Ohio History Journal

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in Europe, and we are becoming politically alive in every direction, that

there exists as never before the possibility of cultivating such a higher

form of political science and history. This new political science will not

aim primarily at dictating political decisions but prepare the ground for

such decisions; it will reveal and illuminate combinations in the realm of

politics and history which hitherto have been scarcely noticed. It will

undertake for example investigations of the following sort:  If anyone

wants this or that, then he will think thus and so at a particular point in

the historical situation, then he will see the entire political process in this

or in that way. But the fact that he wants this or that, depends on these

or those traditions, and these and those traditions are dependent on such

and such positions in the structure of society. Only he who approaches

political and historical problems in this spirit will ever arrive at a relatively

comprehensive grasp of totality. Such a political science and such a history

will acquire a new vitality, a new meaning, and a new usefulness.

Dinner and Evening Sessions

A subscription dinner for members of both organizations

representing the conference and their friends occurred at the

Faculty Club of Ohio State University at 6 P. M. About fifty

were present.    Mr. Robert Price, of the Department of English

of Ohio State University, addressed the group on "Johnny Ap-

pleseed--the Myth and the Man." This address was very much

appreciated by all present.

 

THE RECORD OF THE AMERICAN PRESS

An address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Ohio State Archaeo-

logical and Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio, April 1, 1938,

8:15 P. M., University Hall

By DOUGLAS C. MCMURTRIE

We are all of us, I take it, interested in history from one viewpoint or

another; otherwise we should not be gathered here this evening. Relying

on that interest, I propose to ask your attention to some matters con-

cerned with basic sources of historical material.

If I read aright the trends of historical study, I should say that the

most important thing to the historian of today is access to original, con-

temporaneous sources of information. At an earlier time, the writers of

history used to depend upon so-called "authorities"--upon men who had

written books which had come to be regarded as standard works on one

subject or another--and each writer thereafter would quote such an author-

ity with a sense of finality. But the modern historian is disposed to dis-

count almost all histories written after the fact and to insist upon relating

all statements back to contemporaneous evidence--evidence which has not

passed through all the changes through which so many statements go when

they are filtered through memory and through rewriting and restatement.

And contemporaneous evidence is not only more accurate and hence more

important to the historian; it is also more vivid.

I am not primarily a historian. My interest in history began in be-

coming interested in the history of my own profession, which is printing.

From that as a starting point, I have become interested in history in gen-

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eral, as I found that many a historical event became alive and real to me

when I read some original printed record of it. The  record may have

interested me at first only as evidence of the workmanship of a printer

who was a pioneer in his locality. But the printed document took on new

meaning when I realized the part it may have played in the lives and for-

tunes of men of a bygone day.

Let me illustrate what I mean. It is one thing to read at second hand

of the struggles of the American colonists for independence in the days of

the Revolutionary War. But it is something quite different to pick up and

read the actual printed broadside proclamation in which the royal governor

of one of the colonies called upon the citizens to desist from certain activi-

ties which he called disloyal, and then to read another printed broadside,

issued the same afternoon, in which the patriots declined to be coerced by

the governor and reasserted what they believed to be their rights. From

those original documents you get a feeling of immediacy and reality that

you cannot get, I believe, in any other way.

And so it seems to me, as it must seem, I think, to everybody con-

cerned with any field of historical study, exceedingly important to discover

and put to use every possible source of original, contemporaneous infor-

mation, as of the day or the day after the events themselves.

Broadly speaking, we have two classes of such sources. One consists of

documents written by hand and known to us all as manuscript material.

Manuscript material, of course, is being used more and more as historians

become familiar with the places where it can be found. As yet, however,

I think there is a very insufficient record of where manuscript materials of

various kinds can be found. And one of the tasks yet ahead of organized

historical research is to find and record in some systematic way the manu-

script sources of history. But that is a problem which does not come

within the range of my immediate interest.

The other class of historical source material is printed documents.

And printed material, it seems to me, has an important quality all its

own. If a document was printed, if it was taken to some printer and

put into type, it had an acknowledged importance at the time, or the expense

of printing would not have been incurred. That it was printed indicated

that the writer or author of the document, at least, if not other people,

thought it was worthy of the attention of a wider circle than might be

reached by word of mouth or by the passing out or posting of a hand-

written document.

Printed material, in turn, may be divided into two classes. The first

of these is newspapers. Contemporaneous newspapers are being used more

and more, and their use has been greatly facilitated, so far as the earlier

years of our history are concerned, by the work over the last twenty or

twenty-five years of Clarence S. Brigham.  Dr. Brigham, formerly as

librarian and later as director of the American Antiquarian Society, at

Worcester, Massachusetts, has been indefatigable in seeking out every issue

of every American newspaper published earlier than 1821, in recording them,

and in making known where the various files, or even scattered issues, can

be found. This has been, I think, in many respects the most important

contribution to American history that has been made by any individual in

the last generation.

