Tennessee Printers
1791-1945
Originally Printed by Joseph Hamblen Sears (1865-1946)
reprinted from book within the public domain
Index added by Sharon R McCormack
Index copyright August 20 2004
TENNESSEE PRINTERS A Review of Printing History
I
In the year 1791 George Roulstone, the first printer to enter the State of Tennessee, took his press apart in Fayetteville, North Carolina, packed it on horses' backs or in wagons, and trekked over the trails of the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Holston Valley where Kingsport now stands. There on the barks of the Holston River at James King's Boat Yard he loaded it on a flat boat and floated it down to Rogersville, where he set it up again and started printing the Knoxville Gazette the first piece of printing ever attempted in Tennessee.
In crossing the valley to reach the river he passed over, or within a few yards of the spot where the Kingsport Press, the largest book producing plant in the world, is now operating. And when he finally got to Rogersville and started his primitive hand press in a little cabin, he was within half a dozen miles of the site of the Pressmen's Home, which is a town in itself, created for the benefit of printing pressmen and their profession; consisting of a technical trade school for the training of printers in advanced printing methods, a correspondence school for apprentices, a hotel, a tuberculosis hospital, a home for aged printers-altogether an immense enterprise, the only institution of its kind on earth.
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That is somewhat of a growth in a hundred and fifty years.
It would be interesting to have seen this man Roulstone at work; to have trekked along with him on foot or horse back as he piloted his precious cargos his beloved press and fonts of type up over the ridges of the mountains, down into the valleys, fording streams in a wilderness only relieved by an occasional farm cabin; to pass through widely separated primitive hamlets; to stop for food or bivouac for the night. Macaulay in one of his essays, speaking of the historical novel, says that its value is "to make the past present; . . . to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb; to show us over their houses; to seat us at their tables; to rummage their old fashioned wardrobes."
What sort of clothes did Roulstone wear? What was his little press like? Where did he get his paper, his type, his ink? How did he procure his subscriptions, and did he get paid for his advertising? More interesting still, what kind of a character was he himself ?
There seems to be some sort of hypnotism about setting type and printing. No man who in his youth dips his fingers into printer's ink ever gets them clean again. It's a passion. He becomes a pleasant enthusiast, a bit of a one-idea man, a specialist absorbed even in his sleep with new ideas of margins, arrangements of types, better inking. To write a paragraph, set it up by handy lay that type on the bed of a hand press, swab it with ink, lay a sheet of paper over it, pull by hand the lever that forces down the pressure, and then lift out the sheet and read it, is a joy, an emotional ecstasy, no one can understand unless he has begun it in early youth and grown up steeped in it.
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From Gutenberg to the present day the printer is much the same. All that anybody knows of that dreamer who first printed from type in the 15th century comes from court records of his trials for debt. He never had any money. He was always in financial trouble, hailed into court periodically to pay up. What of it? He was turning the thoughts of a single human being into a form that carried them to others. Until his day all such reproductions had to be done by hand. Monks worked year after year copying manuscripts. Then came Gutenberg to invent movable type and the printing press. And how rapidly his creation spread all over Europe!
So far as any records go, George Roulstone was a replica of Gutenberg. All these early Tennessee printers were-and probably others elsewhere. Roulstone was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1767; probably got his fingers first covered with ink as an apprentice to a Boston printer. At all events in 1786 he was bringing out the Salem Chronicle and Essex Advertiser in Salem, which appeared from March to August and then disappeared. After this experience he seems to have deserted Massachusetts and journeyed to North Carolina, for towards the close of this same year he was at work bringing out the North Carolina Gazette in Hillsborough. In 1789 he was employed by Berkeloe and Mears in Fayetteville bringing out the Fayetteville Gazette. That sheet, like the others, seems to have had a short and not too merry a life, for the next year he was printing the North Carolina Chronicle for John Sibley & Company. This venture, beginning in 1790 went out of existence in 1791 In other words, Roulstone was a printer, not a financier; an enthusiast without much ability (or perhaps interest) in profit and loss, a typical journeyman printer. Certainly he journeyed a good bit, for William Blount,
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then Governor of Tennessee, or rather the "Territory South of the Ohio River" which had followed Sevier's short lived State of Franklin, seems to have induced him to pack up his press and fonts of type, trek across the mountains, and float down the Holston River to Rogersville to start a newspaper.
Perhaps Blount, being a statesman, knew, as all such know, that he couldn't become a statesman unless he was elected to some office and that he couldn't be elected to an office unless he did some advertising. A printer and editor of a paper at his elbow judiciously encouraged would help him spread the information not only of his availability but of his very existence. Such has been the shrewd practice of great men from time immemorial.
There, in company with Robert Ferguson, Roulstone brought out in November, 1791, the first issue of the Knoxville Gazette. Rogersville then was nothing but a collection of log huts, but it was the County Seat of Hawkins County as it has been ever since. In one of these huts Roulstone set up his press. The printing office stood opposite the present site of the post office and was unquestionably a one room affair, perhaps sixteen by twelve feet, with an outside chimney and a big fireplace facing the room. There was a ladder going up to another room under the eaves, and that was all. Here and there in this region such cabins still stand, so solidly built that time is having a tough task destroying them.
In this one room office and home Roulstone worked, ate, and slept, his press at one end, his bed at the other. Perhaps there was a chair or two and a cupboard, a couple of windows, probably without glass. But he produced results. He called his sheet of four pages measuring about twelve by eight inches after the name of Knoxville, because he planned to move there as soon as
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he felt sure the citizens of that metropolis had gotten the Indians under control; for interested as he might be in printing, he was still more interested in his scalp.
But eventually in October, 1792, he seems to have become more confident of preserving the top of his head, for he again took his press apart put it on another flat boat and drifted down the many intervening mites of the Holston to Knoxville where his paper had a good run until 1797 when it passed into the Great Beyond. It appears likely, however, that Roulstone stopped for reasons other than want of cash. Ferguson left him, and other more lucrative printing began to come his way. Already in 1793 he had printed the tracts and Ordinances of the Governor and Judges of the United States of America South of the Ohio River," probably under the instructions of Governor Blount. Again in 1794 he had printed the Governor's Proclamation calling the members of the territorial government to meet in Knoxville. These jobs paid in cash.
A little later he was appointed one of the five commissioners of the town and was made the official printer of the State, which produced the munificent income of $600.00 a year. Hitherto his subscribers to the Gazette, always short of funds, were in the habit of bringing in a bag of potatoes, or a ham, in lieu of their cash payments. Many an advertiser did the same thing. All of which might fill Roulstone's stomach, but did not fill his pocket book or help pay for his paper, his ink, and other necessary expenses.
Presently he issued two sermons by the Reverend Samuel Carrick, President of Blount College, of which Roulstone became a Trustee. Next he was elected clerk of the territorial Court and Senate. Out of all this came real money. O1d records indicate receipts of "twenty-
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two dollars for drawing and engraving nine bills," "ten dollars if in ten days he printed fifty copies of the Act passed to ascertain what property shall be deemed taxable"; "one hundred sixty-six dollars and sixty cents for printing the procedure and constitution of the Constitutional Convention of 1796." In view of this flow of wealth it seems likely that carrying on a paper which seldom failed to lose money did not appeal to him so forcibly as it had formerly.
