Newspaper archives provide glimpse of past

If you don’t mind a little confusion inherent in reading Old English text, there’s a lot of local history to be learned online with the new North Carolina Newspaper Digitization Project.

The N.C. Division of Archives and History just launched the online project that allows users to view 23,000 newspaper pages dating from 1751 to 1898.

"By doing them digitally, you can provide the access," said Druscie Simpson, head of the Information Management Branch that led the project. "Otherwise you had to come to the archives and see the microfilms."

The Web site is at www.archives.ncdcr.gov/newspaper/index.html

The project includes a lot of information on Craven County, and some information about the Havelock area.

One reason is that the state’s first newspaper was published in Craven County.

Printer James Davis, the official printer of the Acts of the North Carolina General Assembly, started The North Carolina Gazette in July of 1751 in New Bern.

In 1764, Davis began publishing the North Carolina Magazine or Universal Intelligencer, and in 1768, revived The North Carolina Gazette for 10 years. In 1783, Davis began printing The North Carolina Gazette or Impartial Intelligencer.

After Davis’ death, Francis Xavier Martin began publication of The North Carolina Gazette in 1786, which ran through 1797.

All four of the papers are included in the project, which was paid for by a $90,000 grant from the Library Science Technology Act.

The process of scanning the pages into digital files from hundreds of microfilm reels started in 2007.

The Web site offers a somewhat imperfect means of searching for keywords through an application called Optical Character Recognition, or OCR.

"It’s an application that goes through and basically reads the newspaper and converts it to a text file," Simpson said. "When you scan something like a newspaper, the computer sees it as an image. It can’t read it. You have to apply this OCR application to it to turn it into a word to search. It makes a lot of mistakes."

Another issue is that spellings of some words from the 1700s may be different from the way they are spelled today.

Tiffanie Mazanek, project coordinator, said the biggest problem with early newspapers was a scarcity in paper.

"They were using any and all of the paper they could get," Mazanek said. "Paper was a huge issue for them. The size of the paper was always changing."

Each issue of these four-page papers carried international and national news often gathered from sea captains who brought newspapers from Philadelphia and New York. Speeches, letters and proclamations from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and other founding fathers were often printed.

Some of the most telling parts of the paper are in the local "advertisements." They painted a picture of life in eastern North Carolina, including the sale of property, the purchase and sale of goods, the organization of those willing to fight for independence, personal information and even the search for runaway slaves.

Examples of some of the advertisements include:

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