Celebrating 20 Years as Barrington’s Signature Magazine
Celebrating 20 Years as Barrington’s Signature Magazine
.
With Quintessential Barrington celebrating its’ 20th anniversary of recording the life and times of Barrington area residents, and their civic, social, charitable, and generational achievements in education, sports, cultural activities and more, it is a moment to look back and recall how our local publications are a source for preserving our history aside from the work of local historians.
Arnett C. Lines (1882-1970) is a name synonymous with Barrington area history, because he organized that history for us in the greatest detail. Much of his life ran parallel with Barrington’s publication of its own, weekly newspaper. And the newspapers were saved to eventually be read again, a century later online at the Barrington Area Library, as is Lines’ history.
Barrington’s publishing credentials began when on Saturday, August 3, 1889, Vol.1, No.1, of The Barrington Review was published. Publisher and editor Miles T. Lamey was a distinguished citizen, whose modest office was above his brother Dan’s building materials shop on the northwest corner of the Northwestern Railway and Cook Street intersection.
This was a broadsheet newspaper of eight pages covering local, national, and international news; local government, civic, school, religious, and social news; cultural events and rural reports. And there were those single paragraph notes that: Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Brown were visiting relatives in Chicago, or that Mr. and Mrs. John Robertson held a musical evening at their home (which is the grand Victorian, now Barrington’s White House). This local newspaper was the social media of its day.
Mr. Lamey produced the newspaper in that tiny office using the “stick and font” method of type and a hand press. Later he had a hand-powered rotary press in another Lamey building at 240 East Main Street. After his death in 1930, management of the newspaper was assumed by Lester B. Paddock who had joined the paper in 1906. Living here, he knew the community and its people. He stayed with the Review until it was sold in 1931.
In April 1931, Leslie W. McClure bought the Review and moved his office into the August W. Meyer building at the northeast corner of Main and Hough (the Gazebo is there now.) Later he moved the newspaper into the Comstock/Abbott house at 126 West Main Street.
Another publishing venture came to Barrington in 1929. Loring A. Platt and Paul Shroeder bought the Palatine News and restarted it as the Community Courier at 200 James Street. The sprawling buildings on James Street, constructed during WWI by George Stiefenhoefer, were also the site of Wilson Herren’s Aeronautical Corporation. Ironically, the experimental aircraft work was followed almost daily, not by the newspaper next door, but by the Review over on Main Street.
In 1941, the Review and the Community Courier were merged to become the Barrington Courier–Review. By 1945, the merged newspapers were headquartered in James Street which became the center of Barrington publishing under the banner of The Barrington Press. Besides commercial printing, Barrington Press published three newspapers and several magazines. The plant was continually enlarged. By that time, they occupied the entire building.
After WWII, the Village of Barrington became the center, or hub, as planners defined it for the growing number of satellite villages, each with their own distinctive character, and local governments—yet united by “Barrington area” civic and societal entities. There was a lot of news to cover, and the editorial and reporting staff was supplemented by free-lance neighborhood columnists contributing to the Review’s pages. Their typewritten columns were delivered to the front desk on James Street until email became the preferred method of delivery in the mid-to-late 1990s, when the commercial internet became widely accessible.
There were strict rules for the columnists in those days, developed by Neighborhood Editor Teddi Martin, and proofreading was thorough by Rita Ehrenberg, checking with a columnist to make certain that a name was spelled correctly.
The Barrington Press was distinguished with the publication in 1976 of “Tales of Old Barrington” jointly with the Barrington Bicentennial Commission. It became a collector’s item. Its contributors were from pioneer families, with historical photographs, giving the reader a mirror into the past. Through its pages one could stroll the streets of old Barrington. From time to time the newspaper published significant historical features, including Arnett Lines “History of Barrington” to coincide with the Village’s Centennial in 1965, and in the early 1980s “The Octagon House Letters,” a series based on over 700 letters written by the residents there towards the end of the 19th century.
