It happened on 25 September
Samois decides to protect its landscape
On 25 September 1909, residents of Samois registered an association with a straightforward name: the Society for the Protection of the Samois Site. Its aim can be summed up in a single sentence: «to protect the sites of Samois, Bas-Samois and Les Plâtreries».
*L’Abeille de Fontainebleau* published the statement in its issue of 1 October 1909. Registered office: at the chairman’s residence in Samois.
No laws, no government department: neighbours who decide for themselves that their landscape is worth protecting.
A woman joins the Supreme Court for the first time
On 25 September 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor is sworn in as a judge of the Supreme Court of the United States. One hundred and ninety-one years after the Court was established.
The Senate had confirmed her four days earlier.
She served there for nearly twenty-five years, often acting as a mediator between the two blocs within the Court.
The first park created to protect a living creature
Exactly nineteen years to the day, America had done the same thing, on a much grander scale.
On 25 September 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed the bill establishing Sequoia National Park in California. It was the second national park in the United States. The National Park Service describes it as the first park established specifically to protect a living organism.
Not a landscape, not a geyser, not a canyon. A tree. The giant sequoia, which the sawmills were beginning to cut up.
Every FridayA week a hundred years ago
Every Friday, we feature the issue that local residents were reading exactly one hundred years ago.
According to The Fontainebleau Bee, a weekly magazine founded in 1835.
Issue of Friday 24 September 1926
Five francs forty a kilo, and the king’s grapes are gone
On Friday 17 September 1926, the harvest from the Treille du Roy was sold. One thousand two hundred and seventy-five kilograms of Chasselas, divided into eighty-five lots of around fifteen kilos each, sold for six thousand eight hundred and eighty-five francs. An average of five francs forty per kilo.
*L’Abeille* describes the harvest as «particularly fine», and writes that one has to go back to 1912 to find a better one. First of all, she praises the sun.
The vine trellis still runs along his wall. And the grape variety has made a name for itself: today, you can buy a «Chasselas de Fontainebleau» vine from any nursery catalogue.
Six minutes
L’Abeille had announced that the equinox would be on Thursday evening, 23 September, at 7.20 pm sharp. A local weekly newspaper that reported the equinox to the minute back in 1926 – that was quite a feat in itself.
Fontyblog is keen to ensure that everything is checked, even if it is a hundred years old. So we’ve done the maths again. Twice, using two different methods. The equinox occurred at 7.26 pm.
Six minutes. We’re more precise now, and it’s taken us a century to get there. As for her, she’d already answered the question.
This Thursday morning, at Vulaines station
It was half past five, and the fog was thick. Train 112, travelling north from Marseille, had stopped at Vulaines-sur-Seine station to park a carriage that was malfunctioning. During the manoeuvre, the 106 express train, coming from Lyon, arrived on the down track.
First aid was administered by uninjured passengers from both trains, including soldiers returning from Morocco and Syria, before the arrival of the fire brigades from Fontainebleau and Vulaines. The newspaper notes that the Minister for Public Works was at the scene before ten o’clock.
As *L’Abeille* goes to press this Thursday evening, Seven bodies have already been recovered, and it fears there may be more. The driver of the machine is still trapped under the rubble.
The line still exists. Trains still run on it, at the same time, in the same place.