The newspaper field, I should say, has been covered well. Just re-

cently, within the last six months, a considerable project, carried through

under the auspices of the Bibliographical Society of America, has resulted

in the publication of a union list of American newspapers since 1820.

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The two lists--Brigham's and the union list--fitted together provide a quite

satisfactory means for finding newspapers published in any locality at any

date. This does not mean, of course, that every issue of every newspaper

can be found. But if copies have been preserved, the record of where they

may be found is available.

Leaving the newspapers, we have the second class of printed materials

in what are called "imprints."  I shall promptly define that term, because

many people with whom I have talked about imprints immediately inquire

"What is an imprint?" This is a fair question, inasmuch as "imprint" has

been adopted by the librarians and the bibliographers as a term used in a

special sense peculiar to their professional jargon.

Strictly speaking, an imprint consists of those printed lines at the bot-

tom of the title pages of most printed books and pamphlets which make

known the place of printing, the name of the printer, and the date. The

lines "Columbus, printed by P. H. Olmsted, 1821" on the title page of a

particular book or pamphlet is the imprint of that particular piece of printed

matter. But by an extension of the term, the book itself will be called an

"Olmsted imprint."  By still further extensions, all printed pieces bearing

Olmsted's name will be known as "Olmsted imprints," all things printed

in Columbus will be designated as "Columbus imprints," and all books and

pamphlets printed in Ohio become "Ohio imprints." In this wider sense,

however, the term "imprints" is usually applied to printed matter falling

within certain limits of date or place which give them historical interest or

value. Thus, we may be concerned with eighteenth century American im-

prints only, or with Idaho imprints before 1891.

A really enormous quantity of this sort of material is available if one

knows where to find it. As a matter of course, the great libraries in

the eastern part of the country can be depended upon to have remarkable

collections of Revolutionary and pre-Revolutionary documents, and the his-

torical societies in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, to mention only

a few, have really wonderful libraries of early printed materials.

But how has this material been recorded, so that the student may know

of its existence and where to find it? Several attempts have been made to

compile lists of American printed documents earlier than the Revolution.

Later efforts were made to record all such material to the close of the

eighteenth century--that is, through the year 1800. The most consequential

effort in the latter field was made by a gentleman who lived in Chicago,

Charles Evans by name. Mr. Evans years ago undertook single-handed

the task of compiling a list of all American books, pamphlets and broad-

sides printed earlier than 1801. I say "single-handed" because, before his

death at an advanced age about a year ago, he had succeeded in bringing

out the twelve volumes of his American Bibliography, recording titles

through 1798 and with half the titles of 1799, without a moment's help from

any other person. He gathered the material, he wrote out every entry in

ink with his own hand, he compiled the volumes, he read every line of

proof--he personally attended to every detail of the whole enormous task

totally unaided. It is a truly remarkable achievement.

Another noteworthy effort to list printed material of American in-

terest was undertaken by Joseph Sabin in his Dictionary of Books Relating

to America.  This work, suspended several times, first because of Mr.

Sabin's death, later by changes of editorial direction, has recently been

brought to completion under the editorship of R. W. G. Vail, and also under

the auspices of the Bibliographical Society of America. Unlike Evans, who

divided the material off by years, Sabin and the later editors of the latter

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work arranged the material throughout alphabetically by authors and sub-

jects. Sabin also includes a wide variety of material relating to America

but printed in many different countries, and covers a wide range of dates.

Evans, as has been said, fixed the final date of the material with which

he concerned himself at the year 1800. This rules out of his bibliography

large portions of the United States in which no kind of settlement or

political organization, to say nothing of presses, had been set up by 1800.

For material printed in the eastern states, Evans provides a good finding

list. But if we look at American history as stretching from coast to coast,

if we believe that the settlement of Oregon is as important historically as

some of the events of the French and Indian War, if we regard the Louisi-

ana Purchase as of importance equal to that of various little quarrels

throughout colonial New England, then we must set up a record of his-

torical material on a much wider basis than with 1800 as a date limit.

Here the Sabin Dictionary is helpful indeed, but even Sabin leaves out large

ranges of useful material.

