Tough Tarbell Trivia

[Rob Wick]

Even though we differ on the newspaper, Steve, that is correct. And, as you can now tell Roger, it was dealing with graduation, but not about her being the only woman.

My newspaper was actually the New York Tribune, (the story obviously made the rounds). I believe that is likely the first time she was ever mentioned in a newspaper outside of western Pennsylvania although I cannot prove that with 100 percent certainty. I searched ProQuest Historical Newspapers, NewspaperArchive.com, and GenealogyBank.com for all the unique articles I could find. So far I've found around 800 unique articles about her, some only a paragraph and others as large as two full pages. And that doesn't include articles that discussed what was appearing in a particular month in either McClure's or the American Magazine. Including those (which I left out because they don't tell anything about Tarbell) and you would have well into the thousands.

Of course, another point to make is that many of the articles I've found were syndicated, meaning that while they may have appeared in several newspapers across the country, there was no one newspaper they came from. If I'm ever able to do my annotated bibliography of Tarbell, I would like to try to separate those that came from just one paper and those that were syndicated. While some bear the mark of the syndicate, many that were obviously done that way do not.

Good job gentlemen.

Best
Rob