Extra! Extra!

I’m excited to announce a unique local history resource now available through the Mercer County Library System’s website. For the first time, entire issues of the Hightstown Gazette and other historical newspapers are available online as PDF documents.

The Move to Digital

For some time, both the Hightstown Memorial Branch and the Hightstown East Windsor Historical Society have been saving newspapers and other historical documents in various formats. We have original copies of many of these papers. However, even under the best conditions—away from light and extreme temperatures - paper doesn’t last very long. For example, we have several surviving issues of the weekly Hightstown Independent ranging from 1883-1900. In the digital format you can see the paper has turned yellow and crumbled. For some issues, only fragments remain. The best scanners and cameras can’t restore the print that has been lost.

The images of the Hightstown Gazette are more complete because the issues were scanned onto microfilm before the paper fell apart. Microfilm itself is very sturdy, surviving jams in the readers, moisture, and extreme temperatures. However, we are limited in how much we can brighten or sharpen the image. Locating a particular article can also be a challenge. It is necessary to scroll through each page manually. If you don’t know the exact date of an article, that can mean wading through several months or even years of newspaper issues. About ten years ago, the Hightstown Library Association experimented with scanning some newspaper issues onto external hard drives but the cost was prohibitive, and the scans were not very clear.

By 2018, technology had advanced further. The Hightstown Library Association collaborated with the Hightstown East Windsor Historical Society to make our historical papers available on the Internet. They hired a specialized document imaging company to convert the paper and microfilm into PDF documents. The company used special machines that took multiple pictures of each page. The images are layered together in each document. This enables us to do keyword searching of the newspapers—even decades at once! Just yesterday I had a request to find an obituary from 1916. I entered the person’s name, selecting a range of dates spanning the person’s entire lifespan. Along with his obituary, I found additional records - an estate sale, a church committee—little details to help bring the history of this ancestor to life.

Access the Archive

You can access this collection in three ways:

First here

Or from Mercer County Library System’s main website, locate the BRANCHES menu. Select HIGHTSTOWN BRANCH, and then HIGHTSTOWN DIGITAL NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE.

Alternatively from our main website, opt for the DATABASES menu and click on DATABASES LIST. Choose NEWSPAPERS as the subject and click APPLY. HIGHTSTOWN DIGITAL NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE will be the third newspaper item.
                                   

An Overview of the Collection

The early days of printing in Hightstown saw a lot of upheaval. Here is a brief rundown, with assistance from Robert Craig and Cappy Stults of the Hightstown East Windsor Historical Society: There was more than one early periodical, and portions of a few survive to this day. The earliest newspaper we have on record started on June 30, 1849. It was called the Village Record, and its two young owners, Jacob Stults and James S. Yard were only 19 and 23 years old.  A subscription cost $1.50 for 52 issues. Within two years, they had both sold their shares of the paper to a single owner. The Village Record struggled to maintain owners, and after changing hands two more times within the next year, Yard regained control of the paper. Two years later, in 1853, he sold it back to Jacob Stults.

Meanwhile the local Universalists Association started a competing paper, the Hightstown Excelsior, in 1857. In the paper’s first four years, it changed editors four times. Then, in 1861 the Hightstown Excelsior and the Village Record merged into one paper: the Hightstown Gazette. It was run by an editor from each paper and published columns and segments from both papers.  Despite several more changes in ownership, the Gazette continued to run weekly with the motto “devoted to literature, agriculture, science, art, and general intelligence.”

In 1912, George P. Dennis took control of the Gazette and ran it as a family business. His son George F. Dennis was managing editor of the paper until joining the army during World War II. He was declared missing in action in 1944 in Southern France, just before his 24th birthday. George is one of the soldiers the Hightstown Memorial Library was built to remember. Our meeting room is dedicated to him and his service. The elder Mr. Dennis’ other children, Palmer and Kathryn, ran the paper following their father’s death in 1955. The Gazette’s final issue was in 2005 when Kathryn passed away. In addition to local events, later issues of the Gazette feature photographs and stories from Hightstown’s past. 

For more on the way things used to be, look no further than the Daily Graphic--a newspaper run out of New York compiling bits of news from around the nation. In our digital collection, we have included one particularly compelling section of this periodical written in 1879. In this issue, their reporters have done a large feature on the highlights of Hightstown, complete with several illustrations of downtown. For more recent events, there is the Windsor-Hights Herald—part of the Princeton Packet publications, covering both Hightstown and East Windsor Township. We have digitized editions from 1965-1986. For copyright reasons, some issues will only be accessible from a computer within one of the libraries.

- Emily, Hightstown Branch

Historical research courtesy of Robert Craig and Cappy Stults