His hand in the steam press

On a Wednesday in December 1855, Daniel W. Burroughs was working his steam press in Fort Wayne when it caught his hand. The press crushed it and cut it. He was the editor of the Standard, the town's abolition paper.

The news reached print that Saturday, 22 December, in the paper across town that had spent eighteen months arguing with his. The Fort Wayne Sentinel was the Democratic paper, and it set the item under a printer's pointing hand.

"We are truly sorry to learn that Mr. Burroughs, editor of the Standard, met with a severe and painful accident of Wednesday, by getting his hand badly crushed and cut while working his steam press. We hope he may speedily recover."

Burroughs had been in the Sentinel for nine years by then, and never before as news. In December 1846 he signed an advertisement for a patent syrup sold "at the Book Store". The next autumn the paper printed a marriage performed "by Elder D. W. Burroughs". In August 1850, at a public meeting on cleansing the city, a speaker named Nelson told the crowd that the board of health had been vigilant, "especially Mr. Burroughs, who had been indefatigable in his efforts to have every thing removed or cleansed that might be injurious to the public health." The same issue carried a death notice. Levi Judd, 76, had died on the 12th "at the residence of his son-in-law, D. W. Burroughs, in this city."

In June 1854 he started the Standard. The Sentinel did not notice the first issue. By September it was calling the new paper "the organ of the abolition wing of the fusion party in this place." In October it reported that the Standard's publisher was "about to try the experiment of a Daily paper in Fort Wayne", and added: "We wish him every success, but at the same time we have not much faith that it will pay at present."

The two papers disagreed about nearly everything and shared the same trade. In April 1855 the Sentinel's paper makers failed it, and it went to press that week on paper Burroughs lent. The Sentinel thanked him in print, and said the obligation was a renewed one.

Then came the press and the hand. Six weeks after the first notice, on 2 February 1856, the Sentinel printed a second.

"THE STANDARD at this place has been discontinued, Mr. Burroughs, the editor, being incapacitated by the injury he received from getting his hand crippled by his steam press, from attending to the editorial duties. Although opposed to the abolition views of Mr. B. we give him credit for great zeal and honesty of purpose in their advocacy, and wish him ample success in any business he may hereafter undertake."

That is the end as the town was told it at the time. The histories remember it differently.

The county history of 1880 gave the Standard two accounts on a single page, and they do not agree. In the first, Thomas Cook sold the Laurel Wreath to Burroughs in 1854 and the Standard started in its stead; the daily, it says, was published by Mr. Cook, and in March 1856 "Mr. Cook sold to R. D. Turner". A few paragraphs down, Cook sold the Laurel Wreath to Burroughs in June 1854, Burroughs began the daily that November, and continued both papers "until in March, 1856, when he sold to R. D. Turner, who discontinued them and founded the Fort Wayne Jeffersonian." In 1917 B. J. Griswold told it the second way, in the same order: Burroughs ran the paper two years, and then it was sold.

None of those books mentions a hand or a press. The injury was reported twice by the Sentinel, and by the Fort Wayne Times in the week it happened, and it did not reach any of them. Whether Turner bought the plant from Burroughs, and when, no paper from those weeks says. Turner's Jeffersonian may be what the March date belongs to. The Standard had stopped a month before.

Nor does the record settle that the hand was the only cause. Peggy Seigel, the historian of the paper, read the Standard's own surviving pages and the Times, and wrote in 2001 of "a combination of problems." The Sentinel named one.

Neither notice is signed. Both came from a paper opposed to everything the Standard printed, and the second said so in the same sentence in which it gave Burroughs his credit.

After February 1856 the Sentinel carried his name only in a list of agents for a patent medicine, an advertisement dated the previous November that ran on into April. Then it stopped carrying it at all.