Fuel Tanks at Long Valley Farm Supply, 2/24/10
[Here's the final installment of Eberle's introduction to Adams County Makes the News; posts of the actual letters will start next Wednesday]
definite pang reading a request of local businesses to give “liberal support” to local musicians—and at the regularity of dances with live music. When the town invited the CCC camp to a celebration, local poet and songwriter Orianna Martin composed a song in their honor and the lyrics were published in the paper. But times have changed. The People’s Theatre—once the site of shows by Miss Willey the world-famous whistler from California, operettas by the high school, and movies such as “Park Avenue Logger” with locally provided musical accompaniment-- has languished abandoned for years down the street from the Adams County Record office. In addition to shows and dances, a significant part of entertainments offered locally included school programs, debates, and talks by local or visiting speakers. A debate on prohibition held in 1909 was packed with area residents, the paper reported. In 1911: “Mrs. C. W. Wight will give a lecture at the Congregational church December 14. Her subject will be ‘What is Woman.’ This lecture will be both humorous and instructive and everybody is cordially invited to attend.” The newspaper, as history, has the ability to recapture some of the more ephemeral aspects of daily life and include them as part of a community portrait.
ey identify themselves as groups to promote social good. Nonetheless, some doubts, apparently, had to be assuaged. In 1928: “Next Tuesday evening will be a red letter time for husbands of these beautiful ladies of the Worthwhile Club. Said husbands may have wondered many times during the past year what it is all about—this club business—but now they are going to be shown. It is the first annual banquet in honor of the husbands of the club members.” Prohibition receives more attention as a national phenomenon, but much of the commentary on this topic as well has to do with its local effects—an argument that Valley and Adams counties could not be merged because Valley is “wet” while Adams is “dry”; a letter from a local doctor deploring cases of alcoholism in Council before prohibition.
today. Roads and the railroad take up a large share of discussion. Concerns over local natural resources are also voiced, but I was surprised by the differences between what those concerns used to be and what they are today. It is interesting to see that in the past, regulation of resource use didn’t necessarily spark the kind of anger that it can currently in the newspaper. I wouldn’t have expected to find such early tolerance of many Forest Service regulations—restrictions on fishing and fire building, for example. In 1919, violation of the order not to build fires on forest land “subjects an offender to a fine of up to $5,000 or ten months in a tomb of reflection, or both.” City ordinances on water conservation, restricting the time and days when irrigation could take place, were enforced by the village marshal in 1928. Locals recognized that over-use of resources would be a bad thing, and supported stream closures (although they blamed dwindling fish populations on over-fishing by tourists.) Similarly, there are letters both for and against killing animals such as bear or beaver. What’s remarkable is the absence of a group identified as hostile to local interests and labeled “environmentalists”—a perceived opposition that often dominates present-day local discussion about the use of natural resources.
there as well as camp and fish. The trouble started when a Forest Service supervisor, Mr. Rice, told grazers that if they didn’t actively use that part of their allotment, their allotment next year would be reduced by that amount. Things became very personal: “We understand Mr. Rice is from Kansas, where they raise huckleberries only in barrels. Mr. Rice seems to think that twelve cents a season for grazing sheep mounts up on four sections to huge sums, and he says that amount of land cannot be spared from the sheep to furnish a few thousand people with huckleberries and the incidental recreation of camping and picking them.… The Leader believes Mr. Rice is wrong. Mr. Rice intimates that there is only one person interested in huckleberries, and that that one person is an ignorant faultfinder. The editor wants to add at least one more ignorant faultfinder to the list.” The use of regulations to threaten a traditional local use of the land seems to have infuriated people in a way that other restrictions did not, and the furor didn’t end until that supervisor left town.
omissions, and I have left out a great deal of material in order to follow what to me appeared to be vital and engaging threads and voices. I also made a decision to limit this collection to the first four decades of the paper’s history. I found this material to have an almost narrative cohesion, documenting the development of the first phase of the region’s economy. The thirties brought the first wave of “bust” after a series of hopeful “booms”—the agricultural ventures and local businesses that grew up in the wake of mining interests, as well as the once flourishing Mesa Orchards, all suffered decline during the depression. The next wave of boom and bust, associated with the timber industry, was just beginning at the end of the thirties and would create a different phase of the area’s identity. Focusing on the early decades made it possible to convey a detailed portrait of that era in the newspaper’s history.
word in this way: the “lower country” for Weiser and Boise, and “this country” for the local area. There are voices, too, which recur and seem constant over time: the voice that exhorts community effort, the voice of personal outrage, the voice that deplores gossip, and the voice that thanks the community for help during times of hardship.
