185 things you may have not known about The Telegraph and Macon

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Telegraph is celebrating its 185th birthday Tuesday. Macon’s oldest business began operating Nov. 1, 1826. In honor of the anniversary, Telegraph columnist Ed Grisamore has compiled 185 nuggets about the newspaper -- from the people who have worked here to the events that have shaped our history and legacy. The six-part series concludes Sunday.

The Telegraph began as a weekly on Nov. 1, 1826, three years after the incorporation of the city of Macon. At the time, Macon was a small settlement with a population of about 800. The first newspaper appeared with four pages of five columns each. It had no headlines, photographs or local news stories.

The Telegraph is the city’s oldest business. Macon was founded in 1823. Christ Church began in 1825. Three other downtown churches -- First Presbyterian, Mulberry United Methodist and First Baptist -- all started in 1826, the same year as the Telegraph.

Myron Bartlett was The Telegraph’s founder, owner and publisher. Bartlett was a pharmacist from New Hampshire who later married into the prominent Napier family of Macon. Bartlett wrote in the first edition that the purpose of the paper was to “disseminate useful news and to advocate fearlessly the rights of the people.” He also spoke of the local advantages of Macon as “an emporium for literature, as well as commerce.” A subscription cost $4 a year.

It became the city’s first daily newspaper on Oct. 17, 1831, when it was known as The Daily Macon Telegraph. In the first edition, the paper “begged pardon for its shortcomings. A candid public we trust will not condemn it for its size nor despise it for its leanness until time and sustenance is afforded it to grow larger and fatten up.”

It is the second-oldest paper in Georgia, the ninth-oldest in the South and the 27th-oldest in the United States. It is second in the state in longevity behind the Augusta Chronicle, which was founded in 1785. The seven other older papers in the South are the Charleston (S.C.) News-Courier; the Clarksville (Tenn.) Leaf-Chronicle; the Nashville Tennessean; the Mobile (Ala.) Register; the Fayetteville, N.C. (Observer); the Arkansas Gazette; and the Selma (Ala.) Times-Journal.

The golden eagle has been the symbol of the newspaper since 1856. The 691-pound cast pewter statue is 4-feet high with a 92-inch wingspan. It was a gift to publisher Joseph Clisby by his brother-in-law, who lived in Baltimore. It was placed on the third-story gable when the newspaper’s offices were located at the corner of Cherry and Cotton. Later, it was mounted on the front of the Telegraph building at 456 Cherry St. and remained there until the newspaper moved to 120 Broadway in 1961. It was repaired and restored by Mercer’s art department in 1988 and is now on display in the front lobby.

The Telegraph’s Golden Eagle Awards program has recognized Middle Georgia high school seniors for the past 34 years. The ceremony, held each April at the Grand Opera House, recognizes students for academic and community achievement in 12 categories: art, citizenship, drama, English & literature, foreign language, industrial-vocational, journalism, mathematics, music, science, social studies and technology.

Speaking of eagles, The Telegraph (and others) were victims of a news hoax in February 1987. A staff photographer joined curious onlookers to view what was believed to be an American bald eagle in a tree visible along Interstate 16 near the river. A color photo appeared in the newspaper the next day, and the event was reported by a Macon TV station. The eagle, actually made of plaster and foam, was placed there by local environmentalists to call attention to the plight of the endangered bird.

Philemon Tracy, a former editor of The Telegraph, was a major in the 6th Georgia Infantry and died in the Battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862. Antietam, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, was the bloodiest one-day battle in American military history, with more than 23,000 soldiers either killed or wounded. But instead of being buried with the rest of his family at Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon, Tracy’s final resting place was Batavia, N.Y. Historians there have long claimed Tracy holds the distinction of being buried farther north of the Mason-Dixon line than any Confederate soldier killed during the war. He is also believed to be the only Confederate officer moved from a battlefield and buried on Northern soil.

In Tracy’s farewell editorial before leaving for war, he wrote: “I have two reflections which I shall cherish with satisfaction. The one is that I have never been found occupying the extreme Southern ground, and the other is that no great man has ever made me his trumpeter and no little man has made me his ladder.”

Before the founding of The Telegraph, the Georgia Messenger was started by Maj. Matthew Robertson at Fort Hawkins on March 16, 1823. Three weeks after the first issue, Simri Rose bought a controlling interest in it. Rose, who was originally from Bedford, Conn., was one of the city’s founding fathers. (Rose Hill Cemetery is named after him.) At the time, Fort Hawkins was considered “the boundary of civilization,” and parcels of land were being sold across the river for the beginning of the city of Macon. The Telegraph purchased the Messenger in 1869.

The Telegraph encountered difficulties operating as a daily in 1831, and it became a semiweekly renamed the Georgia Telegraph on Oct. 3, 1832. It returned to weekly status on Sept. 21, 1851, and was called the Weekly Georgia Telegraph. It returned as The Macon Daily Telegraph on Jan. 10, 1860. The Macon Daily Telegraph again struggled as a daily in the 1860s after much of its staff went to fight in the Civil War. Paper and ink were in scarce supply.

Joseph Clisby, the son of a Massachusetts shipbuilder, became owner and editor of The Telegraph in 1855 and ran the newspaper for 26 years. A champion of public education, he came to Macon after overseeing several newspapers in Florida, including one in Tallahassee.

