John Quincy Quackenbush-ing

By Markus Krueger

I will admit, dear reader, that sometimes I have trouble coming up with topics. I could use a John Quincy Quackenbush.

Emily Kulzer, my colleague at the museum, introduced me to Mr. Quackenbush this recently. She found several articles about him in the Moorhead Daily News around 1884-85. The articles, written by Moorhead publisher George Lamphere, always began with John Quincy Quackenbush stopping into the newspaper office asking for one thing or another – a farm implements dealership, the local policeman, a mill to grind his buckwheat, etc. Then a reporter secretly follows Mr. Quackenbush on his adventure , often name-dropping local businessmen, and writing down the cantankerous farmer’s conversations in his exaggerated speech. For example, from August 4, 1885: “One of those gol darn smart idiots who sells insurance against hail has been tellin’ around that I lost half of my crop by the ternader the other day…”

These were strange, rambling articles that went nowhere, about a guy we had never heard of before. Some were very short, others were rather long. The whole historical society team tried to solve the mystery. Farmer John Quincy Quackenbush never bought or sold land in Clay County, and he does not appear in any census records or city directories. We came to the conclusion that he never existed.

The columns reminded me of a file retired Clay County Archivist Mark Peihl kept on Luther Osborn, the publisher of Glyndon’s Red River Valley News. Mr. Osborn ran an ongoing column titled “Camping in Parkesylvania – How a Whole Family Went Raspberrying” about how he and his wife and six kids went camping and raspberry picking in Becker County. The column ran for at least three years from 1893-96. There would be three paragraphs in one issue, maybe five paragraphs a week later, and “to be continued...” Mark’s file of photocopies on this topic is as thick as a book.

What’s all this about? We think publishers Luther Osborn and George Lamphere were probably just filling space in their newspaper. It’s hard work laying out a newspaper. All the headlines, text, pictures, and ads in a newspaper have to fit on a certain number of pages, preferably with no blank space left over. It is still a hard job, but easier for folks now. Staff at the FM Extra or Forum have the luxury of being able to make photos bigger or smaller on their computers or play with the font size to make everything fit perfectly. It was harder in the 1800s, the era of movable type, when every letter, image, and symbol was a physical piece of metal that could not be resized.

Neither Osborn nor Lamphere’s newspapers included photographs. They had to fill the page with little letters and spaces made of lead. After they set the type for all their stories and advertisements, there would inevitably be some odd empty spaces remaining. So they wrote silly stories about raspberry picking and the adventures of the wacky Quackenbush family that are just the right size to fill the empty space, and these columns would become a running gag among their readers.

Surely many newspaper editors would have come upon this same solution to this common problem. I assume there is an industry jargon name for these serialized filler columns, but I don’t know it. So for our own amusement, when we at the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County encounter this in the future, we will call it “Quackenbush-ing.”

George Lamphere, Moorhead Daily News publisher.