Furthermore, in 1797, when the mails began to come through, he was elected postmaster. More coin of the realm for the struggling purveyor of literature; and the two activities helped one another, for the postmaster was the center of the news of the day, and thus the editor easily gathered material for his paper.
Following this first Tennessee pioneer in ink a little further, it seems that he married a lady named Elizabeth Gilliam who appears to have been a female of parts, for when Roulstone died in 1804 she determined to carry on his work. She filled her husband's position as printer for the State which made her the first woman officeholder in Tennessee; and in 1806 a journal of the Senate was issued with the imprint: "printed for Elizabeth Roulstone by J. B. Hood, printers." She also kept a boarding house, started some time before, to support herself and Roulstone's two children, James and Elizabeth. In that boarding house lodged Colonel William Moore, and presently in addition to her work as printer to the State and manager of a boarding house, Elizabeth found time for communion with the valiant veteran of the Revolutionary Army, which in due course resulted in a matrimonial alliance. Then, as now, there was nothing better than a boarding house to promote such practical and diverting unions.
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The new husband took charge of the printing business which continued until 1807 when it was sold to a man named Lyon, who moved the outfit to Carthage, Tennessee, and started the Carthage Gazette, the first paper in that town. But in 1809 Elizabeth with her husband and two children, followed the press to Carthage, repurchased it and apparently operated it with some success, for in a short time Roulstone's son, James, became associated there with his mother and new father in bringing out the paper and continuing the State printing business. Finally, again Elizabeth moved, this time back to her birthplace in Nashville, and her descendants later inter-married with the Bradford family whose progenitor, Benjamin J., was the second man to set up a press in Tennessee. Perhaps that is another case of birds of a feather.
Benjamin J. Bradford was a Kentuckian and first appears as editor and publisher of the Kentucky Journal at Frankfort in 1795. By 1798 Governor Blount, still interested in newspapers and publicity, wrote to a man named Robertson saying that he "was glad to hear you are about to get a paper published in Nashville and that as the publisher is to come from Kentucky there is a well founded hope that he is not a ministerial printer." Ministerial printers evidently didn't appeal to the Governor, and Bradford was none such. Thus in January, 1800, he started the Tennessee Gazette in Nashville.
The members of this Kentucky Bradford family were all stained with printer's ink. There was the original James; his son Benjamin; another James, Benjamin's brother; a Thomas G., cousin of Benjamin, and perhaps more of them. At all events, they all moved to Tennessee and at various places set up printing establishments and issued newspapers.
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At much the same time George Wilson, issuing the Gazette in Winchester, Virginia, announced in that sheet in 1799 that he was going to start a paper to be called the Observer in Knoxville. That caused Roulstone to revive the Knoxville Gazette with the result that he and Wilson formed a partnership which lasted until Wilson left Knoxville and moved to Jonesboro and there began the publication of the Washington Newspaper and Advertiser, the first to appear in that town.
In such sporadic fashion printing started in Tennessee. Pioneers from Virginia and Kentucky saw, or thought they saw, better opportunities in Tennessee than at home. They were wanderers filled with enthusiasm for their trade and its outlook. They were all impregnated with the spirit of moving on to new fields like other early settlers. And though they may not at first have stuck to any one paper, or any one place, they were forging ahead, building up the printing trade in hitherto unknown territory.
No one can read the scraps of dry records, those bits of information that have endured through the devastating progress of fire and sword and time leaving only little sidelights, without feeling respect and admiration for the men who could stand the lifer the hardships, the appalling difficulties, the disappointments and failures of that day and place, and still keep on. It is a great pity that there are so few diaries, or records other than those of the courts. To get a feeling of some of the daily history a student, like the scientist who reconstructs a dinosaur from a few bones, must build up his picture from the little fragments he digs out of records which have no direr connection with the subject.
There are, for example, only four copies of Wilson's Jonesboro paper in existence. Perhaps it is a good in-
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stance of the others of that day. It was a folio with four columns. Most of the news was political. But the advertisements give a suggestion of the living conditions of that day. Wilson, it seems, had other interests besides his printing and his newspaper. In the issue of January 5, 1803, he announces that "G. Wilson & Company informs the public that they have opened a tavern in that commodious and convenient house lately occupied by Mr. Rawlins in the town of Jonesborough, in which they flatter themselves by attention to give satisfaction. They have on hand an assortment of the best liquors, both foreign and domestic."
Does that suggest something? Does it draw a picture of citizens of Jonesboro coming into this warm tavern for an evening of gossip which will produce news for his next issue of the Washington Newspaper and Advertiser? Does it suggest gatherings in that dimly lighted room of men who after their day's or week's work come together for a social glass-or two- this liquor both foreign and domestic? What was the quality of the American variety? Perhaps it was good sterling stuff, a little raw, but slipping down the lusty throats of those coon-skinned capped, homespun-clothed workers taking their entertainment m a way that has been familiar to human beings for thousands of years.
In this same paper of November 5 appears the following advertisement: "To de sick and distressed! Dr. Solm Casner attens on de hed of de lick creke, und vants to led de peoples to know dat he will ben at de ome, from de nex month, only ven his on de visst to de sick peoples, and he will cure ebery disease, and ville tell vat is de matter by de natur. He will also do schustice by every peoples that vill call on his ouse, where und keeps de sick peoples, which is only two miles from Col. New-
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man's. He vill give good suage. He vill not scharge too much."
If the good doctor knew no more of the pharmacopoeia than he did of the English language, heaven must have had his patients in its charge, or they died. He was "only two miles from Col. Newman's" How did the sick come that distance? And the doctor ends his announcement with the consoling and very modern statement that he "vill not scharge too much." Perhaps, like those of his profession today, he would only charge what the traffic would bear.
In November, 1804, Wilson retired to Knoxville and started Wilson's Knoxville Gazette which took the place of Roulstone's paper after the latter's death. But before he died Roulstone set up, printed and bound at least one book, "The Laws of Tennessee," Which is said to be the first book printed in the State. It was Issued in September, 1803, and consisted of 320 pages. In his preface is a paragraph which lightens up the darkness of human record and gives a hint of what printing a book entailed in that day and place. "The present undertaking has been very laborious to the editor, the stock for carrying on which being brought many mites at great expense. If he has performed an acceptable service to the public by the production of the present edition, his main wish will be gratified.''
Each page, of course, was set by hand. When a form was ready each sheet had to be printed by hand first on one side) then on the other. The type was then distributed and the pages of another form set and printed. The ink had to be mixed and spread over the type with leather daubers. The paper was brought in from the East by horse, or wagon, or boat-perhaps by all three -and the expense was naturally enormous. The binding
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was done entirely by hand. There was only one press, and the staff usually consisted of two men and a boy, the historic printer's devil.
What the size of the edition was does not appear, probably at most a hundred copies. The time required to set type, print, and bind these three hundred and twenty pages must have extended over a period of months in that little county seat of Rogersville only thirty miles from the spot where today the Kingsport Press is turning out bound books at the rate of sixty to eighty thousand a day. Such is the result of demand on the one hand and the development of mechanical processes on the other.
