The Washington Times of 100 years ago that I’ve been republishing here recently is not the Washington Times of today. The original Washington Times was founded in 1893 by William Randolph Hearst and eventually merged with the Washington Herald in 1939 to become the Washington Times-Herald. In 1954 the Washington Times-Herald was purchased by the Washington Post and merged into the Washington Post and Times-Herald. The Washington Post eventually dropped the Times-Herald from it’s masthead in 1973. In 1982, less than a year after the the demise of the Washington Post’s rival daily newspaper, The Washington Star, the contemporary version of the Washington Times was created by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon. In the archives on this blog, I have not made any attempt to separate the two Washington Times, nor do I plan to. All one needs to do is see the original date of publication and they should automatically know which Washington Times is being written about.
As I mentioned previously, this week I’ve been exploring the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers archive. Last night I came up with the idea that I could create an entirely new blog dedicated to showing news from exactly 100 years ago. Dubbed “The Hundred Year Old News Blog,” each entry would be a newspaper article from exactly 100 years ago and to test the theory, I decided to see what today’s blog entry would have been. To my surprise, I found that the now-defunct newspaper called the San Mateo Item used a map of eastern Florida for it’s masthead.
According to the entry in Chronicling America:
The San Mateo Item began publishing in 1891. F.A. Bailey was one of its early editors. The paper periodically appeared under the title of the Item. It is unknown when the San Mateo Item finally ceased publication, but holdings are reported in the Putnam County Archives for 1913.
San Mateo is located in Putnam County in northeastern Florida. The area sustained various agricultural activities about which the San Mateo Item reported. San Mateo was also well known for its recreational opportunities, having more than a thousand ponds and lakes and approximately one hundred miles of access to the St. Johns River, especially attractive to bass fishermen. Sporting activities were of sufficient note to merit coverage by the British press. The Outing, a London sports magazine, complained in its 1891-92 issue that the Item had reprinted one of its articles without credit. The Outing asserted that its enterprise was dedicated in part to distributing “articles likely to attract the sportsman to Florida.” Apparently, San Mateo was worth watching.
Currently there is not a Wikipedia entry for San Mateo Item newspaper
What is interesting about the map is that its presented in a East to West configuration instead of the modern North to South configuration. Starting from the right side of the map going left, you trace Florida’s longest river, St. Johns River, north towards Jacksonville, and near the middle you have the newspaper’s namesake, San Mateo.
The map shows the following towns, lakes, and railroads (roughly South/Right to North/Left):
