From fireworks to gunfire, holiday booms — and wounds — have rattled Macon since 1800s

A few days after Independence Day on a July Sunday morning in 1905, an editorial in The Telegraph told of a “crusade” against America’s “annual pyrotechnic orgy.”

The write-up mentioned holiday injuries resulting from our “barbarous method of honoring the Fourth,” how people “have grown weary of the noise of deafening and murderous instruments.”

Sound familiar?

In recent days authorities here — and no doubt in scores of other places — have warned locals about the dangers of fireworks and of Fourth of July celebratory gunfire. Officials have also reminded folks of the proper hours for noisemaking.

But for more than a century folks haven’t always gotten the message. The Yuletide was once a common time for fireworks and gunshots.

The day after Christmas in 1888, an item in The Telegraph began: “The usual amount of Christmas shooting, with pistol, gun, cannon, and firecrackers, was indulged in yesterday. … There were a number of minor casualties, such as injured fingers, speckled faces and a few horse falls.”

Perhaps the loudest complaint in the recent few years since Georgia again legalized more powerful fireworks for consumers has been the all-hours racket. But it’s a gripe with a long history.

By 1912, Macon had an ordinance forbidding the use of firecrackers more than 2 inches long.

An article in The Telegraph then noted that the city would “be free from the deafening noise of the crackers made of dynamite and big grain powder.”

In the late 1960s, Georgia outlawed the sale of fireworks, but by 1985 there were rumblings for their return.

As one Atlanta-area legislator in favor of the measure told reporters at the time: “Human nature says to celebrate you got to make as much noise as you can.”