A further growth of printing (a weekly paper plus job and other work) in Tennessee took place in Bristol, that amusing town half in Tennessee, half in Virginia, where, for some years, by crossing the street a culprit could put his finger to his nose at the officers of the law fifty feet away.
This border town had much the same experience as its predecessors in the county with its printing and newspaper publishing throughout the second half of the 19th century. In 1857 the Bristol News was started. In a year or two it passed away largely because the editor could not collect enough money to carry on, for in desperation he advertised that he would take spring greens in lieu of cash. This sheet was succeeded by the Southern Advertiser, next by the Stateline Gazette. In 1865 John Slack revived the News; in 1870 the same man brought out the Bristol Courier, and in 1888 this paper became a daily. In 1907 it was merged with the Herald to become the Herald-Courier which still exists. In between there were half a dozen other papers in the town, which disappeared as regularly as they arose.
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This record of constant changes may seem to reflect on the stability of the Bristol character, but that is an unjustifiable assumption. Many of these papers were tacked on to a printer who had a press and had Job printing work. He saw perhaps, a chance to increase his income, especially as possibly some candidate for political office put up the money to induce him to take the risk In a community half in one state and half in another it isn't difficult to guess at the vitality of those campaigns and if one statesman did not have an "organ," he would lag behind his competitors As soon as election was over the particular paper would be of no value to him, but the printer could, if he so desired, go on carrying the fast-emptying bag Hence, these kaleidoscopic episodes in journalism.
Much of the same triumph of hope over experience took place in Chattanooga, which, known as Ross' landing up to 1836, was only a collection of huts constituting a trading center and. military outpost to tackle Indians Until the War Between the States it never had a population of 3,000, but in 1839 it was incorporated and given its present name Much excitement evidently arose over the boom in land So much so that a printer in Blountville named F A. Farnham thought he saw a chance to make a success of a paper started there ostensibly to append the news, butt actually get into the land boom and make the fortune he envisioned Once determined he loaded his press and other paraphernalia on the inevitable flat boat and floated down the river to Ross' Landing to start issuing his Chattanooga Gazette On arrival at the settlement he couldn't find a domicile of any sorts and instead of waiting until some kind of a shack could be set up to house his press, he proceeded to issue his new sheet at once by prating it on the flat boat itself Other enthusia-
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asts tried to compete with him but they soon passed away and the Gazette lived on for a short period
II
Tennessee has its eccentricities and peculiar characteristics, not only those of the land; but of the people who live on and by it Other states, doubtless, have theirs but somehow Tennessee takes the palm for originality Possibly the topography has something to do with it, for even that is eccentric. At one end it is all mountains, at the other flat land One over wanders across it two or three times in a vague, haphazard fashion as if looking for a way out One end was settled by English, Scotch, Irish pioneers who got fed up with the restrictions laid upon them by the Colonial Governments of Virginia and the Carolinas and thereupon moved into the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountain Valleys where they could live as they pleased They fought the Indians, they fought the Spaniards, they fought the French they fought the English And during odd moments of quiet they fought each other-an individual set of citizens, each man with his own ideas which he maintained with stalwart stubbornness against those of his neighbor, if anybody was near enough to be termed a neighbor.
Turn now westward to the other end of the State, coming to the Big River. Long before Daniel Boone started opening up the eastern end, back in the 16th century De Soto and La Salle and other French and Spanish voyagers found the Mississippi, paddled up and down its immense distances and amongst other things started a trading post later called Chickasaws Bluffs which today is the largest City in the State. Later still, long after, in
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1826 , Andrew Jackson and group of his associates liked the look of the place, and because it resembled the old city on the Nile decided to call it Memphis. In 1829 it was incorporated and began to grow.
The eastern end of the State developed more slowly because communications were to say the least, hazardous But at Memphis they had the Road of the River, and hence the population at that end developed from the North and South. Traders moving up and down the big waterway stopped there, settled there, grew cotton there. The men found wives all the way from New Orleans to St. Louis and these ladies did not come front Virginia and the Carolinas. They were frequently of French and Spanish descent Their husbands not only travelled to New Orleans, they went out to the seven seas and came back with a totally different outlook and education from those of the English, Scotch, and Irish of Virginia The westerners were traders the easterners were farmers They had nothing more in common than the Yankees of New England had with the Mexicans of Southern California.
And when in 1843 it became necessary to select a site for the Capital of Tennessee neither end would consent to the other having it So they finally decided on Nashville, which is more nearly in the center of the State Gradually as time passed and railways and better roads appeared, the two ends of the singular territory approached one another and settled what is sometimes called the Piedmont section.
Is it any wonder that in such a vigorous, varied and individual country and people the Journeyman printer found fertile ground for hts enterprises? Is it surprising that he should discover markets for subscriptions and advertising in a land where every man had his own ideas
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and was anxious to spread them amongst his neighbors, where everybody talked and argued politics, religion and most other subjects- is it any wonder that he became convinced of the many chances of making a paper go? It was his happy hunting ground Every day there was something new. If his first attempt didn't separate these citizens from their cash sufficiently he closed up the Gazette here and started the Observer elsewhere in that fertile region.
Thus the empire of printing moved westward In 1824 Charles McLean started another Gazette in Jackson which thus became the first piece of printing turned out in West Tennessee. Throughout the sparse records McLean appears in various places and would seem to have been somewhat experienced in the trade for in 1815 he was joined with Crutcher, publishing the Recorder in Clarksville. Then in 1824 he appeared in Jackson.
In 1826 the first paper to appear in Memphis was known as the Memphis Advocate & Western District Intelligencer In 1836 F B Latham was producing the Memphis Enquirer. In 1841 the Memphis Weekly Appeal came out under the management of Henry Van Pelt. In 1847 the Enquirer changed its name to the Daily Eagle, thus becoming the city's first daily paper In 1858 M. C. Gallaway started the Memphis Avalanch, which in 1861 merged with the Eagle In 1889 the Memphis Commercial appeared under the editorship of J M. Keating Next year the Appeal and Avalanche joined forces, and in 1894 these two were combined with the Commercial to make the Commercial Appeal.
This catalogue could be extended almost indefinitely, but it would neither be interesting nor illuminating. The
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substance of the matter seems to be that East Tennessee, being settled earlier, got in the printing business and with the further growth to the westward that part of the States soon caught up and forged ahead. At the same time there was a slight development in the printing of books and pamphlets, though the newspaper was mainly what kept these little presses busy. The books seem to have been largely court records, proceedings of the local legislature and possibly a text book or two, though the latter are hard to find up to the end of the War Between the States Probably most of the local teachers carried on their educational work practically without text books, and what few volumes were available came from outside the territory. The teachers did what they could under the conditions that existed there. But the lack of books, the lack of proper housing discouraged these rugged people not at all. They went forward with determination and courage.
Meantime, the coming of improvements in presses had an enormous effect on the output. To attempt here an account of the development of presswork, typesetting and binding in the 19th century would be scarcely germane to the subject, once these Improvements did not originate Tennessee. It would be like giving a history of railroads, automobiles, and electricity. None of these were peculiar to Tennessee. Tennessee adopted them as they came along Yet a is worth noting that from Gutenberg's fifteenth century press to those of Roulstone and Bradford there was little change. That means that for nearly four hundred years nobody developed anytime new in the art of printing.
