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The Traveler… the battle of Queenston…
October 22, 2012 by The Traveler · Leave a Comment
Today I journeyed to Boston, Massachusetts by way of the Columbian Centinel dated October 24, 1812. I found several reports in regards to the battle of Queenston, Canada. The reporting begins with Col. Van Rensselaer’s troops having crossed the Niagara River into Upper-Canada and that the batteries in Queenston were attacked . It is stated that Fort George was to have been immediately attacked with troops in Buffalo joining them. Further reports continue with actual loss of the battle and the Col. Van Rensselaer being shot and Gen. Wadsworth being missing, assumed dead. It is interesting to read the different accounts within one issue.
~The Traveler
October newsletter from Timothy Hughes Rare & Early Newspapers…
October 16, 2012 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
Each mid-month Timothy Hughes Rare & Early Newspapers… History’s Newsstand sends an e-newsletter to their members and collector friends. This month’s edition is shown below. Please enjoy.
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There must be a man in the moon…
October 12, 2012 by TimHughes · Leave a Comment
The “Bellows Falls Intelligencer” newspaper from Vermont, issue of May 10, 1824 has an interesting article reporting evidence of life on the moon (see). It’s interesting that astrological science was so rudimentary in 1824 that this report was to be believed by those who read it, although providing some humor when read today.
The Traveler… “The Birdman”, Lincoln Beachey… the irony…
October 8, 2012 by The Traveler · Leave a Comment
Today I traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico, via the ALBUQURQUE MORNING JOURNAL, dated October 8, 1912, where I found that they were having their 32nd Annual State Fair with the top-billing being Lincoln Beachey, the world’s greatest “birdman”. Beachey would be racing between his Curtiss bi-plane and a man on a motorcycle as well as dare-devil flying stunts with his hands off levers and body swaying, dips and deadly spiral dive. “…’I will watch the motorcycle, though, and not Beachey,’ said this man, ‘for to watch Beachey gives me palpitation of the heart’…”
On the last page of the issue is the report that the train carrying the body of Charles Walsh to San Diego would be stopping at Albuquerque. Walsh was an aviation dare-devil who died just a few days earlier when his plane crumbled mid-air and crashed to the ground. Walsh had appeared at this fair the year prior performing aerial stunts … ironically Walsh was trained by Beachey.
~The Traveler
Identifying newspaper reprints… a collector’s story…
October 5, 2012 by GuyHeilenman · Leave a Comment
We recently received an e-mail from a collector who informed us that she had used information from the Timothy Hughes Rare & Early Newspapers website which enable her to identify (unfortunately) that an issue she had obtained (Baltimore Patriot & Weekly Advertiser, September 20, 1814) was a reprint. While disappointed, she decided to post her experience on the web to help educate (and protect) others. Rather than us tell her story, please allow her to share her experience in her own words: OH MY GOSH…I FOUND A REAL TREASURE!
Newspaper Confederate bank note creates a crisis…
October 1, 2012 by TimHughes · 2 Comments
Having recently come across the Feb. 24, 1862 issue of “The Philadelphia Inquirer” (see photo) it reminded me of what this innocent looking front page image of the Confederate five dollar note did in creating a crisis in the Confederate Treasury.
Several months ago the “Opinionator” blog of the New York Times did a very nice piece on the fascinating history of this note and its consequences, which we share with our collectors:
In March 1862, an unusual ad began appearing in Northern newspapers. Among the shops selling pianos and patent medicines, sheet music and sewing machines, this one stood out: it promised “perfect fac-similes” of Confederate currency. There were seven kinds of notes for sale, and testimonials from The New York Tribune and others praising the replicas for their high quality and low prices. Five cents bought you one. Two dollars bought a hundred. Fifteen dollars bought a thousand. The word “counterfeits” never appeared. These were “Mementos of the Rebellion,” sold by a Philadelphia shopkeeper named Samuel Curtis Upham.
Upham didn’t look like a counterfeiter. He didn’t hide out in the woods or perform daring jailbreaks. He didn’t run from the police. He was a respectable small-business owner and devoted Northern patriot. He ran a store that sold stationery, newspapers and cosmetics. But he was also an entrepreneur with an eye for easy profit, and the Civil War offered the business opportunity of a lifetime: the ability to forge money without breaking the law. Confederate currency, issued by a government that was emphatically not recognized by the Union, had no legal status in the North, which meant Upham could sell his “fac-similes” with impunity.
Over the next 18 months he built the most notorious counterfeiting enterprise of the Civil War — one that also happened to be perfectly legal. His forgeries flooded the South, undermining the value of the Confederate dollar and provoking enraged responses from Southern leaders. He waged war on the enemy’s currency, serving his pocketbook and his country at the same time.
