The presses did not die

This county had fourteen newspapers before 1882. The first was printed at Ontario in July of 1842, and one sentence of it survives.

Samuel Hemingway Jr. ran the LaGrange Freeman, a six-column folio, for about two years. What it thought of its neighbours is preserved because the county history quoted it eighteen years later, reacting to the Fourierists who had just set up a phalanx in Springfield Township.

What next! And what is to be the end of all these associations? Time alone will reveal the results. If they prove beneficial, we shall rejoice ; but if disastrous, awful will be the consequences. The matter to us looks dark.

That is the whole of the county's first newspaper as anybody now has it.

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The Freeman suspended, and its material went to Lima and came out as the Whig.

That is the pattern and it holds for forty years. A masthead fails and the press survives it.

The People's Advocate started at Ontario in September of 1844 under an attorney named James Flagg, moved to Lima the next year, and was merged into the Lima Whig. The Whig went to C. D. Y. Alexander in 1855 and was discontinued soon after. A LaGrange Democrat started in October of 1845 and suspended after four or five years, and the county history cannot say who owned it.

Who were the different proprietors during that time, or whether there were any changes, cannot now be ascertained.

The Lima Union started about 1863 and its material became the Kendallville Standard, in the next county. The LaGrange Independent started in 1871 and moved to Sturgis, Michigan, in the spring of 1874. The Wolcottville Gazette started in June of 1876, went to Rome City, was discontinued, and its type was shipped to Indianapolis.

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Then there is the fire.

A third Democrat started in 1868 under Francis Henry and Howard Coe. In April of the following year it burned.

In April, 1869, the office was consumed with the block of business buildings then destroyed by the most disastrous fire that has yet occurred in the town. A number of Democrats renewed their stock, and new press and new material were again purchased and the Democrat re-issued.

It was abandoned the year after that anyway.

Counting that one, this county has had four papers called the Democrat: 1845, 1859, 1868 and 1879.

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The one that lasted started with a mortgage.

The LaGrange Standard started with a mortgage: a Washington hand press and printing material covered by a chattel mortgage, brought in from Ohio. It was the county's first Republican paper. It is the only one of the fourteen still going.

Its machines can be dated across seventy years. The mortgaged hand press in 1856. A second Washington and two job presses in 1869. A power press and steam in October of 1874, the first in the county. A Campbell press in August of 1881, the second. A Linotype in 1913.

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Now the thing the papers were actually like.

The county history looked at what survived of the early ones and said this.

The few copies of these papers that have been preserved unto the present are almost destitute of local references, the editorial labor seemingly having been directed to clipping from distant papers and occasional comments upon National and State matters.

And then the comparison, written in 1882.

There is a remarkable contrast, in respect to "locals," between the newspapers of that day and the present. A country paper now without five to ten columns of home news every week would hardly be looked at by the people. Then there was hardly as much in as many months.

A county paper in the 1840s carried less local news in a year than an 1880s paper carried in a week.

The 1920 history says the same thing about the Freeman and is funnier about it: well edited and neatly printed, no local or personal items, because that was not the style then, and instead long paragraphs on weighty political topics, as if the destiny of the world hung on the writings of the editor.

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Which is worth sitting with, because the thing this archive most often wants from the record is exactly what those papers did not print. A county's first thirty years of newspapers, and they were clipping from papers in other states.

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There is one more thing about all of this, and it is about the sources rather than the papers.

Three books describe the county press. The 1882 county history has a section on it. The 1893 atlas describes the Standard in its account of the town. The 1920 history gives it a chapter.

The 1882 section was written by the man who owned the Standard, and it does not say so.

Every chapter of that volume carries a signed byline, and the county chapters are signed J. H. Rerick. He had owned the Standard for ten of the twenty-five years his section covers, and owned it while he was writing.

His section names the paper's founder, its early proprietors and its presses. It does not name him. Nor does the chapter of his that records the Regulators ordering their resolutions published in the Standard, or the one that quotes a Standard editorial at length on an insanity defence. His purchase of it appears in a different chapter, in a biography of him written in the third person.

And it grades the paper's progress.

A number of changes in proprietors and editors have occurred; but, with all the changes, the paper has been gradually improved and advanced in circulation and prosperity.

Gradually improved. He is describing his own tenure, in the passive voice, in a section he signed and in a book his neighbours bought.

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The other two are not independent of him either.

By 1920 the Standard was a family business. Rerick died in January of 1911 still holding it, his son leased it, and by 1914 Rowland H. Rerick owned it. The 1920 history's account of the county press is substantially a family describing its own paper.

And the 1893 atlas is a subscription volume. Its passage on the Standard reads like this:

The Standard is an eight-column quarto, well patronized by advertisers. It has a larger circulation than common...

That is advertising copy. And Rerick was a subscriber to the atlas: his portrait is in it, among the Methodist Episcopal church group, and his wife is in its subscriber list.

So the three sources on the county's newspapers are one man's unsigned account of his own paper, his family's account of it thirty-eight years later, and paid description of it in a volume he had bought into.

This piece has quoted all three of them, and they cannot be used to check each other. That is not a reason to discard them. It is a reason to say what they are.

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