The second half of the 19th century
in the American west was a period of huge population expansion and economic
growth, in part fueled by the lure of gold and other metals. The prerequisites
for success of a newspaper were economic viability in the community, as well as
a high enough rate of literacy to ensure readership. By 1880, newspapers were
published in half of Washington’s counties. At that time, many were affiliated
with political parties, including some of the early papers in Port Townsend. The
town's first newspaper, the Port Townsend Register, was published on the eve of
incorporation in 1860. Several papers were published during the city’s early
history as a territorial city; these were mainly short-lived weeklies. (A
history of newspaper publishing in Port Townsend can be found in Tom Camfield’s
book, Port Townsend: An
Illustrated History of Shanghaiing, Shipwrecks, Soiled Doves and Sundry Souls.)
Eventually newspapers became the means of communicating local events and social
activities, national and international news and features, and the deeds and
misdeeds of government officials. By the turn of the 20th century,
advertising had become the most important source of a newspaper’s operating
income.
The Port Townsend Leader began publication as a
daily in 1889, when the area was experiencing rapid growth in business ventures
and real estate sales. From 1895 to 1904 it was known as the Morning Leader, and
was issued every day but Monday. In 1904, the paper changed its name to the Port
Townsend Daily Leader, and became the Port Townsend Leader in 1916. Now titled
The Port Townsend & Jefferson County Leader, it is the only newspaper
continuously published since Port Townsend’s early boom years.
By the middle of the 19th century,
newspapers in the big cities on the East Coast were transmitting breaking news
over telegraph wires. As telegraph lines extended westward, smaller dailies and
weeklies could pick up the same news as the big metropolitan papers, including
European news after the first transatlantic cable was laid in after the Civil
War. The Morning Leader of the early 1900s devoted several columns each issue to
late telegraph news, from Olympia, the east, and European capitals. News from
other distant ports, such as those in Alaska, came on the boats that arrived in
Port Townsend each day.
Linotype operator Peter J. Adamson, Seattle
1904.
MSCUA University of Washington Libraries, UW1853. Used with permission.
From the invention of movable type in the 15th
century until the middle of the 20th century, printers’ type
was cast in metal as individual characters. The type for the earliest newspapers
was set by hand, letter by letter, into molds. After a newspaper issue was
printed, the type was stored and re-used for the next edition. In the first
decade of the new century, the Linotype machine invented by Ottmar Merganthaler
came into widespread use; type was cast in metal a line at a time. Winslow
McCurdy, one of the Leader’s early publishers, traveled to San Francisco to
take a course at the Merganthaler school. Each issue of the four-page Leader
contained several display-type ads, for clothing, patent medicines and baking
powder. National advertisers sent boilerplates – metal plates cast with the
ads – to newspapers all over the United States.
The early 1900s were a time of general optimism
across the United States, with expectations of growth and prosperity. The
Pacific Northwest, in particular, was a draw to people from the eastern regions
seeking opportunity in this land of incomparable beauty and boundless natural
resources. In Radical
Heritage, his history of labor and socialism in the Northwest, Carlos A.
Schwantes writes "not until the mid-1880s was the misty solitude of the
North Pacific region broken by railway links to the rest of the United States
and Canada. As a result, social, economic and political structures, especially
in Washington, still seemed malleable to the newcomers … once in the expansive
environment of Puget Sound [a worker] might see himself as a miner or molder or
carpenter—and a participant in the creation of a new and more
equitable society than the one he left behind."
The economic fortunes of many communities were
tied to the route of the railroads, and Port Townsend residents had high hopes
of being selected as a transcontinental railroad terminus. Those hopes were
eventually dashed, but Port Townsend, at the entrance to Puget Sound, also
enjoyed a maritime economy, with shipping being a major industry. Each issue of
the Morning Leader included crew notices, as well as frequent reports from the
U.S. Customs Service headquarters located here.
The United States at the beginning of the
twentieth century was largely a man’s world, and a white man’s world at
that. Bigotry and poverty greeted the European immigrants arriving at Ellis
Island. On the West Coast, Asian immigrants supplied labor for the mining,
fishing, logging and farming industries. Many Chinese immigrants attempted
illegal entry to North America through the various port towns of Washington and
British Columbia, including Port Townsend. These individuals, as well as the
native populations of the area, suffered much discrimination and ill treatment.
Women were definitely the second sex, not granted voting rights in Washington
state until 1910, ten years before national suffrage for women was finally
realized in 1920.
According to historian Evelyn Hu-Dehart, one way
of dealing with unfamiliar cultures is to denigrate or ignore the members of
those groups. If that is true, the reporting of the Leader in the early 1900s
reflected the dominant culture of the times: ethnic minorities were often
referred to in derogatory terms, and women were largely ignored, particularly if
married, when they seem to have lost all claim to their own first names.
Judging from the newspaper advertising of the
time, Americans were obsessed with personal health concerns. Each morning's
paper included several ads for patent medicines and other health products to
alleviate ailments afflicting nearly every body part. Many of the patent
medicines contained opiates or alcohol; Hostetter's Stomach Bitters, advertised
in the Morning Leader as "a cure for headache, nervousness, indigestion,
dyspepsia, constipation and malaria" had an alcohol level of 44%. A
frequent and well-known advertiser was Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, a
brew of herbs and alcohol for "woman's special ills." (The company was
charged with fraud in 1905 for sending out handwritten letters signed by Lydia
herself, when she had been dead for 20 years.)
The Morning Leader had been microfilmed several
years ago by Bell & Howell for the Washington State Library. For this
project, silver negative copies were scanned by OCLC Preservation Resources in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The GIF images that were then created are 1600 pixels
wide, derived from 600 dpi TIFF images. These are restricted to non-commercial,
public access use. Prints can be made directly from the microfilm. For more
information, contact Jefferson County Historical Society Research Center, 13692
Airport Cutoff Road, Port Townsend, WA 98368 (on Highway 19, just outside
Port Townsend). phone: 360-379-6673; email:
jchsrescntr@olympus.net
Each issue of the paper is indexed page-by-page, by library staff and
volunteers. This project has been supported by a federal Library Services and
Technology Act grant awarded by the Washington State Library Commission.
The Morning Leader was published six days a
week, every day but Monday. Page one contained local news: politics,
shipping, crimes and so forth, as well as advertisements in the disguise
of news items. On page two readers would find the mail schedule, comings
and goings of local residents, brief editorial comments, crew notices,
fraternal lodge directory, and rail and steamship schedules. Page three
was reserved for late telegraph news from cities throughout the United
States and even Europe. Finally, page four contained more local and
regional news, and of course, many advertisements. The digitized
version of The Leader is hosted by the
University of Washington Libraries Digital
Collections. You can search on various fields, including date,
headline, subject, advertisements, and names of individual people or
vessels. Note: you may find variations in the names of individuals,
depending on how the person was named in an article - in some cases full
first names were reported, though the more common convention was to use
initials. It has not been possible to verify the full first name of
many people who lived in Port Townsend at the time.
