Ink, Pumpkins, and Revolution: From colonial New York to a small-town newspaper in South Dakota

Election Day 2026

This weekend Cyndy and I went with Sam and Iris to Boston. And while we were there, I caught the Revolutionary War bug.

If you’ve ever been to Boston, you’ll know why.

Boston’s history seems to be everywhere. Paul Revere. The Boston Tea Party. The Old North Church. I mean, it’s incredible! Some of these places are still standing!

And then to sit in the Old State House, where delegates gathered in 1788 to debate ratifying the United States Constitution. Wow! To think of the arguments and enormous decisions being made in those rooms more than two centuries ago.

And later, on a beautiful fall day, we drove out to Lexington and Concord. We stood where the first shots of the Revolution were fired, near the place where the “shot heard round the world” rang out. And then we watched a demonstration of a real Revolutionary War cannon.

Wow!

By the end of the day, I was ready to put on my Minuteman outfit, grab my musket, and join the Revolution!

But then we came back to New York.

And on one of the days when I was out on my own—it seems the rest of the crew had to work. Go figure!—I decided to take an audio walking tour of revolutionary New York.

Goodness. What a difference!

In Boston, the story seemed so clear. Patriots standing up to the British. Farmers grabbing their muskets. A people united in their struggle for freedom.

But New York was a very different story.

Here, loyalties were divided. Some residents passionately supported independence. Others remained loyal to the British crown. And plenty of people were caught somewhere in between, trying to figure out how to survive a war that divided families, neighborhoods, and communities.

When the British captured New York in 1776, the city became their military headquarters for the remainder of the war. Patriots fled. Loyalists arrived. Neighbors found themselves on opposite sides of the Revolution.

And the stories of the people caught in the middle were fascinating.

One was Boston King, an enslaved man who escaped bondage and sought freedom with the British. Think about that. While American Patriots were fighting for liberty, some enslaved people saw the British as their best hope of becoming free.

King eventually traveled to Nova Scotia and later Sierra Leone, still searching for the freedom and dignity that so many Americans were declaring to be their God-given rights.

This Revolution was complicated!

It made me realize how much of our history gets lost when we tell it only through the stories of generals, battles, and famous men.

But one of the places that really hit home for me was a little spot called Printers’ Corner, near Hanover Square.

It was here that I began to realize that this war wasn’t fought just with muskets and cannons, redcoats and Minutemen.

It was also fought with pens and printing presses!

New York was a bustling port city. Ships brought news from England and Europe. Often, New York was the first place in the colonies to receive that news. And the city’s printers played an enormous role in getting it out to Boston, Philadelphia, and the other colonies.

Newspapers carried reports of British policies, colonial protests, and events unfolding hundreds of miles away. Printers exchanged stories with one another. People read them, argued about them, and passed them along.

Imagine what that meant in a world without telephones, television, or the internet.

One of those printers was John Holt, whose New-York Journal became a powerful voice for the Patriot cause. Another was Hugh Gaine, whose shifting political loyalties reflected the complicated world in which these people lived.

The printers weren’t always objective. Some supported the Patriots. Others supported the British. Some changed sides as the war unfolded.

But their presses helped shape the arguments that eventually shaped a nation.

And then there was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Published in Philadelphia in 1776, it spread throughout the colonies in thousands upon thousands of printed copies. Imagine what would have happened to that revolutionary argument without the printing press.

Words were moving people.

Ideas were crossing boundaries.

Colonists who had thought of themselves primarily as Virginians or New Yorkers or Massachusetts men were beginning to imagine themselves as Americans.

A revolution was taking shape, one printed page at a time.

And as I watched an old printing press operating during my tour, I couldn’t help thinking about Cyndy’s family.

Her mom and dad, Clair and Jocelyn, ran the Avon Clarion, a little newspaper in Avon, South Dakota.

Cyndy has wonderful memories of sitting right on top of the press, barefoot no less, helping unstick the paper on hot, humid days with her bare hands!

Can you picture that?

A little girl perched on a printing press, helping keep the newspaper moving.

Almost all of her brothers and sisters did the same. It was a family operation. And when Clair retired, Cyndy’s brother Jack took over the paper.

And Clair wasn’t afraid to stir things up a bit.

One year, after watching the Avon High School football team struggle through a rather disappointing season, Clair noticed that the team seemed to have an awful lot of coaches.