In recent years a most useful mechanism has been created for locating

printed historical material--the union catalog.  The first and the most

important of these union catalogs was started by a grant from the Rocke-

feller Foundation to establish in the Library of Congress at Washington a

combined catalog of all the principal libraries in the United States, which

should be kept constantly up to date. This catalog now comprises between

seven and eight million titles. It is maintained with a high degree of

ability and is kept strictly up to date for titles in all the libraries that

contribute to it. So it is possible to go to that catalog in Washington and

look under the name of any desired authority and find in what libraries

copies of it may be consulted. In not a few cases it will be found that

only one copy has been recorded, and it is sometimes immensely valuable

to know in what library that unique copy is located.

The union catalog at Washington is now being supplemented with

others, such as those which have been started in Philadelphia and in Cleve-

land. In these local catalogs will be gathered the titles of all the libraries

within their respective metropolitan areas, including many libraries which

have not contributed to the great union catalog of the Library of Congress.

But the union catalog mechanism, though widely welcomed by bibli-

ographers and historians, does not completely solve the problem of finding

historical source materials. These catalogs are author catalogs only; they

are not classified by subjects. The student in search of a book of which

he knows the title and the author's name finds the union catalogs invalu-

able. But the student in search of material on a special subject is still

more or less helpless, as he cannot possibly know the title and author of

every book and pamphlet bearing on his subject. One interested, for ex-

ample, in the early history of the city of Saint Louis may have references

to ten or a dozen books of importance. These he can find. But there may

be forty or fifty other books and pamphlets of equal importance to him if he

could but know of them. How is he going to find them if he does not even

know that the material exists?

The answer to that question of how we can make an inventory of all

printed historical material throughout the United States--material of im-

portance to the history of various localities or of various periods--is a

project in which I have been interested in recent years. Let me explain

how I happened to get interested in this subject. As I have said, I am not

a professional historian. I am not even a professional librarian. But I

have long had a deep interest in the history of printing. When I began

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actively to work in that field, however, and endeavored to compile some

satisfactory reports of the early beginnings of the press throughout the

United States, I soon found that there were great gaps in the available

information about how, and where, and when our pioneer presses were

established. What is more, I found out that the information which was

available was about sixty per cent wrong. Much of it was hearsay which,

when checked against the actual records, proved to be misinformation and

hence useless. I found, in short, that if I wished a reliable record of early

printing in the United States, I had to disregard almost everything that

had been written on the subject and start from scratch to find my own

source materials.

The first state I happened to take up for study was Louisiana. I was

living in New York at the time and became acquainted with a great Ameri-

can scholar who died only six or eight months ago--Dr. Wilberforce

Eames, emeritus librarian of the New York Public Library. Dr. Eames

was unquestionably one of the greatest men in the annals of American

scholarship. He started out as a lad with nothing but a grammar school

education. He worked for a number of years in book shops because he

loved books and because he was more interested in learning about books

than in the salary he got--and a meager salary it was that he received at

the end of each week. He was finally taken out of a book shop to become

an assistant in the Lenox Library before that institution was merged into

the New York Public Library, and he eventually became the most learned

man, I believe, in all fields of American library and historical work. He

lived to the age of eighty-two, retaining an undimmed and active mind to

the very last, and his powers of memory never ceased to amaze everybody

that ever came into contact with him.

Dr. Eames had always been interested in American imprints. He was

the first man in this country that ever really developed that interest. While

at the New York Public Library he zealously collected, studied, and

recorded these documents. He realized years ago, when the West was still

in its formative stages, that all kinds of little ephemeral pamphlets, political

tracts, proceedings of local church and fraternal organizations, and many

other such things, were records of history in the making, and that some

day, twenty, thirty, fifty years later, historians would be anxiously searching

for such material because nowhere else could they find the intimate, per-

sonal story of the men and women who first made settlements on our fron-

tiers. The invaluable Eames collection of American imprints eventually

found its way to the Henry E. Huntington Library at San Marino, Cali-

fornia--that amazing depository of so much priceless material which

scholars can find nowhere else in the world.

Dr. Eames not only collected imprints, but he started in the New

York Public Library an imprint catalog, the only thing of its kind in the

world. A development of twenty-five years of specialized attention, this

catalog contains titles arranged by places and dates--titles not only of

books and pamphlets in the New York Public Library, but also titles of

rarities gathered from a number of other sources. Here one can find for

example, a list of titles printed in Chillicothe, Ohio, or in Kalamazoo,

Michigan, or in almost any other place, arranged by dates. It is by no

means complete, of course, but still it is the most valuable card catalog in

the world for one who wishes to get information as to what was printed

in a given place within a given range of dates.

