The Richmond Review
Reported by Erik Smith
Web produced by Rachel L. Miller

The first edition of The Richmond Review was distributed in 1876.

It managed to survive for 124 years and eight months, chronicling the good times and bad times of a little Michigan town through the course of three very different centuries.

It was a true community newspaper full of local stuff about local folks doing local things.

Perhaps if it had been one of those big-time daily papers, more mention of its untimely passing might have been made. But in once rural Richmond, The Richmond Review died peacefully on a cold February morning, leaving behind a simple legacy of neighborly honesty, volumes of yellowed pages from its humbled past, and more than a few mourners.

The editor of the Review, Liz Scutchfield, said the demise of the paper hurts.

"I choke back tears talking about it," Scutchfield said.

A worker adjusts the paper's masthead.

The Richmond Review actually began its mission in June 1876, printing the kind of news that really doesn't change much over the years -- births, deaths, school announcements -- but in 124 years and eight months, The Review did write the history of a village, village that became a city, and a city that has now all but become a suburb.

"When I look back through and see all the old stuff from the people in the area, and I look in and there's, you know, a birth announcement in it, my dad's obit, a wedding picture, all that kind of stuff that's no longer there," a Review employee said.

In the early year of its second century, the farmers of Richmond learned about things like the sinking of the Titanic, about their men who went off to the World War in the pages of the Review.

In the 1920s, the Review worried about keeping kids down on the farm. In its final edition, it was worried about just keeping the farms.

The main street of Richmond.

Times have changed, and the Review reflected those changes for better, some for worse, but it was always there every Wednesday. In fact, folks didn't even call it Wednesday in Richmond and Memphis and New Haven -- they called it "Review day."

"People find out what's going on, what has gone on, what their neighbors are doing, why the police were at the corner last week, what city council has decide when had they weren't there," Scutchfield said. "It showed the people in the places and for us when you go back over 125 years of editions, it shows you how life has changed."

These are difficult times in the newspaper trade, what with TV, radio and the Internet. Maybe we've just outgrown our sense of community, our need for neighborly news.

An empty Review chute.

Wednesdays will never be quite the same in Richmond, and all those paper chutes that dot the old town's dirt roads and the city's new streets will serve now only as a reminder that the more things change, the more things change.

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