Upham first got the idea the month before, on Feb. 24, 1862. That day, customers kept coming into his shop to buy The Philadelphia Inquirer. Puzzled, he asked one of them what made that particular edition so popular. The answer was on the front page: the Inquirer’s editors had printed a copy of a five-dollar Confederate note. Philadelphians had never seen Rebel money before and were fascinated by it.
Upham saw a chance to cash in. He raced to the Inquirer’s offices, bought the plate of the note, and printed 3,000 copies on French letter paper. They sold extremely well. Along the bottom of each bill, he included a thin strip that read, in small print, “Fac-simile Confederate Note,” with his name and address. The tags could easily be clipped off, transforming the “fac-simile” into an excellent counterfeit.
After his first print run, Upham rapidly expanded his inventory. He took out ads in newspapers, promising to pay in gold for more specimens of Southern money. At first, it seemed possible that he sincerely thought of his reproductions as souvenirs. In early 1862, most Northerners still expected the war to be brief and glorious. They wanted “mementos of the Rebellion” before the Union crushed it. By the time Upham launched his publicity campaign in March, however, his business had clearly evolved from a modest retail operation into a high-volume wholesaling enterprise. No one needed 1,000 souvenirs: people were clearly using his products for a less innocent purpose.
By April, Upham’s fakes began appearing in Richmond, the Confederate capital. They caused a sensation at the Confederate Treasury Department, and a Treasury officer persuaded the editors of the Richmond Daily Dispatch to inform the public about the new threat. “This note is well calculated to deceive, and in nearly every particular is a fac-simile of the original,” they wrote, condemning the forgeries as “Yankee scoundrelism.” In May, the Dispatch discovered one of Upham’s notes with the margin bearing his name and address still attached. “Who is this man Upham?” they asked. “A knave swindler, and forger of the most depraved and despicable sort.”
By then, Upham had grown his business considerably. In an advertisement published in late May, he claimed to have sold half a million notes in the past three months. He now offered 14 varieties of Confederate notes, postage stamps, and “shinplasters” — fractional bills worth anywhere from 5 to 15 cents — and printed his fakes on real banknote paper. Ingeniously, he even fulfilled orders through the mail. For 50 cents, plus 18 cents for postage, customers throughout the Union could have a hundred of Upham’s notes delivered.
Southerners responded with outrage. They became convinced that Upham belonged to a covert Union plot to devalue the Confederate dollar. For the Philadelphia shopkeeper to be able to advertise his counterfeits openly and send them through the mail meant the authorities must have given him permission or, possibly, material support. Moreover, Union troops spent counterfeit Confederate cash in large quantities — evidence of “a deep laid scheme on the part of the thieving, counterfeiting North … to undermine the Confederate currency,” in the eyes of the Daily Richmond Examiner.
In the summer of 1862, Upham’s notes inundated northern Virginia, brought by Union forces marching south from Washington. A Southern journalist observed men “fortified with exhaustless quantities of Philadelphia Confederate notes,” which they used to buy everything from horses to sugar to tobacco. When one of the soldiers ended up a prisoner in Richmond, the Confederates found one of Upham’s advertisements on him. The shopkeeper’s counterfeits appeared “wherever an execrable Yankee soldier polluted the soil with his cloven foot,” fumed the Richmond Daily Dispatch.
By the summer of 1862, as fake cash flowed across the border in ever greater quantities, the Confederate leadership took notice. On Aug. 18, President Jefferson Davis discussed the threat in a message to the Confederate Congress. Counterfeit Confederate notes were “publicly advertised for sale” and furnished to “the soldiers of the invading army” with the full “complicity” of the Union government, Davis declared. Later that day, Confederate Treasury Secretary Christopher Memminger submitted a report to the House of Representatives that reiterated Davis’s concerns and singled out Upham’s role in the crisis: “[P]rinted advertisements have been found stating that the counterfeit notes, in any quantity, will be forwarded by mail from Chestnut street, in Philadelphia.” By then, forged bills had been found far from the Union border, in Atlanta, Savannah, Montgomery and other cities of the Deep South. There was “no means of knowing to what extent they have been circulated,” the Richmond Daily Dispatch warned.
Hamstrung by a disorganized government and mounting logistical challenges, the Confederacy couldn’t stanch the surge of counterfeit currency. Despite Southern claims, however, it’s unlikely that the Union government ever actively promoted the forging of Confederate money. Federal authorities most likely found it easier to ignore the forging of Southern bills than to take a position either for or against it. They certainly never interfered with Upham, who freely continued forging Confederate cash until August 1863. By that time, the value of the Southern dollar had fallen so low that it was hardly worth counterfeiting. During the 18 months that Upham operated his venture, the purchasing power of the Confederate dollar disintegrated. Between February 1862 and August 1863, the value of Confederate paper money fell by ninety percent.
