We have some exciting news to share with you today!
The Museums of the Bethel Historical Society has now finished uploading digital copies of the Oxford County Advertiser and Norway Advertiser spanning from 1882 to 1933, to the Internet Archive website.
The easiest way to search this newspaper, and all of our other digitized newspapers, is by using the Newspaper Search tool on our website. Just type your keywords into the text box on the left, choose a newspaper or region from the drop-down menu, and click search to be shown results on the Internet Archive website. When you click on a specific issue, it will bring up the full text of that issue with your search terms highlighted.
New discoveries await!
These newspapers are sure to be a boon to researchers and genealogists working on western Maine communities, and have already led to new discoveries. Christopher Dunham, creator of the Maine Genealogy website and Greenwood as It Was Facebook group, shared the following:
The Bethel Historical Society, under the leadership of Will Chapman, has begun uploading digitized issues of the Oxford County Advertiser and Norway Advertiser. They may be searched here:
I could not be more pleased with this development, as it will allow me to find and share more stories about the lower part of Greenwood. Let's start with this vivid description of a baseball game from the Advertiser of October 11, 1907:
Great game of ball on Patch Mountain. When a few of the Greenwood City ball team had gathered a sufficient number of recruits, ages nine to thirty to make a quorum, they sallied forth to play ball with the Patch Mt. boys. Defeat was a foregone conclusion with the Greenwood team, but being anxious to play one more game and determined to do their level best they went into battle with courage unquenched and ardor undiminished by the odds shown by the enemy.
When they arrived on the mountain the team from that place was already in the field, umpire and all. They had been there all the forenoon and ate their dinners standing up after the umpire had called "time." They had practised on the help to that extent that not a spear of grass was to be seen. Well, the game commenced with the city team at bat and the mountain boys in the field. Nothing doing. When the mountain boys came to bat the crowd began to make a noise, and every time a score was made you could hear harness bells, cow bells, sleigh bells and blue bells, all ringing at once.
Then there were conch shells, tin pans and wash boilers, to say nothing of other music furnished gratis too numerous to mention. Anything in the shape of wind instruments was at a premium as the wind up there blows something terrible and most of the time. It blew most of the city boys' scores off the card and they lost track of them, but the mountain boys mittened onto all of theirs and held on for dear life. No wonder the score got one-sided for half of the men are one-sided anyway, the wind having blown them so hard and often that they "lean toward Sawyer's."
John Gould offered an explanation of that last Maineism here:
