Thursday, November 19, 2020

Lorinda Schofield and her pioneering lines of type

Lorinda (Schofield) Dawson, buried with husband Will in the northwest section of the Chariton Cemetery, had a number of distinctions. She lived to be 93 and had given birth to 12 children en route, a major accomplishment in itself. The Dawsons celebrated their 50th, then their 60th, wedding anniversaries with general health and faculties intact. And at the time of her death she was the oldest living member of this and that and a 76-year member of First Baptist Church.

 But one of her most widely noted claims to fame was her status as the first woman in Lucas County to learn and practice the art and mystery of newspaper typesetting.

At the time, text for newspapers in Chariton and elsewhere was handset by craftspeople who plucked individual lead characters from cases, arranged them in "sticks," then transferred the results line by line to forms that eventually contained entire pages which then were locked and inked before sheets of paper were "pressed" directly to the forms to created the printed page. 

Sam Greene, editor of The Chariton Herald, contributed the following information in his edition of Aug. 1, 1901, while writing about the death in California of a former Chariton Patriot editor, Francis M. Fairbrother:

"Miss Lorinda Scofield, now Mrs. William Dawson,  of our city, has the distinction of being the first lady in the county to have learned and practiced the art of type setting. In spite of the strong popular opinion that type setting was a very improper occupation for any young lady, Miss Scofield entered the Patriot office and began her duties as a typo in 1863, boarding at the Fairbrother home down west of the railroad, near the jail,  on 11th Street, where A. Rosenberg now resides. In that early day, ready-made clothing was not to be had as readily as now, and so Miss Scofield  put in the time mornings and evenings making buttonholes for the clothes of the editor, wife and three children."

The youngest of a dozen children herself, Lorinda was born to Joshua and Ada (Warren) Schofield on Oct. 11, 1845, near Mulberry Gap, Tennessee, and moved to a farm near Bonaparte in Van Buren County, Iowa, when she was three and a half years old.

I believe, but can't prove, that Joshua died in Van Buren County soon after 1850. What remained of the family moved across the state line into northern Missouri during the 1850s after having lived seven years near Bonaparte. Lorinda apparently remained behind for a time and was working as a servant girl in Van Buren County, age 15, when the 1860 federal census was taken.

Some of Lorinda's brothers enlisted in Union outfits for service during the Civil War, a tricky proposition in northern Missouri where conflicting loyalties often led to hostility. According to a newspaper article published when William and Lorinda celebrated their 50th, "the war of the rebellion drove the family (at least herself, her mother and a sister) back into Iowa."

By 1863, she and her mother and sister had settled --- most likely with family members who had arrived earlier --- in the Goshen neighborhood of southwest Lucas County. She was living there when she relocated to Chariton and learned typesetting. And she was married to Dawson, a tinner by trade who she met in Chariton, on Nov. 5, 1864, at the Andrew Leach home near Goshen.

Interviewed by The Chariton Leader staff during 1933, Lorinda said that "Chariton society in that day did not consider printing quite the trade for a girl. Even Mrs. Dawson's mother joined in the protesting chorus."

"But I enjoyed the work and never found the troubles that almost everyone predicted. The men on the Patriot staff were all gentlemen," she said.

Will Dawson died at age 83 on Feb. 10, 1929. Lorinda died 10 years later, on May 14, 1939, age 93, at the home of her daughter, Maude Pettijohn, with whom she had lived for the preceding five years. Her survivors included four additional children and numerous grands and greats. And, yes, the death year inscribed on her tombstone is a mistake.



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