Monday 28th December 2009 - Relying on the Kindness of Grown-up Ladies

          It being the Monday morning after the holidays, I'm rudely awakened by the insurance company wanting every detail, right down, it seemed, to my inside-leg measurement.  It's just as well I'm up early, because I have to go and see that Rozzie is being tended to, and get the rest of the luggage out of the back.  The only reassurance I get is that the repair company are fairly sure it won't take two weeks.

 

          Then it's off to the library.  Glasgow has a new central library on the edge of town.  The grown-up ladies are poised on the starting blocks, waiting for the little-boy-lost whistle to go.  (Or do I mean up in their crow's-nests, scanning the horizon for little-boys-lost?)  In any case, I give off the right pheromones, and they're at my side, ready for battle.

          It turns out they've passed most of their local history section to the Cultural Center (I get a frisson of pleasure at the very thought), but they immediately rush of to get the details, and come back with them all written up, in that very distinctive grown-up American lady handwriting.

          The library does have some material, and the most wonderful armchairs to sit and read in.  As ever with history, there are several versions of it.  But I finally find one which says that Barren County was instituted by the state in 1798, and at its November court session of 1799, it ordered that the county town be established on land donated by one John Gorin, and that it be known by the name of Glasgow.  If there haven't been any courthouse fires, it should be possible to check that from the original source.  And that would make it (just)18th Century.  There is only the vestigial Glasgow in Potsdown PA that's older than that.

          The State Legislature also organised the town in 1809, extended it in 1835, and chartered it as a city in 1875.  So a check on the court records and we'll be done-and-dusted.  Because it's court records, it will simply be the decision, or order, there will be no record of any debate about the name.  That is almost certainly lost.

 

          Later that night, we were discussing the merits of age.  The barmaid, who I had thought was about 14, claimed to be 22.  She asked me if I thought she looked old enough to be a barmaid.  I told her she didn't even look old enough to be young.  Then everyone agreed it was obviously time to go home.