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Back when the population of Kelowna was measured in mere hundreds, it already had a newspaper. In fact, there were two!
The new exhibit at the Kelowna Museum focuses on the Orchard City Record, and immersing yourself in it is like stepping into a time machine and landing in the early 1900s.
The articles showcase the people, places and events that helped shape Kelowna.
Even a century later, the stories remain captivating and relatable.
The Orchard City Record, which evolved into the Kelowna Record published from 1908 to 1920.
"So the exhibition takes a bunch of different articles from these papers," explained the museum's curatorial manager, Amanda Snyder, "and highlights some of the interesting things that were going on at the time."
The newspaper provides a clear view of what mattered to the people of the era.
"What visitors might find out when they come is that some things haven't really changed," said Snyder. "And other things are looking very different."
The exhibit leads visitors through the topics that dominated the pages of the record, from war to agriculture, transportation, health and entertainment.
Incredibly, it was just one of two newspapers that residents could turn to at the time.
That's pretty good news coverage for a city which boasted just 600 residents when it was incorporated in 1905.
"There was the Kelowna Clarion, which would later become the Courier and this Orchard City Record, so they were actually competing really early on," Snyder explained.
Enlarged newspaper articles, archival photos and artifacts support the stories on exhibit.
It's important to note that the view of the world expressed in the newspapers is clearly from the point of view of the British settlers.
"So missing, of course, is the perspective of the Syilx Okanagan people that were here and also the other settlers that came," she said.
"People coming in from China and Italy. They're referred and mentioned in the papers but not by their own voice."
The exhibit even created a section where some of those references are most jarring in their insensitivity.
(Mis) representations, they are called.
"People reading the papers today would certainly be shocked to see how people were being written about," Snyder added.
Apart from that, the reporting tends to be very even-handed and free of the inappropriate injection of editorial opinion in its coverage of day-to-day issues.
It's also interesting to see how it didn't take much to get into the newspaper back then.
"Things that we wouldn't think were news today," said Snyder, "like someone visiting from Alberta!"
The advertisements are also fun to look at.
The Kelowna Museum invites you to travel back in time to when the paper was hot off the presses.
The exhibit is on now and runs until September.
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