The "Grit" Newspaper

 By Bruce Shawkey

I grew up with a newspaper called the "Grit," which my parents also called the "Pennsylvania Liar." Each issue contained a mixture of funny, offbeat news .. not nearly as whacky as, say, the National Enquirer, but similar.

Here is annotated history of the Grit from its website:

When the first headline for Grit was set in 1882, it’s doubtful anyone could’ve envisioned the publication continuing into the 21st century.

Dietrick Lamade was a 23-year-old assistant press foreman for the Williamsport, Pennsylvania, newspaper the Daily Sun and Banner. In December 1882, the newspaper began a Saturday edition titled Grit, which included local news items, editorials, and humorous tidbits. 

The Birth of Grit

Dietrick was born Feb. 6, 1859, in Gölshausen, Baden-Wrüttemberg, Germany, the fourth child of Johannes and Caroline Lamade. When he was 8, the family immigrated to the United States. Less than two years after the family settled in Williamsport, Johannes died, leaving Caroline to care for nine children. The older children went to work to help support the family, and young Dietrick apprenticed at a local German weekly newspaper. 

In 1884, the young man seized the opportunity to help revitalize a small weekly newspaper, The Times. However, the man who purchased the paper became ill and put the physical plant on the market. At the same time, Daily Sun and Banner staff were planning to end Grit.

Dietrick persuaded two men — the editor of Grit and a printer — to join him in a partnership to purchase Grit’s name as well as The Times’ printing plant. They intended to launch Grit as an independent Sunday newspaper.

No one seems to know how the name “Grit” came to be. But it wasn’t just the paper’s name; sheer grit was also how the newspaper survived those early years. After the first year, Dietrick had bought out seven of his partners, and the newspaper maintained a mountain of debt, even though circulation continued to increase.

Dietrick knew local readership wouldn’t be sufficient to keep the new publication going, so he began traveling the region searching for sales agents and news correspondents.

During one of his trips in 1885, an idea was born. Dietrick sold his partners on a contest — still legal in those days — in which readers would send in coupons for chances at winning various prizes. The drawing was held Thanksgiving 1885, with three out-of-towners and two local subscribers winning the five grand prizes. When the dust cleared, Grit had 14,000 subscribers and $400 in the bank — with all bills paid. The partners gave themselves a raise, from $12 a week to $15.

It was about 1891 that Dietrick hit upon another grand idea: employing newsboys to sell Grit directly to the public. After that, the newspaper began to expand to small towns across the country. By the time Grit celebrated its 50th year in 1932, circulation was up to 400,000. What had started as a one-room business with six staff members now employed 200 people.

The special celebration brought with it a flood of letters and telegrams from prominent and well-known men across the country. All had begun their careers as Grit newsboys.

“Among [Dad’s] greatest joys of accomplishment was the army of business and industrial leaders who gained their first commercial experience, lessons in honesty and integrity, and the value of self-application, by selling Grit in their hometowns,” said George Lamade, Dietrick’s son, in a 1952 write-up of Grit’s history. Grit continued to be sold by newsboys until the 1970s. Notably, 30,000 carriers delivered more than 700,000 copies to homes during the 1950s.

The Lamades continued to lead Grit as the decades went on. Dietrick passed the title of general manager onto his son George in 1936, and then began to enjoy his retirement.

“Working at Dad’s elbow, I soon learned why he held in such high regard those people living in small-town America,” George recalled. “To compete with metropolitan dailies or national magazines was never Dad’s aim. He wanted only to serve those villages and hamlets removed from the influences of big cities. … Grit has had, for many years, the largest concentration of circulation in small towns of any publication.”

Dietrick continued to keep in close touch with the business until 1938, when he passed away at 79.

Changing with the Times

Perhaps Grit’s resiliency is in part due to its adaptability. In 1944, Grit switched from a broadsheet to a tabloid-sized newspaper. At the time of the magazine’s 75th birthday in 1957, there were three editions: a Williamsport and area edition with a circulation of 40,000; a Pennsylvania state edition with 112,000 subscribers; and the national edition, which reached some 728,000 subscribers. The magazine’s circulation hit its high point in 1969 with 1.5 million subscribers.

Grit was also a leader in the introduction of offset printing, and it was among the first newspapers to use color photographs, running a full-color picture of the American flag on the front page in June 1963.

The Lamades remained at the helm of the family business until 1981, when Grit was purchased by ADVO System Inc. in Connecticut. Then, two years later, Stauffer Communications of Topeka, Kansas (which already owned Capper’s Weekly, a national tabloid that began in 1879 and had an audience similar to Grit’s), purchased the magazine. After 111 years in Williamsport, Grit moved to Topeka in 1993. Both Grit and Capper’s Weekly were eventually sold in 1996 to Ogden Publications, owned by Ogden Newspapers, based in Wheeling, West Virginia. Today, Grit enjoys a print and digital readership of nearly 900,000.