The fair ran from April to October in both 1939 & 1940; this pretty well dates my father’s photos to September 1939, since he wrote “Fall ‘39” on the back of each. He was one of 44 million visitors to the exhibition, which has since been memorialized in such diverse works as Alfred Hitcock’s Mr & Mrs Smith, E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair, & Aimee Mann’s Fifty Years After the Fair—just to name a few.
The shots of New York City my father did capture say quite a bit about his interests. Both the photo of the Henry Hudson Parkway & the photo of the George Washington Bridge are structural, & my father was most certainly a builder at heart. He built everything from houses, boats & cabinets to clocks, wooden marble runs (I forget the German name for these), limberjacks, & whirlygigs or windmills (the wooden contraptions with a propeller that can be a man chopping wood or a woman churning butter). In fact, he was accepted to the Colorado School of Mining with the intent of obtaining an engineering degree, but was unable to attend due to his family’s poverty. There’s little doubt that he had the mind of an engineer.
The photo of the boats on the Hudson shows another of my father’s most keen interests—boating, & especially boating with the intent of fishing. I have never known anyone as obsessed with fishing as my father! He continued to fish until he was around 90 years old in fact, by this time having relocated to Florida & fishing in the Gulf. One upshot of this was that my family ate inordinate quantities of fish when my sister & I were growing up, & neither of us cares much for fish at this point! He used to talk about sailing when he was stationed in the Phillipines during World War II—one of his pleasant war memories, & one of the few that he’d talk about. He also built a wonderful boat that we used for fishing & waterskiing & pleasure rides—it was called the “Off We Go,” driven by an old 30-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor.
[Part 3 (of 4) of Eberle’s Introduction to Adams County Makes the News]
representing with word-for-word accuracy what a certain part of the population cared about at the time—the people who wrote to the paper and the editors of the paper. It would not be accurate to say this represents the community in its entirety, because many people don’t write to the newspaper—the prostitutes, for example, who were reported as having a fight in 1902, were not writing letters to the paper. And there are groups which are completely or almost completely unrepresented—children, for instance, or the workers at the Mesa Orchards. Material sent in to the paper is based on the fact that the writer sees her or himself as existing in some relationship to the community—to a certain degree, because of its public nature, the writing is about that relationship. 
found their way into the paper very compelling. Everyone who writes for publication in the newspaper, whether a reader or an editor, shares a similar starting point: the decision to make personal thoughts public. The different voices that are generated by that decision, and the range of motivations that prompt it, reveal various dimensions of private and community life over time. As with any history, what is unwritten creates its own spaces between the lines and is part of the experience of reading. To my mind, the kind of gaps and fragments inherent in the county newspaper narrative create a particularly fascinating landscape, a kind of do-it-yourself novel. There are tempting by-ways, and sudden glimpses of remnants of the past, archways framing vistas from half-forgotten points of view, paths to be taken or left behind.
palpably present, creates a humanizing perspective on that period of history— not always a comfortable experience, as some individual voices, untempered by abstraction, can be disturbing. It is one thing, for instance, to know that some people understood and supported the killing of Germans in World War I as justified genocide; it’s another to see that thought process in action in someone’s own words. I found that my own emotional responses to the various narrative voices became integral to this way of reading the past.
details—how to use egg-white for mending, what percentage of school children have tuberculosis, who has a rooster for sale, what constitutes profanity, the Council bank failure, who has grown the biggest ears of corn. The juxtaposition of large and small events hints at a sense of scale that I often find lacking in more traditional histories. There is foreground and background, and randomness, and moments of poetry, which I think of as reality haiku. For instance, “news” sent in to the paper from Indian Valley in 1913:
items. The Overland Hotel, for instance, gone for decades now, advertised pack trains into the mining regions; a woman residing there advertised a two-year old baby in need of a home; the price of meals was published, as well as the dates when a traveling optometrist would be there to see residents with eye problems. Facts that might not find their way in to many histories of the early twentieth century West appear in tantalizing detail—that people used to give cracked bones to their chickens instead of oyster shells, that school outhouses for girls and boys had to be fifty feet apart from each other by law, that a piece of brown paper covered with mutton tallow and well sprinkled with ginger was recommended as a chest plaster in cases of whooping cough.
Outhouse at C. Ben Ross Reservoir, Indian Valley 2/13/10
So, where’s the story? My dad has passed on, so I can’t get the story of his time in New York City from him or from any of his friends or from his two brothers. They were all part of a generation that’s disappearing. This is the story: while I can’t tell you the details of his trip—I can only show you a handful of images that he found interesting enough to photograph—I can say that these photos, along with the many I posted in the Dad’s Photos series have given me some insight into a man who was very private & not forthcoming about his autobiography. But in these photos I’ve come to see a glimpse of an adventurous young man, & a young man who loved a good time—perhaps a bit more than was good for him, but still—he was only 25 when he took these shots, not even half my current age: very much different than the man I knew as a small child when he was well into his 40s.
