Sarah Hawthorn and Mike Forbes got quite the historical surprise when they started a renovation project at their Queen Street home.
As the couple started peeling back the layers of flooring put down over the years of their late-1800s home in search of original flooring, they found someone many, many years ago had used newspapers to help level and/or insulate the floor at some point.
“They were laid out flat, to fill in the undulations in the wood,” said Mike Forbes.
There were at least 50 of then, the oldest being copies of a 1908 Guelph Daily Herald, a paper in the Royal City from 1872 to 1924 that was eventually merged into the Guelph Mercury.
There were also copies of the 1933 Guelph Evening Mercury (cost: 3 cents), The Fergus News Record ($2 per year subscription) and a 1908 Toronto Mail and Empire, where advertisements offered three-quarters of an acre of property for $13,000 and downtown homes for $17,000.
“There were five or six layers of linoleum and hardwood that we went down through before we saw the newspapers,” Forbes said.
“We just kept going and going. No one had ever ripped it all the way down until we did - 100 years later,” Hawthorn said.
Just as surprising as the find was the condition the newspapers were in. Many of them readable and able to turn their pages.
What constituted front-page news of the day back then was a little different than these days.
While there was a healthy dose of world news, particularly from England, Scotland and Ireland.
Local news bulletins and odd tidbits like this one that appeared in the Nov. 6, 1908 Guelph Daily Herald under the headline “MYSTERIOUS DISAPEANCE CLEARED UP” (spelling mistakes were very common):
“POWASSAN, Ont. Nov. 5. - James Chambers, who mysteriously disappeared from his farm, 12 miles from here last July, has as mysteriously appeared.”
The advertisements are just as interesting: men’s tailored suits for $10.75 anyone? Or medicinal treatment that will help with your "unwanted discharges"?
Then there were the local “Personal Paragraphs,” where those leaving town for a few days would list their absence and where they had gone. Or, in the case of James Goldie, share the news that you were “recovering nicely” from a fall last Saturday.
Hawthorn said she plans on framing one of the newspapers for her home and will be checking in with the Guelph Museum and Guelph Public Library to see if they are interested in any of them.
Given the excellent condition of them, it’s likely they are.
