Society of American Archivist's 250 for the 250th

In celebration of the Nation's 250th anniversary, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) put out a call to archives all over the country to contribute digital documents and images to an online repository that tell the Nation's story. 

The repository is divided into five themes: American Experiment, Doing History, Power of Place, Unfinished Revolutions, and We the People.

From our archive, we submitted a digital copy of the Poverty Flat Nugget to the Power of Place theme.

The Poverty Flat Nugget was a newspaper within a newspaper. It was published by the Mountain Echo newspaper in February 1916 by the fictitious editor Caulpepper Starbottle. It was written as the weekly 1857 newspaper of the town of Poverty Flat, which was a movie set created just outside of Boulder Creek, Santa Cruz County, California, for the filming of the silent movie "Lily of Poverty Flat" written by Bret Harte, staring Beatriz Michelana, and directed by George E. Middleton. Seven issues were published coincident with the movie production. The movie set was used in the filming of several subsequent silent movies.

It gives the reader an insight into the new industry of silent motion pictures and offers a glimpse into the lives of the actors, directors, and motion picture technical staff, both on and off of the set. California's birth as the epicenter of the silent movie industry provided independent filmmakers a way to evade Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company's (MPPC) monopoly which heavily restricted the industry on the East Coast.

By moving across the country to California, independent filmmakers could shoot without fear of their equipment being seized. When the monopoly was broken by court order in 1912, the industry in California was poised to expand. Santa Cruz County's diverse geography meant that filmmakers could simulate almost any location they wanted and the Big Trees (Coast Redwoods) were a wonder that would enchant audiences.

You can read the document HERE.