With the centennial of the sinking of Titanic in the news all weekend, I wanted to see how the tragedy was covered in small-town North Carolina papers. There is a rapidly-growing list of titles available in the North Carolina Newspapers digital collection, so far we have only one title from 1912: The Mebane Leader, a weekly paper nominated for digitization by the Alamance County Public Libraries.
The first issue of the paper to come out after the Titanic disaster was on April 18, 1912, a few days after the ship sank. While North Carolinians in the early 20th century didn’t have the vast array of information sources that we do today, I suspect that news of this magnitude would have reached town before the weekly paper was published, which might explain why the sinking of the Titanic received a smaller headline than a bank robbery in Hillsborough. Then again, the paper may simply have placed a higher importance on local news.
The story itself is pretty short, and focuses almost entirely on the wealth of the passengers on board, rather than the tragedy of such a large and dramatic loss of life.
