100 Years At 5 Church Hill Road––

The Bee Celebrates A Century Under One Roof

By Curtiss Clark

One hundred years ago this week, a small staff of journalists and office workers moved into a brand new building at 5 Church Hill Road, establishing a new home for their growing newspaper –– The Newtown Bee.

Brothers and partners A.P. and A.J. Smith erected a long and narrow building on the site –– eight paces wide and 24 paces long –– which has served as the sturdy backbone for several other alterations and additions over the past century. They had been running the newspaper out of cramped offices above the Newtown Post Office, which was in the former Newtown Academy building on the current site of Edmond Town Hall.

The Newtown Bee had its beginnings in second floor rooms above a plumbing shop just north of the Meeting House 26 years earlier in 1877, so the move to Church Hill Road finally brought the newspaper’s operations down to earth, where it remains, well-grounded, today. The new building looked a lot like a grange hall, and in the beginning it was painted gray, not the familiar and distinctive red it adopted with its second paint job. But for the Bee staff, which was still small enough to gather all together on the front stoop of the building, it was a big step into the future. It finally had the room it needed to write, compose, and print Newtown’s weekly newspaper. More importantly, it had room to grow.

Over the course of the next century, the building sprouted wings –– one on the west side of the building in 1930, and another to complement it on the east side in 1977. Between the two, in 1950, the main body of the building bulked up and dug in at the back of the property, providing a broad basement to accommodate large offset presses and other machinery along with some much-needed paper storage space. Additional storage space in back was added to that in the 1970s.

In 1974, the building was crowned with, perhaps, its most recognizable feature –– a bee weathervane created by John Hallock of Bethlehem.

Over the years, tons of typewriters, linotypes, tape printers, mainframes, and computers have been hauled in and out of the building in an attempt to keep up with the technological challenges of serving a town with an insatiable appetite for local news. One piece of equipment –– The Bee’s Goss Comet flat-bed press –– went out of service in 1967 after 40 years of shaking the building from stem to stern every Thursday afternoon. It was too heavy to move out, so it was broken up and dropped into its own service pit, where it still lies today a few feet beneath The Bee’s typesetting department.

 An incredible accumulation of folk art and antiques settled in the building over the years, thanks to the sharp eyes and collecting skills of Bee Publisher Scudder Smith and his wife, Helen, who have been covering antiques shows and auctions for 40 years for The Bee’s sister publication, Antiques and The Arts Weekly.

With a staff of nearly 50 full- and part-timers, plus all the art and office equipment, The Bee building filled up fast in the second half of the 20th Century, so in 1994 The Bee moved its basement press room to a new printing plant on Commerce Road, freeing up more space for offices and computer equipment.

Today, The Bee offices remain, as they always have been, a hive of activity bound up with a unique amalgam of tradition, art, and computer cables. And every Thursday afternoon, there is yet another stack of newspapers to sell on the front counter. This week’s stack is No. 5,201 at 5 Church Hill Road.