Preserving History’s First Draft in Central Texas

Archived papers at Medina Valley High School (photo by Shari Biediger)

Ever since John McDaniel bought a property south of Lockhart in 2018, he had heard rumors of the silver mines on his land. According to legend, in the early 1800s, when Texas was still a part of Mexico, silver was discovered on his property. A group of Native Americans got word of this silver mine and plotted an attack on the land. The miners, looking to hide their wealth, buried 43 bars of silver somewhere on the property. Nobody has ever found that silver.

McDaniel always suspected the story was made up, but he remained curious through the years. Then, during Lockhart’s First Friday celebration in December 2023, he noticed that the Lockhart Post-Register had an open house.

There, he met the newspaper’s publisher Dana Garrett, who told him to take a look at the Lockhart Post-Register’s archive on the website NewspaperArchive to see what he could find. It turned out that the silver mines had been covered at fairly regular intervals by the local newspaper, as McDaniel found articles from 1949, 1959, and 1972.

“Old Silver Mine Legends Now Coming Back Into Popularity” the 1949 headline reads, as if announcing that low-rise jeans had come back into style. The 1959 story cited a man whose uncle had worked on the mines. The uncle, who had moved to Ohio, had a map with the location of the silver, but he died just before the pair planned to go out to find it.

Following his research, McDaniel still thinks there’s more legend than truth to the silver mine story, but he was impressed by the Lockhart Post-Register’s archives. “It’s cool that they’re preserving this medium where you can still go and look at it ... I mean, what a project to digitize all that,” McDaniel said.

Preserving newspapers is important business for Garrett and other newspapers and historians in Central Texas. Garrett, who bought the Post-Register in 1979, said he thinks “every newspaper man” understands this importance to some extent. “It’s our duty to protect that history,” he said.

But the Post-Register has been particularly prolific with its digital archives. According to Garrett, the newspaper has digitized over 115,000 of its pages. He has made such an effort to ensure that the newspaper endures and he has at least three versions of every newspaper: the hard copy, a microfilm version, and a digital version. He has tried to pass down the importance of having multiple versions (aka “redundancy”) to the younger generation in the newsroom.

Protecting these newspapers has become particularly important as an increasing number go out of business across the country. This is where Ana Krahmer comes in. Krahmer is the director of the University of North Texas Libraries’ Digital Newspaper Unit, which has become a hub for local institutions looking to archive their newspapers.

The UNT Libraries’ Digital Newspaper Unit has been around since 2008 and now has over 1 million newspaper issues and over 11 million newspaper pages from across the state that span centuries. “Our goal is to preserve any newspaper from Texas, from any time and any place,” Krahmer said. The first newspaper the unit digitized was The Ferris Wheel – a weekly from Ferris, Texas.

At times, the threat of losing a newspaper becomes existential for communities. Krahmer noted a town in the Texas Panhandle called Higgins with a population of 356 people. Unsure of how much longer the town will exist, Krahmer recalled members of the community telling her, “We want to save these newspapers, because at least it’ll save our history, even if we’re not here to maintain it.”

Of course, the digital archives also allow local communities to research their relatives or other details about their town. “A lot of the people we talk to tell me things like 'My entire family, going back to 1870, is in this newspaper, and I see them in the cemetery, and I want this newspaper online to go down to research and learn about them,’” Krahmer said.

This is the type of resource that Shari Biediger wanted to see made available when she was reporting on a story in Castroville, outside of San Antonio. In 2021, Biediger, a reporter for the San Antonio Report, published a story about the tragic demise of The Castroville News Bulletin. The newspaper’s publisher, Natalie Spencer, who had been financially keeping the operation afloat, died in a car crash on April 2, 2020. The newspaper’s team wrapped up their final issue on April 15, 2020.

While reporting the story, Biediger tried to find old newspaper archives but realized nothing was available online. Instead, the newspaper archives had been given to the Medina Valley High School journalism department for storage and use. When she got access to the archives, she found them haphazardly strewn on shelves. “I was just marveling at the history that these newspapers contain, and how much the people of Castroville would appreciate having access to them,” she said.

After getting permission to move the archive, Biediger connected with Krahmer. “I’d give my eyeteeth for those papers,” Krahmer told Biediger. Krahmer drove a van down to pick up the newspapers in October 2022. The first newspapers were available online by August 2023. Now there are 51,030 pages across 5,258 issues of various iterations of Castroville newspapers going all the way back to the 19th century available online.

Thus far, Biediger said she’s heard people have used it for genealogical research. And it turned out that it wouldn’t take long for Biediger to start using them herself. She moved to Castroville last year, and her new home had a pair of graves behind the house. She found a newspaper that mentioned the tombs, the oldest of which has a death date of 1879.

Indeed, the older the newspaper, the more microscopic the small-town newspaper’s coverage seemed to be. Biediger referenced articles about the salads served at a church gathering or who had dinner with whom. There’s a richness to the mundanity.

“The stories that really bring the community together are in those newspapers, and it’s just a snapshot of time that you can never get back,” Biediger said. “Even to know what the cost of turnips were at the local grocery store back in a certain year just provides such a texture to the history that you can’t find in other sources.”