Under the Floorboards at Paradise: Saving Seattle Newspapers From 1927

A newspaper found in the Paradise Developed Area dig. Emma Rockenbeck.

The Paradise Developed Area dig was a multi-year archaeology project led by the archaeology team at Mount Rainier National Park. Under the floorboards of the Paradise Visitor Center it found newspapers that had been used as insulation between the baseboard and the floor. The finds spent a year in a freezer to rid them of any hantavirus, then went to the park's curatorial facilities. One June, Workforce Management Fellow Emma Rockenbeck processed them with Northwest Youth Corps fellow Audrey Nelson, archaeology intern Grace Atkins, curator Brooke Childrey and a group of volunteers.

Cleaning the papers

The pages were caked in red-brown dirt, stuck together and fragile with age, so each section was kept folded and laid on a long table covered with clean acid-free paper. Soft brushes swept away the loose dirt in smooth strokes, left to right, right to left, then diagonally, until no more came away; then the section was turned over and the process repeated. For what they had been through, the papers were in remarkably good shape.

Archaeology intern Grace Atkins and Northwest Youth Corps fellow Audrey Nelson process finds from the dig. Emma Rockenbeck.

What the papers held

Most were sections of The Seattle Daily Times of Sunday, September 11, 1927:

• full-page illustrated advertisements for tools, farm equipment, wagons, cars, real estate companies and shipping lines;
• a society section of gossip about rich and influential Seattle families, which to a modern reader resembles an upmarket tabloid;
• a fashion page advertising "Gay Tub Frocks to Buy This Fall", with drawings of dresses, hats and fur coats;
• headlines about Prohibition, an article marvelling that imitation leather on cars fooled even the experts, and Seattle called the "Queen City", alongside stories that still sound familiar: sensational local crimes, traffic safety reforms, political posturing, and laments about what society had come to.

The front page was the most striking. A noir-style illustration, splashed with vivid green, shows two prison guards, a convict in prison clothes and a priest in a long dark robe reading him his last rites, with an electric chair looming at the left, under the red headline "Electric Chair Inventor in Horror of his own Creation." Photographs at the right show Alfred Porter Southwick, the inventor of the electric chair, and Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, whose case was the issue's lead story.

The front page: "Electric Chair Inventor in Horror of his own Creation." Emma Rockenbeck.

Why ordinary things matter

Everything the dig found was once ordinary: glass bottles, jars, shards of pottery, nails, pieces of ceramic pipe insulation, buttons, combs, slivers of animal bone. Now each is a clue to how people lived, what they bought and wore, and what they valued. The builders of the visitor center thought nothing of stuffing a newspaper under the floor, just as people today wrap belongings in newspaper for a move or spread it under a painting project; someone who finds a paper from 2023 in an attic may be just as intrigued. News is history written as it happens, shaped into a story people can take in, which is why it is worth preserving both historic objects and contemporary ones of cultural significance, and studying them.

Sources

• National Park Service, Mount Rainier National Park, "Under the Floorboards: Preserving Newspapers from 1927," by Emma Rockenbeck, National Park Service Workforce Management Fellow in partnership with Northwest Youth Corps, for the series "A Day in the Life of a Fellow." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/under-the-floorboards-preserving-newspapers-from-1927.htm
• Corrected: "last rights" to "last rites".
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.