For the most part, earlier newspapers now out of print were compilations of dull advertisements and smatterings of what newspaper people today call news copy.

On the other hand, they’re goldmines of information, and little windows into the past. Simply fill in the blanks, read the ads, what there is of the stilted news reports, and you have inklings of what people did a century or more ago and what mattered most to them.

One of my pastimes is reading those old newspapers. Unfortunately, one of my regrets is that some of those old papers exist today only as archival copies, and while I have no choice and have to read them online, I don’t enjoy it. If that makes me a Luddite, then so be it. No apologies.

In earlier times people received most of their news from newspapers and by word-of-mouth. This often meant that thriving villages and towns, such as Canning, Windsor, Wolfville, and Kentville, had newspapers dedicated solely to serving their residents and only contained local news and gossip.

Windsor, a mini-city in its heyday, was served at one time by two newspapers – the Tribune, issued on Fridays, and the Hants Journal, issued on Wednesdays. The Avon Herald was being published in Windsor circa 1860, but it must have been short lived since there’s no evidence that it was running along with the Tribune and Journal.

By the time the railway was up and running, Kentville could boast of having two newspapers as well – the Western Chronicle and The Advertiser. The Wedge, first published weekly, then semi-weekly, also ran in Kentville for several years around 1898.

 I would dearly like to read hard copies, even online copies, of papers published a century ago in Hantsport, Canning, and Parrsboro. Canning was once a prominent shipbuilding and commercial port and it’s understandable that at its peak it would have a newspaper. The Kings County Gazette was published in Canning in the mid-1860s, followed by the Canning Gazette which began publishing in the village circa 1888. A few copies of the Canning Gazette can be found online.

But what about Parrsboro and Hantsport? What’s the story on the newspapers published there? Both communities are listed as having weekly papers in a directory published in New York in 1910, but I couldn’t find copies of them in newspaper archives. Despite the directory listing, I doubt a weekly newspaper existed in Parrsboro. However, Fergusson’s book on Nova Scotia place names indicates that two weeklies were published in Hantsport between 1894 and 1917. One of these papers, either the Advance (published from 1894 to 1912) or the Review (published from 1916 to 1917) had a circulation of about a thousand or so.

The directory I mentioned, which can be found in the library at Acadia University, is a compilation of magazines and newspapers published in Canada and the States. Since it also included statistics such as the population of towns with newspapers, the directory is an invaluable resource for researchers.

If you’re a researcher, be warned that determining the home base and establishing timelines for some of the early newspapers will be difficult. Before it became The Advertiser and published in Kentville, for example, it was called The New Star and was published in Wolfville. In the same period, in the mid to late 1800s, The Wedge was being published as a weekly in Kentville. Also in the same period, two weeklies were dated at Wolfville, but one was published in Kentville. The Canning Gazette merged with Kentville’s Western Chronicle in the 1880s and so on and so on.

One of the most interesting weekly papers I looked at recently is the Windsor Tribune. In his book on Windsor, Larry Loomer obliquely refers to the Tribune several times; but this didn’t tell me it was a long-running publication and a serious competitor of the Hants Journal.

Then I discovered a clipping in a scrapbook compiled in the 1940s closely connecting the Tribune with Kentville Publishing and The Advertiser. I’ll have more on this interesting bit of newspaper history in a future column.