When The Mobile Register printed on paper made from okra

Ruins of the paper mill that made paper from okra plants.
The Mobile Register printed at least one edition on this paper.

Around 1868, Willis Gaylord Clark retired as an owner of The Mobile Register.

In 1852, Clark, a native of New York, had been a 24-year-old lawyer in the office of Campbell & Chandler and editor of The Southern Magazine. He served as a leader in Mobile’s Whig Party and for a time edited The Mobile Advertiser.

During the Civil War, the Advertiser and the Register merged under the ownership of Clark and John Forsyth.

A successful Mobile politician, businessman, author and newspaperman, Clark also served as a trustee of the University of Alabama. The university’s Clark Hall is named in his honor.

After leaving the Register, Clark turned to making paper at his mill in Beaver Meadows in northern Mobile County. For a time, the mill experimented with making newsprint from the fiber of the okra plant. The Register satisfactorily printed at least one edition of the newspaper on paper made from okra plants in Clark's mill.

Paper can be made from almost any plant fiber. Using agricultural plants such as okra, however, creates tremendous problems of supply, transportation and storage of the plants for processing. Large amounts of land also are needed to grow the okra. Eventually, tree fiber proved much more practical and economical.

The photos in this post show all that was left of Clark’s paper mill in the late 1980s.

Know Any Newsboys From the 1920s or '30s?

"There are a number of these young
newsboys in the Alabama cities"

In October 1914, socialist photographer Lewis Hine brought his camera to Mobile and took the photos of the newsboys on this post. The photos are from the Library of Congress

Until about the mid-1800s, The Mobile Register and most other newspapers didn’t sell the paper by the individual copy. In fact, in the 1830s the Register forbid its carriers from selling copies of the paper on the street or to deliver them to anyone other than regular subscribers.

The reason for this was simple. Newspapers needed to budget on a regular income and they could do that only with readers who usually paid in advance for a year’s subscription. And an individual paper cost too much for most people on the street to afford.

"One of Mobile's young newsboys
who begins work at daybreak."

There is no general history of Mobile newspaper boys, also called newsboys and newsies. Newspapers in big Eastern cities used newsboys first, but generally the Register and other small-city dailies used boys as street vendors about the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century.

The newsboys weren’t employees of the newspapers. They bought papers from the publishers and sold them as independent agents. Because they were not allowed to return unsold papers, the newsboys often worked late to hawk every last copy.

"7-year-old Ferris. Tiny newsie who did not
know enough to make change for investigator.
There are too many of these little ones
in the larger cities." The paper is The Mobile Item.

In 1899, New York City newsboys went on a two-week strike to get a better deal from Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York Morning Journal. Strikes weren't limited to big cities. Newsies struck in Butte, Montana, in 1914, and in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1920.

With unemployment growing in the late 1920s, men began replacing boys as paper carriers. The 350 street vendors for Mobile’s two competing newspapers, The Mobile Register and The Mobile Press, jostled one another for space on the city’s street corners. The conflicts sometimes became violent as the carriers burned bundles of their competitor’s newspapers and overturned delivery trucks.

"Newsboy."

Major changes were in store for newspaper carriers after World War II, but that is a topic for another post.

Do you know anyone who was a newsboy in the 1920s or '30s? How did he like it?

Stories from behind the headlines

This blog is all about the “inside story” or the “story behind the headlines.” I always have been as fascinated by the people who put out the news as much as by the news itself. Besides telling the stories I know, I also hope to call on the experiences of other newspaper men and women.

Two of those people are the husband-and-wife team of Thomas “Tom” Taylor III and Sandra Baxley Taylor.

Tom, a former Press Register executive editor, retired in 1994. In June 2000, the Press Club of Mobile honored Taylor for his many contributions to the newspaper profession and Mobile community. Sandy is a former Press Register reporter and editor and also is the author of several books.

Tom and Sandy each wrote a column for The Mobile Press Register as part of its 200th anniversary series titled “We Were There.”

In “Mobile had its share of sensational murders through the decades,” Tom recalled some widely followed murders, including that of

newspaperman Arch McKay.

In “Newsrooms, news coverage change but the power of words will always reign,” Sandy recalls the newsrooms of the 1970s and ’80s and some of the colorful characters who worked in them.

Take a moment to read their stories and you will get a better sense of what is was like to work on the Press Register and report on some of the most important stories in Mobile’s history.