Anyone who reads the Nashville City Paper or NashvillePost.com with regularity is familiar with the work of E. Thomas Wood, the veteran reporter who’s been alive and kicking in local journalism since the 1980s. These days, in addition to his regular journalism duties and assorted other projects, Wood has taken on a project that brings back words written about Nashville long before he was even born. Old News takes a look back at the stories that Nashville was talking about – and the stories from Nashville that the rest of the country heard – as far back as the 1780s. From tales of Captain Tom Ryman, to the goings-on at legendary radio station WSM, to the origin of East Nashville’s own Lockeland Springs, the site offers those of us who live here today a glimpse into our city’s past that you’ll rarely find anywhere else without the benefit of some serious library time.
Wood took some time out of his busy schedule last week to answer a few questions about his new site. Here’s what he had to say about Old News.
Downtown Nashville has changed a lot since the 1880s
East Nashville Blog: What sources do you draw on to write your posts? And more specifically, how do you get your hands on those sources?
E. Thomas Wood: Directly or indirectly, most of my source material has an online origin.
Much to my wife’s dismay, I have filled half our garage with bound volumes of old Nashville newspapers purchased off eBay since 2003. I have a partial volume from 1884, a full three-month one from 1886 that the Library of Congress deaccessioned, and many from the 1920s and early 1930s. The closest thing I have to a hobby is that I spend all-too-infrequent moments of spare time down there going through the volumes.
Because most are in advanced states of decay, I try to preserve interesting items by clipping them and putting them into protective materials. In no systematic fashion, I have scanned several hundred of those clippings into image files. In working on history-related news items over the years, I have had occasion to process some of the scans into text with OCR software. Much of the fodder for Old News comes from the garage. (more…)