The press was roughly about the size of a high bureau or chest of drawers, made entirely of wood, a solid frame standing on four legs; a flat bed on which the
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type was lead, and above it a solid place of wood which could be pressed down by the force of a screw operated by a hand lever This pressure was only as great as a man could put into working the hand lever.
In Philadelphia in 1796 Adam Ramage changed the old-fashioned screw into a triple thread that made it possible to do the work quicker. Next came Clymer's press, which instead of a screw, involved a series of levers that increased the force and the speed. In 1829 Samuel Rust developed the Washington press which used the toggle joint in place of any kind of screw In between, here and there, man power gave place to the horse. They put a horse in the cellar of a building and the animal, by walking round and round revolved a shaft which going up through the floor, brought about still greater pressure and speed Then, after four hundred years, began the great development in printing and typesetting which has, of course, revolutionized the whole craft.
In 1830 Isaac Adams of Boston built the first press operated by mechanical power. Up to that tune it was hard work for two men to print seventy to a hundred copies of a sheet on one side in an hour, but in 1837 the Adams mechanical press could turn out 800 impressions in the same time Finally, in 1843, R Hoe & Company built the first single cylinder press, the double cylinder in 1853, the four cylinder in 1858, the eight cylinder in 1864 The last had a capacity of 20,000 copies an hour By 1879 this same company had a press that could print, fold, and turn out complete 30,000 copies of an eight page newspaper sheet in the same time Since then improvements have gone on until today a metropolitan paper consisting of forty pages with illustrations can print at the rate of 70,000 per hour on a huge machine sixty or more feet long and twenty feet high.
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Printers in Tennessee took advantage of these new processes as they came along. And meanwhile typesetting advanced with the development of mechanical processes also. From hand setting, extending without much variation over a period of four hundred years, the change came fast once it started. Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1887 produced the linotype machine which is operated much after the manner of a typewriter. It sets a slug of type a line long. The next year Tolbert Lanston produced the monotone machine which produces a line of separately cast type characters.
Think of old Gutenberg coming out of court, or perhaps jail, where he has been squirming out of an unpaid bill On his way back to his press in a dream he wanders into a room bigger than he has ever seen and comes on an immense apparatus turning out many hundred thousand pages of a book an hour! It would interest George Roulstone and all the Bradford family too. And yet Columbus would get just as big a kick if he wandered down a dock today and came upon the "Queen Elizabeth," which could lift his "Santa Maria" up on her davits as easily as the great Discoverer's crew lifted a case of grog aboard his little caravel.
III
The War Between the States played havoc with dally life in Tennessee as it did elsewhere throughout the South, and the printers did not escape their share of the ruin But they carried on as well as they could with a determination and courage that today seem almost sublime. When approaching armies threatened their lives and their presses, they packed up and moved on to safer spots
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in the deep South. When the tide of battle overtook them, again they packed up a second or third time and still moved on, bringing out their papers, turning out such pamphlets and books as were in demand as they moved along Always moving, still bringing out their sheets they kept on until finally overall and destroyed. And when the battle was over and peace came they started off again and continued to build up the editing and publishing of the State. It is a simple but inspiring history of misery, destruction, and splendid courage.
Long before 1861, however, the signs of the times were evident to those who issued looks and newspapers And here the eccentricities of this unusual State stuck up their heads again. Some of the inhabitants, especially those of East Tennessee, had Northern leanings, others didn't believe in slavery extension to the westward, still others believed in it everywhere In any case nobody agreed with his neighbor, which didn't help matters, bad enough anyway.
In 1815 the Manumission Society was organized at Lick Creek Meeting House in Greene County Elisha Embree seems to have been one of the moving spirits, and at Jonesboro in 1819 he established the Manumission Intelligencer, which apparently was the first antislavery paper in the country. After a year or so it was combined with a new sheet and called the Emancipator. It was a two-column sixteen page affair devoted entirely and most vociferously to antislavery, and was printed by Jacob Howard in the East Tennessee Patriot office.
Then a Parson William Brownlow who, having started the Tennessee Whig in Elizabethton in 1839, moved the next year to Jonesboro where he continued publishing it until it was suppressed in 1861. The
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good parson must have been a stalwart citizen, for he printed stuff that stirred the already sufficiently agitated citizenry, taking as his motto: "cry aloud and spare not!" Evidently he followed his motto to the limit, for there is an extract from a letter written by an Englishman named J. S. Buckingham who was in Jonesboro in 1839, which suggests the heat of the day in these journalistic battles. "When we returned to the hotel," writes Buckingham, "I had an opportunity of looking over some of the local papers, and though I had seen much of the heated political controversy and could make allowance for the excitement of election, I was shocked and disgusted by the ruffianly and blood thirsty spirit which seemed to guide the pens of the editors."
But Brownlow went on, getting into a hot row with Frederick A. Ross who had some connection with a paper printed in Rogersville called the Calvinistic Magazine. But this was just daily food for the parson, and presently he was bringing out another sheet in Knoxville with the following announcement; "By the time this notice reaches the eyes of our numerous subscribers we shall have commenced the publication at Knoxville of a large weekly paper printed with new press and type to be denominated Brownlow's Whig and Independent Journal. The price will be $2.00 in advance, or $3.00 within one year. Through the columns of this paper we will in the future hold forth on all subjects we deem it proper to discuss." And he evidently held forth with vim, for when the Federal forces entered Knoxville in 1861 the sheet was summarily "suppressed." But it came to life again in 1863 and two years later Brownlow retired to become Governor of Tennessee, succeeding Andrew Johnson. In 1869 he resigned that office to become United States Senator, all this time keeping his finger on
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his journalistic activities. For in 1875 he was back again in the editorial chair of a paper which lie called the Daily Chronical & Weekly Whig & Chronicle, that eventually reached a circulation of 10,000 copies.
As the actual break arrived and the War got under way these various printers and editors grew hotter and hotter under the collar. Within the same State-sometimes within the same town-these irrepressible Tennesseans continued to bring out their papers and pamphlets pitching into one another with that frankness of language and epithet which spoke more for their earnestness than for their manners. They were in a struggle that hit everyone; they were being driven from their homes; they were being financially ruined. Why be polite about it? It was a tune of sparky undressed realities, and the language of the editors was as stark and undressed as the times.
One of the many War papers, the Chattanooga Daily Rebel, started on August 1, 1862, and though it lasted only two years it had a career that was unique even in that unique time and place. Henry Watterson was the first editor, but he didn't stay long. He put into the paper all the vigor and originality of his remarkable mind, but he was too much for even those Chattanooga citizens, for in 1863 he resigned because of the uproar created by his attacks on General Bragg and that officer's conduct of the campaign. Charles 0. Faxon took Watterson's place and carried on until the Union forces captured the city. The paper was printed at the time in the back of a liquor store in front of which ran the railroad tracks down the middle of the street. Something had to be done at once, for the Yankees were shelling the town from across the river. So Faxon got hold of an engineer of the Western & Atlantic Railway and induced him to
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run a locomotive and car along to the Rebel office ; whereupon he loaded the press, type stands, and other printing materials on the car and had it run southward to safety.
