Drag Day
Halfway Worth Mentioning
The Times-Tribune--Dec. 16, 1982
By Bill Gladstone

The picture we are running this week was taken in the spring of 1915. The day was known as "Drag Day". There were no gravel roads in the county at that time and the dirt roads were maintained by the farmers using either drags or graders pulled by horses.
Following the winter, the roads would be in deplorable shape. On Drag Day farmers from all over the county would hitch their horses to drags and drag the roads all the way to the county seat.
You will notice two, three, and four horse hitches. I haven't figured out whether the single horse in the bottom left of the picture is hitched to some sort of a drag or not.
If you study the picture a little more closely you will begin to realize that there are a heck of a lot of horses and drags in the picture.
The two cars sitting in front of the hotel look just a bit out of place.
It would seem reasonable to me that there is someone in the TT readership who is in this picture. At least, there should be someone who can furnish us with a first hand account of one of those special days in the county when the roads were dragged.
This picture is a copy of one of several that were furnished to the Worth County Historical Society by Mr. & Mrs. Tony Kidney from pictures that Roy Kidney had collected. The original of the picture was taken by N.A. Combs who operated a photography studio in Grant City at that time.
Sometime ago someone introduced me to the term FYI (for your information). This is an FYI.
I have been trying to track down the location of some old postoffices in the county. From an old county history book I was aware that there had been a postoffice called Honey Grove. I couldn't seem to get a handle on the location so I turned to the National Archives in Washington D.C.
It is possible to secure from the National Archives a copy of individual postoffice location site reports. I sent for several, including Honey Grove. I was quite surprised to find that the Honey Grove postoffice was not in the Honey Grove neighborhood but in section three, range thirty-one, township sixty-six. That placed it on the land now owned by Gladys Rinehart.
The report, dated 9 September, 1862, states that the office was on the route from Smithton in Worth County to Mt. Ayr in Iowa on which mail was to be carried once a week.
One George M. Risdon was the postmaster. An 1878 Worth County Atlas shows a G.M. Risden as owning a 45 acre tract lying in the NE quarter of section 3.
This information begins to clear up where the early day postoffice was in the Irena community.