Taken back 100 years ago, few of us would recognize San Luis Obispo County at the turn of that century. Save the missions and the hills, few of the familiar landmarks would be around that would remind us of the area where we now live.
The small SLO downtown would be practically treeless; the roads were dirt, and a horse-drawn transit system would take you where you wanted to go. Around the county, you would find no Hearst Castle, no Mid-State Fairgrounds, no town of Halcyon, not even the old Paso Robles Carnegie Library. That wouldn’t be built for seven years yet.
So much has changed in the last 100 years that we were wondering how best to capture that as the 1900s draw to a close (though not the 20th century as trivia-minded would be quick to point out). We settled on the Decades Project. For the next 10 weeks the center of our paper will be dedicated to creating a newspaper page that never could have really existed. Our fake newspaper sums up the news from a decade of SLO County history, with each page offering a snapshot of who we were.
And what a history it’s been: Teddy Roosevelt, Laurel and Hardy, Nikita S. Khrushchev, and Carrie Nation all made their mark on San Luis Obispo County this century. As have earthquakes (fortunately not one centered here), floods, droughts, fires, and wars (including one that came to our coastline).
Taking on this formidable chore was our newest staff writer, Jen Stevenson, who scoured old newspaper clippings, history books, photos, and old postcards. Her task was not only to find information about the decades’ top stories, but also to write in the journalistic styles of those time periods. Similarly, art director Alex Zuniga was charged with creating a look for each decade that represented how newspapers appeared at that time.
This effort was aided to a great extent by workers of the SLO County Historical Society. Despite having all their documents warehoused during the seismic retrofit of the county museum, society staff gave us access to photos, articles, and other information necessary to give a complete picture of the county’s century.
In any project of this nature, some condensation is necessary. In each decade we only had room for between six and 11 stories. But what you’ll find over the next 10 weeks is a mixture of the big stories and the small ones, each of which tell us something about who we were at that point in history.
So take a look back with us at the century that was and how we got where we are today. Æ