That’s the final entry in a minutes book discovered in May 2015 at the YMCA Buffalo Niagara in Buffalo, N.Y. The management committee of the local railroad department had met there in December 1899.

Who knows what it means? University at Buffalo archivist-in-training Matthew Oliver found it while reorganizing the YMCA’s records. Details are here.

02/20/2017 A number of readers have written in with a likely answer: The reference is to 1 Samuel 7:12, “Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, ‘Thus far the LORD has helped us.'” The Israelites erected the stone to commemorate their victory over the Philistines. This meeting took place during the Third Great Awakening, when the reference would have been well understood.

Reader Phil Moberg Jr. writes, “The ‘Railroad Ys,’ as they were known to those of us in the business, were a great improvement in the general living conditions to crews between runs, being a more than welcome change from the seedy flophouses and saloons that preceded them. The last of them in Southern New England closed in the early ’70s, with the building that housed the New Haven (CT) Railroad Y having been torn down late last year.”

(Thanks also to Delyth Yabar and Anthony Douglas.)