To get back to my interest in the early press of Louisiana: Through

Dr. Eames I happened to see, at the New York Public Library, photo-

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static copies of some early documents printed in that state. They seemed

interesting to me from the point of view of the technique of their printing

and I realized that there was some new information to be gained from

them. Now the Evans bibliography which I have mentioned said that the

first printing in New Orleans had been done in 1797; yet here I had be-

fore me the photostat of a document with the clear statement at the end

that it was printed in New Orleans by a certain printer in 1768. But per-

haps Evans was to be pardoned for having missed the 1768 document;

there are only two copies of it known to exist in the world. One of them

is in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris; the other is in Seville, Spain,

preserved in the Archives of the Indies.

I found, too, that Dr. Eames had later documents printed in New

Orleans. Where were they to be found?      Some were in the Bancroft

Library of the University of California, at Berkeley. Others were in the

Harvard College Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Still others were

in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. As yet, not one

had been found which was in a collection in Louisiana. Here, then, were

some of the foundation stones of Louisiana history, not one of which was

to be found in that state.

As is well known, Louisiana during its early years was under three

different flags within a quite limited period. This appealed to me, some-

how, as rather uniquely interesting, and I began a search for other evi-

dences of the work of the early press there. After two or three years I

was able to make considerable additions to the imprints which Dr. Eames

had found. We had known, to begin with, that a printer had applied in 1764

for a license to print in New Orleans. Happening to be in that city, I got

to searching around in the old Cabildo there and finally found two docu-

ments printed in 1765--within a year from the time the printer applied for

his license. That was exciting! But a little later I had the privilege of

visiting a library in a private home, where a gentleman spent three hours

in showing me first editions of Homer, and sets of the Kelmscott books,

and many other treasures which were only mildly interesting to me.

Finally I asked him "Have you any early Louisiana material?" He replied

"Oh, yes, I have a few things." He got them out, and among them was

a broadside. At the bottom of this broadside was an imprint--in French,

of course, as was the text of the broadside. And this imprint, translated,

read: "From the press of Denis Braud, printer to the king." Braud was

the printer who had applied in 1764 for a license to print. He omitted to

put on this broadside the year in which he printed it, but the document bore

a manuscript endorsement by the secretary of the council of the royal

province of Louisiana, and this endorsement was dated September 16, 1764.

So here, at last, was a document printed in New Orleans in the first

year that printing was permitted there. And what was this document?

Nothing less than the edict, or proclamation, by which the king of France

informed his loyal subjects in Louisiana that he had transferred title of

the territory to the king of Spain and asking them in the future to give

allegiance to the Spanish crown. There it was, the only copy that has

yet been found of a printed document of the highest historical interest,

casually lying in the library of a collector of first editions!

At length I put together and published a list of all these things, titles

of books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed in New Orleans before the

year 1811, titles from copies in New Orleans, in Washington, Berkeley,

San Marino and Cambridge, in London, Paris and Seville. There was a

list, as complete as reasonable diligence could make it, of certain material

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that was basic for the history of Louisiana, for historians to use as they

saw fit.

That Louisiana venture was the beginning of what has since become

almost an obsession. My wife tells me that I am ruined as a social being.

I do not play bridge well any more, and I do not do many other things

that perhaps I ought to do as a family man, because all my spare time is

spent in a seemingly endless search for early American imprints. Nobody

apparently, had even attempted to list such material for any of the Middle

and Western States. A virgin field was there for anyone who wished to

work it. And that was the task I set myself--to take the states not covered

by Charles Evans and other bibliographers and attempt lists of their early

imprints.

I began at first by trying to concentrate on the imprints of one state

at a time, disregarding all others. But such a plan was found to be im-

possible. If I were in a Kentucky city, for instance, and took some spare

time for a look at the catalog of a library there in search of Kentucky

imprints, and if I found there the titles of some early imprints of Ten-

nessee, I could not just pass them by. I might never visit that library

again, so while I was there I made notes of everything I found--titles from

Ohio, Missouri, Indiana, or wherever, that were in that particular catalog.

All these titles were later assorted and filed by places and dates.

This restless search for early imprints has resulted in some sur-

prising discoveries in surprising places. Let me tell you of some of them.

I had never intended to do anything with the Southern States, assum-

ing that they were quite well taken care of by others because early southern

printing figured quite extensively in all the standard bibliographies. But I

got into the habit of reading all the book dealers' and book auction cata-

logs and all the calendars of manuscripts I could get my hands on, and

formed the desperately bad habit of reading such things as the calendars

of documents in the Public Record Office in London and the various guides

to manuscripts in overseas collections published by the Carnegie Institution.

These guides and calendars were compiled by men whom I call manuscript

hounds. They were able, far-seeing historians who realized that in those

treasure houses overseas there was material of vital importance for the

study of the history of the American colonies. But they were concerned

only with manuscript material, and if they encountered anything that was

printed they simply passed it by. They assumed, perhaps, that as it was

printed, many copies of it were available elsewhere.

