The foregoing article by Angela Shears is primarily a personal impression of the Valley Times-Star of Newville, Pennsylvania, a weekly newspaper that began publication in 1858 and continues to this day. The author has written about its content, its editor, and its readers, especially in the past 30 years. Although editorial styles have changed, printing technology has improved, and the substance of our lives is in many ways unrecognizably different from that of a century and a half ago, the Times-Star remains primarily a "hometown newspaper," a record of local persons, events, and institutions.
As the random extracts published below may amply indicate, the columns of the Valley Star, (as it then was), in 1859 as in 1997, contained a miscellany of advertisements, meeting announcements, records of births, marriages, and deaths, and news notes from Shippensburg, Chambersburg, Newburg, Carlisle, and other distant places. In addition, like most newspapers of that period, the Valley Star printed essays, short stories, poems, jokes, anecdotes, and odd pieces of literature culled from anthologies and, perhaps, the editor's own reading. All nineteenth-century papers also usually expressed in strong and often colorful terms the opinions and prejudices of their editors and readers, whether on the tariff, the construction of roads, canals, or railroads, abolitionism, local option, or the political opposition. Sometimes there was news from the great world beyond: in 1859 the Valley Star printed letters from local citizens who had gone to settle in Kansas or Minnesota.
If the newspapers then as now were a sort of pot-pourri, they also constituted a serious record. Newspapers of any day are one of the sources of information about the general social history of the place and time. This is probably truer in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth. Advertisements, notices of lectures, meetings, and dramatic productions, reports of visits, births, deaths, marriages, and accidents presented a picture of the daily life of the people, of the things that concerned them personally as pronouncements of statesmen, the issue of distant battles, federal laws, and Congressional debates never did-or do. These few extracts, taken at random from a single year of the Valley Star, suggest such various aspects of the ordinary daily life of citizens of Newville a century and a half ago.
Each of the following extracts is followed by the date of the issue of the paper from which it is taken.
A similar tapestry of life in any year might be woven from newspapers of Shippensburg, Mechanicsburg, Mount Holly, Carlisle, or other towns. Such a record, intriguing, instructive, and rewarding, might be compiled cooperatively by, for example, a group of honors students in the history class of any high school in the country.
Small "hometown newspapers" mean different things to different people. On vacation recently, I bought a copy of the local weekly newspaper-published in a quaint beach town for the past 142 years-and the store owner jokingly said, "You gonna go fish? That is the only thing people do with that paper! "
Charles A. Henneberger was the proprietor of the Eagle Hotel on Main and High streets in Newville. A collector of taxidermy, among his specimens of birds and beasts were a wild-cat and a snow-white squirrel from the North Mountain. He also collected reptiles.