Tecumseh Herald debuts in 1850, devoted to literature, science, progress, truth

The Tecumseh Herald from October 31, 1850. Photo from the Tecumseh Herald Archives.

By David Panian

The Tecumseh Herald will celebrate 175 years in October.

TECUMSEH — When The Tecumseh Herald’s first edition rolled off the presses 175 years ago, the front-page news was about the upcoming election.

However, only a small portion of the front page was dedicated to listing the candidates for Lenawee County offices, which included Charles M. Croswell, who was running as a Whig for register of deeds. Croswell turned 25 on the date of that first edition — Oct. 31, 1850. He went on to serve as Adrian’s mayor, in the state Senate and House of Representatives and was elected governor in 1876.

Instead, five of the seven columns across the front page were filled by a work of fiction, “Homes and Husbands: A Tale for Young Wives.” The parable tells the stories of three young couples. The three husbands are carpenters, but their wives are different: One keeps an untidy home and never has supper ready when her husband returns home from work, another keeps an immaculate home but treats it like a museum and doesn’t let her husband or children disturb it in any way, and the third keeps their home tidy and comfortable. The first two husbands often escape their homes for the comfort of the local “public-house,” as the story calls the local pub, while the third stays home in the evenings while his wife reads a book aloud or they share in conversation. The story continues about how the first two wives attempt to reform themselves to keep a home like the third so that their husbands will stay home in the evenings.

The early editions of the Herald would be dominated by such short stories, as well as essays and transcripts of speeches, following the paper’s motto printed under the nameplate on the front page: “Devoted to literature and science — progress and truth — morality and religion.”

On the first edition’s second page, publisher James H. Perry described the publication’s aim to be both literary and local. Tecumseh and its 1,000 to 1,200 residents might have interests to which the rest of Lenawee County might be indifferent, and a local press would be supported by the community’s successful agricultural and commercial businesses, Perry wrote. The paper also would be engaged in the interests of education, particularly the public schools and the Tecumseh Literary Institute.

“But beyond these immediate and local wants, the entire aim and scope of our paper, will be Literary and Scientific,” Perry wrote. “We believe that the reading community of our ‘Beautiful Peninsula’ want, and feel their want of a weekly periodical devoted (so far as may be) to original Western Literature — a periodical which shall once every week, carry to the fireside and the study our portion of the waking thought and melody of the mighty West.”

“We shall keep wholly aloof” of politics, Perry wrote. The paper would report the news of the day “with fidelity and dispatch” and “without note or comment.” It would “have nothing to do” in a partisan way with the “babbling tergiversations of party menials” or the “honorable or ingenuous contest for real or supposed political purposes.”

The paper would advocate for causes the public supported.

“The prominent evils and abuses of the day, from which the People seek redress, we shall not hesitate to expose and rebuke, wherever they may exist,” Perry wrote, “and those prominent changes and reforms, which the people call for, and which, in our opinion, the better interests of Society demand, we shall not hesitate to urge, and to defend, whether opposed to party policy or not.”

In selecting pieces for publication, Perry wrote, they would not print anything that “ought to offend the purest morals, or the chastest taste.”

Perry aimed to produce what might today be called a “family newspaper.”

“With the literature of the day before us, we know that this must be a difficult task, and that it must necessarily shut out many things entertaining, and in fact otherwise good for their kind, but while we anticipate, perhaps too fondly, visiting many a family fireside, and discoursing not unwelcomely, with the gathered circle there, that expectation would be to us a source of anything but pleasure, could we for a moment suppose, that our weekly advent might be the means of contaminating those young minds with the grossness of a studied infidelity, or any of the blandishments of refined vice.”

In the second edition, much of the front page is devoted to an address given Oct. 4, 1850, by Dr. Michael Patterson at the Lenawee County Agricultural Fair. He recounted how the land was prepared by pioneers for farming and also discussed how there was a need to learn new ways of farming to ensure continued good harvests. He discussed how they learned to wait until late September, when frost had killed off the larvae of a fly that decimated wheat crops, to plant the next wheat seeds so that the plant would grow enough over the winter to be resistant to the flies that emerged in the spring.

“We may look to Heaven for a blessing upon our crops, but before we can hope to obtain the blessing, we must deserve it by exercising those noble faculties which God has given us to aid ourselves,” Patterson said.

In the Dec. 26, 1850, edition, Perry selected a short story, “The King of the Hearth,” on the nature of man by Henry Morley, an English professor of literature, that was first printed in the Nov. 30, 1850, edition of Charles Dickens’ magazine “Household Words.” The main character shares a story about something that happened to him while walking to Christmas dinner.

Those first several additions of the Herald are preserved on microfilm at the Tecumseh District Library, and the quality of the print editions that were preserved is not always good. Several pages are smudged, wrinkled or torn, so some stories or parts of stories are unclear or missing. Such is the case of one of the first obituaries in that first edition. The name is obscured by a smudge that runs across part of the second and third pages, but it appears to be very brief, only about four lines, for someone who died at his father’s residence in Ridgeway.

The obituary below the first appears to be for Huldah Silliman Bangs, the wife of the late Rev. Joseph Bangs, of Ridgeway. She died Oct. 25, 1850, according to findagrave.com. The obituary says she died of stomach cancer at the home of her son Alanson. Rev. Bangs had been the preacher at the Macon Methodist Episcopal Church, according to the church’s website.

Much of the rest of the four-page first edition and those that followed are made up of advertisements and public notices. A couple of the larger ads are for the S. Van Nest hardware store, which is promoted as “the cheapest hardware store in Michigan,” and for Dr. S.P. Townsend’s Compound Extract of Sarsparilla.” Dr. Townsend’s extract is labeled as “the wonder and blessing of the age! The most extraordinary medicine in the world!!!”

Throughout the first several editions, there is not much local news. Other than the election returns, which were mostly reported in the Nov. 14, 1850, edition — the Whigs dominated the Democrats — most of the news was reprinted from publications from throughout Michigan and the United States. News from Europe sometimes found space inside the paper, which continued to be a four-page publication for many years. A report in the Nov. 28 edition from “A Citizen” decried the conduct of some boys during a lecture at the Literary Institute on the 18th “who not only annoyed the audience, but wantonly mutilated and spoiled several books belonging to students in the academy. Such acts are an outrage to the whole community, and they should receive the punishment they so richly deserve.”

Graphics were limited to a few business logos. An ad from the Herald saying it would take farm produce as payment for subscriptions was accompanied by an image of a farm showing horses and a cart, pigs, ducks, and cattle along with a farmhand and barns all around a tree in the middle of the barnyard. Instead of running horizontally, the 3-inch wide image is printed vertically within one of the columns.

The Herald kept that format for the next several years. The four-page editions had many ads, signaling that the business community found value in promoting its products and services to the paper’s readers, while Perry collected news items from near and far to fill out his pages of literary, scientific and philosophical writings.