Well, having been lightly flamed over this, I researched this myself, despite the fact that the Snopes site says “false” in large red letters. Lots of back and forth.
I found this article in the Salina Journal from this year, claiming the test to be authentic. Live and learn.
http://www.barefootsworld.net/salina1895testarticle.pdf
I'm coming in at the end of this thread, but I wanted to say that I appreciate your follow-through in the discussion and investigation of this matter, and your honesty in acknowledging the fact that Snopes.com is incorrect. You have basically retraced the steps to finding and consulting the primary sources in Salina which I and some friends did a decade ago when the story first broke.
There was one aspect of the current *.pdf Salina Journal article you posted that I found especially amusing. The article's author, reporter David Clouston, can't resist attempting to diminish the significance of the fact that the test was real by including this ostensible "expert commentary":
"One of those intrigued by the exam is Forrest Bishop, a self-employed inventor in Seattle. He believes in the test’s authenticity — its style, linguistics and subject matter fit the era it was created in perfectly. “If I was to take this thing, I’d probably pull about a C+. But it was only (given) one time, one year. That, to me, takes away from its standing as a sort of standard of excellence,” Bishop said. “It’s almost like it was an experimental test.”
I suppose it never occurred to Forrest Bishop, or reporter David Clouson either, that the teachers in those earlier, "simpler" times understood that giving the same test year after year would not contribute to academic "excellence", but might instead encourage intellectual laziness or even facilitate cheating, as is rampant in our "modern" schools.
Of course, the most important lesson to be gleaned from this thread is a reminder that blind trust of any self-proclaimed authority, including Snopes, is risky.
It also occurs to me that the founders of the Snopes.com website might derive some enjoyment from the "secret irony" of their success in putting one over on the rest of us by creating and using a website ostensibly intended to promote fact and truth in order to subtly promote and further a tacit ideological agenda.
There is an adage that goes something like "the best way to conceal a lie is to sandwich it between two truths". Snopes does this frequently and subtly on issues which are politically and ideologically charged. You also see this camouflage technique employed by other self-professed "truth" or "watchdog" organizations such as FactCheck.org or the ACLU.
The bottom line is that Snopes can be useful, but we should never trust them blindly...