But fortunately for the imprint hound who followed their trail, these

recorders of manuscripts often left valuable hints of printed material that

they had seen. For example, there might be listed a governor's letter,

Governor-so-and-so writing to the home office, under such-and-such a date,

from Charleston, South Carolina. There would be a synopsis of the con-

tents of the letter, telling what action the governor had taken in certain

matters, what proclamations he had issued, perhaps an account of how the

colonists were misbehaving. But then, at the end, there would be the two

interesting words: "Printed enclosures."

Hundreds and hundreds of pages of guides and calendars of manu-

scripts were searched for these notes of printed enclosures. Inquiries were

then directed to the depositories in which the manuscript records were pre-

served, to ascertain what the printed material might be. And in some

cases this effort has been indeed richly repaid.

Let us take South Carolina as one instance. In South Carolina, ac-

cording to all accepted accounts, printing started in 1732. For ten years

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previously the colony had been trying to get a printer to settle there to

print the laws. There was urgent need in any colony that the laws be

printed. The South Carolina authorities had offered various inducements

to tempt a printer to come there, but none came. Finally an offer was made

of two thousand pounds in proclamation money as a bonus to any printer

who would come and settle in Charleston to print the laws and other public

papers.

This offer brought results. Instead of one printer, three came to

Charleston, each one claiming the bonus. Each applied to the colonial

legislature for the reward, as we know from their applications recorded in

the legislative journals. Thus we know the names of these three printers.

And we knew that two of them actually got to work. Thomas Whit-

marsh, from Philadelphia, backed by a partnership agreement with Ben-

jamin Franklin, almost immediately began to publish his South-Carolina

Gazette, of which an almost complete file has been preserved in the collec-

tions of the grand old Charleston Library Society, which was founded in

1748. Eleazer Phillips, from New England, also established a newspaper,

the South Carolina Journal, but of this paper not a single copy or even a

fragment has survived. But we know of it because Phillips died after a

few months in Charleston, and his father put an advertisement in the

other newspaper asking those who had subscribed for the Journal please to

come forward and pay up their subscriptions.

But there was still a third printer who came to Charleston and applied

for the bonus. We knew from the legislative journals that his name was

George Webb, but otherwise nothing whatever was known of him. There

was no record anywhere of anything that he had printed. Then it hap-

pened that I noticed the mention of "printed enclosures" in the record of a

certain letter from the governor of South Carolina preserved in the Public

Record Office in London.  I sent for photostatic copies of this printed

matter. The package of photostats arrived and was opened with consider-

able eagerness. And there, at the bottom of one of the printed documents,

was the very obliging imprint: "Charles Town, Printed by George Webb"!

And that was not all. The document in question was dated, not 1732,

the year which had always been accepted as the date of the first printing in

South Carolina, but 1731! Thus the story of the first three Charleston

printers was completed, and an earlier date was set for the beginning of

printing there. Furthermore, the document printed by George Webb, pre-

viously unrecorded except as an undescribed "printed enclosure," was found

to contain considerable information as to early South Carolina legislation

affecting land grants, quit rents, and so on.

This experience with South Carolina was repeated with state after

state, particularly through the South.  Suppose you had the urge to do

a little historical research on the beginnings of civil government in Mis-

sissippi; where would you look for material? Your first and most natural

impulse might be to go to Mississippi and look for your material in the

archives and libraries there. But I would advise you, instead, to come first

to Chicago and look at our indexes of Mississippi titles there. If you

would do so, you would find that the earliest known piece of printing done

in Mississippi, the important militia law that was necessary to be circu-

lated in order to have organized protection of the territory against the

Indians, printed six months earlier than any other document known to

have been printed in Mississippi, exists in just one extant copy, and that that

copy is in Seville, Spain, where I had it photostated. And the second known

printed Mississippi document survives in but two known copies, one in

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New York and one in Boston. The only known copy of the third Mis-

sissippi imprint is in the State House in Boston, Massachusetts. The fourth

is known only from a defective copy in private ownership in Mississippi.

The session laws of 1802 were supposed to have been lost entirely;

there was no record anywhere, in print or even in manuscript, of what the

Mississippi territorial legislature did at its session in May, 1802. But quite

recently a friend of mine, knowing my interest in such things, wrote to me

to say that a printed copy of the session laws of 1802 might be found in the

library of a military school a few miles south of Natchez. The photostat.

was again called into play, and before long there will be published a fac-

simile reproduction of those lost session laws.

