Milam County Historical Commission
Milam County, Texas
Milam County, Texas
Some Reporter issues now available online
Editor's Corner by Mike Brown
Rockdale Reporter - 2016-03-10
Good news about the news. The Rockdale Reporter’s past news, that is.
After years of anticipation, the first archival issues of The Reporter are now available
online at the University of North Texas’s Portal to Texas History.
UNT, in connection with the city library and the Tocker Foundation has started the
laborious process of transferring more than 100 years of Reporter (and Messenger) pages
from microfilm to Internet page, thanks to a Tocker Foundation grant.
Here’s the address:
If, like me, you could never enter that into a browser without making a mistake, or doing
a copy-and-paste, we’ve included a free link on our webpage and Facebook page.
(We had to pay an extra penalty fee for posting something on Facebook that’s true, but we
love our readers.)
Only a fraction of The Reporters are posted. It’s promised by UNT that more are being
added all the time.
Now, a caveat — no that’s not the guy who used to be on late night opposite Johnny
Carson.
To get them in more-or-less order, click on decade, then year, then month.
While there are a lot of Reporters in the UNT archive they aren’t nearly all in there,
yet.
For instance, as near as I could figure when writing this column (Thursday), the decade
with the most Reporters online so-far was the 1950s with about 1,000.
And that’s less than a fifth of the 5,200 papers, give or take a couple, published in the
Eisenhower-N-Elvis decade during which the greatest people of all time were born.
The city library, courtesy of The Reporter, has sent UNT its files, it’s just a matter of
getting transferred. It will take some time.
What’s interesting is that UNT has access to some really old newspapers that we don’t
even have in our microfilm file archive.
For instance, the very first (chronologically) file in the Portal’s Reporter section is
one page — yes, one page — of the Rockdale Messenger’s June 29, 1876, edition.
(The Milam County Messenger dates from 1873, one year before Rockdale’s official
founding. It became the Rockdale Messenger, which merged with The Rockdale Reporter. The
Messenger name is still listed on our masthead.).
At the top of that page is a poem by Mary F. Hunt of Caldwell who wrote:
“Soft clouds of rose and amber; floated over wood and wold.
White lights of kingly purple; blended with the sunset gold.
And nature seemed a priestess; kneeling at the vesper hour;
To offer up sweet incense; from the chalice of each flower.
She’s talking about the sun going down.
We never became known as a poetry publication.
mike@rockdalereporter.com
All credit for this article goes to
Mike Brown
and the
Rockdale Reporter
Mike Brown
and the
Rockdale Reporter
Messenger, June 29, 1876
.