BUIES CREEK -- In the stacks of Duke University's library is a collection of handwritten newspapers that tells the odd story of an eccentric journalist who copied out the news to a list of subscribers that numbered 100 readers.
On April 9, 1861, John McLean Harrington, Harnett County's first journalist, wrote - by hand - to warn readers of his The Weekly News of a threat: "We learn that Lincoln has sent troops around South. If it is to continue [to] the seceding states, we may look for warm work in a few days. Whatever may be their destination, it looks rather suspicious. We hope it may be only a sensation [sic] rumor."
Today, April 12, marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. Harrington's April 16, 1861 issue of The Weekly News gave readers a Gatling gun burst of dispatches reporting the news that Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard and his Confederates had forced U.S. Maj. Robert Anderson to surrender the Union garrison of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, beginning the war.
While Harrington did no original reporting, he provided his rural community in the Sandhills 30 miles south of Raleigh with a voice. Before he died in 1869, he published 302 different issues of newspapers that he wrote out by hand, up to 100 copies of each one. As postmaster, he knew his community well and circulated his papers in the now-defunct town of Harrington, not too far from present-day Broadway in Lee County.
By age 18, John McLean Harrington had already proven that he was something of a prodigy. He began teaching school at age 15. To write his newspapers, he used red, blue or black ink, whatever he could find. He began in 1858 with The Young American, which included news, short stories, commentary, wedding announcement and jokes.
In an April 1858 Young American, Harrington drew a hand pointing to a joke that read: "Two well draped shoemakers being in company were asked their profession by a very inquisitive personage. Says one of them, 'I practice the heeling art.' 'And I,' added the other, 'labor for the good of men's soles.' "
With amateurish humor and cursive handwriting that remains hard to read, Harrington gave readers in his area a record of life before, during and after the Civil War. He used his handwritten papers to unite farmers living in grinding poverty who sensed that life was changing. After the war, Harrington left the Democratic Party, became a Republican and told President Andrew Johnson that he was always faithful to the Union.
Why copy out his newspapers by hand? Harrington lived in a community wracked by denial. A new way of life was coming, with railroads, telegraphs and industries dependent on the meshing of mechanical gears. The community of 1858 still valued the old ways. By handwriting his newspapers, Harrington provided a visible symbol that the community could participate in the news of the day without having to acknowledge that mechanical industries would dominate the nation of the future. By using a method of production that dated to ancient times, Harrington demonstrated, at least momentarily, that the tide of modernity was not inevitable.
The libraries at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke contain examples of his work. The Harrington Papers, as they are known, are all that is left of the man and his rural community, but the story he tells is one that lives on in the faded ink of the Tar Heel past.
Michael Ray Smith is professor of Communication Studies at Campbell University.
