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Newspaper of the month

The True Northerner, 1 February 1899

One page of an old valley paper, read slowly. This month: the back page of Paw Paw’s weekly, in the middle of a Michigan winter, with egg prices, a farmers’ meeting and the war with Spain at the opera house.

The True Northerner was the weekly of Paw Paw, the seat of Van Buren County. Its back page that week was a working page: the market report, the end of a long account of a farmers’ institute, the circuit court, real-estate sales, and the advertisements that paid for it all. Tap any clipping to see it at full size, or open the whole page at the Library of Congress.

Our local markets

This is what Paw Paw dealers paid farmers that week, not what the shops charged. Butter 12 cents (a pound), eggs 14 cents (a dozen), potatoes 25 cents and wheat 65 cents (a bushel). The units were so well known that the paper did not print them. Cattle and hogs were priced by the pound, “on foot” (alive) or dressed. Above the list, the corner of an advertisement for Royal Baking Powder: “Absolutely Pure,” seven years before the Pure Food and Drug Act.

The farmers vote

A winter farmers’ institute in Van Buren County passed these resolutions. Senators “should be elected by the people”: in 1899 state legislatures still chose them, and the Seventeenth Amendment did not change that until 1913. County officers should draw a salary instead of keeping fees. And fruit should carry “the name and address of the shipper,” an early demand for honest labels from the fruit belt.

A dollar a bushel

A. S. Packard of Covert, “one of the most successful peach growers in the county,” told the institute that his last crop came to about 3,000 bushels and averaged him over a dollar a bushel. Peaches were the money crop of the Michigan fruit belt, and the paper promised to print his paper in full.

At what age should a child read?

The evening session argued about schools. The institute’s president thought a child should be in the second reader by five or six “if it were not for the laziness of parents.” Alice Bangs disagreed: no child ought to begin before six. The paper calls her Miss in one line and Mrs. in the next; the rest of the report says the audience nodded with her.

The war at the opera house

Six months after the fighting with Spain ended, a travelling company brought moving pictures of it to Longwell’s opera house for one night, Saturday, 4 February. The Lumière cinématographe had been shown for the first time only four years before. Many “war films” of the day were staged re-enactments, so the audience could not always tell what was real. Admission was 10 and 20 cents.

Every soldier, life size

The advertisement across the foot of the page made the real promise: the reviews of the Michigan volunteer regiments would show “every soldier from Paw Paw and vicinity life size so that each and every one can readily be recognized.” Another notice on the page says that at Grand Rapids parents saw sons who had since been buried in Cuba.

Saw edges

Men wore detachable starched collars, and a badly ironed one left a rough edge that cut the neck. The Model Steam Laundry on South Kalamazoo Street claimed to be the only laundry in southern Michigan that could take the “saw edges” off.

Read the page yourself

Reading an old paper

• Start with the ads and the markets. They tell you what things cost, who kept which shop, and what people wanted to buy.
• Read the “continued from” stories. The front page opens a story; the back page often holds the names.
• Do not trust the typed text. The searchable text behind a scanned page is machine-read: here it turns “Eggs” into “Kpgs.” Search it, then read the picture.
• Find your own town’s paper. Chronicling America and Michigan’s digital newspapers are free. See the sources shelf.

Source: The True Northerner (Paw Paw, Mich.), 1 February 1899, page 8, digitized by Central Michigan University’s Clarke Historical Library for Chronicling America, Library of Congress. The clippings were cut from the Library’s scan; tap one to open it at full size there. Every quotation on this page was checked against the page image.