[PRCo] Re: Derry (Re: Re: Perspective on nostalgia)

[Fred Schneider]

Isn't it nice Derrick ... the number of suggestions we can give you?
Quite honestly, there is a lot of material out there in newspapers and
government documents but it takes a lot of effort to dig it out.  Ed
Lybarger has been working for years on reading newspapers in the West
Penn territory and he has the same problem there that I have in
Lancaster.  Too many newspapers and not enough time.

Often in the early years of the 20th century ... without telephones ...
counties were not very cohesive.  Most people lived out their entire
lives within a 10 mile circle.  Therefore newspapers also covered a very
tiny area.  Here in Lancaster, the New Era (one of three daily papers)
had stringers in Lititz, Quarryville, Ephrata and Columbia but that still
didn't cover the county adequately and they only published the county
items that the stringers sent in.  At the turn of the century, the
Columbia stringer had a pipe line into the Pennsylvania Railroad yards
and printed every accident.  But the Lititz stringer ignored everything
but church events.  .  And the New Era had a different editorial
viewpoint than the Intelligencer.  One believed in public transport while
the other felt it an intrusion on civility.  Therefore, when we go back
to the 1880s we find one announcing new cars and painted cars while the
other paper had accounts such as "The 5:30 express to Lancaster,
thundering up George St. [in Millersville], killed [name not remembered,
possessive] dog."  A horse car with a single horse thundering up a 1/2
percent grade.  Well, you get the picture.  If you want the entire
Conestoga Traction history, you need to read at a minimum, both major
city papers prior to 1900, at least one after that.  Then add to that the
Lititz Record, The Columbia Times, the Ephrata paper, and the Coatesville
(Chester County) Times.  I think there were also papers in Elizabethtown,
Mount Joy, and Quarryville.  So far the Quarryville paper is done, parts
of Lititz, and most of Lancaster from 1874 to 1902, and the middle and
late 1920s, and all of Coatesville.  I may never live long enough.   So
far, I've got 85,000,000 bytes of trolley data on my hard drive and that
is almost all Lancaster.  (12 inches of paper in the backup file)

Ed Lybarger has been working hard on the West Penn history but he has the
same problem.  Ed has been into the Connellsville daily and John Swindler
was also reading, I think the Connellsville weekly paper.  That leaves,
at a bare minimum, newspapers crying out to be read in Uniontown,
Greensburg, Latrobe, McKeesport, and Tarentum.  I think Dennis did the
Kittanning paper.  The Leechburg paper also needs someone who likes to
read.  And then we also small town papers which might mention things that
totally were omitted in the large papers ... Brownsville, Masontown,
Scottdale, Mount Pleasant, Irwin??.  And remember that West Penn owned a
large property in West Virginia ... how about the papers in Moundsville,
Wheeling, Steubenville, Wierton?  And if you want the entire West Penn
enpire, don't forget Clarksburg, Fairmount, Weston, Parkersburg, the
Marietta [Ohio] Times, Chambersburg (PA), Waynesboro, Hagerstown,
Frederick and Cumberland.  Now we know why it hasn't been published.

You also understand why there are a lot of books out there on little
companies but nothing on Pittsburgh or Brooklyn or Manhattan or
Indianapolis or Louisville.





robert netzlof wrote:

> --- Fred Schneider <fschnei at supernet.com> wrote:
> >
> > Why don't you go out and read all the old newspapers out in that
> > area?  Latrobe
> > and Derry if they had any.  If they were weeklies (or weaklies)
> > even better
> > becasue there are only 52 issues in a year.
>
> Latrobe Bulletin, a daily, was still published in 2001 (and may still
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