The room went quiet at two per cent a month. Three of us were working through a front page of an Austin weekly, reading aloud whatever caught an eye, and one of us had reached a public notice from a man whose promissory notes had been stolen. He listed each one so that nobody would buy them. One, for $512.95, carried interest of two per cent per month.1 Nobody at the table had seen a harder number for the price of money in that town that year, and it had come from the column most researchers skip.
The notice nobody meant as data
The paper is the Weekly Democratic Statesman for Thursday, December 9, 1875, a four page issue digitized by the University of North Texas and served through the Library of Congress.1 The weekly began in August 1871 as a companion to a Democratic paper that had first appeared in Austin that July, with John Cardwell editing both.2 The page reached Washington from Denton; the university dates its work for the national newspaper program to 2007 and notes that the same pages can be read on its own site as well.3
The notice itself is the best economic evidence on the page. It describes five notes. One was dated at Goliad in June 1875, for $1,500 in coin, due twelve months after date with interest at twelve per cent from date. Another, dated at Austin on November 15, 1875, was for $175 in coin at twelve per cent. Two dated at Austin in late October carried two per cent a month.1 The notice was written to protect a creditor. It records, as a side effect, what borrowers in and around Austin were paying, that some debts were written in coin rather than paper currency, and how long they ran.
Reading the printer’s keys
The second thing the column holds is small type at the foot of each advertisement. Under the advertisement for a patent bitters the printer set aug5w6m. Under a land agency’s card he set oc22 w1y, and under a notice of land for sale, no18.1 I read these as insertion marks: the date the advertisement first ran and the length of the paid run, weekly for six months or for a year. That reading is my inference from the pattern, and I hold it with some care, but it fits every mark on the page.
If it is right, it changes how an advertisement dates anything. The bitters notice on December 9 was a contract made in August. A merchant whose card appears in a given issue had paid, weeks or months before, to appear through a date he chose then. So I date an advertisement by its first insertion, never by the issue I happened to find it in, and I treat its continued presence as evidence of a contract, not of a business still open.
The page makes a smaller point about catalog records. The Library of Congress describes the weekly as introduced in August 1871 as a Tuesday paper.2 The masthead of this issue says the weekly was published every Thursday morning.1 Neither is wrong. They describe different years, and only the paper itself says which day it came out in 1875.
Who was buying space
The third kind of evidence is who paid. A block of cards is headed St. Louis Business Houses Seeking Texas Trade, listing commission merchants in cotton, hides, wool and grain, an iron store and live stock commission firms at the stock yards across the river in Illinois. Below it runs a second block from Kansas City, for agricultural implements, a surgical institute and live stock firms.1 A Baltimore firm advertises a turbine water wheel with 7,000 in use. An Austin land agency offers to pay taxes, perfect titles and collect claims against the State, with examinations made at the Land Office.1
None of that is news, and all of it is economic geography. Merchants in two Missouri cities thought Texas readers of a Democratic weekly in Austin worth paying to reach. The land agency tells me what kind of trouble land owners had in 1875. And a millinery card, promising the newest styles at the corner of Pecan and Brazos streets, puts one woman’s trade on a known corner in a known month.1 A corner is what a fire insurance sheet can place, a pairing described in the essay on Sanborn maps.
Many newspaper historians would reverse my order of reading. I read the legal notices first and the display advertisements last. The display advertisement is the more vivid and the more quoted; it shows a merchant’s goods and voice. But it is a claim made to sell, and the bitters card promises to prevent fever and ague and credits its recipe to a celebrated French chemist.1 The legal notice was written to be relied on by strangers and could cost its author money if it misstated a term. For the price of money or land, I trust the dull column.
What the paid column will not tell me
The column has limits I cannot argue away. It shows who paid to reach this paper’s readers, which is a political and commercial audience chosen by the editor, not the whole town. It shows asking prices and stated terms, not what anyone actually paid. And a notice of stolen notes survives because a man was robbed; the ordinary loans of the same autumn, which nobody needed to advertise, left no mark here.
The same paper, a few months earlier, carried the convention reporting read in the study of one delegate across three records; news and paid columns are two witnesses in one issue. For the daily edition’s later run, the state library in Austin lists a historical newspaper database covering the Austin American Statesman from 1871 to 1980 among its research resources.4 Texas titles digitized under the national program can also be searched on the Denton library’s Portal, which is often the quicker route for a county weekly.3 Work of this kind fed the ordinary economic texture of the Coke book, and the other studies in this series live on the archives hub.
So before I read what an advertisement was selling, I put one question to it, and it now comes first every time: who paid for this line, and on what date the payment began.
References
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The Weekly Democratic Statesman (Austin, Tex.), December 9, 1875, page 1, Library of Congress, Chronicling America. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9
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Library of Congress, About The Weekly Democratic Statesman (Austin, Tex.) 1871 to 1883. ↩ ↩2
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The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries, History of the Portal. ↩ ↩2
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Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Genealogy Resources. ↩