A Mississippi gentleman interested in the history of medicine once

wrote to me, "There was a yellow fever epidemic in Natchez in 1823. We

know that there was a printed account of it and that two editions were

printed, one in Natchez and one in Washington, Mississippi, but we have

never been able to find a copy of either." After consulting my Mississippi

records, I was able to write back, giving him locations of three copies of

the first edition, and two copies of the second.

Mr. John B. Stetson, Jr., the hat manufacturer, who is much in-

terested in the history of Florida, asked me to do some work on early

Florida imprints.  After exhaustive search, we thought we knew    just

about all there was to know about them. We knew that there was a Masonic

grand lodge in Florida at an early date, but not a trace had been found of

any printed document concerning it. One day I was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa,

poking around in the Masonic Library in that town. On looking through

their catalog, to see what they might have of interest to me, I saw "Florida,

Grand Lodge, Proceedings, 1821 to date."  And there they were, every

single issue, not one year missing, in a library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where

a searcher for Florida material would hardly think of looking.

I knew of an interesting Baptist minister in the early days of Illinois,

John Mason Peck, a great figure in the history of the Baptist faith in the

Middle West, a great believer in the power of the press. I knew that he

had set up a press at a little spot on the Illinois prairies which was called

Rock Springs. I doubt that Rock Springs could be found today on any

map. Peck later moved his press to Alton. In one of his publications

appeared a notice addressed to Baptists announcing the formation of a

Baptist historical society, with the aim of preserving records of denomi-

national activity in the Middle West. He asked all Baptists to send to

the society for preservation copies of all association minutes, proceedings,

and other records.

Had anybody ever heard of that society?    I inquired everywhere,

whether that plan of a collection of Baptist historical material had ever

materialized, and nobody knew. But I felt sure that somewhere there might

be some result of Peck's plan to gather Baptist records. The natural place

to look for it was Alton, where Peck had his press. And in Alton, the

natural place to look was in the library of Shurtleff College, a Baptist col-

lege. Shurtleff College therefore became an objective to be kept in mind.

So one day, when I was driving down to St. Louis on business, with

my wife as company, I stopped off at Shurtleff College and went into the

library. I asked, "Have you any early Baptist material here?" The lady

in charge said, "I don't know; the librarian died seven days ago, and I

am only the assistant; but whatever we have is in the catalog." So I looked

in the catalog and found four or five items of some interest, most of them

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already known to me. So I asked "Isn't there anything else around here?"

And the answer was, "No, not a thing."

Then I went over to the office of the president and asked him if there

was not some collection of Baptist material somewhere. No, he knew

of nothing; in fact, he was quite sure that there was nothing of the

kind. But he added that an old professor who then was running the col-

lege book store might possibly know of something.

As a last chance I went then to the book store. The old professor

did not know of any Baptist collection; he recalled that many years back

there had been some talk about it, but he was quite sure that if there ever

had been any such collection, there wasn't anything left of it. However,

in case I should be coming back that way, he offered to make some in-

quiries and to give me further information on my return visit.

So I went on to St. Louis and completed my business there. The

evening before leaving I told my wife that I was asking to be called at

six o'clock. Said she, "What's the hurry?" I explained, "I have to be

in Alton early in the morning to see what I can find there."  There was

vigorous objection, but nevertheless we were in Alton about half-past eight

the next morning, and I hurried to look up my old friend in the book store.

The good old professor was not encouraging. He said, "Well, I don't

know whether it is what you are looking for, but there is a closet in the

library, and I'll show you what is in it." So he took me back into a corner

of the Shurtleff College library and opened a closet about eight or ten

feet by four or five, and there I beheld pile upon pile of pamphlets, con-

taining practically every issue of every printed set of minutes of Illinois

Baptist associations, some of them over a hundred years old! There was

the first known pamphlet ever printed in the city of Chicago and a number

of other Chicago imprints previously unknown. There was practically the

whole story of Baptist activities in the early days of Illinois, from the

southern tip of the state to the northern, all nicely arranged, and all, I

assure you, untouched for years and years and years!

I shall not claim that I was not a bit excited. I bored into that mass

of material and worked madly, writing down notes of one title after

another. Finally I heard a plaintive toot from an automobile horn and

recalled that I had left a wife parked outside. She reminded me that it

was lunch time and quite justly complained about being left out there in the

sun. So I found a young woman, a senior in the college, instructed her

hurriedly in the rudiments of bibliographical descriptions, and left it with

her to do the rest of the work on the material in that closet. It was a

month or so before she sent in the last title to be recorded from that ex-

traordinary collection.

