Important Notice

As of September 7, 2010, all newspapers published in Richland Center, WI between 1855 through 1900 AND EXISTING ON MICROFILM have been read and indexed.  Newspaper issues available to the Wisconsin Historical Society were microfilmed in the 1960's and 1970's.  However, and here comes the excitement, somewhere along the way, and nobody seems to know the details, a gift of old newspapers was made to the Richland County History Room.  A volunteer went up to the attic and organized several hundred very old and very fragile newspapers, developing an inventory of issues.  When that inventory was matched to the missing issues list of the Newspaper Index, there were 62 issues discovered, including one issue of a newspaper title that has not been represented by microfilm copies, "The Richland Press" of 13 Dec 1860.

In Sept, 2010, I made arrangements with the History Room staff for access to these newspapers, set up a camera with tripod and took approximately 1300 pictures. Since time was limited, the pictures were not ideal, that is they were not taken square with the field and are very distorted. It would take many more hundred hours than I have to "stitch" the images together and correct the distortion.  I hope to read them in the near future and will add entries to the Index.  Simply maintaining the identity of all pictures and reading the distorted images takes over three hours for each issue, longer if there are lists of names.  There were 148 entries from the Richland Press, with a Newspaper Code of "N," those from the County Observer will be noted by "o" rather than "O" in current use and likewise, the County Republican will be designated by "p" rather than "P" as defined in the Index.  These newspapers are very fragile and packed in boxes, making it essentially impossible to make copies.  We will have to wait until they are microfilmed before we can be certain of reading copies of the articles.  However, if there are not too many requests, if you send an email to me, I will look at the pictures I took, (7.8 GB total) and if it is reasonable, will try to clear some of the distortions and make an individual article readable.

I first looked at the Richland Press, and saw an article reporting the disposition of cases heard before the Circuit Court shortly before December, 1860.  There were many marriage and death notices that would be printed only once.  These are most likely the only copies of these newspapers that have lasted until today.  Since the environment is not optimum for archival storage in the Richland Center Library attic, we can hope they will be microfilmed soon, before more deterioration occurs.

The Wisconsin Historical Society has agreed to microfilm these issues, making a new roll, but that project has not been scheduled and nobody seems to know when it will be done.
Until then, there are no reliable copies available of articles in "Roll H1"  23 Nov 2010

Margaret Jordan
RichlandNews@comcast.net

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