Presently the Rebel was appearing in Marietta, Georgia, where the Memphis Appeal and Knoxville Register were also in hiding. Finally this haven had to be forsaken and the Rebel continued to appear in so many places that it came to be known as the Chattanooga Rebel on Wheels. At last it came to rest in Selma, Alabama, and when General Wilson took the town, his troops appropriated the press and proceeded to bring out a sheet called the Yankee Cavalier. It was printed on ruled paper by a soldier-probably the only paper he could get-and sold at twenty-five cents a copy. And then in 1865 the outfit went out of business altogether.
Another paper, the Memphis Appeal, went through much the same experience. It was started in 1841 by Henry Van Pelt and had a moderately successful and peaceful career until 1862 when its normal life ended and it became an adventurer. On the approach, June 5, of the boats filled with Federal troop s it became evident that Memphis would soon be occupied. At that a man named S. C. Toof, who is solidly identified with the printing history of Tennessee came to the Appeal's rescue. Toof was superintendent of the paper at the time, and as the hostile army got nearer he went to work with extraordinary energy and courage. First he got his wife and children off to a place of comparative safety. Then he worked all night getting the press and types, the paper and ink loaded on a train. By early morning before the town fell he got the train off to Granada in Mississippi where he set up business again and continued to bring out the paper until the approach of the Northern
[ 26 ]
Armies forced him to move on again, this time to Montgomery, Alabama ; then to Atlanta Georgia; bringing out the different issues as he wandered about the South with his paraphernalia until the newsboys got into the habit of calling in a sing-song voice: "Buy the latest copy of the Memphis-Granada-Jackson-Montgomery-Atlanta Appeal."
Finally in 1865 the Yankees caught up with the paper in Columbus Georgia destroyed everything connected with it and its peripatetic life came to an end. Yet even so it wasn't dead for in some way the troops which destroyed the outfit skipped the actual press itself ; and shortly after the close of the War that same press, due to Toof 's ingenuity, was brought back to Memphis and the Appeal appeared again in its home town with a picturesque description of the story of its wanderings on its front page.
IV
These indefatigable printers went to work after the War to rebuild on newer and more modern foundations. In tragic periods like those of the reconstruct ion days, even more than in peaceful times, the people wanted to know, wanted to be informed as to what was going on; insisted on discussing the problems of the hour. And thus printed matter became as necessary as food and raiment. It was a time of changes, of rebuilding along new lines and in those days newspapers and pamphlets were the only means other than talk for discussing the absorbing questions of the day.
The inventions and developments in mechanical typesetting, printing, and binding that appeared in the
[ 27 ]
second quarter of the century jumped ahead with extraordinary speed in the third quarter with the result that much larger and better printed papers, more and better books, as well as all printed matter began to spread over the State. The publisher as distinct from. the printer became a factor. Division of labor developed. From being author, editor, typesetter, printer and binder all in one the men of the trade gradually split up their work one becoming a compositor, one a pressman, one a binder, another an editor; still another publisher and financial director.
One of the first of these modern printers was S. C. Toof who worked with such energy to save the Memphis Appeal during the War. Toof was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1834. When he was still a child his parents moved to the United States and settled in Madison, Iowa. At sixteen young Toof dipped his fingers into printer's ink as an apprentice on the Dispatch in Keokuk. Two years later he went to Memphis and got his job on the Appeal, and from that time onward he worked up through various positions until he became superintendent. Then came the War and his wanderings with the paper to find a place to lay its head.
By the end of 1864 he was back again in Memphis and had set up his own printing business under the name of S. C. Toof's Franklin Job Printing House with one small press and three employees. But he had organizing ability and initiative and made a success of the enterprise from the start, even in those disturbed days when the town was a raw village with muddy streets no sidewalks no street lights, nothing but a collection of rough structures which straggled along above the river bank.
Presently, in 1876, he took in his brother-in-law,
[ 28 ]
W. H. Bates, as partner and in 1900 the now eminently successful concern was incorporated as S. C. Toof & Company. Meantime in 1857, a man named Otto Zahn, w ho later came into the Tennessee picture, was born in Berka, Thuringia, Germany, where in his early youth he began wandering over the continent finally getting a job in the famous Zaenhsdorff Bindery in London. There he worked for several years becoming such an expert binder that he won first prize at the London Exposition. Thereupon he took his prize money and began wandering again, coming eventually to Memphis where he found employment with Toof & Company.
It wasn't long before he won another first prize in binding at the St. Louis Exposition. And before he died in 1928 he had taken his place as one of the finest binders in America, as well as becoming President of Toof & Company. Toof himself died in 1910; Bates in 19 18. Zahn not only lived to become the head of a large printing plant, but took his place as an outstanding figure in the binding world. Today the Company is one of the largest and most successful general printers in Tennessee.
About the same period that is to say in 1854 the Methodist Episcopal Church South at its General Conference in Columbus, Georgia, voted to establish a publishing and printing house in Nashville. At the start, the set-up of the organization consisted of two agents, one a clergyman, the other a layman, chosen by the Conference who were to operate the enterprise in conjunction with a book committee of five members and these two men were given equal authority to operate the Company under the general supervision of the committee. With the exception of the fact that the Committee, which act: as a board of directors, has since been enlarged from five
[ 29 ]
to thirteen members this organization has continued for ninety years.
Through war and seemingly insurmountable difficulties it has developed from the smallest of beginnings to its present position of one of the large publishing houses in the country. It is owned by the Methodist Church. It is operated for the benefit of the Church. It publishes innumerable church periodically pamphlets and books, doing its own printing as well, the profits from which go to the Church-five percent of the receipts to support retired ministers and five percent to carry on the educational programs, the teachers' training work and other activities connected with its special interests. Some idea of its growth can be guessed from the fact that in 1888 the payments for these two purposes amounted to $5,000.00 and that each year with one or two exceptions that payment has gone on increasing until today it amounts yearly to well over a hundred thousand dollars.
Its first building was in an old sugar warehouse in the Public Square of Nashville, and the success of the enterprise was so marked that in 1858 the House published and printed 322 books besides more than 400 tracts. Today it has its five story publishing office building in Nashville as well as its own printing plant known as the Parthenon Press, also in Nashville. Altogether it constitutes an extraordinary monument to the publishing and printing fraternity of Tennessee. It issues annually at the present time approximately 100,000,000 leaflets; tracts, Sunday school slips, pamphlets and periodicals, besides some six hundred thousand books and seven hundred thousand paper covered volumes. From the acceptance of the manuscript to the completion of the finished book or magazine the entire work is done under the direction of B. A. Whitmore and F. D. Stone,
[ 30 ]
the two executives of the Company currently working with the Committee of Thirteen.