In 1884, a 16-year-old Telegraph employee named Jerome Balaam Pound, who worked in the composing room, invested $8 and founded The Macon Evening News, an afternoon paper. He used the money to buy a used printing press and enough paper to print 500 copies a day for six days. It was an old rotary press that had to be turned by hand. He sold the News for 10 cents a week. It was a one-man operation until he sold it four years later.

Pound was a native of Dooly County and worked to support his widowed mother. He had set type, cleaned floors and made deliveries for the Barnesville newspaper. When he asked for a raise above $2 a week, he was turned down. He quit and went to work in Macon. Pound sold the News for $5,000 in 1888 and moved to Chattanooga, where he became a tycoon after founding The Chattanooga News and a major hotel. He also founded papers in Memphis and Knoxville and opened hotels in Atlanta, Savannah and other cities across the South.

For 50 years (1911-61), the Joseph N. Neel department store was located next door to The Telegraph on Cherry Street. But the relationship goes back even further. On Feb. 22, 1889, Neel placed an advertisement on page 8 of the Telegraph. It continued every day for the next 98 years, becoming a fixture in the top left corner of page 2A. The last daily ad ran on Aug. 17, 1987. The streak was noted in Guinness World Records as the world’s longest-running newspaper ad. The store closed in 1993 after 107 years in operation.

Joe and Cecil Coke opened a photography studio on Cotton Avenue in 1934. A year later, Cecil was hired as the paper’s first press photographer and engraver. His job was to run the paper’s one-man engraving department, which was located in an upstairs room at the offices on Cherry Street. Coke’s knowledge of the engraving process came from a book he had checked out from Washington Memorial Library. The Coke brothers expanded their studio to include a camera dealership and were the first in Macon to handle Kodak film processing. After a fire in 1944 destroyed the studios, Coke’s moved to its current location on Cherry Street.

The newspaper’s home page made its debut as www.macontelegraph.com on April 22, 1996. In the early stages of the Internet, when newspapers were just entering the online fray, Macon Telegraph Online (MTO) offered reader subscriptions for dial-up connections at 28,000 bits per second at a monthly rate of $9.95.

The newspaper’s current website, www.macon.com, now receives an average of 6.1 million page views and 600,000 unique visitors each month.

The “Telegraph” name was already in use some 11 years before Samuel Morse invented the electromagnetic device called a telegraph. The word was defined as “distance writing” and was applied to anything used to send coded messages such as military bugle calls, Indian smoke signals and African drum messages.

Eugene Anderson went to work as a printer’s apprentice at The Telegraph in 1884. He was with the paper for most of the next 77 years. He died in 1961 at the age of 94. He penned his final column, called “Around the Circle,” a few days before he died.

W.T. Anderson followed his brother Eugene’s footsteps to Macon in 1885. He started as an office boy and was foreman of the composing room from 1893 to 1914. He started buying into the paper, and he and his brother P.T. bought the rest of the stock in 1914. He was publisher and editor until 1940, when his nephew Peyton Anderson Jr. assumed control.

W.T. Anderson campaigned for economic opportunity for black residents, added a “colored page” to the news content, was active in Democratic politics and was instrumental in the establishment of highway construction, most notably U.S. 41.

In 1917, Anderson introduced a special section with a page of news specifically for Macon’s black community. It was called Social and Personal News of Our Colored Community. It was one of the first of its kind in the South, and it continued until 1969, when it was integrated into the rest of the newspaper.

J.H. Owens was the first editor of that section. Over the years, a number of prominent black educators, ministers and writers served as editor.

Mildred Henderson was longtime editor of the black community section. She graduated from Ballard Normal High School in 1939, attended Selma University and worked as both a waitress at Camp Wheeler and at a local dime store before The Telegraph hired her in 1951. She later became a receptionist and “mother hen” of the newsroom until her retirement in 1990.

Charles Bayne was a longtime associate editor of both the Telegraph and the News from 1917 to 1949 and also worked as correspondent for the New York Times and the New York Post. He was an editorial writer for the Baltimore News and Washington Post. He wrote an estimated 40,000 editorials and continued to write a column until a few months before his death in 1959 at age 88.

Before Bayne arrived in Macon, he worked at The Atlanta Journal, where he shared an office with Don Marquis. It was there that he helped provide the inspiration and creativity behind the characters of a cynical cockroach named Archy and his alley cat friend, Mehitabel. Marquis wrote a widely read column called “Archy & Mehitabel” in The New York Evening Sun and later in several books. The Archy character would roam the newspaper office at night after everyone had left the building and write satire and poems about life in the city on an old typewriter.

Anticipating the need to expand, owner Peyton Anderson led the effort in 1958 to purchase railroad property between Broadway and Fifth (now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) bounded by Riverside Lane. The Telegraph acquired 254 feet along Broadway and 450 feet on Riverside.

The Telegraph spent exactly 50 years (1911-61) in its offices at 456 Cherry St., and this year it is celebrating its 50th anniversary at 120 Broadway, moving into the new facility at the corner of Riverside Drive in February 1961.

This story was originally published November 1, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "185 things you may have not known about The Telegraph and Macon."