Loveland Reporter
In 1907, the Loveland Reporter was a six-column, eight-page broadsheet published every Thursday.
Estes Park didn't have a newspaper until 1908, while in 1907, Loveland had three.
Where should we go to learn about the history of our town in 1907? As of April 2018, as far as Larimer County newspapers, the state-funded Colorado Historic Newspaper site had only digitized (or had only made available the digitized version of) the weekly edition of the Fort Collins Courier from 1907. One paper for the entire history of Larimer County in 1907. Entering "Estes Park" as a search term yields 115 hits (of which 3 of these refer to an individual named "Estes Park Taylor", related only in the sense that he was named after Estes Park), meaning researchers (and not just historians, this includes genealogists and property owners of older Estes Park homes/businesses) interested in Estes Park in 1907 currently have access to 112 articles or public notices that mention Estes Park.
These 112 clippings are only a tiny, tiny fraction of what was going on in Estes Park in 1907. Some of you have probably already made more than 112 FB entries or tweets in the first three months of 2018. Enos Mills alone probably said or accomplished 112 noteworthy things in 1907, or visited 112 different towns on his lecture tour, or met 112 different interesting people, or fired 112 of his staff.
Yet those of us living in Estes Park, and interested in having more answers than questions, or at least the capability of having the chance to answer some of those questions, are told to be happy with what we are being provided. Here's 112 mentions of Estes Park, peasants. Go entertain yourselves in some other way, by attending a bad local play or searching for pikas based on manufactured history, a pretend packaged history in this wonderful book for $27.95, "The History of Nothing" written according to one individual's fantasies and half truths, an Estes Park historian who wasn't around full time until 2012, and certainly wasn't alive in 1907.
And the paucity of information publicly available from 1907 is no different (and certainly no better) than 1906, or 1905, or 1904, or 1909, or 1910, as far as Larimer County newspapers available for amateurs and the unchosen (so Estes Park history the public is able to determine for itself), compared to the large number Larimer County newspapers that were published.
What is so special about our county's taxpayer-supported museum directors and staff, that only they are allowed to dole out information and access? What are they doing to make this information available? Well, they are obviously requesting more money from the taxpayers. Whether or not it costs $10 per issue or $100 per issue to digitize a run of newspapers, the public is just told "give us more money", and expected yet again to be satisfied with the results, however meager, they dole out.
I came to Estes Park a decade ago and decided I didn't want my answers provided for me, especially by those pressed into service or whose degree was in another field. What I have been advocating for the past decade, and what I have been actually doing, rather than waiting for others to do, or waiting for contributions to do, is not evil, or criminal, or wrong in any sense. I've been acquiring and saving hard copies of Colorado newspapers, and executing a plan to make the information contained in them available to the public. I don't really care if "the opposition" scans (unless they scan badly) the only remaining copies and converts these scans to searchable text, provided the scanning doesn't damage the papers, and provided they don't say "Mission Accomplished" and throw away the hard copies after scanning. (Actually I do care, deeply, but the people who own (generally by squatters' rights) or inherit the newspapers don't listen to me, so I've resigned myself to not caring.) As long as their are hard copies that haven't been damaged by their greasy or clumsy approach, I can extract the information correctly.
So every Sunday, just because I can, just because all the folks who hate me can't stop me, I type in another two pages of a Larimer County newspaper. Currently it's the 1907 Loveland Reporter, which contains, on average, 4 direct mentions of Estes Park or an Estes Park individual each issue, and 10 indirect mentions, as far as people who used to live in Estes Park, or are going to live in Estes Park.
