Day in history for July 10, 2000

1875 -- 125 years ago

Charles A. Jarvis has purchased an interest from Bellows And Taylor in the Bellows House, Rock Island. The rates are now $2 a day.

1900 -- 100 years ago

The 1900 school census of Rock Island reveals the population of the city is at least 23,796 persons.

1925 -- 75 years ago

Leon F. Robinson, 54, Rock Island, drowned after being struck by lightning while fishing at Webster, Wis.

1950 -- 50 years ago

``All of a sudden that hay said `Boof' and there were flames everywhere, just like someone had poured gasoline on it.'' That's how Mrs. Jennie Redman described the explosive suddenness with which fire swept through the large barn where she and her husband, Emil, were milking cows yesterday morning. The fire, believed to have started spontaneously, in baled hay, destroyed the 60-by-60-foot barn, a tool shed and chicken house on the Redman farm, located 2 miles east and 1 1/2 miles south of Sherrard. Eleven-hundred roll bales of hay were burned, and tools and farm equipment ruined.

1975 -- 25 years ago

Don Aitken, 13, of Moline, wanted to be taller so he made himself a pair of elevator shoes that raise him a story off the ground. Don, a ninth-grader at John Deere Junior High School, says his stilts ``are the tallest stilts in Moline, and probably in the Quad-Cities.'' Built of 2-by-2's the 10-foot stilts are ``hard to walk on but really neat, even when you fall!''

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