Another Newspaper from Hudson's Past

Ever wonder about the Star, the newspaper that merged with the Hudson Register at some point in history to create what we now know as the Register-Star? Recently, seventeen years of the Hudson Weekly Star, from 1858 to 1875, were added to the vast collection of old newspapers at FultonHistory.com, so I decided to investigate and learn about the Star. For starters, here's the masthead:

For a dollar a year, payable in advance, one could subscribe to a publication that defined itself as "News, Agriculture, Temperance, Education." 

The Weekly Star was what today would be called an aggregator. Possibly at the time, it was known as a digest. It primarily published articles that had appeared in other newspapers in the Northeast and sometimes farther afield. For example, on the front page of the Weekly Star for November 4, 1858, there was a story with the headline "A Family Burned to Death," which told reported "one of the most appalling calamities that ever occurred in Kent County." Since I grew up just one county over from Kent County, my first thought was, "I didn't know there was a Kent County around here," only to discover that the story had originally appeared in the Grand Rapids (Michigan) Enquirer.

This same November 1858 issue of the Hudson Weekly Star also contained this interesting piece of very local Hudson news, which provides evidence of exactly when the horse ferry that once carried people across the river was replaced by a steam ferry. 

This drawing, provided to Gossips by a reader a while back, shows what "the old 'floating scow'" that was the horse ferry looked like. 

COPYRIGHT 2015 CAROLE OSTERINK