Unstacking Alaska History Through Old Newspapers

ANCHORAGE - To librarian Mary Nicolson, the newspaper you're reading is more than sports scores, wedding news and movie listings.

Where you see school-lunch menus, Nicolson sees history.

"You can learn a lot about a town through its newspaper," she says. "It's like a family tree."

From her office at the state library in Juneau, Nicolson is overseeing Alaska's part in a 50-state effort to inventory the nation's newspapers and create a computer database. The effort is being funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A source for history and culture

The goal is to track down every issue, from rural newsletters to the nation's biggest papers. The repository would become a coherent - if overwhelming - resource for writers, historians, genealogists and other researchers.

In Alaska alone, an estimated 900 newspapers have been published since 1868.

Titles include the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner - which dates to 1903 - and the weekly Tundra Times, the first statewide Alaska Native newspaper begun in 1962.

Inventories of these and other contemporary Alaska newspapers already exist on 4,600 reels of microfilm, which have been cataloged over the past three years. Reviewers must check each volume, making sure no edition is missing and each day's paper is complete.

With the four-year federal grant in its last year, Nicolson says the remaining task is the hardest: Filling in thousands of journalistic blanks with small-time newspapers that no longer exist, published in towns long gone from the map.

"In Skagway alone, in a 20-year period around the gold rush era, we're looking for 4,000 issues," Nicolson said. "We have a big project on our hands."

Looking far and wide

Word of the great newspaper hunt was sent to senior centers and pioneer homes, and to far-from-Alaska groups of ex-residents who throw get-togethers each year in other states. Sought-after Alaska editions have turned up as far away as Arizona, Nicolson said.

"We hope there are individuals out there with newspapers stored in a box under the bed who are wondering what to do with them. We hope they'll contribute or loan them to us."

Elusive editions include Seward's defunct Rumorgram - among the 100 Alaska papers for which no issues exist - and the Anchorage-based Alaska Spotlight, an African-American newspaper that ran at least through 1968.

"It's a latter-day history," said Juneau-based writer Ed Ferrell, whose book, "Strange Stories of Alaska and the Yukon," is a collection of ghost stories, mining tales and other oddities culled from turn-of-the century journalism.

"Alaska attracted a highly literate group of people," Ferrell said of Gold Rush-era pioneers. "They wanted to read."

Where there were readers, there were newspapers:

-- In Juneau, the foreign language Servian Montenegrin appeared in 1905 for Yugoslavian miners;

-- Hydaburg journalism students produced the New Native weekly in 1919;

-- The Orphanage News Letter was published monthly from 1899 to 1922 by a Baptist orphanage on Kodiak's Woody Island.

Local news dominated. For instance, the defunct Mailboat Monitor published in the 1950s aboard the vessel Expansion, showcased news from Aleutian Island ports - as well as "Aleutian Solutions," an advice column for the lovelorn.

Nicolson says just two issues of the Monitor exist, 14 of the New Native and two dozen copies of the Orphanage newsletter.

Most-wanted list of newspapers

The Montenegrin - which Nicolson says she at first thought did not exist, because of its unusual spelling - is now on the archivist's most-wanted list. Nicolson says Juneau old-timers recall the publication but no copies have been found.

Troves have turned up in likely - and unlikely - places.

A cache of more than 5,000 vintage Alaska newspapers was stored for years at Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka and recently was inventoried for the national project. More than 600 editions from the collection will be microfilmed to fill out the state's catalogue.

Sheldon Jackson librarian Evelyn Bonner says the newspapers are part of a collection amassed by Pacific Northwest historian C.L. Andrews, a turn-of-the century journalist and book author.

The project relies on alert Alaskans who know where old newsprint may be tucked away. Outhouse insulation and the foundations of pioneer-era homes are good places to start, Nicolson says.

"How could you put a value on these newspapers?" she says. "Once they're lost, the stories are lost too."