Published November 30, 2006
Progress marks century
of Edge family management

By Jeff Warren
A hundred years is a long time. Wednesday, November 22 marked a century of Edge family involvement with this newspaper, the Pickens County Progress. Claude Fletcher Edge took over operation of the Progress in 1906 with the help of his young sons, Claude and Robert.
Robert's grandsons are present proprietors here. They are the brothers Pool: publisher John Robert, managing editor William and editor Dan. Their great grandfather Claude Fletcher Edge (Robert's dad) was a printer by trade and almost by birth.
His family splashed into ink during Reconstruction when Claude Fletcher's older brother Harmon (a doctor and surgeon) established a newspaper in middle Georgia in 1873. Located in the resort town of Indian Springs, The Indian Springs Echo informed locals and tourists who tarried to take the waters.
Harmon's paper was really a family business where his siblings participated. Claude Fletcher Edge, his brothers and and sisters all eventually joined the printer's trade, at least for a time.
Though Harmon sold the Echo in 1875 and went back to doctoring, most of his siblings kept a hand in printing as did their father. Their dad, Rev. N. N. (Newton Nehemiah) Edge, spent much of the rest of the 1800's as an itinerant preacher and newspaper editor in north and middle Georgia.
In 1878 N. N. Edge, with sons and daughters, was turning out a handset daily newspaper in Griffin. Next stop was Senoia and another paper. From November 1881 through December 1883, Rev. N. N. Edge edited the Cherokee Advance (forerunner to the Cherokee Tribune) at Canton.
Part of that time, Claude Fletcher Edge helped his dad at the Advance. The younger Edge also ran a printer's job shop in Canton, the kind of enterprise that typically produced handbills, business forms and letterhead.
For a brief time Claude Fletcher Edge and Canton jeweler-photographer J. W. Jarvis served the Advance as publishers while N. N. Edge continued to edit. Under the reverend's leadership the Advance adopted a new masthead motto: "We had rather be right than to be President."
After N. N. Edge left the Advance, his son Claude Fletcher Edge apparently continued work at that paper for some time under owner-editor Ben Perry. During his time at Canton, young Edge met Mollie Daniel. They later married. A few years afterward, he and Mollie moved south, and Claude Fletcher Edge simultaneously published the Jonesboro News and the Hampton Herald.
Eventually he sold his newspaper interests and moved to Atlanta to work for the Franklin Printing Company. In the days when printers still composed columns from individual letters of moveable type, Edge was a fast typesetter. He won sixth place among the 40 fastest typesetters in the Southeast in a contest held at Atlanta's Piedmont Exposition in 1887.
Because he was fast, Edge knew he could make more money setting type than he could running a newspaper. For that reason he left newspaper work and found employment in a commercial printing plant. But five years of nine-hour days in the plant wrecked his health, and Edge determined to leave printing for good.
A visit to Jasper by his daughter Jenny put Mr. Edge back in the ink. Jenny was in town visiting her father's sister, Ida Holland. At the time, Ida was temporarily running the Progress after her and Claude Fletcher's youngest brother Cooper gave up the paper to marry and go to farming at Ludville.
Jenny's dad had been out of work about four months. During her visit, a sawmill in town offered Jenny an office job and for her dad, a position as lumber grader--light outdoor work. When the family decided to move to Jasper, Ida urged Claude Fletcher to take over the Progress instead of working for the sawmill. Eager to work with a newspaper, both of Claude Fletcher's sons backed that idea.
The family made the jump from Atlanta to Jasper in 1906. Jenny went to work in the sawmill office, Claude Fletcher's older son Claude (age 14) worked in the sawmill and younger son Robert (12) helped his dad with the newspaper.
Initially Edge leased the Progress from Captain Howard Tate (Colonel Sam's cousin). The newspaper office occupied the ground floor of a one-and-a-half-story wood building that stood where Moore's Furniture is today. Actually the Edges shared the space with black barber and preacher Miller Carter, who ran his shop out of one corner.
The following summer the Progress moved to a smaller frame building on the north end of Main Street. The move saved $2.50 in overhead, a quarter of their previous $10 monthly outlay for printing plant and office space.
After a year in Jasper, Jenny married Clifford Owens, the sawmill went bust and Claude Fletcher's older son Claude came to work at the Progress.
Two and a half years after they started, the father was too ill to work but edited the paper from home while his teenage sons ran the printing plant. Shortly before he died in 1916, Claude Fletcher Edge bought a frame building on the south end of Main Street where Papa's Pizza is now. The Progress moved there after his death.
Earlier in 1916, on New Year's Day, Edge partnered with Jenny's husband Clifford Owens to buy the Ellijay Times and the Ellijay Courier. Edge and Owens consolidated the two papers into the Times-Courier. For a while, Edge's sons Claude and Robert divided their time between Jasper and Ellijay and the two papers. Later Clifford Owens, Jenny and their two sons ran the Ellijay paper.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Robert Edge went to war. He served an artillery battery as bugler in a time when bugle signals were still the only mobile battlefield communications. His family bought the Progress from Howard Tate the same year. At home Claude struggled by himself to make the paper go. Things improved some with the Armistice and Robert's return in 1919.
