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Oscar
Dalton must have felt as proud as a new papa when he pulled that first copy of
The Crockett Printer off his press.
Volume one, number one of the newspaper
appeared to enlighten the citizenry of Houston County on Dec. 6, 1853. It had
not been an easy process.
As Dalton wrote apologetically in an item headed
“Our Troubles,” the first issue had been a while in coming. The main problem had
to do with transportation. A yellow fever outbreak in Houston had made it “impossible
to get a wagon at any price.” Without a wagon, Dalton could not get the supplies
he needed. Finally, two civic-minded locals took a wagon to Houston to haul Dalton’s
press, type and ink up to Crockett
from Harris County.
But something else interfered in launching the new
sheet: “Some laggard, on the road, stole our keg of ink, and placed us under the
necessity of borrowing from our neighbors of the Trinity Advocate.”
Why
someone would want to steal a barrel of ink is open to conjecture. Maybe the thief
took it for a barrel of whiskey and had an indelible surprise when he tapped the
keg.
Whoever it was, Dalton wrote, he was “mean enough to steal…a meeting
house or rob the churchyard [or] take the last chaw of tobacco out of a drunkard’s
mouth, and walk ten miles in the rain at midnight to rob a dying widow of her
coffin.”
The most imaginative punishment Dalton could come up with for
the thief was that he “ought to be tied to a goat’s tail and beat to death by
fleas!”
Having overcome the consequences of yellow fever and thievery,
Dalton didn’t have much news to fill his first issue.
The Edmistons had
hosted a candy pulling, “where many fair women and brave men…assembled [and] found
amusement in stirrin’ the ‘lases candy, whispering those pretty nothings, drawing
the kerchief, and some in looking sentimental.” With “candy here, candy there,
candy everywhere….We thought of our new coat and left.”
The following
night, “the beaux and belles again assembled at the courthouse, with a violin
in attendance and merrily trip’d the light fantastic…till the wee hours of morning.”
In other news, the “ancient and honorable fraternity of Mason” planned
a dinner at Hall’s Hotel two days after Christmas and a local architect offered
up a tip from “Scientific American” on how to build a better-drawing chimney. |
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