Centre County Government

6. Newspapers

Bellefonte was seldom without a weekly newspaper after 1814, when it was a village of a little over 300 persons. In the early days of our new republic, when political parties struggled to think of what to do between elections, they all hit on putting out weekly papers. The presses printed legal and court documents—when the right party controlled the courthouse. Editors received their copy from "exchanges" with like-minded weeklies that came in the mail. Until the Civil War, weeklies "were filled with the doings of Congress, the bickerings of political parties, and foreign affairs," and almost devoid of local news. With only an editor and perhaps an assistant to write editorials, copy articles, and set up and print the four or so pages, news had to find its way to the office to get in. When something big happened, like the capture of Robber Lewis and his accomplice Connelly by a Bellefonte posse in late June 1820, the story could pass from paper to paper by more personal "exchanges." Two weeks later the Perry Forester told its readers how such an "exchange" came about:

The above information we have received from a young gentleman of respectable appearance direct from Bellefonte, who was passing through Landisburg on Thursday last.

Work on a Bellefonte weekly began the illustrious careers of the Bigler brothers. In 1831 John Bigler moved to Centre County to buy the 4-year-old newspaper Philip Benner had founded to help elect Andrew Jackson, the long-lived Centre Democrat. He bought it cut rate, because Jackson had disappointed Benner. John's brother, 17-year-old William followed him from Cumberland County to help with the paper. William was 21 when his brother sold the Democrat to study law. (John was to follow the gold rush to California in 1849 as a lawyer, and three years later became governor.) William also left Bellefonte in 1836, with a second-hand press, and founded the Clearfield Democrat. At 38 he was elected governor of Pennsylvania.

Fatherless William F. Packer apprenticed four years with Henry Petriken on the Bellefonte Patriot, then worked as a printer in Harrisburg for Simon Cameron on the Pennsylvania Intelligencer before buying his own paper in Williamsport, the
Lycoming Gazette. He collected political friends with every paper, defeated Andrew Curtin for the state senate in 1848, and became governor of Pennsylvania ten years later.

Probably the most notorious editor in the county was Peter Gray Meek, whose vehement anti-war and anti-Lincoln editorials in the Democratic Watchman got him arrested for treasonous statements five times during the Civil War—and elected to the state assembly immediately after. Following many terms in Harrisburg he returned an elder statesman and put out the most widely read weekly in the state.

The Democratic Watchman's Republican rival at the beginning of the 20^th century, the elegantly printed Keystone Gazette, imported editor Thomas Harter from Middleburg, where he was famous for his Pennsylvania-German "Bohneschtiel" column-and infamous for his attempts to phoneticize German pronunciation by English spelling.

In 1898 a State College weekly, The Times, got off to a trembly start. Bought by Claude Aikens in 1916, the weekly paper briefly became State College Times in 1932, then began daily publication as Centre Daily Times on April 2, 1934. Under the editorship of Jerome Weinstein, the paper gave wide coverage and support to the Aaronsburg Story celebration in 1949, which drew 40,000 spectators, the greatest attendance of county residents to a single non-sports event (a qualification necessary since Beaver Stadium's expansion to 96,000 seats).

Criticized for its weak coverage of world events by a large academic audience used to the New York Times, the CDT has made the difficult decision to cede national and international news coverage to cable television and internet sources, and to focus on in-depth local reporting. Complicated by the paper's dedication to teaching young non-local reporters fresh from college the ropes of local newsgathering, this effort is paying off with increasingly professional perspectives on well-defined local issues. This inversion of the performance of our county's earliest newspapers is a development wholly to be desired.