Home from the war, Robert Edge married Ermie Evans in the early 1920's. The couple's two daughters, Martha and Bobbie, grew up with the Progress. Bobbie Edge remembers her first job as addressing copies of the Progress in handwriting when she was about ten years old.
A handsome man with blue-gray eyes and red hair, Robert Edge had a temper to match, and it occasionally flared, daughter Bobbie recalls. But like an artillery round, his anger boomed and was spent. It never smoldered long. Her father's prevailing nature was light-hearted, Bobbie Edge said.
"He could tell good stories, and he had a great sense of humor and would make people laugh," she said. "You expected something funny from him all the time. Claude was very reserved--very into studying history and the bible. But daddy was a big cut-up. He was well-read though he only finished the sixth grade. He hated school. He talked about the trouble he had with long division."
As strong a personality as he was, Robert Edge found his match in Ermie Evans. Brown-eyed, brown-haired and a crack shot, Ms. Evans was a liberated lady before the tag was invented.
She grew up near Jerusalem. Her farmer father, William M. Evans, also trapped and hunted and taught his daughter to shoot. Later at Reinhardt College, she competed on the rifle team.
During World War II, Ermie Edge served as local Red Cross Home Services chairman. She lobbied the military to issue emergency leave if a GI's family experienced a crisis at home. She ignored channels at times and appealed straight to the brass, Bobbie Edge recalls. Admonished for these procedural end-runs, she would plead procedural ignorance (each time she phoned) and press hard for her request.
"Most everybody she got home," Bobbie Edge said.
Ermie Evans Edge worked at the paper and penned the "locals" for the Progress. She checked with merchants on Main Street, Jasper for news of social events and local happenings and had correspondents in Ludville and Talking Rock providing the same kind of information. Today, "Turning Back the Pages," compiled by Martha Edge Pool, draws on her mother's work from the 1940's.
"When they first met," daughter Martha Edge Pool said of her parents, "my dad was also the postmaster. He always had to do something else or wanted to do something else."
In the Thirties, Robert Edge served as Jasper's mayor when the town first raised a water tank and built a water system. In the Forties, he was federal commissioner, a magistrate to whom arrested moonshiners reported to post bond.
Martha Edge Pool said her father sometimes recounted how the family stayed alive during the Great Depression on the food customers brought to the newspaper office.
"People traded food for subscriptions," Pool said. "They'd bring in whatever they had and trade for a subscription, which was about a dollar then."
In the aftermath of World War II, Robert Edge joined with a group of investors to start Jasper Banking Company. At the time, Jasper had no bank. A previous bank had failed during the Depression. Edge backed many local improvements including the Veterans Memorial on the courthouse lawn and the old brick schoolhouse in town that is now part of Jasper Elementary.
"They didn't get any federal funds for that," Martha Edge Pool said. "They just got out and got the money, and he was always involved in things like that."
But as a young man just back from World War I, Robert Edge labored alongside his brother Claude to push their small town newspaper toward prosperity.
In 1920 a fire burned the east side of South Main from Spring Street north to the marble-fronted building now owned by Mark Miller. That structure was saved, but the Progress office went up in the blaze. After the fire, the Edge brothers bought a brick building and two adjacent frame buildings north of the old courthouse. The buildings stood in about the same spot where the Progress operates today.
Relocated in one of the wood buildings, the Progress took ink on a powered press turned by a gasoline engine. This was before Jasper had either running water or electricity. Cold crept in through holes in the office floor. Claude and Robert heated water to thaw the moveable type. It had to be handled wet. At evening on short winter days, the men worked by light from two kerosene lamps, wall-mounted with reflectors behind. Candlesticks lit type cases.
The brothers built the Edge Building on the same real estate in 1924 and switched from moveable type to Linotype machines in 1933.
Linotype machines cast whole lines of column type in molten lead. The operator typed out lines at a keyboard on the front of the man-tall machine. The contraption resembled a pump organ and automatically arranged individual, single-letter, type molds in sequence for filling with lead.
A plunger squirted a charge of liquid metal into the assembled line mold, and when cooled, the finished line of type dropped into a tray left and below the keyboard. Type lines still had to be hand assembled in a printer's metal form to make up newspaper pages still inked on a conventional press.
Typesetters laid out whole newspaper pages of type on a marble-top table and tightened the metal form around it. Lead Linotype filled the columns. Headlines were still composed of larger single letters of moveable type. Turning a key adjusted quoins, cams or wedges that squeezed the type inside the form.
Sometimes the type would buck up at the page center when the form was tightened. A smack with a wood block and hammer knocked it all back flat and tight. A whole page of type moved to the press held tight in the form without top or bottom. If the form loosened, the whole page fell to pieces and hours of work scattered on the floor.
At times, progress of the Progress was one step forward, two steps back. The newspaper office burned again in 1943, probably due to arson. During World War II, the local rationing board operated from an office on the Edge Building's second floor. It is believed burglars set the fire to cover the theft of ration coupons from the government office. The Edge brothers rebuilt their newspaper inside the same walls.
