Jim McClure
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Leading businessman George S. Schmidt liked the way York was heading in the Gay Nineties, five years after it had become a city.
But he felt some folks had held too firmly to the past for decades and, in fact, were still doing so. Let well enough alone was a motto which we devotedly followed for a hundred years and which might well have been engraven on our borough seal, he wrote in the daily York Gazette in February 1892.
He didn t stop there. We lived a life as placid and contented as it was narrow and bigoted, he wrote, and blindly sacrificed on the altar of a mistaken conservatism every tendency toward municipal advancement. He wrote these words in connection with businessman A.B. Farquhar’s aggressive improvements to the newspaper he had just acquired, the York Gazette.