In the 1970s, Phillip Bash joined John Rockwood as owner of Barrington Press, and over the next 10 years they increased the company’s production to nine newspapers. In 1986, the Barrington Press was sold to Pioneer Press. For a few years operations continued at James Street, but increasing use of the internet, and the eventual sale of Pioneer Press newspapers to the Sun Times saw a change of content as reporters were sent out from the editorial offices in Glenview and covered fewer important meetings in the Barrington communities. The number of neighborhood columnists declined, and their frequency was reduced.
Eventually, the Sun Times suburban newspapers were sold to the Tribune Company. The Barrington Courier-Review now publishes under the banner of Tribune Publishing. Its content is widespread from the North Shore to Barrington and places in between.
The Daily Herald covers our important political, governmental, social, and human-interest stories. Based in Arlington Heights, it is distributed in the northern, northwestern, and western suburbs of Chicago. The paper started in 1871 and was independently owned and run by four generations of the Paddock family. In 2018, the Paddock family sold its stake in the paper to its employees through an employee stock ownership plan.
While these local newspapers continue their print editions, online subscriptions now allow the reader to follow local and national news from anywhere. The morning train travelers into the city now read their newspaper on their phones or tablets instead of folding and turning the pages.
Those stories of the rich and evolving social, cultural and civic lives of what is still a unique community of historic and newer neighborhoods, of smaller gardens and wide-open spaces, both public and private, with a unique equestrian past and present, with area community organizations that continually look to a good quality of life for all residents will always matter, and printed news offer a hardcopy record that stands the test of time.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Barrington had additional print-publishing ventures, led mostly by women. The Barrington Banner, its chief reporter and photographer Marcia Opal, was printed in the early 1980s. From 1994 to 2011 residents enjoyed Barrington Lifestyles, a charming tabloid-format newspaper which was published out of Crystal Lake by Glenne M. McMonigal. Those can be read online through the Barrington Area Library’s Local History collections.
In September 2005, a new publication took up the pens and cameras of earlier journalists and historians. For 20 years now, the pages of Quintessential Barrington (QB) have captured the rich tapestry of our community life, direct mailed every two months, to our 60010 and Inverness mailboxes. The QB is printed in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Digital files built in Barrington are sent electronically to the press through a software program. There, after pre-press reviews and plating, the body pages are printed via a heat-set web offset press, where paper moves through the press at high speeds, and a slower sheet-fed press assures the magazine’s covers are crisp and clear.
A large team of writers worked hard on an in-depth 2015 Special Edition which was produced in partnership with the Village of Barrington to commemorate Barrington’s Sesquicentennial (150th). Perhaps these stories will rest in the Cloud, to be read 100 years from now.
It has been a privilege to cover some of these pages with my walks through history. In that distant future, researchers and historians will be able to relive our times. We can look back at the beginnings of the community through the pages of those old newspapers and magazines and find the continuity of our stories and the voices who told them.
Barrington has been blessed with two outstanding historians (and residents) who by their very nature also did the work of detailing and documenting nearly every aspect of our area’s history. Arnett C. Lines (1882-1970) worked at Marshall Field’s in Chicago and was also the company’s choir leader. His uncle, Fred Lines, designed and built the John Robertson home—today Barrington’s White House—with a skillset that rose above a lack of computer software and power tools. Arnett wrote a book capturing his observations and the changes he witnessed over time in Barrington.
Kent, England, native Barbara Benson moved to Barrington in 1980 and ran the Barrington Area Historical Society at a time when it was an inviting social epicenter and gatherer of local history. She has written extensively for the Courier, Township Newsletters, Quintessential Barrington, and she published a book called, “They Builded Better Than They Knew.” Barbara is also a manager of the White Cemetery in Barrington where some of our earliest settlers’ rest.
Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Kate Mills at the Barrington Area Library whose support and expertise added to this feature.
Share this Story