Another printing enterprise, also in Nashville started in 1865 just at the close of the War. James H. Bruce was the organizer an d Andrew Marshall, his associate, under the firm name of Marshall & Bruce Company. During the first years the concern devoted its energies entirely to binding, but in 1869 it added the first press. Shortly after the company bought a building in Main Street and proceeded to grow under able management but like the Methodist Book Concern they had their difficulties. In 1895 the whole outfit burned down. Nothing daunted, the management moved to temporary quarters, purchased new printing and binding machinery and carried on without interruption while putting up a new building of generous size on the old site. In 1912 Bruce P. Shepard a nephew of the original Bruce, became president of the company, and in 1939 under his direction, the plant was moved to 12th Street where it is now housed in a modern building. The Marshall & Bruce Company is a printing house. It does no publishing. It is today a flourishing business that has grown through a period of nearly eighty ears from the smallest of beginnings into one of the important printing and binding establishments in the State.
In 1891 George L. Berry, left an orphan at the age of seven started as an apprentice to a printer at the age of nine. In fad, he began as a printer's devil cleaning out the office and sleeping in the pressroom. At the age of twenty-four he was chosen head of the Printing Pressmen's Union, and from that time began planning the Pressmen's Home institution near Rogersville. This organization, under his leadership and vision has been built as the Capital, the center of the International Printing
[ 3 1 ]
Pressmen and Assistants; Union of North America, consisting of 65,000 men and women engaged in the printer's craft in six hundred cities of the United States and Canada. The site is in the so-called "Little Happy Va1ley" in Tennessee near Rogersville. It was selected by Major Berry after a long study of possible situations. The 5,500 acres comprising the property lie in a beautiful bit of country covered with forests, and today it has its own post office and innumerable buildings of the most modern type for carrying on the work of the Union, which involves the teaching of would-be pressmen and the care of the sick and superannuated members. It conducts a school for advanced study in the printing art, to which experienced foremen and workers come from all over the Western Hemisphere, and the building created for that work is supplied with modern machinery for typesetting, printing and binding. In this building there is a research laboratory, and it also houses the correspondence school through which courses are sent to cities in the United States and Canada to synchronize with this educational system reaching apprentices journeymen pressmen, and progressive executives.
Besides these units there is a swimming pool, an athletic field, a large dairy farm a well appointed hotel a completely equipped tuberculosis hospital for the free care of printing pressmen stricken with the disease; still another group of buildings which constitute a home for superannuated members of the trade, a beautiful church and an administration building. Altogether it is a fairly good sized town devoted entirely to the promotion of the welfare of the old and the instruction of the young in the printer's trade. There is nothing like it, or equal to it anywhere else.
Some years ago while creating and building up the
[ 32 ]
Pressmen's Home, Major Berry, who at one time was also United States Senator from Tennessee, began the study of a press that should print five or more colors at one time. After a decade and a half of study and experimentation he and his associates in 1926 finally organized the International Playing Card and Label Company in Rogersville and thus created in Tennessee another unique unit of the printer's craft. The company prints playing cards and labels-today principally labels-on complicated presses which are the only ones of their kind in existence. It turns out each year billions of little four-by-six inch labels printed in five colors at one time. And in addition, the outfit is substantially self-sustaining, for it manufactures its own inks, plates, rollers, varnishes, etc.
V
The art preservative of all arts, has undergone much in the way of development during the last half century. steadily rising labor costs the shortened work day and week, increased competition in both the publishing and production of books, plus an unprecedented growth in the public demand for more and better made books have all contributed to invention and ingenuity. Improved machinery, papers, inks, plates and plate-making methods, new lithographic processes, and the advent of new binding materials have all stimulated the progress.
The appearance of magazines of the format of Life Liberty, Fortune, Reader's Digest, and many others has reflected the shift made possible in processing publications. Higher speeds of printing equipment, improvements in multi-color production the appearance of mag-
[33 ]
azines produced by the offset-lithographic and gravure processes, many on thin, or rough, or process coated papers, have instigated new achievements in both the processing and format of books.
Today America leads the world in the production of printed matter. One of the nation's leading weekly quality magazines ships more printed tonnage into Canada each week than the combined weekly tonnage of all Canada-produced magazines. Recently released figures on the book production in the United States during 1943 gave the staggering total of over five hundred fifty-one million books (of which one hundred ninety-two million were cloth bound) as the annual grist. Compared with these almost unbelievable figures, only a few over twelve million books were produced in Britain during the same year.
While the graphic arts industries in the United States have been rolling up new records, Tennessee has forged to the front rank among all States by reason of an entirely new, and quite novel, grouping of industries allied to printing. Within the State's borders has been created something new in industrial management.
Back in 1910, in Kingsport, then hardly more than a settlement in the historic Houston Valley on the recently completed Clinchfield Railroad, there had been started a small pulp mill. From the near-by slopes of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains came the pulp wood principally by horse and wagon transports, to feed the grinding maw of this small enterprise. It was the second industry started in the new town, following dose on the heels of the cement plant. There being no near-by means of consuming the finished and dried soda pulp, it was shipped to paper mills in the north and east wherever a market could be found.
[ 34 ]
World War Number One handicapped the builders' plan for the full development of Kingsport, but at its close the work of creating an industrial city started on again. The inexhaustible supplies of natural resources all about the city were still there, and the obvious step was to develop them as a means of building and stabilizing the life of the community. The one industry selected for immediate action was destined to be a chain of corporations linked to one of America's most progressive trades, printing and its allied services of supply and distribution.
It was a natural assumption, given the supply of pulp wood in the surrounding mountains coupled with an already existent pulp mill, that there should be a paper mill also. The planners reasoned that having plenty of pulp, it should be turned into printing paper, should be then made into books and sold to the public. In their reasoning they had hit on one of the fundamental principles controlling the birth of such an industry so far away from the established publishing centers of this counts. If there was something to publish that the American people wanted, then a printing and binding plant, a paper mill, a pulp mill could be linked together in worthwhile production, and thus increase the growth of industry in Kingsport.
A little research brought forth the possibility of establishing an entirely new line of publications for which it appeared the American public was really the hundreds of so-called "classics," books by time-honored authored which were free of copyright. Thus, it was determined to start a publishing house which would revive these classics, and then a printing and binding plant to manufacture them from the paper produced from a new paper mill, using the pulp from the already operating mill, and at the same time training the available but inexperi-
[35 ]
enced labor on these cheaper books so that the manufacture of fine books might be taken up later.
The new publishing house was located in New York the haven of man rest publishing houses. It was planned that this publishing house, when the labor was trained to handle better work would later give place to a regular agency for the new book producing unit and solicit manufacturing from other publishers seeking new, modern and expanding facilities for their own manufacturing. Contacts were made with the great m ail order and chain-store houses and arrangements developed for the marketing this new series of books, cloth bound, to retail for ten cents a copy.
But the establishment of a paper mill and a bookmaking plant in the infant city of Kingsport has a problem. The planners looked about and discovered paper mills in Chillicothe and Clinton, Ohio, and went to work to interest the owners, the Mead Corporation , in the idea of building a paper mill at Kingsport and acquiring the pulp mill, with the assurance that the pulp produced there and turned into book paper would be used by the printing plant near by to make the ten cent books as the beginning of a basic industry to be developed later.
The prospect proved interesting and the Mead interests agreed, provided the book plant came into being. A plant set up to print and bind books requires a great deal of floor space as far as possible on one floor to eliminate costly handling of the many tons of paper, printed matter, heavy materials and the finished books which must be stored to season and to provide stocks for forthcoming demands. The cost of building such a plant capable of handling all matters incident to the complete production of the type and volume of publications planned would be very heavy and require time. The planners
[ 36 ]
wanted to get this project underway immediately to provide employment for the people of the community, to build up the freight revenues of the new railroad and to give to Kingsport the prestige as an industrial city in order to interest other industrialists to locate there.
