100 years ago in The Record
A suspect who identifies himself as a “Russian pole” is in custody after the second shooting incident in three days near Lock 1 of the barge canal north of Waterford. Mike Goul is being held in the Mechanicville jail on a vagrancy charge after his arrest in a clump of bushes about a half-mile from where shots were fired around 2 a.m. A National Guard corporal was wounded in the same vicinity on the morning of April 14. Today’s incident begins with “two whistles that sounded like a signal and an answer.” When a sentry moves to investigate the noise, he draws fire from “some one in the vicinity of a dredge beyond the lock.” The sentry returns fire but misses his target. A search party discovers Goul shortly afterward. The same Private Madison who was shot at during Saturday’s incident takes the stranger into custody. Goul has no weapons on him, and The Record reports that he has nothing else “that would mark him as a dangerous character.” During his arraignment in Mechanicville, Goul explains that he had been in the U.S. for “a little over three years” and had most recently worked in the mines near Port Henry. He claims that he was on his way to look for work in Troy when he was arrested. Company K of the Second New York Infantry regiment was assigned guard duty for strategic roads, bridges and canals in Saratoga County in advance of the U.S. declaration of war against Germany on April 6.
Troy’s Jewish community is postponing plans to build a community center until after the war in order to focus on “doing everything possible to aid the United States in the prosecution of the war against Germany.”
Fundraising for the community center was scheduled to start today, but fundraising committee chairman P. H. Butler explains that the war effort is a higher priority.
At tonight’s meeting the committee pledges support to President Woodrow Wilson and “the task which he has undertaken to make America the champion of republican governments and to assure freedom from autocratic oppression of all the peoples of the world.”
By declaring war on Germany the U.S. becomes a de facto ally of Russia, which recently overthrew its monarchy to become a republic. The Troy committee declares that Jews are “materially interested in [the war’s] outcome, not alone for the freedom it has brought to our brethren in Russia, but because the improvement of the social conditions of all civilized countries is involved in upholding the principles for which the United States entered this great conflict.”