Being named after the last Whig president this nation ever had doesn’t carry much water with a government cost-cutting commission in New York. The commission recommendd that Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo be closed, according to the Buffalo News.
Millard Fillmore counted Buffalo as his base of operations. The hospital was named after Fillmore in 1923, though the hospital dates back to facilities that first opened in 1872. Declining population in Buffalo has made traffic easier, the newspapers note, but also made it necessary to consolidate some public facilities.
Population declines in some places are temporary, like recent now-reversed declines in Dallas and Houston. Other declines may be permanent, like some of those in west Texas. Into which category does Buffalo’s decline fall?
While one namesake of Fillmore closes, at the other end of New York, Moravia’s Cayuga-Owasco Lakes Historical Society has a gift from Nucor Steel which will allow the Society to construct a 25-by-40-foot building to house Fillmore memorabilia, according to the Auburn (New York) Citizen. Buffalo was the haunt of the adult Fillmore, but the nation’s 13th president was born in Moravia in 1800.
If I am not careful, this blog could become for Millard Fillmore what the old Salt Flat News was for that part of Utah and Nevada that includes the famous Bonneville Salt Flats. The area’s largest city is Wendover, a city that straddles the Utah-Nevada border. It is famous for long, lonely drives. And the slogan for the Salt Flat News which flourished in Salt Lake City during the 1970s was, “The only newspaper in the world that gives a damn what happens on the Salt Flats.”
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 