Just across the fields from the pulp mill ( and there were plenty of fields in those days) stood a leather tannery developed during the war period for the production of sole and saddlery leathers by the Simmons Hardware Company of St. Louis. This Grant Leather Company had been acquired by Simmons along with many additional acres of land, and in the last years of the war there had been constructed a group of connected brick, concrete and steel buildings to house a harness and saddlery industry. At the dose of the war, just when these buildings were completed, the project was given up. The buildings had never been used, and came into the market. It was an opportunity for the proposed printing plant, and the new company bought the entire outfit.
It is doubtful if at that time the planners realized what steps were being taken in the graphic arts in Tennessee. Certainly no one visioned to what extent the infant industry and its affiliated enterprises would grow. First came the acquisition of the pulp mill by the Mead interests. Then the paper mill was started. And finally the Kingsport Press (then called J. J. Little & Company) took over the buildings of the Grant Leather Company, and the installing of printing and binding machinery began together with the first training of raw labor in the printing processes. The fall of 1922 saw the beginnings of both paper and printing plants. In the spring of 1923 paper began to come off the first (and at that time the only) paper machine. And the lino-
[37 ]
types, the presses and the binding machines in the Press began to hum into production.
To provide a complete cloth bound book of 256 pages to sell at retail for ten cents required initiating new techniques. The Press would only get six and one half cents per copy including the paper which was purchased from the mill next door. Even by printing in editions of 100,000 copies the specifications common to books usually found in book stores selling from fifty cents to three dollars had to be abandoned. Instead each book was planned to make exactly 256 pages, permitting the printing of 128 pages on one sheet of paper -64 pages to a side-two of these sheets making a complete book.
Furthermore, there was no allowance for the usual sewing in the binding. In its place what is known as "perfect binding" was adopted. This ingenious process binds a book without sewing by gluing the back edges of the sections, reinforced with a special piece of muslin to hold the whole together. New types of high speed automatic machines had to be built to accommodate this new book format. Then, too from time immemorial a book cover titled in "gold'' had a rich appearance. Hence these new productions had to be stamped in gold. But pure gold leaf was out of the question. Here again ingenuity triumphed. A new "gold'' ink, actually bronze, was developed. Then there was the problem of the cloth for the cover. The lowest priced bookcloth in those days, even when purchased in large quantities ran the per copy price out of reach. It became necessary to make the cloth to suit the need. This was a difficult problem. There were then only three large wholesale producers of bookcloth in America and they reported that they could not make a cloth to meet the needs of quality,
[ 38 ]
texture, and price. Therefore, a bookcloth manufacturing department was set up and an expert cloth chemist employed to manage production. Today that man is the Vice President and Treasurer of the Press-Walter F. Smith-the man who produced this special cloth and invented the "gold'' ink in the early days.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of these infant industries is the way in which they found trained and develop ed the hundreds of skilled artisans needed to operate such technically difficult processes. I n the hills and valleys surrounding Kingsport lived thousands of young men and women of almost pure Anglo-Saxon strain who hitherto had known nothing of the intricacies of typesetting, electrotyping, printing, binding and the other steps in making books. Word got about that a new industry was starting at Kingsport, and men and women of all ages began to flock to the magnet. At one time the late J. Fred Johnson, resident director of activities of the city builders made the statement that he could stand in the center of Kingsport and sell a thousand jobs in this new bookmaking plant at fifty dollars each. It offered entirely new forms of employment. The first to be employed were fascinated with such interests, and their enthusiasm spread by the grapevine route into the hills and valleys until the plant acquired an abundance of help.
Yet the training of these people, intelligent though they were, in a complicated series of technical details was a difficult task. The management had to resort to "on-the-job" teaching. Presently came a vocational school operated within the plant under the supervision of the State Educational Department. As the months rolled by and the volume increased the type of books was changed from the very cheapest to the better grades
[ 39 ]
and then to the finest books. Competent mechanics and supervisors had to be brought to Kingsport and given the task of training this new family of printing and binding craftsmen while they produced books. Presently experts began to show up amongst these intelligent people. And today when you visit the plant you will meet dozens of the leaders who are native sons and daughters of Tennessee and the neighboring states.
The public is not to be depended on to continue to buy one brand of soap, gasoline, tobacco, duties, or books. Thus, after a year or two people tired of buying even the bargain in classics; the sales began to fall off; the chain stores stopped their orders. Presently there wasn't enough business to keep this huge mass production plant going. Something had to be done quickly if the business was to survive and the plant develop properly. This was in the spring of 1925, just three ears after the Kingsport Press was started and at the time when America was recovering from the first slight depression following the first World War and before the great depression of 1929. There was need for customers on the one hand and new management on the other. Someone was needed with an established reputation, not only as a producer of high grade books on a mass profusion basis, but one with the entree to the great publishing houses of the country, a man who could design, re-equip, build an organization anew and sell such a producing service to book publishers.
The field of book making was searched such a man found and secured; and the rebuilding began. Slowly painstakingly, the plant was remodelled, the workers retrained and increased in number, a sales organization created with a close associate of the new leader in direction, and the wheels began to roll again -- at first
[40]
slowly, for no production could be attempted of a quality beyond the scope of the plant to produce. Half a million books a month. Then a million books a month. But the end is not yet in sight. During the recent war years, with the book publishing business enjoying new and hitherto untouched heights of prosperity, the production of this once infant prodigy has steadily pushed the gauge toward the goal set many years ago of two million bound books a month!
While speaking of the huge output an important point must not be overlooked. That is the diversification. The old adage "never put all your eggs in one baskets" has been an axiom. There is a great temptation in American business to overspecialize. In building books it is very easy to fall into the same mistake. It is much easier and sometimes more profitable, to specialize in the making of only one category of books--textbooks, for example. But the textbook business is best in the summer months when quantities are prepared in advance of the fall opening of schools and colleges. And the "trade" book field- fiction, biography, travel and the serious types, while produced throughout the year, have their high spot production months, too. The ideal in production of books is to have a "balanced diet," a volume selected to maintain plant production throughout the twelve months on an even basis. Such a combination also makes for continuous employment. The result of this study in Kingsport is that this huge Kingsport Press is today making ten per cent of all the cloth bound books produced in the entire nation. And in the Last three years the plant has been able to maintain an almost perfect ratio of all three types of production based on the national figures for each class.
Paralleling this growth of Tennessee's great print
[41]
ing enterprise have come other developments in Kingsport that have a direct bearing on its production activities; that is, closely related industries independent of one another, but at the same time interdependent.