You know, of course, that printing in Ohio started at Cincinnati in

1793, when the southern wave or stream of westward migration reached

that point. You also know, perhaps, that not until 1818 did the first press

reach Cleveland, with the second, or northern, stream of migration. Now

in Cleveland there is an important historical society that has concentrated

on gathering material over a long period of years. As a result, they have

a fine collection of local material, especially, of course, relating to Cleve-

land and the Western Reserve. But when I came to write a note recently

on the beginnings of printing in Cleveland, notwithstanding the generally

received impression that the first pamphlet or book printed in Cleveland was

an almanac for 1828, I was able to state that the earliest known Cleveland

imprint was not this almanac of 1828, but a bit of literary composition, a

play entitled Catharine Brown, the Converted Cherokee, described as "a

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missionary drama, founded on fact, written by a lady," which was printed

in "Cleaveland" in 1820--only two years after the first little press produced

the first little newspaper there.

And where is this interesting little drama to be found? Not in Cleve-

land, nor even in Ohio. The only known copy of it is buried in the drama

collection in the Harvard College Library, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The second Cleveland imprint of interest is the proceedings of the

local Baptist organization. There are some of the minutes of this associa-

tion in the library of the Western Reserve Historical Society. But there is

one that isn't there; it is in the Samuel Colgate Baptist Historical Col-

lection, at Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York, a sleepy little col-

lege town where even the railroad has ceased to run. How would you ever

find that if you were making a study of the Ohio Baptists?

The third known piece of Cleveland printing of cultural interest was

a sermon delivered in Cleveland and later in the neighboring town of Euclid

in 1824. It was a sermon on future punishments, and if you were in-

terested in that important subject as viewed by a Cleveland pastor of so

long ago, where would you look for it? It is on an upper floor in the

back of an office building on Beacon Street, in Boston, where the Congre-

gational Church has its historical library--which few students of western

history ever visit.

These instances might be multiplied. But enough has been said, I'm

sure, to point out how a dragnet put over all libraries that have interesting

material will bring much to light that is of historical importance. If the

titles thus dredged up are then brought into one central place and there

recorded, regionally first, and then by dates, the result is a guide to vast

quantities of source material of which our historians can otherwise have no

possible way of knowing.

Therefore it is interesting, to me at least, to find that my more or less

personal enthusiasm for searching out early imprints has been received by

historians and bibliographers in various parts of the country with a reason-

able amount of favor. So when the Historical Records Survey of the

Works Progress Administration intimated through its national director a

year or so ago, that they would be open to the consideration of new proj-

ects of use to historians. I made bold to offer a proposal to undertake a

nation-wide inventory of printed materials from Maine to California. This

proposal was submitted to a number of authorities, who apparently ex-

pressed a favorable opinion of it, for about a year ago the American Im-

prints Inventory was set up as one of the activities of the Historical Rec-

ords Survey, and the various state directors of the survey were asked to

cooperate in the project as far as their local staffs permitted.

During the year the Historical Records Survey has been able, with

very limited forces available in most states, to make remarkable progress

in a number of directions. We have had twelve people at work in Penn-

sylvania, three or four in New York state, three or four in Ohio, with

varying numbers in other states. Very good work has been done in Califor-

nia, in South Carolina, and elsewhere.

The work has thus far resulted in two publications, preliminary

check lists of early imprints of Missouri and of Minnesota. These have been

received with considerable favor, which has prompted the authorities of the

Works Progress Administration to regard the imprints inventory as a

desirable project which they are willing to encourage. This encouragement

has been given in a most substantial way. The authorities made it known

that they were willing to set in motion separate state projects in all the

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states in which they are needed, with a considerable number of workers, to

clean up the record of American printed materials once and for all, so that

it may be filed regionally and chronologically.

A number of these state projects are now under way. We have seventy

people at work today, for instance, going through all the libraries in Mas-

sachusetts and recording titles, not only in the larger and more important

libraries that scholars know, but also in the smaller local libraries, most of

which our scholars do not know, but which in some cases have collections

going back two hundred years and more.    My own experience tells me

that the search through these small and relatively obscure libraries is per-

haps the most important part of the work. No one can say what may be

found in them.

We are going through, for example, some three million cards in the

Philadelphia union catalog. And we are going through the seven million

cards in the union catalog of the Library of Congress. But we are also

going through off-the-track libraries that few bibliographers ever visit.

Think of what may be found in the library of the Harvard Andover Divin-

ity School! Think of what 1,400 bound volumes of pamphlets in the

Auburn Theological Seminary may disclose! Think of what is contained

in the library of the Massachusetts Masonic Grand Lodge in Boston!

