United States Senators from Minnesota,
was at one time a resident of Aurelius or Onondaga, and wrote
stirring political articles for the Mason papers. Wm. H. Clark,
Esq., your marble man, was once a devil in a Mason printing office.
from which he went out to print a paper of his own. So you see
Mason had furnished its full share of newspaper celebrities. Nor
has the village been without its newspaper sensations, for we can
distinctly remember hearing "old settlers" relate the circumstance of one of Mason's printing offices being mobbed by a band
of indignant citizens, who entered the office in the night and destroyed the type and presses. During the war a like attempt was
made at three different times to destroy the News office, and lately
we learn that some miscreant attempted to destroy the office by
setting it on fire, while to crown all else, we learn that the present
editor has got a $10,000 libel suit on his hands. (This was Kendall Kittridge, but the case was quashed.) The year of 1859
was emphatically a year of hard times. Money was never so
scarce before. The principal articles of export, upon which the