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Sunday, April 2, 2023

Raleigh Politics; Do Dams That Generate Electricity Also Breed Malaria Mosquitoes? April 1, 1923

Raleigh Citizens Take Interest in Things Municipal. . . Mass Meeting Elected Ice Cream Manufacturer to Head Organization. . . School Issue. . . Chairman Says the Question Has Nothing to Do With the Movement. . . Ku Klux Klan Talk. . . United States Health Department Is to Do Experimental Work in Montgomery and McDowell Counties

Raleigh, March 31—A get-together meeting, maybe, it was; anyhow some 200 citizens of this community met last night and in the interest of “good government” elected George White, the warm-blooded proprietor of Raleigh’s leading ice cream factory with territorial rights on Eskimo pies, chairman of an organization which frankly acknowledges its intention of defeating Commissioner of Public Safety Moonyham and Commissioner of Public Works Bray.

Today the community, which had hitherto taken mighty little interest in the listless municipal campaign, paused in its mild-mannered mumblings over the high cost of railroad-tax lawyers to wonder who, what and why.

Chairman White, who is a member of the school board and is generally understood not to care personally for the attitude shown toward that body’s suggested high school site by Commissioners Bray and Mooneyham, insists that the school question has nothing to do with the organization.

The Ku Klux cannot so easily be interviewed. Some of those most interested in the formation of the “good government” organizations are reputed Kluckers, and it has been suggested on the streets that the Klan is engaged in attempting to do in the city what some of its more blatant friends claimed that it did in the county primary last summer.

What the big idea is nobody seems to know; but the effect is to give some form to the organization of the outs, while of course the ins tighten theirs. Mayor Eldridge is left to run his own and that which the member of the city department of finance who hold under him can build up. The other two commissioners aren’t working with him and there seems to be no possibility of healing the breach.

It begins to look as if there would be some excitement, after all, in the coming primary, with the odds in favor of the ins if the outs adopt or have affixed to them the K.K.K. label.

The United States Public Health Service, it weas learned here today, will station engineers in Montgomery and McDowell counties to conduct a campaign for the control of malaria, which may have been bred by the impounding of water at Badin and Bridgewater. Edwin H. Gage, a federal engineer, came here from Memphis for a conference with the state department of health.

The engineer in charge will be L.D. Fricks of Memphis.

There are now pending a hundred suits for damages at least against the Tallahassee Power company, which operates the big aluminum plant for which the Badin dam furnishes power, and the Southern Power company, which owns the Bridgewater reservoir. Not all of these suits allege damage to health perhaps, but a large number of them charge malaria specifically.

Always along the countryside, as any observant person who ever lived along it will remember, dammed-up water is never considered very healthy. How many small-fry have been forbidden an artificially constructed swimming hole while permitted to use running water at will? Whether either Bridgewater or Baden has impaired the health of the surrounding county is not yet in evidence; but the people think both have and hence the engineers.

A thorough investigation, with emphasis on the annihilation of Anopholes Mosquito and his family, is contemplated.

From the front page of the Durham Morning Herald, April 1, 1923

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