Posts Tagged ‘bicycles’

7
Apr

Chickens Must Stay at Home

   Posted by: admin    in Animals, Transportation

The Fort Dodge Messenger: April 7, 1904

Chickens Must Stay at Home

Police to See That Owner Keeps Them on Property.

A Ban Is Also Placed on the Practice of Bicycle Riders Using the Sidewalks.

Many complaints have been made to the police to the effect that the productiveness of newly made gardens is enhanced by the intrusions of neighboring chickens. The number of complaints have been such that it is now ordered that all persons who are the owners of fowls must keep them in enclosures or at least take some means by which they will remain on the owner’s premises and if there is any scratching or garden destroying to be done that only the owner of the chickens shall suffer.

Police records in cities the size of Fort Dodge, where the advantages of the country can be enjoyed in so far as it is possible to raise one’s own chickens and lose no sleep when the grocer asks sky scrapinging (sic) prices for eggs, show that many cases which the mayor is called upon to settle often arise from such a little thing as one neighbor’s chickens paying a visit to another neighbor’s garden and digging up the young plants from which neighbor No. 2 expected to reap a harvest. To eliminate the number of such disturbances and because of the further fact that a person owning chickens by law is obliged to keep them on his own premises, owners of the feathery property of all kinds are warned to keep the same on their own domain.

With spring comes the bicycle and with it comes another mandate from the police. Every street in Fort Dodge is not paved with asphalt and it must be admitted that there are some at certain periods of the year, of which spring is one, when they are not at all unlike country roads. For these reasons riders of bicycles on many of the resident streets resort to the sidewalks, where they find peddling much better than on the muddy street. There is an ordinance against riding on the sidewalks and it is to be enforced. Bicycle riders apprehended riding on the walks will be arrested and fined.

(Editor’s note: My last bicycle-riding experience was about three or four years ago in Fort Dodge. I had gone to pick up a bike from a friend, who was giving it to me. I tried out the bike and decided to ride it home, a few blocks away. While waiting for the light to change at Sixth Avenue North and 15th Street, I was chastised and cursed at by a guy in a car for riding my bike on the street.  It is still the law in Iowa that bicycle riders must ride on the street, and vehicle drivers must allow it.)

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