I suppose in some sense any photograph is somehow a portrait of the photographer. I can see my dad in these.
[Eberle’s introduction to this new series continues!]
the dynamics around authority that anonymity creates, the Adams County newspaper is scaled to individual dynamics within the community, and the uniquely local history created by those dynamics. Viewing the newspaper as a record of the past involves seeing a subjective community history—a record of relationships as well as of events. When people write letters to the editor, for instance, they exhibit aspects of their perceived relationship to local authority by the tone and voice they choose in order to give their claims weight and legitimacy. The newspaper itself can make fun of this fact, as when an editor started putting headlines to a published debate between two posturing local men that poked fun at the studied politeness of their anger: “Mr. York Loves Mr. Thorpe, So He Says—If Affection Is Reciprocated, Why Not Kiss And Make Up.” The relentless return to the personal is an element that fascinates me—over time, it creates history on a scale small enough to include the individual as a recognizable unit.
saying: “Meats - Fresh and Cured - at prices somewhat lower than conditions may seem to warrant,” there is no losing sight of the individual—even across the decades I get a sense of his character, I wonder about his extreme caution in committing himself and what this has led to in his life—there is very definitely a person there in the words. Similarly, when I read: “B.F. Shannon the shoemaker is still here,” and: “Remember the shoe shop isn’t out of town yet,” I am struck by his choice of tone, and wonder what particular meaning it conveyed to county residents who knew him. The lugubrious tone could easily be a response to or a comment on the way that people knew him in the community. In a small town, personal knowledge or speculation (i.e., gossip) informs how people write to and read the newspaper. Knowing that your readers know you, know of you, or may do so at any time—this changes the act of writing and the act of reading as well. There’s no escaping the fact, under these circumstances, that words exist in a web of interconnections, that “information” is never really neutral.
young Harry is exhorted to change his ways in 1914: “You are on the right track now, Harry, and have a future before you by sticking to your manly resolution. Do not under any circumstances betray the confidence your friends have placed in you, and all will lend you their moral support to make a man of yourself.” At times, the populace at large can be scolded in an attempt to organize, for instance, a town clean-up day or a road repair crew. Rumor control is another function of the paper, and specific rumors are addressed: a denial of rumors about the nature Frank Haworth’s injuries in a French hospital during World War I, a denial of rumors about local cases of infantile paralysis in 1932. The paper continues through the century to perform this function. On July 3, 1986, a resident writes to the paper that she is not at this time or in the near future leaving her husband; she goes on to clarify other details of her life. She closes by asking that if people have more questions about what she is doing would they please write her and enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope for a reply.
to the newspaper, and what they say to each other through it. By directing what they say in the paper to known neighbors, local writers actively create voices that play a part in defining the newspaper’s character. In 2003: “To the person who sent roses to me at the bank. You know who you are – I don’t – so now I have to be nice to everyone. Many thanks.” In 1977: “Please change the population sign to 897, we don't want to be part of the town.” In 1974: “As you may or may not know, the city board is looking for a dog-catcher. The word around Council is that I have taken the job. As yet, they have not given me the job. I would appreciate if the citizens of Council would not call my residence at 3 a.m. about dog problems….” The local populace is small enough that the newspaper can publish the activities and words of a much larger proportion of the whole than would ever be possible in an urban newspaper—whether it’s to describe the color scheme of the refreshments at a meeting of the Indian Valley Improvement League, or to comment on the fact that the Lappin family sat up late Saturday night listening to the radio. While the differences between a rural and urban paper might have their origins in the smaller rural population, the effects are more complex and far-reaching, creating the newspaper’s community identity.
People who have never met can be a “community” through chat rooms. What is remarkable about the nature of a rural community is its physical basis—everybody eventually runs into each other—meaning that controlled separation of one group from another is hard to achieve. Ironically, a larger population base can mean that people separate more easily into homogeneously-defined groups in terms of where they live, work, or go for recreation: the community of the workplace can be completely separate from the domestic community, and economic segregation into neighborhoods can create gated communities as effectively as physical walls. Several years ago, I had a visitor from New York City who expressed some astonishment after his five-day rural immersion. It struck him as remarkable that he would be having a beer in the evening with the woman who stamped his package at the post office in the morning, that the city official speaking on the fourth of July rang up his groceries the day before at the store. He commented, “It’s like you are all acting in a play together as well as seeing each other back stage."
