Cameron County Press Archive

            Cornelius B. Gould (1826-1897) arrived in Emporium, Pennsylvania, on the last day of February 1866, recruited from Binghamton, New York, by a group of Cameron County Republicans who wanted a local newspaper reflecting that party’s politics. Gould, a native of Cherry Valley, New York, had worked with three newspapers in that state.

            In an 1888 memoir published in J.H. Beers’s The History of Cameron County (1890), Gould said that his first impulse upon arriving in Emporium was to get on the next train back to New York, as “a more desolate looking place, or one more uninviting to embark in the enterprise of establishing a newspaper, could rarely be found. The only view that met our eye, on stepping from the cars, was the towering mountains, woods, and stumps.” Gould stayed, despite the discovery that the equipment provided from the defunct Smethport Citizen consisted of a hand press and some type. The Cameron County Press was launched in March 1866 and was an immediate success, allowing Gould to buy a new Gordon press.

            Cameron County, located in the Allegheny Mountains wilderness of Pennsylvania, was formed in March 1860 from parts of Clinton, Elk, McKean, and Potter Counties, and named for United States Senator Simon Cameron, of Lancaster. Edward Shippen settled in the area along Sinnemahoning Creek (emptying into the West Branch of the Susquehanna River) around 1810, and the community was known as Shippen in 1861 when chosen as the Cameron County seat. The name was changed to Emporium when the town was incorporated in 1864. Emporium, a Latinized form of the Greek word for market or center of trade, reflected the citizens’ (all 800 or so) hopes for prosperity.  Lumbering and its adjuncts of sawmills and tanneries were the largest industries in town in the late 1800s. Emporium’s population increased by almost 86 percent (to 2,147) between 1880 and 1890, and the Press thrived, claiming 800 readers, despite a major setback when the plant burned down in November 1877. In 1890, a new industry --explosives manufacturing--arrived, and the Climax Powder Plant later supplied explosives for constructing the Panama Canal. At least three other explosives factories opened later, supplying the needs of the country during World War I and underscoring Emporium’s nickname, “Powder City.”

           Gould died in May 1897, and there was a seamless takeover of the Cameron County Pressby his son-in-law, Henry H. Mullin (1851-1916), a Carlisle native who had arrived in Emporium in 1867 and immediately joined the Press. Mullin made few changes to the newspaper, which remained six columns wide and eight pages long, and continued to cover local news in depth through columns titled “Personal Gossip” and “Death’s Doings,” while serialized fiction by famous authors of day including H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle was featured on page one. Of special interest were letters (March 11, 1897) from local residents who had gone to Alaska as gold prospectors in 1896; reports (August 1896) on the local reunion of the famed Bucktail Regiment, the 42^nd Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry of the Civil War, whose men had come from Cameron and nearby counties; and news reports (September 4, 1902) of the explosion of the nitroglycerine building at the Keystone Powder Works, “the third shock of the kind in eleven years.”