Upham wasn’t the only reason behind this collapse. Fake cash plagued the Confederacy from the beginning, supplied by Northern and Southern counterfeiting gangs. Gross mismanagement of Southern finances led to runaway inflation, which posed an even greater danger to the Confederate dollar. But Upham’s impact was significant. He later estimated that he had produced $15 million worth of Confederate bills. If all of that ended up in the South, it would have made up almost 3 percent of the total money supply — a large amount for a single counterfeiter. In March 1862, his business had only just begun. Over the next year and a half, he would become one of the strangest success stories of the Civil War: a legal counterfeiter, driven by patriotism and personal gain, who struck at the financial heart of the Confederacy from the safety of downtown Philadelphia.
The Traveler… Surrender of Detroit… New Orleans takes a blow…
September 24, 2012 by The Traveler · Leave a Comment
This week I am traveling through Boston, Massachusetts, via the Columbian Centinel dated September 26, 1812, where I found the reporting on the “Surrender of Detroit” and “Gen. Hull’s Official Account”. The Surrender report is a “Letter of Col. Cass, of the army late under the command of Brigadier-General Wm. Hull, to the Secretary of War…”. Gen. Hull’s report includes “…The surrender of Michilimackinae opened the northern-hive of Indians and they were swarming down in every direction… the Wyandots, Chippewas, Ottawas, Pottawatamies, Munsess, Delawares, etc. with 
whom I had the most friendly intercourse, at once passed over to Ameherstburg, and accepted the tomahawk and scalping knife…” “…On the evening of the 7th and morning of the 8th inst. the army… recrossed the river, and encamped at Detroit… Nothing, however, but honor was acquired by this victory; and it is painful consideration, that the blood of 75 galiant men could only open the communication as far as the points of their bayonets extended… On the 15th, I received a summons from him to surrender fort Detroit, of which the paper marked A is a copy. My answer is marked B… On the 15th, as soon as Gen. Brock received my letter, his batteries opened on the town and fort, and continued until evening… It now became necessary either to fight the enemy in the field; collect the whole force in the fort; or propose terms of capitulation… I feared nothing but the last alternative…” and more.
There is also an article pertaining to New Orleans. It seems that what may had previously been reported in earlier newspapers as a tornado hitting the city is now being reported as “…one of the seven year hurricanes of that country — but its effects were more destructive than any of the preceding ones…” . The article continues with further information on the destruction in the city, ships, surrounding areas and loss of lives.
~The Traveler
The Wright Brothers… from a friend…
September 21, 2012 by GuyHeilenman · 2 Comments
The following note and corresponding image was sent to us by a friend of the hobby. Please enjoy.
Hi to the good folks at Timothy Hughes Rare & Early Newspapers.
This article (see image below) is from the bottom of the front page of The Evening Herald of Fairhaven and Whatcom, Washington state, Dec. 18, 1903. It is a rare front-pager. I don’t believe the Wright Brothers wanted the publicity being in a race to get the air machine patent, and I don’t think many editors believed the first reports of powered flight.
This paper came from a bound volume. It is in excellent condition and I’m glad the editor had the sense to put it on the front page, even at the bottom. The newspaper is now called The Bellingham Herald.
I’ve been collecting newspapers since 1969 and really enjoy your website, blog and catalog.
Mick Boroughs
MyAuctionFinds’ Interview of Tim…
September 17, 2012 by GuyHeilenman · 1 Comment
MyAuctionFinds recently interviewed Tim (Timothy Hughes Rare & Early Newspapers) to obtain his thoughts on the value of Kennedy Assassination and Obama Election newspapers. Please enjoy:
Next year will be the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. On that fateful day, newspapers around the country – some of them still afternoon papers– blared the story in big bold headlines.
Millions of newspapers were printed and sold, and families scooped them up to read every morsel about a shooting that was unbelievable. Many saved those papers as a reminder of that day and time, likely not thinking that someday they may be worth more than the few coins they paid for them…
Read The Entire Interview At: The value of your JFK and Obama newspapers…
“The United States of America”… humble beginnings?
September 14, 2012 by GuyHeilenman · 2 Comments
One of our rare newspaper friends recently discovered an interesting news item regarding the (potential) first use of “The United States of America” as referring to the American colonies. If true, the first use appeared in a newspaper – a Revolutionary War Era issue of The Virginia Gazette. To add to the intrigue, the origin of the phrase still retains an element of mystery as the article in which it appears was merely signed, A Planter. Thanks to the Byron DeLear of The Christian Science Monitor, and to NBCNEWS.com for bringing this to light. To view the entire article, please see: Who coined ‘United States of America’? New twist to mystery…