J.J. Duncan, whose name graces our American Legion post, had a father and a mother (no surprise), and they were married in 1907. Our paper didn't cover this, because we didn't have a paper. His parents didn't live in Estes Park yet in 1907, but it helps to have someone who knows a bit about Estes Park history curating published information that doesn't itself yet know its importance to Estes Park's history. Ultimately, since everyone is connected to everyone else somehow, every word ever published in every Larimer County paper in 1907 needs to be correctly spelled and searchable for Estes Park to have a fighting chance of understanding and reconstructing its past. And, make no mistake, even after this is accomplished, after all the 1907 Larimer County newspapers and yearbooks and pamphlets are digitized and searchable, Estes Park still will have more questions than answers. Because ephemera printed for public consumption in no way reflects the be-all and end-all of information. Diaries, letters, interviews, initials carved on trees - All of these are sadly lacking, and I can't think of anyone else in Estes Park even remotely interested in recovering these things. Think about the 6-year-old girl who was recently run over on Elkhorn Avenue. Even in 2018, if it were up to our newspapers, we would only know her age. Without some archiving all of social media, we will never know, restricted to looking back at saved newspapers, what her name was, or whether she lived or died.
It takes me about two hours to type in two newspapers pages (which equates to 7-9 pages of a Word document using 12-point font and standard margins, the range depending on the size of the advertisements), and I am not compensated in any fashion for the work, except for the joy of transiently (because I'm not a computer) knowing more about Estes Park than anyone will likely ever know. I wish other people in Estes Park or Loveland (imagine, Loveland being interested in its own history) would join in the effort - Think how, instead of it taking one person one year to type in one year of a bound volume of one Loveland newspaper, 50 people could do it in one day.
I wish those people who couldn't type, but who are going to end up giving money to the Estes Park or Loveland Museum to duplicate my efforts, would just give the money to me, to help pay for electricity and for making this information freely available on a website that is not supported by advertising or grant money.
I know, in 50 years, long after I'm dead, researchers are going to compare the horrid results from automated scans with my tedious, painstaking efforts to essentially retype Larimer County newspapers in a digital format and say, "Thank you, person whose name I don't recognize, person who was not given any accolades or awards during the time this was being undertaken, and was instead attacked and belittled and ignored, thank you for caring enough about my history to do something the right way. I couldn't locate the marriage of my ancestors using their product, but I had no trouble finding it using yours, plus three other mentions of their activities following the marriage, including the honeymoon, the return home to a charivari, and the birth of their first child 11 months later."
And I already know this, and believe me, while I'm typing, I laugh, and laugh, and laugh. Einstein may or may not have said "Only two things are infinite - The universe and human stupidity, and I'm not so sure about the former" but you don't need to be an Einstein to recognize stupid.
Where should we go to learn about the history of our town in 1907? As of April 2018, as far as Larimer County newspapers, the state-funded Colorado Historic Newspaper site had only digitized (or had only made available the digitized version of) the weekly edition of the Fort Collins Courier from 1907. One paper for the entire history of Larimer County in 1907. Entering "Estes Park" as a search term yields 115 hits (of which 3 of these refer to an individual named "Estes Park Taylor", related only in the sense that he was named after Estes Park), meaning researchers (and not just historians, this includes genealogists and property owners of older Estes Park homes/businesses) interested in Estes Park in 1907 currently have access to 112 articles or public notices that mention Estes Park.
These 112 clippings are only a tiny, tiny fraction of what was going on in Estes Park in 1907. Some of you have probably already made more than 112 FB entries or tweets in the first three months of 2018. Enos Mills alone probably said or accomplished 112 noteworthy things in 1907, or visited 112 different towns on his lecture tour, or met 112 different interesting people, or fired 112 of his staff.
Yet those of us living in Estes Park, and interested in having more answers than questions, or at least the capability of having the chance to answer some of those questions, are told to be happy with what we are being provided. Here's 112 mentions of Estes Park, peasants. Go entertain yourselves in some other way, by attending a bad local play or searching for pikas based on manufactured history, a pretend packaged history in this wonderful book for $27.95, "The History of Nothing" written according to one individual's fantasies and half truths, an Estes Park historian who wasn't around full time until 2012, and certainly wasn't alive in 1907.
And the paucity of information publicly available from 1907 is no different (and certainly no better) than 1906, or 1905, or 1904, or 1909, or 1910, as far as Larimer County newspapers available for amateurs and the unchosen (so Estes Park history the public is able to determine for itself), compared to the large number Larimer County newspapers that were published.
What is so special about our county's taxpayer-supported museum directors and staff, that only they are allowed to dole out information and access? What are they doing to make this information available? Well, they are obviously requesting more money from the taxpayers. Whether or not it costs $10 per issue or $100 per issue to digitize a run of newspapers, the public is just told "give us more money", and expected yet again to be satisfied with the results, however meager, they dole out.
