Knoxville

This beautiful little village is situated on the west end of the county, on the Demossville and Knoxville turnpike, and is five miles from the Dry Ridge depot on the C. N. O. & T. P. R. R. [the Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Texas Pacific Railroad, a.k.a., the Southern] and is noted for its enterprising tobacco merchants and dry goods business. 

We have three dry goods and grocery stores, and drug stores, one hotel and bar room, one blacksmith shop, and one wagon maker’s shop, and a first class flour and saw mill combined, two churches, Eclectic Normal School taught by Prof. Brough of Williamstown, and a splendid Odd Fellows and Masonic Lodge, and we can excel any town in the country for good looking girls, and if the Bachelors of the best will come in our midst we will do all we can to procure them a rib, as we can sympathize with them. 

We noticed in the last weeks issue that one of them was out all night, and taking quinine to keep the matrimonial fever from taking an effect.   W. M. Wilson, of Kansas City, brother of John Wilson, a type-setter on the Brooksville Democrat, is here representing a nursery in Dayton, Ohio, and is doing a good business soliciting orders for fruit trees.  

Renters in this vicinity have to pay half of the crops they raise and furnish their own teams and farm implements, and this is the cause so many have to be returned delinquent in paying taxes.  They say they can’t hardly make a living besides paying taxes, and is one reason why our county is so involved in debt on account of tenants having to pay much high rents that they are not able to pay their taxes. 

by Adie O. Robertson, 1885