Is anyone interested in the beginnings of Masonry in Ohio?   The

material cannot be found in this state. The Masonic historian could search

and search, and then truthfully say that there is no worth-while collection

of early Ohio Masonic material anywhere in Ohio. But I could take him

upstairs in a building on Boylston Street, in Boston, and show him every

single printed document of Ohio Masonry, from the first two-page letter

right down to date. And there is a pretty good collection of Ohio mate-

rial also in the Masonic Library out in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Now, all this has been, perhaps, very bibliographical and technical.

But I assure you that any study of the early printers of America brings

out a great deal that is very interesting, very human. Wherever you touch

the subject, you will find that the printer was, almost without exception, a

devoted servant of the frontier community in which he had decided to make

his home. He was a man with enthusiasms, and often with a real vision of

the possibilities of the future.

The very first press that came to British North America was brought

to Cambridge, Massachusetts, by an enthusiast who felt that the newly

established Harvard College could not do educational work satisfactorily

without the help of the printing press. He went back to England, raised

money, bought a press, employed some printers, and returned to America.

On the way over, like so many of the early pioneers, he died at sea, so the

press arrived here without him. But the first press in English-speaking

America, which began operation in 1639, is to be credited to this non-con-

formist English clergyman, Jose Glover.

From that time onward, the history of the press in America is the

story of interesting personalities, interesting adventures--even more inter-

esting, it seems, as the press moved westward. Consider, for instance, the

first printers of the Rocky Mountain region, most of them drawn by the

lure of gold or other precious metals discovered in one place or another.

A man went out to the Pikes Peak region, to what is now Denver, soon

after the discovery of gold in that vicinity. He looked the country over,

felt that there was a field there for a newspaper, and went back to Omaha

to get equipment. He started west again with his equipment in an ox

cart, planning to get out the first newspaper in Denver.

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240     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

As he passed one of the outfitting points along the way, someone

asked him, "What have you got in the ox cart?" He said, "I've got a press

and some type, and I'm going out to Cherry Creek [as the settlement was

called then] and start a newspaper." The other man said, "That's funny,

there was another printer went through here two or three weeks ago with

the same idea in mind." And so, still determined that his newspaper should

be the first in the new field, William Byers mounted his horse and hurried

on ahead, telling his men to bring the ox cart through as fast as possible.

Arriving at the Cherry Creek settlement, Byers rented a cabin with a

leaky roof for his printing office, and when his equipment finally came,

he set up his press and began with feverish haste to get out the first issue

of his newspaper.

In the meantime, Jack Merrick, the printer who had taken the west-

ward road ahead of Byers, had arrived but had seen no need for hurrying.

But when he learned that a rival printer had appeared, he, too, went to

work. And so, late in the evening of April 23, 1859, during a blinding

snowstorm, two newspapers were born on the banks of Cherry Creek within

twenty minutes of each other. But William Byers and his Rocky Moun-

tain News was ahead of Jack Merrick and his Cherry Creek Pioneer. Mer-

rick came over and took a look at his rival, then traded his press and type

for a prospector's outfit and started for the gold fields. There never was

but one issue of the Cherry Creek Pioneer, but the Rocky Mountain News

is still being published in Denver.

There are similar stories about the printers who first pushed up into

Montana on the heels of gold seekers, about the Mormons and their first

press on the shores of Great Salt Lake, about the Mexican printer who

first established the press in New Mexico, and many, many others. But

there is no time to discuss them all--the hour is getting late.

I should like to leave with you, however, this impression of the pioneer

printers and what they did. The little newspapers they published, the

little pamphlets or even books they printed, are the very flesh and blood of

early local history. These printers did not move to the frontiers with the

thought of establishing profitable businesses, or if they had any such idea,

they were disabused of it shortly after their arrival. But almost all of them

were enthusiasts for the new communities to which they had come, and

they served as publicity agents to "sell" these new communities to the

people "back home."

It is instructive to read some of these old frontier newspapers with

their glowing accounts of the new settlements; of "cities" laid out where

we know that at the time there was nothing but a group of plank shacks on

"streets" which were sometimes hub-deep in mud; of fertile fields and

prodigious (but still prospective) crops on acres still thick with stumps:

of golden business opportunities in a center where the printer himself

could barely collect enough money to keep his paper going. You may

think that the editors were not altogether ingenuous, that they were even

more than a little dishonest in their representations. But though the first

printer in St. Paul took unwarranted liberties with the literal truth in his

description of that city as it was in his day, yet we find that his promises

for that city, his visions for its future, and the similar visions and prom-

ises of other printers for other communities, have almost all been realized.

Therefore, with me, the conviction is unescapable that those early printers

had a very large part in making those visions come true.

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