I came to Estes Park a decade ago and decided I didn't want my answers provided for me, especially by those pressed into service or whose degree was in another field. What I have been advocating for the past decade, and what I have been actually doing, rather than waiting for others to do, or waiting for contributions to do, is not evil, or criminal, or wrong in any sense. I've been acquiring and saving hard copies of Colorado newspapers, and executing a plan to make the information contained in them available to the public. I don't really care if "the opposition" scans (unless they scan badly) the only remaining copies and converts these scans to searchable text, provided the scanning doesn't damage the papers, and provided they don't say "Mission Accomplished" and throw away the hard copies after scanning. (Actually I do care, deeply, but the people who own (generally by squatters' rights) or inherit the newspapers don't listen to me, so I've resigned myself to not caring.) As long as their are hard copies that haven't been damaged by their greasy or clumsy approach, I can extract the information correctly.
So every Sunday, just because I can, just because all the folks who hate me can't stop me, I type in another two pages of a Larimer County newspaper. Currently it's the 1907 Loveland Reporter, which contains, on average, 4 direct mentions of Estes Park or an Estes Park individual each issue, and 10 indirect mentions, as far as people who used to live in Estes Park, or are going to live in Estes Park.
J.J. Duncan, whose name graces our American Legion post, had a father and a mother (no surprise), and they were married in 1907. Our paper didn't cover this, because we didn't have a paper. His parents didn't live in Estes Park yet in 1907, but it helps to have someone who knows a bit about Estes Park history curating published information that doesn't itself yet know its importance to Estes Park's history. Ultimately, since everyone is connected to everyone else somehow, every word ever published in every Larimer County paper in 1907 needs to be correctly spelled and searchable for Estes Park to have a fighting chance of understanding and reconstructing its past. And, make no mistake, even after this is accomplished, after all the 1907 Larimer County newspapers and yearbooks and pamphlets are digitized and searchable, Estes Park still will have more questions than answers. Because ephemera printed for public consumption in no way reflects the be-all and end-all of information. Diaries, letters, interviews, initials carved on trees - All of these are sadly lacking, and I can't think of anyone else in Estes Park even remotely interested in recovering these things. Think about the 6-year-old girl who was recently run over on Elkhorn Avenue. Even in 2018, if it were up to our newspapers, we would only know her age. Without some archiving all of social media, we will never know, restricted to looking back at saved newspapers, what her name was, or whether she lived or died.
It takes me about two hours to type in two newspapers pages (which equates to 7-9 pages of a Word document using 12-point font and standard margins, the range depending on the size of the advertisements), and I am not compensated in any fashion for the work, except for the joy of transiently (because I'm not a computer) knowing more about Estes Park than anyone will likely ever know. I wish other people in Estes Park or Loveland (imagine, Loveland being interested in its own history) would join in the effort - Think how, instead of it taking one person one year to type in one year of a bound volume of one Loveland newspaper, 50 people could do it in one day.
I wish those people who couldn't type, but who are going to end up giving money to the Estes Park or Loveland Museum to duplicate my efforts, would just give the money to me, to help pay for electricity and for making this information freely available on a website that is not supported by advertising or grant money.
I know, in 50 years, long after I'm dead, researchers are going to compare the horrid results from automated scans with my tedious, painstaking efforts to essentially retype Larimer County newspapers in a digital format and say, "Thank you, person whose name I don't recognize, person who was not given any accolades or awards during the time this was being undertaken, and was instead attacked and belittled and ignored, thank you for caring enough about my history to do something the right way. I couldn't locate the marriage of my ancestors using their product, but I had no trouble finding it using yours, plus three other mentions of their activities following the marriage, including the honeymoon, the return home to a charivari, and the birth of their first child 11 months later."
And I already know this, and believe me, while I'm typing, I laugh, and laugh, and laugh. Einstein may or may not have said "Only two things are infinite - The universe and human stupidity, and I'm not so sure about the former" but you don't need to be an Einstein to recognize stupid.
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