Song of Rhode Island

Picture a lonely night in Omaha. Maybe it’s raining. And the heart of one soul longs for…..Rhode Island! This little treasure was rediscovered in our ongoing retrospective cataloging of the old classification systems. Five verses of pure Rhode Island glee.

And the medium for this creativity? A flimsy piece of hotel stationary from the Hotel Plaza in downtown Omaha, Nebraska.   Bernard J. Tiemann of New York  penned songs for all the states and published them in 1905 in his Songs of our States and Nation.

But who was this mysterious typist? Did he or she type from memory or a text?  Why was he or she in Omaha? What brought Rhode Island to their mind at that time in 1920? How did the scrap make it back to the RIHS shelves? Historical Collections often create as many questions as they answer. But 91 years after the fact we can still enjoy the humanity of a reconstructed moment.

~psb~