Say you like newspapers. Or your kid never learned the value of feeling newsprint between their fingers; they didn’t wake up to daily crosswords and juicy local developments on the front porch. Isn’t it time to get away from those darn screens?

The Timber Heritage Association museum on Samoa will be displaying local newspaper history with copies of the TImes-Standard from 1995-2015 and a hands-on history blast of the last few decades of news headlines. The papers are part of the Humboldt County Historical Society collection and are duplicates available for the public to take home.

“We don’t have to be precious with the materials. It’s not like going into some kind of stuffy institution where you’re wearing white gloves,” said Steve Lazar, former president of the Society. Rather, you can put your fingers on the papers and even take them home with you.

Often referred to at the “first rough draft of history,” the exhibit will feature handpicked headlines from 1995-2015, on poster boards in the room. Attendees can pick up, feel, smell and peruse the leftovers from a volunteer effort to save a mass of newspapers. And as an added bonus, it will help the Humboldt County Historical Society offload extra copies they need to move out of a borrowed space.

The Society acquired these pallets of papers when the Times-Standard moved printing to Chico in 2020. The papers were once stored in a room at the Times-Standard called “the morgue.” Volunteers from the Clarke Museum and the Humboldt County Historical Society saved them from the landfill in a frenzy, first taking them to the historical society’s garage on Eighth Street in Eureka and later THA shops in Samoa to sort and find out how much of it was worth keeping.

“It was a giant pile of chaos,” said Lazar.

Collectively, he said volunteers spent over 1,000 hours of work sorting through the papers, stretched out in a historic workshop. Pacific Paper supplied bankers boxes to organize materials and volunteers came “out of the woodwork” to help. About 30% to 40% of the materials from the Times-Standard were of use to the historical society, beefing up its collection of local papers. But the rest, currently on pallets in a Timber Heritage Association blacksmith shop on Samoa, are papers and volumes already part of the collection. And the Timber Heritage Association would like its space back.

“We’ve kinda just been doing it as a favor because we hate seeing historical documents destroyed,” said Sean Mitchell, president of Timber Heritage Association. He said the effort is a good example that people interested in saving history have to fight hard.

The storage is temporary: Wind blows through cracks and the buildings leak. So Lazar aims to re-home the duplicates to anyone interested in about in the next few weeks: March 23, 30 and April 7 will be days the public can pick up a paper there, on a first-come, first-serve basis.

The collection boils down to having the color version of papers, Lazar said.

“This is our last chance to grab these photographs in color,” said Carly Marino, Special Collections Librarian and Archivist at Cal Poly Humboldt.

Marino sends every Times-Standard to be turned into microfilm, a transparent film that can scale down hundreds of pages of newspapers into a small roll that researchers or the public can read. The papers are all saved and accessible at the Humboldt County Library Eureka branch and Cal Poly Humboldt — just not in color.

While microfilm has the benefit of keeping the papers available on a generational scale, as it has a lifespan of hundreds of years, Marino says it comes with its own challenges. She says it’s an extremely slow research process and comes with the loss of color in pictures.

Lazar’s plan is to eventually start digitizing Times-Standard copies — something he says will take a lot longer than he initially expected. Digitization expands access and allows people to search through the articles easier. The physical paper run in a way is the “line of defense for the holes that exist within other archives,” he said.

He said the fun doesn’t stop at getting to offload unwanted piles of paper on the public — there’s something special about seeing the history of your home through the eyes of a newspaper.

To really understand a long-term community history, Marino said it’s through the newspaper. Seeing developments (like when Maxxam left Humboldt County as Pacific Lumber went bankrupt, reading about important court cases, local teams or community members’ accomplishments) gives readers a perspective that can’t be found anywhere else.

Sage Alexander can be reached at 707-441-0504.