Battle of Mobile Bay brings the Civil War to the Register's backyard

Battle of Mobile Bay, 5 August 1864 (1890), by Xanthus Russell Smith. The monitor ships are CSS Tennessee (left), shown surrendering, and USS Chickasaw (foreground). Admiral Farragut's USS Hartford is right
 and USS Winnebago, left.

The Mobile Register reported in its edition of Aug. 3, 1864, that 23 Union warships had gathered in the Gulf of Mexico off the entrance to Mobile Bay. This buildup of warships indicated a pending attack.

Register owner John Forsyth confidently wrote that forts Morgan and Gaines at the mouth of the bay, the Confederate bay fleet and other defenses would send the federal ships to the bottom.

On Aug. 5, 1864, Union Rear Adm. David G. Farragut steamed past Fort Morgan and into history as he damned the torpedoes and captured lower Mobile Bay.

Farragut and Captain Percival Drayton standing by the wheels
of a Dahlgren howitzer on the quarter deck of the squadron flagship,
USS Hartford, 1864. U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph.

In series of editorials about the action, Forsyth sharply criticized Lt. Col. John K. Williams of Mobile for the surrender of tiny Fort Powell, which guarded Grant’s Pass in the Mississippi Sound. Forsyth called the minor action in the battle for the bay a “disgraceful surrender.” 

The article so offended Williams that he sent Forsyth a letter “as usually precedes a challenge.” But Williams accepted a follow-up article as an apology from Forsyth and the editor was not forced to defend himself on the field of honor.

Union forces were content to control the bay for the time. Mobile would continue under the Confederacy for another eight months. But the end of the war was becoming increasingly obvious, although Forsyth and the Register would not surrender until forced to do so.

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.

Civil War military censors tried to control the news

Union fleet passing Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip below New Orleans.

The Civil War marked the first time military leaders used electrical communication to fight a war.

Military officials in both the North and the South also realized that the news reports coming over the telegraph could give the enemy valuable information about the disposition of troops.

As might have been expected, military officials began trying to control telegraph transmissions.

The Mobile Advertiser and Register had trouble getting the news out to the rest of the South when a federal naval squadron under Capt. David G. Farragut battled its way up the Mississippi River past forts Jackson and St. Philip on the night of the April 24, 1862.

Telegraph operators in New Orleans quickly flashed the news to Mobile where the Register reported that the South’s largest city lay open to the federal fleet. Military censor at Mobile, over the Register’s protest, attempted to block transmission of the news elsewhere. Every report had to be shown to the general in command in Mobile before it was put into type. Such censorship remained a problem throughout the war.

What stories of the Press Register can you share?

One corner of The Mobile Press Register in the days before computers.
From left: Mignon Kilday, Gordon Tatum and Sylvia Hart

I wrote two columns for The Mobile Press Register as part of its 200th anniversary series titled “We Were There.”

In the first, I recalled the afternoon of June 30, 1981, when I encountered a hostage situation in the office of then-Mobile Mayor Robert Doyle, who was being held at gunpoint by a former policeman. I agreed to talk to the disgruntled man and became a hostage myself. You can read the story here.

The second column focuses on colorful newsroom personalities of the past century. Read it here.

Do you have a story you would like to share?

Press Register begins '200 Years in 20 Days'

The Mobile Press Register as it was when I was there 1979-94.

In case you haven’t seen it, The Mobile Press Register is marking the 200^th anniversary of the newspaper with a series of features called "200 Years in 20 Days."

The series includes the news, sports and entertainment events that have occurred since 1813. The first installments today include stories about the events that led up to Mobile being acquired by the United States from the Spanish and the massacre at Fort Mims during the Creek War of 1813-14.

The series also will include “We Were There” features in which current and former employees and other writers provide their first-person accounts of reporting on some of the top news stories of the last 50 years. I’m one of those the paper has asked to write a first-person account. It will appear sometime by the end of the month.

I am looking forward to reading the other accounts by former colleagues and by MPR staffers I never knew.

I, too, am looking to former staffers to include their stories here. If you have a suggestion for a post, then please contact me.