The Telegraph-courier. [volume] (Kenosha, Wis.) 1888-1946, 1916-05-18
County Clerk Jones Has a
Cleanup - Disposes of
Literature from County
Building.
SHOWS WASTE or The STATE

Kenosha county is getting thrifty.
County Clerk Jones has the clean up
fever and uniting thrift and clean up
spirit the clerk got busy yesterday aft
ernoon and cleaned up the basement of
the county building. Tt has probably
been forty years or nearly that since
it was cleaned up for at least a lot of
stuc found piled away in the hooks
and corners had been made more than
forty-five years ago. More than three
tons of paper were taken out of the
basement of the building and sold to
men who were willing to pay for it at
price of some ten dollars ton. No one
seems to be around who remembers
when just such another cleaning took
place at the court house. In the pile
of stuff that went to the junk men was
a whole library possibly of three or
four hundred volumes but it was a
library that the ordinary man doesn It
want but that he has to pay for. Stored
In the cellar of the court house were
state reports and government reports
dating way back to 1871 Some of them
had never been taken out of the origi-
nal wrapping. There were reports of a
score of state officers and of state de-
partments old bound volumes of the.
statutes and local laws which no one
had called for in the days gone by.
There were records of the committee re-
ports of members of the county board,
Old poll lists of elections which were
held so long ago that even the men who
were candidates for office have been
forgotten in the city. There was a
whole room filled with this sort of old
junk
"This sort of stuff represents the
wastefulness of the state and the
county," said Clerk Jones. "Here
is printed matter that must have cost
the state and the county thousands of
dollars some time and yet no one ever
cared to open it and now it is worth ten
dollars ton or less. We get in these
reports of state Officers and the com
missions, of proceedings of the legisla-
ture and pile them up year after year
and in ninety-nine cases out of hun
dred no one ever comes and asks to see
them. 1t is pretty certain that condi- 4
tions are the same in nearly every
county in the state. Up in Madison
every fellow that holds state job must
rush into print and usually he has
bound volume. The people are not
greatly interested in these statistical
reports and there should be some way
found to reduce this expense ON the
state. -
In the bunch of rubbish cleaned out
of the basement were hundreds of vol
umes of session laws passed by the legis-
lature running back more than forty
years. These were sent to the county
for various officials including the score
of justices of the peace that the county
is entitled to elect and most of the men
for whom these volumes were sent
never took interest enough in them to
come and get them. They were simply
left to gather dust about the county
building.
Under recent statutes the county rec
ords are not permitted to pile up as in
the old days as the county board mem
bers now have power to destroy the
leave-overs from the elections within a
year after the elections have been held
and this rule aids materially in re-
ducing the annual contribution to the
junk pile in the basement. The money
that is going to be secured from the
sale of the relics Of by-gone years will
90 into the general fund of the county.
Want Ads Bring Results.