It may be "old news," but the articles and advertising printed on the yellowed broadsheet newspaper pages are still informing the public. For more than 100 years, copies of The Brockport Democrat, a weekly four-page newspaper, lay undisturbed on the third floor of a Main Street, Brockport business. The copies of the paper, close to 500 issues in all, were likely used as de-facto insulation. The issues were unearthed when Pete Apicella, owner of the Main Street business Java Junction, was in the process of renovating the third floor of the building into apartment space. "There's a real steep staircase that goes to the roof and in a crawl space between the roof and the ceiling I found all of these newspapers," he said. Apicella found the issues in the late 1990s and passed them along to a historian in Hamlin. "There was talk of microfilming them but I think it was just too much of a task," he said. So the remaining issues languished in the crawlspace until Apicella's tenant moved out. He then went back into the crawlspace, dragged the papers out and gave them to Brockport's Historian Emeritus, Bill Andrews. The papers, Andrews said, have a curious history. "There was a Brockport Democrat in the late 1850s that expired at some point," he explained. "It was resurrected at some point in the 1870s and ran until about 1926." Brockport also had its own Republican newspaper - The Brockport Republic - which started in 1856. In about 1925 the two newspapers merged into the Brockport Republic - Democrat. Of the copies discovered, one dated October 26, 1892 featured a front page filled with fiction stories and poetry in addition to the "patent ads" which offered to sell everything from shoe polish to hats to sarsaparilla (which could purportedly cure almost any ailment). The second page of The Brockport Democrat included appeals from the Democratic committee. The remaining two pages were filled with snippets of news stories from across the country as well as more patent ads. P.J. Williams was the publisher of the 1892 edition. "The Democrat struggled," Andrews said. "Even back then, Brockport was a very Republican town." Until this find, Andrews said there were less than five copies of The Brockport Democrat in existence. "There was one in the Hamlin historian's office and maybe one or two at the Rochester Museum and Science Center," he said. "We had a pretty complete set of The Republic. An annual subscription price, printed in the May 4, 1883 edition, went for $1.25. "That may seem like a low price," Andrews said. "But back then, that was a day's wages." Once the copies of the papers are cataloged and indexed, they will be taken to be microfilmed. A program under the New York State Library system will hopefully fund the microfilming, Andrews said. The filmed papers will be available at the Seymour Library, the SUNY College Library and in some branches of the Rochester Library system, Andrews said. "This is an exciting find and these papers hold a lot of value for local history," he said. "I'm impressed they've survived more than 100 years in a space that had no climate control." Editor's note: Westside News Inc. owns the names of the Brockport Republic-Democrat newspaper, as well as the name of The Holley Standard. The West Edition of Suburban News was originally named The Brockport Republic - Democrat Holley Standard Edition of Suburban News. Westside News Inc. publisher Keith Ryan says he believes the building where the newspapers were found may have been the newspaper's office at one time. |