The installation of the first Fourdrinier paper making machine in the plant of the Mead Company was but the beginning of a continuous and generous growth of that institution. At first practically all the output of the one machine paper mill wended its way across the fields, by rail or truck, to its neighboring book producer, and was consumed in the production of the dime classics already mentioned. With the steady push of the Kingsport Press sales agencies in New York and Chicago came demands for the building of different types of books-juveniles, fiction (both new and reprint editions), Bibles, Testaments, dictionaries, school and college textbooks in endless varieties, reference books, and sets. Different types of books required different types and grades of printing papers. With the swing away from the cheaper classics came the demand for better grades of paper. Shortly after the changeover the Press installed alongside its perfecting presses printing machines of the single cylinder one and two color types for the production of high quality illustrated and color production by the letter-press process. The Mead Company was kept busy attempting to make most of these new grades and types of papers. As a result came the installation of paper machine after paper machine and the additional equipment to meet the demands of the Press and an expanding national clientele.
Today the Mead mill still delivers a very large proportion of the tonnage of the paper produced in the Kingsport mill to the Kingsport Press. Thus, the Mead
[ 42 ]
pulp and paper mills have grown side by side along with the Press, each independent, yet with distinct inter-dependence. Savings to the buyers of Mead papers made at the Kingsport plant for delivery to the Kingsport Press still prevail, savings in time from paper machine to printing press, savings in simple skid deliveries, savings in the short trucking or shuttle railroad trip.
Another large and interesting development in industry building was that of bookcloth finishing. It will be recalled that the Kingsport Press made all its own bookcloth when production was limited to the inexpensive classics. Shortly after the turnabout in 1925 from the specialized production of only one type of book to general book production the Press not being able to make all the grades of cloth it required realized that its own bookcloth plant could make more cloth of the inexpensive types than it could consume, Luckily at that time the Holliston Mills of Norwood, Massachusetts, one of the three largest producers of bookcloth in America was looking for a spot in the near South to locate a bleachery for the huge yardage of gray goods drawn each year from mills in the Carolinas from which they finished their cloths. The Press was a large annual buyer of bookcloth and other bookmaking supplies from the Holliston Mills. The Press had a bookcloth plant in operation but no bleachery. It also had ample acreage for the location of a new plant. Holliston had a mill in the North needed a bleachery in the South; and it wanted to have a second plant for the production of certain classes of bookcloth, particularly those of the types used by the Press. Thus came the sale of the bookcloth plant of the Press to Holliston and the leasing of several acre's of land on which to build a new combined
[ 43 ]
bleachery and bookcloth finishing plant. It was a happy and economic step which has maintained mutual service since 1926.
In the intervening years Holliston, like Mead, has expanded its manufacturing facilities enormously. Thus it is seen how three independent industrious not a share of stock of which in any of the three companies being owned by either of the others, can be and have been developed on an individual basis, though all three are interdependent. One of the underlying principles among Kingsport industries is strict financial independence coupled with art interdependence of interests and services. As a result Kingsport's industries have suffered far less in times of depression than those in other communities. The interrelation of these three industries is unique and most interesting. The pulp logs roll into the Mead pulp mill, flow as pulp into the Mead paper mill, there being made into papers of different kinds, a generous tonnage of which is shuttled across the main highway into the Kingsport Press to be used in making books. And at the same time rolls of finished bookcloth travel from the Holliston cloth mill into the Press's bindery.
In this complete plant devoted exclusively to book production you see all the steps from manuscript to finished book, all to the tune of an average of over 65, 000 volumes every working day, and some days the figure goes as high as one hundred thousand. Tennessee can claim to have within its borders not only the largest bookmaking plant in the world, employing some 1,150 people, but also the one community in the nation where all the operations of producing the main ingredients employed in printing and bookmaking are centralized. Here the manuscript begins its journey, is
[ 44 ]
turned into type, type into electrotype plates, plates locked o n high speed presses, and the printed sheets routed through the diversified and intricate processes of edition binding, coming out in the format that is a delight to the eye.
As you visualize the investment, the thought in design and planning, the array of locally trained artisans and the unending stream of paper, cloth and books flowing out of these three individual establishments united in a common purpose, you recall the words of the Bible: "Of the making of many books there is no end. . . .''
From the college bred men and women who prepare the author's manuscript ("copy" to the printer), past the linotypers and monotype keyboard operators down through the hundred different steps required to print and bind a book the impression is always the same -pride in craftsmanship. The man on the machine, the girl at the bench, the workers in the mailing room, or in the box car the motor truckman at the shipping docks each glances up with a look that says: "I'm making books-books for all the world! ''
In this modern plant you come upon a fine employees' club room; next to it an enclosure with a sign over the window; "Kingsport Press Credit Union,'' an institution--the first of its kind in Tennessee-that belongs entirely to the employees with assets of over $100,000; a modern cafeteria with a soft drink and snack bars a day and night infirmary and first aid room presided over by a trained nurse; and many other ultra modern departments created solely for the betterment of those who work there.
The Press is a one hundred percent Union plant that has operated from 1922 without a strike or serious
[ 45 ]
labor disagreement from the start. Like management does everything in its power to provide conditions of the most modern type that shall maintain a desire on the part of the employees to be comfortable and happy in their work. These employees understand that there is a straight line relationship from the lowliest helper to the top executives, maintaining amicable discussion and adjustment of all problems. It is common sense dealing in a spirit of give and take.
Out of the mountains round about Kingsport have come these people, young and fresh and intelligent. They have learned a trade. They have grown older. They have prospered as the plant has prospered. They have married, built homes, raised children and sent them to the city schools. And already some of the sons and daughters of the earlier employees are finding happy and gainful employment with the same firm that their fathers and mothers joined as |novices in the printers' art many years ago. There is a corps spirit about the entire enterprise that is remarkable.
As you complete your trip around this example of advanced art in the printing industry, stop on the second floor of the main building. There you will come upon Colonel E. W. Palmer, a quiet gray haired man with keen eyes. He is the President of the company-the man who was prevailed upon to give up another business in 1925 and come to Tennessee to rebuild, develop and expand the facilities of this enterprise . Drafted by his country, commissioned a Colonel and given the task of organizing and operating the agendas of the War Department to produce the myriad publications with which to train the greatest army this nation has ever assembled, and to provide the printed matter and instructions with which the enormous fighting machine operates, he has
[ 46 ]
only recently returned to civilian activities. Before entering the Army he was called to Washington to establish, organize, and operate the mechanism of the War Production Board for directing the entire printing and publishing industry of the nation---newspapers, magazines, books, commercial printing and all the contributing services.
Altogether, the story of the inception and development of the Kingsport Press in the new Tennessee city is the story of vision and energy resulting in an industrial success that appropriately climaxes the growth of Tennessee printing.
VI
In 1638 the first press in the American Colonies was set up in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Henry Dunster and Stephen Daye. In that year the territory now included within the State of Tennessee was an absolutely unknown wilderness to white men. One hundred and fifty years later the first press was started in that terra incognita by George Roulstone. One hundred and fifty years later still, that is to say the present day, there are operating within the boundaries of the State approximately one hundred and seventy newspapers-weeklies, semi-weeklies and dailies; some ninety-five periodicals, and in addition about two hundred sixty commercial printing concerns of all kinds. Approximately one quarter of all the people employed in the trade are in Nashville, a fifth in Memphis, a sixth in Kingsport, a thirteenth in Chattanooga, and a sixteenth in Rogersville. And within thirty miles of the spot where Roulstone started his first venture in the State there has been developed the largest book production house in the world.
[ 47 ]