Bees, Hay, and a Chaotic Monday
A routine day of honey harvesting at Bill Tewalt's place erupts into a farm-field fire, followed by a swarm of angry bees.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
C. Tillery has sixty or eighty stands of bees down on Bill Tewalt's place. Monday morning he worked among them smoking them out as he took away the honey. When he left he didn’t put out his rags, and the wind soon fanned them into flame and set fire to the dried grass. The flames tore across the field and would have taken a hundred tons of hay but for the efforts of the Finley fire department. When the hay was out of danger, Bob Gammon, Phillip Hitchcock and Buzz Quimby went to look for the bees and found several stands burned up. They carried water and put them out, but Phillip got stung in the eye, Buzz on the back of the neck and Gammon all over the face. About then Bill came along. 'Gosh, look at the honey,' he said and walked up to a hive just as Gammon doused it with a pail of water. About 750 bees took after Bill and you ought to have heard him yell. Everyone this side of Kennewick did.
“Everyone this side of Kennewick did [hear him yell].”
The transition of rural farm life into local legend captures the neighborly, often calamitous, nature of early 20th-century agriculture in the Tri-Cities region.
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