Attention Clay County chroniclers and Brazil back-story buffs! The first batch of the Brazil Daily Times is now going up on Newspapers.com. (Uploading may take a week or more and will include a run of issues from 1907-1931.) Indiana residents can access this content for FREE via INSPIRE. If you need help accessing the content, read our related blog post.
Here’s a short side note on the history of the Daily Times, ancestor of today’s Brazil Times.
Small-town newspapers often have interesting pedigrees. Brazil’s is no exception. When the Daily Times’ debut came on December 1, 1888, it was under the editorial leadership of a man named Robert Henkel.
Bob Henkel came from one of the original German families of the American South. Their involvement in printing, preaching, and pioneering went back many generations.
Though William Travis wrote up the editor’s genealogy in his 1909 History of Clay County, Travis’ version is full of mistakes. Yet as the chronicler knew, Henkel’s story links Clay County history back to 16th-century Germany.
Bob Henkel’s fascinating family lineage was prestigious, going at least as far back as Johann Henckel, a German Catholic priest at the time of the Protestant Reformation. While Europe’s spiritual foundations were being shaken up by the monk Martin Luther, Johann Henckel, who served as Hofprediger (court preacher) and spiritual guide to some members of the Hapsburg royal family, was exchanging letters with the Dutch reformer, humanist, and priest Erasmus of Rotterdam.
William Travis mistakenly writes that Henckel was Father Confessor to a certain Queen Mary of Norway. Actually, this was Queen Mary of Hungary, sister of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Mary later served as Hapsburg Governor of the Netherlands during the height of the Reformation. Henckel, while friendly to Protestants calling for reform, ultimately swayed Mary away from becoming a follower of Luther.
That couldn’t be said of the rest of the Henckel family, who emigrated to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the early 18th century. As Appalachian frontier folk, the fervently Lutheran Henckels (later spelled Henkel) also helped settle the “German belt” of North Carolina at a time when English took linguistic third place in the western Piedmont. Until the early 1800s, German and Scottish Gaelic — not to mention Cherokee — were commonly-spoken languages in backcountry Carolina.
Printer’s ink must have been mingled with Bob Henkel’s blood. Around 1807, in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley town of New Market, Virginia, the Indiana editor’s great-grand uncles, Ambrose and Solomon Henkel, set up one of the first German-language presses in the American South. (The Virginia Historical Society has a great webpage showing some of the beautiful work done by these craftsmen.) From 1807 to 1809, Ambrose published Der Virginische Volksberichter und Neumarketer Wochenschrift, a small, short-lived weekly newspaper printed in the heavily German-speaking area around the famous Luray Caverns. The Henkel brothers’ press in New Market is considered the oldest Lutheran printing house in America. The brothers also published educational books, like an 1819 ABC Book in the collections of the College of William and Mary.
Ambrose and Solomon’s father, the Reverend Paul Henkel, was a celebrated Lutheran minister who preached in both German and English. One of the pioneers of Lutheranism in America, the North Carolina-born Paul Henkel sowed the seeds of his church in the trans-Appalachian West during travels out to Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana. William Travis claims that he served as the first president of Ohio State University in Columbus. This is wrong, but Henkel did help establish education in the early Midwest.
Several members of this prominent family of Virginia Germans were drawn into the conflict between North and South. A few trained as doctors at the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious medical school before the Civil War. Caspar C. Henkel served as an assistant surgeon in Confederate General Stonewall Jackson’s brigade during the 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign.
It should come as no surprise that the Lutheran minister Paul Henkel’s great-grandson, Brazil Daily Times editor Bob Henkel, was born in apt-sounding Germantown, Ohio, in 1866, just a year after his Confederate relatives back in the Virginia mountains lost the war. Henkel was raised, however, in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where he became a printer’s apprentice at age sixteen. Robert eventually bought the Crawfordsville Daily Journal, briefly moved out to Coldwater, Kansas, where he married Josephine Cole, then back east to Rockville and La Porte, Indiana.
In 1888, Robert established the Brazil Daily Times, ancestor of the town’s current paper. Under the umbrella of the Henkel Publishing Company, he served as its editor until 1912. William Travis claims that the Clay County paper was established with capital investment amounting to just $1.60, “with no type, paper or any other supplies with which to establish the venture.” Within a few years, however, Henkel and his partner “had all modern devices known to the printer’s art.”
At a time when most American newspapers were at least loosely affiliated with a political party, the Daily Times‘ editor kept it independent of partisan politics and was much admired for his honesty and support of the best political candidates, regardless of what party they belonged to.
Bob Henkel moved to Indianapolis in 1912. In 1918, he bought the Indianapolis Daily Live Stock Journal and published it until he died of pneumonia on February 4, 1930. Henkel was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery.