Those Bygone Printing Presses

The distinctive smell of burning coal hit me as I walked onto the grounds of Bonanzaville in West Fargo. I knew that acrid burning in my nose came from the steam engines being fired up for demonstration purposes at the recent Pioneer Days event. I was there to serve as a volunteer in the historic Hunter Times print shop. Allan Burke, the publisher of the Emmons County Record in Linton, invited me to help out. Since I’m interested in the role newspapers played in the developing West, I was happy to help. Burke is a driving force in maintaining a historical connection with the old printing industry of yesteryear, both in Bonanzaville and The Braddock Letterpress Museum in Braddock, ND.

The story of The Hunter Times is unique to itself yet repeatedly told in the overall history of small town newspapers. It appeared as The Hunter Eye in 1886, transitioned to the Hunter Herald in 1894, and assumed the name of The Hunter Times in 1928, doing so until its final words found print in 1969. As was common to most small town newspapers it devoted itself to local affairs. The last owner of the paper looked to Bonanzaville to preserve the spirit of its bygone days and donated the building with its contents in 1971.

Today’s Enderlin Independent continues to print weekly and stands alongside The Emmons County Record as one of the few weekly newspapers still existing that devotes itself to local affairs. While The Record first saw print on June 10, 1884, The Independent was born as the Enderlin Journal on December 22, 1892. 

The neighboring town of Sheldon was home to a weekly, too, but unfortunately, it is long dead. It is my hometown, and  I’ve become addicted to the Heritage Center’s microfilmed archive of The Enterprise, then The Progress where I’ve learned about my community’s beginnings. Some have called journalism “the first rough draft of history,” and I agree wholeheartedly. Where else could I have learned when barbed wire arrived. Or how the first lumber to build houses came by wagon and ox team. Or an early resident rode west with Custer. Or the Italian work gangs built the Northern Pacific. Or how the town faced the onslaught of hoboes at harvest time. It makes for great reading.

A long, fact-filled article from Stanford University’s Center for the American West asks, “Did the west make newspapers, or did newspapers make the west?” They call it a chicken-or-egg question and their answer is a bit of both. A small, rather portable Washington Hand Press made its way westward in large numbers, thereby making it quite easy to set up a print shop and start publishing. By 1915, an estimated 17,000 weeklies circulated, many of which came off the Washington press. Sometimes they arrived by wagon, sometimes by rail. History tells how Clement Lounsberry’s press arrived in Bismarck on the first train to reach the city and has become the oldest paper in the state, the Bismarck Tribune.

The Time-Life series of books includes one called The Chroniclers. It tells the story of how a Washington Hand Press was being transported across a body of water in a canoe, which of course capsized and dumped its cargo into the water. The distraught owner dived in those crocodile-infested waters and heaved it back aboard. The editors report it was highly unlikely he did it by himself, as reported, but in fact he did dry it off and begin printing a paper called The Panama Star.

The late Richard S. Wheeler of Montana wrote a trilogy of books that centers on the editor Sam Flint who hauls his press by wagon to communities in Montana - Flint’s Gift, Flint’s Truth, and Flint’s Honor. The books are historical fiction and center around the reality of printing a newspaper in the rough and tumble days of frontier Montana and how the principled publisher survived strong arm opposition to his editorial stance. I’ve read them a couple of times. There are indications that publishers in North Dakota were forced to withstand many pressures, too, some bending to the strong arm, some not.

Old-time printing methods kept modernizing and developing into labor saving machines. To replace laboriously hand setting every letter in a story, linotype machines were invented whereby operators could sit at its console, press letter keys, and set the type. A rather complicated looking affair, it served newspapers well. Two retired Fargo Forum employees who ran these machines volunteer to demonstrate the linotype that sets in the Bonanzaville building. They are among the few who still know how to operate them.

Computers seem to replace everything and have pointed the way to the social media available today. We all read the same homogenized news filtered through only a few outlets, and the question arises what impact does all this have on independent thought.