Missing year of Manchester Enterprise located!
by Sara Swanson
Manchester’s longest-running newspaper, The Manchester Enterprise, began publication in 1867 and was published weekly until being consolidated into a county-wide publication, Washtenaw Now in 2014, which ceased publication altogether in 2015. In 2017 we announced that in collaboration with the Manchester District Library, the Manchester Mirror would be hosting digitized editions of The Manchester Enterprise online at http://www.themanchestermirror.com/History/. This would help make this invaluable resource available to everyone with internet access, regardless of their location in the world!
The digital files were made from the micro-film collection of the Manchester Enterprise, which the library had digitized and stored on 99 CD-Roms in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, the low quality of the underlying microfilm resulted in variable image quality of the files, some of which were unreadable. Additionally, some newspapers, even whole years’ worth, were missing already by the time the physical copies were photographed to be turned into micro-film. Two whole years missing were 1887 and 1888.
Shortly before Christmas, we were contacted by a historically-minded online-auction shopper who ran across a listing for a bound collection of Manchester Enterprises Sept. 15, 1887 – Sept. 5, 1889, up for bid in a Columbus, Ohio Goodwill online Auction. She’d found the digital archive online and realized that these were missing years. The Mirror bid and won the auction and the book arrived right before Christmas!
Our plan is to photograph and digitize all of the newspapers ourselves and upload them to the archive, starting with the newspapers that are missing outright. While some of the 1889 editions already exist in the archive, they are some of the harder to read ones, so our second wave will be digitizing and replacing those copies with higher-quality versions.
There were some surprises, too. For starters, someone had cut clippings out of some of the newspapers — mostly ads, as far as we can tell. But the second surprise is a good-sized 1970s-1980s enlargement of a Victorian photograph. While we aren’t sure they are a Manchester couple, they could be. Let us know if you can identify them!
What was the Manchester Enterprise like in the late 1880’s? It was four pages each week (but a larger page size [broadsheet] than the Mirror). Local news, births, deaths, and marriages were mostly located on page 3. Communities covered included Manchester, Sharon, Bridgewater, Freedom, Iron Creek, Wamplers Lake, and Norvell. The front page each week was a serialized installment of either a non-fiction work or later in the collection, a fiction story, licensed by the Enterprise. For instance, “A Masked Marriage,” described as “thrilling and romantic,” written by John E. Barrett, editor of Scranton Truth, a Pennsylvanian newspaper, begins in the March 29, 1889 edition and runs through May 30, 1889.
Enjoy these photos and we’ll post again when the first wave of digitizing is complete.
Advertisement for new fiction story running week to week on the front page of the Enterprise.
One surprise was clippings removed from some of the newspapers!
Another surprise was this large-sized 1970’s or 1980’s enlargement of an antique photo. Who is the couple? It is a mystery.
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