Library Corner: Looking back at our local newspapers

As we look forward to the holidays and the inevitable tick into 2020, I can’t help but look back at our local history and how it’s been preserved and reported by our newspapers and their reporters for six generations. The Ritzville Adams County Journal’s own lede is “Eastern Adams County’s Only Independent Voice since 1887” making it 133 years old and one of the oldest businesses (besides our farming families) in the county.

The first paper to print in the county was the Adams County News in 1885 of which we have a few of the earliest prints preserved and available for checkout on DVDs. The 1880s to the 1960s saw a host of newspapers pop up, consolidate, divide, and some go under until finally the Ritzville Adams County Journal became our local paper of record. Besides the “News,” a few others included the Adams County Record, Adams County Times, Ritzville Mail, Ritzville TImes, Washington State Journal, Washington Herold, and Der Beobachter.

The Herold and Der Beobachter were published in the German language and served our German from Russia immigrant population. Most of the publications have been lost, but the library has one of its physical copies available for viewing in our Research Room!

Ritzville was far from the only town to host newspapers. At varying times Washtucna was home to the Enterprise, Recorder, and World. Lind was home to both the Adams County and Lind Leaders. Othello, of course, hosted the Outlook and also the Progress News and Times. And finally there was both the Hatton Hustler and the Paha Hub.

Paha, sitting at the geographic center of the county, naturally named its paper the “Hub.” The life of the Hub was a few short years and the January 17, 1906 issue of the Adams County News reported, “Among the long list of those gone before is the Paha Hub whose cold form was laid to rest on January 1st. With bare and naked bodkin with scissors long and keen the versatile editor of the Hub quietly and alone, at the dead hour of midnight when all was still, consigned the remains of the deceased to the newspaper bone orchard and there were no mourners for the little paper died while yet able to pay its own funeral expenses with its one and only subscriber six months in arrears.”

Newspapers, particularly the small publications in our hometowns, provide a record of our lives in a way that no other publication does. For those of us who work in libraries--who research genealogies, who answer the questions of the public--these records are invaluable and can be easily lost, even in this digital world of ours. So, five years ago the Friends of the Library raised enough money through their book sale to digitize our own microfilmed copies of our papers. These records can now be easily checked out at the front desk on a disc to be used at the library or home, allowing our patrons another source of information as we continually work to provide knowledge and most importantly access.

Our little library district is greatly assisted and supported by the Washington State Library system which has one of the most progressive newspaper digitizing programs in the country. The Washington Digital Newspaper program (https://washingtondigitalnewspapers.org/) has 400,000 pages currently scanned and by the end of this year they will be adding another 100,000 pages with a focus on newspapers that represent our Vietnamese, Danish and Greek communities, like the Den Danske Krønike that was published out of Spokane in the 1910s.

Of course our state’s newspaper preservation project didn’t appear out of thin air--its roots can be found at the Library of Congress (LOC). In 1982, the National Endowment of Humanities sponsored the United States Newspaper Program and funded state-level projects to locate, catalog, and selectively preserve historic newspaper collections published from 1690 to the present. This is how the Ritzville Library, Adams County Historical Society, and other groups were able to provide microfilm versions of our local newspapers to our patrons. Now, with that same focus of providing access of information to the public, the LOC has created the Chronicling America program (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/). This program has created a searchable database to view and download millions of pages of newspapers from all over the country, including Adams County.

As we step into 2020, perhaps one of the things we should be thankful for are our local reporters who write our stories, the archivists who preserve them, and the librarians who help the rest of us rediscover and interpret our histories.