An editor whose paper, wrecked by fire, kept printing

The offices and printing plant of The Glen’s Falls Messenger were destroyed in a massive fire that swept through downtown on May 31, 1864, consuming 112 buildings and houses.
Yet editor and publisher Norman Cole did not miss putting out an issue of the weekly newspaper, thanks to the help of a competing newspaper publisher in Sandy Hill, now Hudson Falls.
“At the time the fire broke out, we were printing the first side of The Messenger, which was all destroyed, with press and nearly everything else,” Cole reported in the paper’s June 3, 1864 special “Phoenix Edition.”

The morning after the fire, E.D. Baker, publisher of The Sandy Hill Herald, sent a message: “Friend Cole — My office is at your disposal.”

Cole, working out of a barn in Queensbury, printed the June 3 edition on a small hand press that had been salvaged from the fire, using type and ink that Baker provided. Subsequent editions were printed temporarily at the Sandy Hill newspaper’s plant.

Cole had been associated with the paper since 1858 and had been its full owner for about a year. He received a $1,000 insurance payment, of which $500 went to pay off the mortgage.

After other costs were met, he had $468.33 — the equivalent of $17,326 in today’s dollars — to rebuild, according to H.P. Smith’s “The History of Warren County,” published in 1885.
Cole accomplished the task and relaunched operations at Glens Falls in September, after purchasing a new cylinder press.

Well respected by his peers in the newspaper business, Cole was still running the Messenger more than 20 years after the fire when Smith compiled his local history.

“He has risen to an honorable position in the great field of journalism and can look back upon his life, as far as it has passed, as one well spent,” Smith wrote in 1885.

Cole’s career would continue until October 1890.
“After thirty-five years of active and hard labor in the business, Mr. Cole has for some time felt it necessary to retire,” The Morning Star, a Glens Falls daily newspaper, reported on Oct. 17, 1890. “He has never recovered from the grip and during the summer was quite ill, although his health is now much better than it has been.”

“There comes a time in the affairs of man when a change is desirable, if not inevitable,” Cole wrote in the Messenger on Oct. 31, 1890, announcing his retirement. “For more than thirty years, a period of an ordinary generation, the undersigned has had the care, responsibility, and almost constant watch as publisher and editor of The Messenger.”

The Rev. George B. Gow, a community leader and pastor of First Baptist Church, wrote a tribute to Cole.

“You have adapted your paper to the wants of the people. You have not shown yourself avaricious or unduly ambitious,” Gow wrote, in part. “You have avoided the sensationalism which is the greatest vice of modern journalism.”

Cole sold the paper to A.C. Johnson, the son of former U.S. Rep. F.A. Johnson, R-Glens Falls, and C. H. Starweather, who had been the paper’s assistant editor.

The new owners kept on Cole’s staff.
“The politics of this paper will remain unchanged, continuing in the future, as in the past, to uphold the principles of the Republican party,” the new owners wrote in an editorial on Nov. 7, 1890. “We shall enlarge the departments of the paper and fill its columns with all the latest news of the day.”

The Messenger had endorsed every Republican presidential candidate since John Fremont in 1856, two years before Cole became associated with the paper.

Cole’s editorials often traded barbs with The Glen’s Falls Republican, a longtime rival weekly, which, contrary to its name, was aligned with the Democratic Party.

The new owners of the Messenger made one noticeable change: They dropped the apostrophe from “Glen’s Falls” on the paper’s masthead — reflecting a use of punctuation that was no longer common in the village.

After his retirement, Cole remained active in freelance writing, historical research, Republican politics, mineralogy and gardening for nearly 30 more years until his death on May 16, 1919, at age 84.

His gardening prowess was often a topic of local news reports.
“Norman Cole, upper Glen Street, had asparagus from his garden for dinner Wednesday,” The Morning Star reported on April 30, 1895.

“Norman Cole … picked a cluster of full-blown pansies in his garden Monday,” the Star reported on Dec 15, 1897.

“Norman Cole had new potatoes from his garden for dinner yesterday,” the Star reported on June 16, 1899.

Another year, the early birds got Cole’s almost-ready-to-pick peas.
“Norman Cole, who had some fine early peas just ready to gather on Saturday, was unfortunate enough to have the vines stripped by black birds,” the Star reported on June 21, 1902.
But the 1902 gardening season was not a bust.

“Norman Cole has some very fine specimens of Groil’s hybrid gladiolas, including the rare blues, purples and heliotrope shades,” the Star reported on Aug. 30.

Cole also had a variety of other flowers, vegetables and fruits in his garden that year.

 

Maury Thompson was a reporter for The Post-Star of Glens Falls for 21 years before retiring in 2017. He now is a freelance writer focusing on the history of politics, labor and media in the region.