Interpreters Offer Printing Insight, Newspaper Legacies

By BILL BELLEN
COOPERSTOWN

For 217 years, “The Freeman’s Journal” has been Cooperstown’s newspaper, sharing notable local happenings to generation after generation of families that call this area home. Today, as small, locally-owned newspapers struggle, we take for granted the ease of computerized printing and digitally-accessible news to spread the word each week in a much more accessible manner than ever before. However, things were not always so simple.

These intricate complexities of a bygone era are exhibited to a tee at the Fenimore Farm and Country Village’s printing office. Modeled after the printing office of the “Otsego Herald,” a now centuries-defunct rival publication of “The Freeman’s Journal,” the facility is staffed by two to three people, depending on the time of year. Connor Davidson, qualified interpreter and printing enthusiast, primarily staffs the printing office due to his extensive training and historical background knowledge.

“In order to print anything around the middle of the 19th century, you [would] have to set up every single word of anything that’s printed, using movable type,” Davidson explained.

“So that is individual letters cast out of an alloy of lead, antimony and tin…In a rural place like this, printers would order that equipment before they could even set up shop. It’s something that requires a lot of investment before anything begins…Every single letter of every word of every sentence of every paragraph of every page has to be arranged using the type, letter by letter,” he said.

Davidson went on to detail that this complexity, among other factors, was the reason rural papers began the tradition of running once a week.

“A single newspaper page takes somewhere in the ballpark of eight to 10 hours [of labor],” he said.

As historical interpreters at the Fenimore Farm print office, Davidson and his colleagues frequently show off the printing process. Using the printing presses at their disposal, they are able to work through type setting, performing practice prints for those who visit the site.

Davidson highlighted how the iron presses at Fenimore Farm—the origins of which trace back to “The Freeman’s Journal” itself—were an advent of technology uniquely poised to serve local news outlets like TFJ through the mid-1800s, while major city outlets moved on to power presses.

“So this is the innovation of an iron press. A wooden press has a wooden platen, and that means you’re mostly just kind of redirecting the force you apply in downwards, but the machine itself isn’t applying too much on its own. But this one, there’s a lot of potential energy stored in here, so when I pull the bar here, one quick little tug like that is enough to apply hundreds of pounds of force and transfer all of this text to the page,” Davidson demonstrated.

Davidson went on to discuss the role of commissions in financing newspapers of the mid-1800s, and how the museum’s printing office follows in these footsteps by producing primarily mock advertisements or other historic documents to be sold at the farm’s gift shops. A particular print of note is that of “The Freeman’s Journal” itself, as Davidson recounted:

“We got articles from different editions of ‘The Freeman’s Journal’ over the course of the year 1845…We got kind of a greatest hits of news from that year and compiled it into a couple of pages. We set some of the type by hand. That was very slow, so a lot of the longer articles and things we had reproduced as stereotype blocks.”

These “modern prints” of the 1845 content can be seen in numerous spots throughout the printing office.

The legacy of “The Freeman’s Journal” is quite conflict orientated, with the influence wars between William Cooper and Elihu Phinney being infamous for their historical implications. As the decades progressed and “The Freeman’s Journal” persisted well past the Herald’s demise in the 1820s, the paper evolved to focus primarily on local news, rather than the national or political talking points of its infancy.

It is undoubtedly important to support the local news of our region today, but it is also very insightful to look back to the past, to see where it all began and to better understand how our local papers of today came to be.

Those interested in reliving this legacy of printing in Cooperstown can find the Fenimore Farm’s printing office just past the blacksmith’s shop, on the country village’s main street.