It wasn’t that long ago that people had to wait until the local daily or weekly hit the front stoop, sidewalk or mailbox to get the latest news and information. In today’s world of breaking news reports and computers that, with a few keystrokes, pull up news from across the globe, the physical newspaper has really taken a hit.
There have been dozens and dozens of newspapers published across the Old Granville area over the years, and Thornton Library’s North Carolina Room Specialist Mark Pace talked about some of them with WIZS’s Bill Harris on the Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk.
A number of print newspapers continue to provide local news and community journalism for their coverage areas, including The Dispatch in Henderson, the Oxford Public Ledger, Butner-Creedmoor News, Warren Record and Franklin Times.
But do you know about the Gold Leaf, a newspaper printed in Henderson by Thad Manning?
“He really kind of changed newspapers in this area,” Pace said of Manning, who came from Halifax County, NC in 1881 and began the weekly newspaper.
Until then, newspaper publishers were more “fly by night” operations, bringing in printing presses on the back of trucks and setting up shop in storefronts in small towns.
During World War I, there was such a demand for news that Manning started a weekly paper in 1914 called the Dispatch. It later became a daily, was owned and operated for decades by three generations of the Dennis family, and it currently publishes three times a week under its original name, The Dispatch.
Henderson had another publication called the Henderson Semi-Weekly Index, which Pace noted became popular enough to be replaced by the Weekly Index. Not surprisingly, issues of that publication have not been located for the years 1861-1865, because of the chaos brought by the Civil War and the scarcity of newsprint.
Much like today’s wire services – think Associated Press and Reuters – newspapers shared copies among themselves and published stories that would be attributed to the original source. Pace said that’s how researchers can piece together information about long-gone newspapers. The credit line “taken from Gillburg News,” for example, confirms the existence despite the fact that no physical copy of the Gillburg News exists, Pace explained.
The newspapers of yore contained information that today may seem insignificant or trivial – visiting relatives and a story about someone’s unusually large potato won’t be seen in today’s newspapers. But Pace said it can really help piece together what a community looked like at the time and it can help genealogists with their research, too.
Pace implores anyone with old newspapers – or other printed information that may seem obsolete – to bring it to the library before hauling it to the landfill so he can take a look. There just may be something of interest there.
Two good resources for finding microfilm or copies of old newspapers are https://www.newspapers.com/ and the NC Digital Heritage Center at https://www.digitalnc.org/
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