Digitized archive of Cashmere Valley Record unveiled at museum event

CASHMERE — At the Cashmere Valley Museum and Pioneer Village on April 22, the center was closed to the public, but only so that a group of volunteers could show off and celebrate what they’ve just made publicly available from the Cashmere Valley Record.

The history of the paper is a storied one, beginning in 1907, when the newspaper of record for the valley was the Wenatchee Advance, which had circulation in Cashmere, but was mostly comprised of stories about Wenatchee. After all, the town had only been called Cashmere for a few years by then, and the paper that had run since the name change from “Mission,” the Cashmere Democrat, was already out of print.

A new lawyer in town, Arthur Mohler, was attending a gathering of the Cashmere Commercial Club, and he offered to start a paper, if the Club would buy $40 worth of ads every week, purchased for an entire year. He may not have expected it, but they took him up on it, and the Record was born.

Over the years, the paper has changed hands quite a few times, but the purpose has remained the same: Wenatchee may be bigger, and the paper in Leavenworth may be older, and sure, some space had definitely been taken up in print about wandering cows and Girl Scout graduation ceremonies, but Cashmere is its own unique place and deserves its own representation with a newspaper.

Simply put, the stories of entire lives can be tracked through appearances in a small town newspaper, and the Record has faithfully reported all the details of every loose cow and Scout badge along the way.

When Ward Media purchased the Record, there was already a project underway by the “Friends of Old Mission” group from the Cashmere Museum to get the Record digitized for preservation. Not just an online edition, like the one Ward launched shortly after buying the paper, but an actual searchable archive, like the microfiche ones at the public library you used to have to use for reports in school way back when. But no fancy machines are required on the Washington Digital Newspapers website — you just pick the paper you want to look through and it’s all there, if the community has digitized it.

After some generous donations from the community, the Friends were able to spend thousands of hours archiving the paper from the sources they could gather. They hired someone to take the pictures of the pages, since scanning was out of the question for some of the priceless prints. They painstakingly curated all but just a few missing years that some enterprising person had secreted away with for unknown reasons.

The end result that Pam Wonn, Tom Hart and Mari Beckley showed off on Tuesday was the beautiful fruit of that tree of knowledge. The Friends were down one member before the end of the project — Dick Brender had been integral to the project, but passed before he could see it completed. There was a moving tribute to Brender during the ceremony, and his brother, sons and grandsons accepted a plaque on his behalf.

Nine years of research produced about 4,000 businesses, among them the expected “One hundred and ten fruit packing and cold storage companies, 25 gas stations, 23 barber shops, 47 grocery stores, 15 bakeries, 16 water companies, 106 buffets and restaurants, six banks and 41 new car auto dealerships,” according to Hart, who proudly went through a slideshow for the gathered crowd inside the Museum.

In fact, the group found out a lot more about Cashmere than just the history of commerce. During an explanation of how to use the website at washingtondigitalnewspapers.org, Wonn showed what happens when you search on a name — in the case of her example, Amos Pipkin. Just typing the name exactly as you see it here will produce lots of results, because the database is returning results for every instance of both “Amos” and “Pipkin.” But the fact is, the Pipkins have been in Cashmere since the early 1920s, and the first time the name Amos shows up in the Record is 1925, but it doesn’t have Pipkin at the end.

If you type in a name in quotation marks, like “Amos Pipkin,” there are just 5 results. You can know with certainty that it’s the exact person you were looking for.

One local writer, Michelle Timpe Quan, used the database when it first went online without fanfare. She’s a Valley lifer, and she knew that her mother, who has passed, would feature prominently in the digitized Cashmere Valley Record. She used the database to write a long-form history of her mother from her childhood on. Looking at this database, she got to see the Record report, for example, on June 2, 1960 how her mother — who had excellent grades in high school, got to speak at an assembly as part of a symposium of students with B averages or better. The database detailed when her mother sent bridal shower gifts to her friends. The Record remembers when her mom was installed as the Worthy Advisor of the Rainbow Girls.

Needless to say, the possibilities for news archaeology using this tool are endless if you’re from the area. And that was exactly the aim of the Friends of Old Mission. Yes, we should remember the history of the paper, and yes, we should celebrate the growth and success of the beautiful town of Cashmere.

But using this tool, we can delve into human history all the way back almost to the founding of Cashmere with more than just an oral tradition. We can see it in pictures of the original newsprint that wound up at your house as a subscriber. We can look back at the price of gas — and eggs — from the ads inside. And we can know for certain that Cashmere, from its time as the town of Mission to today, has been all about community.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media