An article of interest from the Olean Times Herald online edition.  4 August 1999

"Angelica Historian's Discovery Uncovers Truth About Republican's Roots"  by John Anderson

BELMONT - Angelica will celebrate its heritage this weekend with its annual Heritage Days festival, and an item purchased at an auction this past weekend should provide another reason to celebrate. Angelica Town Historian Bob Dorsey was nosing through items to be auctioned off at the Burt Funeral Home last weekend when he found a bound book of old newspapers. And one of the newspapers may help prove what some in Allegany County have argued for years: that Angelica is the birthplace of the Republican Party. The Towns of Angelica and Friendship had documents showing the existence of the GOP in 1854, but Congress voted and authorized Ripon, Wisc., as the birthplace with documents showing a party there around 1852. But one of the newspapers, the Angelica Republican from September of 1831, has an article announcing sending Republican Party delegates to the county and state senatorial convention. Allegany County Historian Craig Braack said he believes that at that time, the two major parties were the Wigs and the Democrat-Republican party. Mr. Braack was contacted by Mr. Dorsey about the papers, as the cost of preserving them would be too expensive for the Angelica Library. Mr. Braack then attended the auction, and the bidding on the papers started at $10. He out-bid a man he didn't know, and won the old newspaper collection with a bid of $120. "Here, we have the Republican Party, by name, in September of 1831 and it's utterly spectacular," said Mr. Braack. "I'll contact the National Republican Party and see if their historians are interested in this, if it's deemed accurate." As for the papers from Angelica being found in Angelica, a town with the motto "where history lives," Mr. Braack said, "This is why Angelica is the gem in Allegany County's crown. There are marvelous things there and it comes at a perfect time to push Heritage Days." Mr. Braack's first order of business will be exhausting his historian's budget to preserve the papers and get them put onto microfilm. "The bad news is papers from the mid- to late 1800s have a higher acid content than the rag weave content of the Civil War-era papers which could survive hundreds of years," Mr. Braack said. "Ninety percent of the books in our library are ticking time bombs waiting to disintegrate and it scares all of us in the field. Some of the old newspapers . . . you touch them, they disintegrate." Mr. Braack said he's contacted the state library in Albany and the papers will be taken to a conservator, a person trained to handle archival materials, and each paper will be unbound, making it easier for microfilming. They will then be sprayed and put in capsules for the public and schools to view them.
The old newspaper collection was put together by Angelica Republican Editor LaMont G. Raymond on July 1, 1898, who wrote that he wanted them to stay in the area. Mr. Braack said there are 50 or 60 separate newspapers from Angelica, Nunda, Pike and Wellsville. Today, Oramel is a small town outside of Belfast with a fire department and a diner, but an 1855 paper shows what a booming town it once was. "There is a magnificent 1855 Oramel paper, which was a weekly paper published in Oramel," said Mr. Braack. "That was a gem, and that was a major stop on the canal because Oramel was a one-third of the way between Rochester and Olean ... it was a big place" back then. The oldest paper is an 1806 Hartford (Conn.) Courant, and Mr. Braack says "the only thing I can imagine, is when somebody had made up their mind to migrate from Hartford to Angelica, they brought that last issue as a keep sake, which is why it survived in the album. "In terms of history, they are spectacular. There are marriages and deaths otherwise you would have no idea about whatsoever because there wasn't a state law for licenses until 1890," Mr. Braack said. "Socially, I can learn about businesses, postmasters, shops, wagon makers, every type of business we have no record of. You didn't need a permit to open a business, you simply opened up your shingles and hung a sign." Thumbing through the papers and finding more information each page, Mr. Braack said "This was the best $120 I spent for the county in a long, long, long time. A spectacular purchase."




Russell V. Combs Jr.
Ph.D. Program
Dept of History
SUNY-Albany