West Jefferson in Days Gone By - series 95 by Charlie Miller

_____September 1, 1897 – Hon. S. M. Taylor, brother of Druggist Zack Taylor, has been appointed United States Consul to Glasglow, Scotland.

____January 6, 1898 – Former West Jefferson resident William Wallace Fellows, died in Columbus last Monday morning. (W. W. Fellows was born in 1818 in New Hampshire and came to Jefferson in 1836 and entered into the mercantile trade and farming. He and his son, T. B. Fellows later operated a dry goods business. In 1872 he retired and went to farming on the 18 acres that he owned along the Frey Ave. and Lilly Chapel Pike. He built the large brick home on the corner of Fellows Ave. and Frey.
Ave. Fellows Avenue is named after him.)

____February 16, 1898 – West Jefferson now has a long-distance telephone line by having the line at Zack Taylor’s store connected with the one in Columbus.

____February 23, 1898 – “Fort” Byron, one of the eyesores of our town, is being torn down to make way for a new building. (This is the current site of the Huntington (former 1^st Merit) Bank.

____March 2, 1898 - Another murder near West Jefferson----Three miles west of town on the London-West Jefferson Road near the home of Thomas Pearce, the dead man, Joe Millholland, had been shot and then placed on the Little Miami R.R. tracks and ran over by a train. The guilty party is not known.

April 20, 1898 – A new hotel is being built in Jefferson and is being entirely lighted by gas.

____May 18, 1898 – Chas. Recob, Mary Kehoe, and Pat Matlock have purchased new bicycles, there are about 100 of these vehicles in this village.

The Spanish-American War

The Spanish-American War was a war waged against Spain by the United States in 1898 to liberate Cuba from Spanish rule. Relations between the two countries became strained in 1897 and the accidental blowing up of the United States battleship Maine in the Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, led to the beginning of hostilities. Cuba was blockaded on April 22^nd and the war was declared first by Spain and a day later by the United States on April 25, 1898. On May 1^st the Spanish fleet under Montojo, was completely destroyed by Admiral Dewey in the Manila Harbor.

The Peace Protocol was signed on August 12, 1898, and the actual treaty was ratified in Paris on December 10, 1898. By the terms of the treaty the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and all Spanish West Indies were ceded to the United States in payment of 20 million dollars, while Cuba was recognized as an independent territory under the protection of the United States.