Historic Hood River

Notes

Here’s a fitting post for the day before Election Day from the museum archives.  We recently relocated the museum’s long-term storage and I caught a glimpse of this great object with the “patina” of many decades of use.  Fortunately our database offers a little context and confirmed my hunch it was election related.  This was a ballot box used by Farmer’s Irrigation District to conduct district elections.

Geo. D. Barnard & Co. was a popular stationery manufacturer established in St. Louis in 1872.  They patented and produced these sturdy ballot boxes for some time.  They seem to come on the market frequently, so they must have made plenty of them.  Several sites claim these were designed to strap to mules so ballots could be securely transported to a central counting site.

Farmers Irrigation District was founded in 1874.

I know that for early school board elections you needed to show up at the district meeting in order to have your say on taxing decisions.  I wouldn’t think you would need such a sturdy ballot box if you were gathering ballots and counting them immediately in the setting of an annual meeting.  Perhaps FID sent someone around the district to collect ballots from district members?

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