Claude and Robert Edge continued to operate the Progress right through the 1950's. In November 1956 they marked a 50-year anniversary.
"There is no better people on earth than right here," the brothers editorialized in that November 22nd edition of the Progress. "When we came here fifty years ago, your county became our county. We loved it then, we have loved it ever since, and expect to keep on loving it until our spirits leave our bodies here."
Robert Edge died in 1958, followed by his brother Claude in 1959. Planning for the future, Robert had trained his son-in-law to carry on the family business. Martha Edge Pool's husband John William Pool, a cattle farmer, bred Herefords in the Long Swamp bottoms at Marble Hill. But as Robert Edge neared the end of his career, he trained Pool on Saturdays in the newspaper business.
"When my dad died, it wasn't all strange to him [John William Pool]," Martha Edge Pool recalled. "He came up here too."
Martha had been helping her father and mother and Uncle Claude at the Progress part-time. With the death of Robert and Claude, the Pools took the reins, and running the paper became their full-time jobs. Shortly thereafter, in 1960, Willis Padgett joined the Progress staff.
Under John William Pool's leadership, the Progress upgraded to a Cox-o-type press in 1965. The Cox-o-type was a web press--that is, it printed on a continuous stream of paper that webbed its way through the machine from a huge feeder roll. Pool bought the Cox-o-type second-hand from a small town newspaper near Point Royal, Virginia.
"They took it apart and brought it down in a truck and set the pieces out here in the parking lot," Martha Edge Pool recalls. "The parking lot was full of pieces, and everybody said they'd never get that back together, but they did."
The Pools added a brick press room to the back of the Edge Building to house the new printing plant, and the paper expanded from its longstanding eight-page layout.
Prior to the Cox-o-type, the Progress printed a sheet at a time on a hand-fed press. The operator laid a single sheet of news print on the press, and two newspaper pages printed side by side. The sheet was reversed, and two different pages went on the back.
By contrast, the lightning Cox-o-type printed 16 pages at one cycle. But it still relied on flat beds of metal type.
An offset press acquired in 1974 finally retired metal type and the old Linotype machines. Now ink was transferred to newsprint from thin metal plates rolled on to a press cylinder. Plates were burned from pasted up, paper layout pages using a photographic process.
As metal type went into retirement, so did the lead matts and plastic engravings formerly required to print a photograph. More photos now made their way into the Progress with the new streamlined method of including them.
Still the transition was a challenge. "I remember when we first got that offset press," Willis Padgett said. "The first week we worked to four o'clock in the morning to get a paper out. The second week we worked 'til 4:30 in the morning." Eventually they battled the big machine into cooperation.
For two decades, Martha Edge Pool and her husband John William Pool headed the Progress, and she penned all the editorials. First son John Robert Pool joined his parents at the Progress in 1972. Second son William Pool came to work at the paper around 1977, and William's wife Martha joined up in spring of 1982.
Martha Edge Pool still remembers the pressure of deadline day. Deadline arrives on Tuesdays now, but it used to raise its ugly head each Wednesday.
"On Wednesday, if anybody had come by and wanted to buy it [the Progress], I'd have give it to 'em," Ms. Martha smiled.
John William Pool's leadership of the paper ended suddenly with his unexpected death on New Year's Day 1982. Following his death, John William Pool's sons assumed greater responsibility for operations at the Progress.
During the 1990's, youngest son, Dan Pool, came to work at the Progress as editor. In 1997 he married reporter Christie Mullinax. Today their two daughters are budding journalists. Ellie Pool knows her letters, and Madeline Pool is learning to spell.
The 90's also brought computers to the Progress--computer generated pages, that is. Any metal type still seen around the Progress office today is venerated as an antique.
Even the last press is gone. Since 1994, the Progress has been shipped to a press plant of the Rome News-Tribune for printing, a transition that allows color photos in the newspaper. Today pages transmit to the printer electronically by e-mail. John Allen Pool sends off pages from the same room where Claude and Robert Edge once composed moveable type by lantern light.
John Allen Pool (John Robert Pool's adult son) makes the fifth generation of Edge descendants at work at the Progress.
Others have joined their lives to the history of this newspaper. Set to retire in March 2007, Willis Padgett came to work at the Progress almost 50 years ago.
Except for some time off to serve the United States in Vietnam, Padgett has spent his whole career at the Progress, a career that spans from the era of Linotype machines to our present computer-generated newspaper. Padgett set up the first computer system at the Progress and trained the staff to use it.
Typesetter Shawna Isaac joined the Progress staff in 1981. Executive assistant Sheri Crowe came to work here in 1990. Photographer Damon Howell joined the staff in 1998. And many friends from the Burnt Mountain Center participate weekly in the life of the paper, assembling newspaper sections in the same space where the big press used to turn.
In recent years, Kristi Silvers (daughter to Willis Padgett), Michael Moore and Jeff Warren have also joined the Progress staff. No one who enters here finds the newspaper office a dull place to work. Even after a century, covering small town news in a place like Jasper is still a pretty interesting business.
"I just think it's the best business I know," said Martha Edge Pool, "though others may not have as many headaches every week."