Map of Columbia County Newspapers, 1792-1900
Throughout its industrial development between 1792 and 1900, Columbia County produced 68 newspapers according to a variety of publication schedules. Some had titles that bore political stances–Democratic Freeman,The Hudson Republican, Equal Rights Advocate, Northern Whig–while others assumed more objective, journalistic titles, such as Valatie Weekly Times and Hudson Daily Star. This map depicts a network of area newspapers published in populous towns and cities, connected to one another and the world beyond by the development of railroad technology.
Data from the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America project shows that 15 newspapers in total sustained the reading public in Columbia County from 1792 to 1840; however, between 1840 and 1900, the age of the railroads, an additional 42 were added to the list for certain, with another 12 of uncertain dates falling somewhere in that period as well.6 The same technology that powered the railroads, the steam engine, triggered exponential growth in the newspaper industry, as “[steam printing] presses made it possible to push circulations much higher. The old Gutenberg-type printing press could print perhaps 125 newspapers an hour; by 1851 the [New York] Sun‘s presses were printing 18,000 copies an hour.”7
By and large, newspapers were published in Columbia County’s populous and commercially active towns and cities, which themselves were situated along the rail lines. Throughout this period, the 3 largest of these cities and towns accounted for between 59 and 62 of these 68 newspapers: Hudson had 37; Chatham published 12 (taking together Chatham Four Corners, Old Chatham, Chatham, and Chatham Village); and Kinderhook ran 10, or 13 if including nearby towns Niverville and Valatie, which would eventually become part of greater Kinderhook. The remaining titles were published in Hillsdale, Philmont, New Lebanon, and Stottville, all of which are likewise located along Hudson and Boston or New York and Harlem lines.
Newspapers were published in cities and large towns for several reasons. For one thing, they survived on advertising and so needed a generous and receptive immediate audience; even though newspaper distribution through the post and along rail lines brought in far-flung readers, newspapers tended to print matters of local interest, such as political items and agendas, the proceedings of local police courts, and of course, area advertisements.8 Between 1867 and 1890, revenue from advertisements at the national level surged from $10,000,000 to $71,000,000, indicating just how robust the market was for print advertising.9 In addition, newspapers needed to be connected somehow to the events being covered in their pages; increasingly, the reading public of 19th century America expected these events to fall within an ever widening radius of coverage. Bustling railway stations collapsed the distance between local newspapers and the world unfolding around them, as they serviced through-passengers from near and far, and sent and received telegraph messages.10
In Columbia County, this was no different. Hudson and Chatham, the county’s two busiest commercial hubs, rail junctures, and links to the markets and people of New York to the south, Boston to the east, and Albany on into the midwest and opening western frontier, supplied county residents with the most newspapers during this period. Kinderhook, located between Chatham and Albany on the Hudson and Boston line, also published a number of newspapers. The number and variety of these publications suggests that there was a lively, healthy market and reading public here, one connected to the rest of the country and, increasingly, the world, along the transformative communication technologies of the 19th century, the railways and the telegraph.
Whereas residents used the postal system to carve out space in between or even despite the vectors of rail lines and telegraph cables, the newspaper system was comparatively linear. After allowing for the stray coordinates of the Kinderhook and Hillsdale newspapers on my map, due to CartoDB’s clustering/spiderifying problem identified in my Methods section, there are relatively straight lines that connect the three major publishing locations for Columbia County newspapers during this period: the railways and their upper-storey mirror, the telegraph lines.
This second map, made using Carto’s torque visualization, shows the newspapering of Columbia County from 1792 to 1900. The torque visualization allows users to see a map in motion over time to gain a sense of the cumulative effect of their being published here.
End Notes
6. “Chronicling America « Library Of Congress”. 2016. Chroniclingamerica.Loc.Gov.http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.
7. Mitchell Stephens, 1994. “History Of Newspapers”. Nyu.Edu. https://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/Collier’s%20page.htm.
8. Henkin, 2006; Stephens, 1994.
9. Sidney A. Sherman, 1900. “Advertising In The United States”. Journal Of The American Statistical Association 7 (52): 119-162. doi:10.1080/01621459.1900.10502429, pp. 120-121.
10. Schivelbusch, 1986, pp. 28-30, 34-35.