So he wrote an editorial in the Avon Clarion suggesting that perhaps the only thing the team needed to win a few more games was to hire a few more coaches!

Well, that didn’t go over particularly well.

Especially with the football team.

And as luck would have it, the editorial appeared just before Halloween.

That Halloween night, Clair and Jocelyn’s house got pumpkined. About thirty pumpkins appeared around their house, courtesy, apparently, of some rather unhappy football players.

I remember asking Clair about it afterward.

“Well, Clair, did you learn anything from all that?”

“Yep,” he said. “I should have waited until after Halloween to write the article.”

I love that story!

Not a word about wishing he hadn’t written it. Not a hint that he regretted poking a little fun at the football program.

Just a lesson in timing.

I suspect John Holt and some of those other revolutionary printers would have appreciated Clair’s answer.

And suddenly, standing there at Printers’ Corner, the connection between those eighteenth-century printing presses and the little newspaper in Avon, South Dakota, didn’t seem so distant at all.

Clair would have loved this place.

His heart would have swelled with pride.

Because for Clair, running a newspaper wasn’t simply a way of making a living. He believed in the importance of a free press in our country.

He knew that a community needed to know what was happening. School board decisions. City council meetings. Elections. The births and deaths and everyday stories of ordinary people.

Someone had to pay attention.

Someone had to ask questions.

Someone had to write it down.

And someone had to get the next edition out!

I wonder if Clair ever thought about the connection between his little newspaper in South Dakota and those revolutionary printers in New York.

I suspect he might have.

We wouldn’t be the country we have become without a free press.

And that brings me to today.

It’s Election Day.

And just this morning I was reading about Tarrant County, Texas, where county officials voted to eliminate 92 Election Day polling locations compared with the last midterm election. The number dropped from 316 to 224.

Officials who supported the decision argued that some sites were underused and that the changes would make elections more efficient. Voting-rights advocates raised concerns that the reductions would make voting more difficult, especially for people in poorer neighborhoods and communities of color.

But here’s what caught my attention.

ABC News didn’t just report the controversy. Its journalists examined where the polling places had been eliminated.

They discovered that 21 heavily nonwhite ZIP codes, representing roughly 30 percent of the county, accounted for 40 percent of the county’s net polling-place losses.

In one neighborhood, the number of Election Day polling locations dropped from eight to three. In another, from nine to three.

Now, those numbers don’t tell us everything. They don’t establish why the decisions were made or how many people will actually have difficulty voting.

But they certainly raise questions worth asking.

And how did we learn about this?

The press.

Reporters examined the records. They compared the numbers. They listened to the arguments. They investigated the possible consequences and shared what they found with the public.

Exactly the sort of work that makes a free press so important to a democracy.

I find myself thinking about how easily we dismiss journalism these days. Fake news! Biased reporters! Attacks on newspapers and journalists from every direction.

Of course, reporters make mistakes. Newspapers have biases. And the printers of revolutionary New York certainly weren’t immune to either.

But a free press gives us something indispensable: the opportunity to hold those in power accountable, to challenge official explanations, and to discover things we might otherwise never know.

And there is something wonderfully ordinary about that work.

An old press in New York.

A little newspaper in Avon, South Dakota.

A team of journalists examining polling-place closures in Texas.

Different centuries. Different technologies. Different circumstances.

But the same essential work.

Getting the news out.

As I stood there at Printers’ Corner, I found myself wishing Clair could have been standing beside me. And Jack too. Clair, who gave so much of his life to that little paper in Avon, and Jack, who carried it on.

I could almost picture the three of us there together, looking at those old presses, talking about ink and deadlines and paper jams and the strange, stubborn importance of getting the news out.

And maybe another story or two about those pumpkins!

Because democracy doesn’t survive on grand declarations of liberty alone.

It needs people willing to ask questions, to tell stories, to uncover uncomfortable truths, and to make sure the rest of us know what’s happening.

It needs a free press.

I’m grateful for those printers who helped give birth to our nation.

I’m grateful for the journalists who continue that work today.

And I’m grateful for Clair and Jocelyn, and Jack, and the whole family who kept that little newspaper going on the South Dakota prairie.

I wish I could have told Clair that standing at Printers’ Corner helped me understand a little more about what he spent so much of his life doing.

I think he would have loved that corner.

I certainly did.