WEST UNION Steuben County New York
NEWSPAPER TIDBITS

1911

ROMANCE OF A DAY FOR UP-STATE GIRL Left the nice little Town of Rexville One Morning and Was Glad to Go Back the Next. HER ESCORT IN THE LOCKUP She’s Quite Cheerful About it, Though the Family Was Upset – Didn’t Want to Marry After All.      Eva Dennison had never been further away from her home village of Rexville, Steuben County, N.Y., than the neighboring town of Hornell, where there is a moving-picture show, until last Wednesday afternoon. Then she left her father’s Post Office and general store to come to the great city, with the man of her choice, to be married. It all looked bright and rosy.      It looked less so yesterday. The romance was over and she sat homeward bound in the train, safe in the keeping of her uncle and her brother.      All in less than a day she had begun what had been intended for a lifelong journey in the height of happiness and undying love and ended with her expectations so changed that she wished her father to come and “punch” her husband-to-be. All that day they had been pursued by a detective and her irate parent until they separated in a police station, and then their ways had forever parted.      It happened that the father, a Postmaster and general storekeeper in a small town, was a man of action. When he heard that his daughter had slipped away he got the telegraph lines humming with descriptions of the couple and the number of their trunk checks, and made it the easiest thing in the world for Detective Curry of the Second Jersey City Police Precinct to gather them in as they alighted from a train at the terminal of the Erie Line and take them to the police station.      Capt. Richards locked the man up on a technical charge of being a disorderly person, and then took the young woman into his office and explained to her that she ought to know the man she intended for her husband better.      The girl seemed the least concerned of any one in the case. She expressed some surprise when they were arrested, but after that nothing troubled her. The Police Captain and the Secretary of the Y.W.C.A., where she was lodged Wednesday night, declare that she was about as inexperienced in the ways of the world as any girl that has come under their observation.      It seems that Emil C. Hottinger had advertised for a wife in a daily paper. One of the answers, according to the girl’s story, came from an aunt of hers, Miss Sarah Nixon, and finally Hottinger was invited to Rexville.      There he met Eva and the aunt was dropped, so she says. Along about last Christmas he told the family, including Miss Nixon, that they wanted to be married. But Postmaster Dennison said he did not want a matrimonial advertising son-in-law.      Affairs languished until last Saturday, when Hottinger made another visit to the Dennison home. On Wednesday Hottinger proposed that they take a ride to Hornell. The girl assented. When they got there, he suggested that they go on to New York. She said she would.      “But why did you go with him?” asked Capt. Richards.      “Oh! To get married,” she replied naively.      The Captain sent her for the night to the Y.W.C.A. in Jersey City.      Just before he was led to his cell, Hottinger came into the Captain’s office and said good night to the girl, kissing her. When Hottinger had gone Miss Dennison asked the Captain why he had not “punched him in the jaw” for doing it.      Hottinger was arraigned in the Second Criminal Court, where Judge Queen held him in bail for extradition, pending an indictment by the Steuben County Grand Jury within thirty days.      When Eva’s uncle was brought into the room at the Y.W.C.A. he looked at her and said: “Well, you have made us lots of trouble,” The girl smiled cheerfully. They delayed their departure for Rexville until the girl’s brother got back from New York, where he investigated Hottinger’s position in life. Hottinger had said that he was an assistant cashier at Louis Martin’s restaurant. It was learned there that he had been employed as a kind of page.      Hottinger told the police on his arrest that he did not know the girl was under age. She said she would be nineteen in March. Her brother said she would be eighteen. But as she did not know the year she was born in, and had to appeal to her brother, the Captain assumed he had a more exact knowledge.      The plan of the runaways, according to what Hottinger told the police on his arrest, was to be married immediately on arriving in the city. They had no license, however, and it is required that the parties appear before the License Bureau at City Hall in person, and the City Hall was closed for the day before they reached Jersey City.      Hottinger says he lives at 46 West Sixty-fifth Street, where he boards in the apartment of Mrs. Ida Kershaw. He wrote a letter to her yesterday from his cell in the Jersey City Police Station. No one was there yesterday afternoon.      Hottinger is likely to be kept in the Hudson County Jail for at least thirty days awaiting an indictment by the Steuben County Grand Jury. The Dennisons said yesterday that they would press the charge against him. The girl has given her relatives satisfactory evidence of her lack of desire to wed him. The New York Times (New York, NY) February 24, 1911.

1923

21 YEARS AGO IN CANISTEO (Reprinted from The Canisteo Times of Wed., Feb. 14, 1923.) REXVILLE:      Mrs. James Harkener is ill from pneumonia.      Margaret Sweeney and her school children enjoyed a sleigh ride to Whitesville on Saturday evening. Canisteo Times (Canisteo, NY) 1944.

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