Moving Forward

Grit is now in another phase of its rich history. Having entered the market of lifestyle farming after years of publishing more nostalgic content, the magazine returned to its rural roots, honoring the joys of contemporary country life. Dietrick himself wrote about this same sentiment in one of his notes to his sons:

“Wherever possible, suggest peace and good will toward men. Give our readers courage and strength for their daily tasks. … By such a course, we can do much to improve the minds and lives of the millions of people who read Grit every week, and bring them a higher realization of their duties in life.”

----------------------------------------------

I decided to subscribe to the online version of Grit to see how it has changed since the years I remember it. Here is an excerpt from story titled "Moving Off the Grid," from the January 14, 2026 edition:

Two hundred years ago, if you were living in the United States and said you wanted to go off-grid, you’d have gotten some confused looks. “The grid,” as we know it today, got its start in relatively tiny sections in 1880s New York City and wasn’t quickly or widely expanded from there. The first transmission line went up in Oregon in 1889 and in the mid-1920s only about half of U.S. households had electricity. It wasn’t until the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 that the grid really took off. Up until then, folks were generally used to cooking and heating with gas, coal, or wood and weren’t quick to change.

The modern usage of “off-grid,” popularized during the 1970’s back-to-the-land movement, was a largely unknown phrase until then. Since the 70s, however, off-grid living has become more than a technical achievement but a lifestyle, and interest in it has skyrocketed. The Internet boasts hundreds of thousands of forums, blogs, influencers, and YouTube channels using the term.

What Is ‘Off-Grid,” Really?

Clearly defining the grid shifts as its use in the modern vernacular expands. To some, it merely means the electrical grid: that source of electricity centrally generated and distributed. But to others, it means any necessary resource that is not self-generated, including water, sewage management, food, and even entertainment. Independence from power companies and city services (and their bills!), “opting out” of power outages and shortages, and building some semblance of self-sufficiency have become the daydreams of many grinding, nine-to-five workers. And while off-grid living is an idea easy to read or write or fantasize about, what does it take to achieve it?

My husband and I opt for a more flexible definition of “going off-grid,” to encompass any activity that allows us to declare independence from one or more of those formerly out-of-our-hands resources. We started out in the city and now live off-grid in the Ozarks. Having traversed the adventuresome years it took to get from small house in an urban neighborhood to a rural hand-built home independent of city services, I feel like I can talk about the subject with some authority.

The systems we ultimately chose are likely to be different from those you’ll choose. So, in addition to telling you what we’ve done, I list some of the decisions we made; the options we decided between. If you want to go off-grid as well, you’ll need to do a lot of personalized searching to figure out just what that’ll look like for you. Independence is the theme, after all!

Land and Home

Most modern homes are built with the grid in mind (electric or otherwise), and it can be both difficult and expensive to get them off it. In addition to the technical or physical challenges, society poses its own special set of hurdles. You may like your solar panels, wood-burning stove, and clothesline, but a suburban homeowner’s association may feel otherwise. This isn’t to say it’s impossible to live off-grid in the city or suburbs, but it can feel a lot like trying make a plot independent from the county rolls without the plot actually leaving the map.

As a result, many who go off-grid end up building our own homes in the country. There tends to be more freedom to living and building the life you want the more backwoods you go. Out-of-the-way rural areas often have more relaxed zoning laws and fewer HOAs. If you’re willing to work and live on “unimproved” land — meaning a parcel without structures, utility connections, or even roads — you can more often find decently affordable property, too. I understand if you feel finding your own bit of land and building your own home is an intimidating prospect. It certainly can be, but I encourage you to also view the idea as thrilling and freeing. It’s probably the biggest DIY project of your life, meaning you’ll acquire dozens of skills you may never have attempted before.

There are many alterative styles of home that can be owner-built, all of them suited to different climates and environments. Our home took years to build, but in doing so, we were able to perfectly custom fit it to our way of life and our local climate. Your choice of style will require research to fully understand and implement, so I’ve listed books my husband and I depended on. As you research, don’t feel constrained by any one design style. Our home, for example, is a hybrid timber-frame house that’s half-buried and bermed with an earthship-style outer wall.

I almost exclusively favor older publications that aren’t sold as “off-grid” books, because I find most modern off-grid literature to be distressingly obsessed with gadgetry, fearful end-of-the-world rhetoric, and an over-emphasis on generating the excessive, modern requirement of electricity rather than the harder and worthier revitalization and rethinking of how to live.

The $50 & Up Underground House Book by Mike Oehler

The Timber-Frame Home by Tedd Benson

Serious Straw Bale by Paul Lacinski and Michel Bergeron

Stone, Log and Earth Houses by Magnus Berglund

The Craft of Modular Post & Beam by James Mitchell

A Logbuilder’s Handbook by Drew Langsner

The Hand-Sculpted House by Ianto Evans, Michael G. Smith, and Linda Smiley

Earthship, volumes I, II, and III by Michael Reynolds

Earth-Sheltered Houses by Rob Roy

Building Green by Clarke Snell and Tim Callahan

One of the first images of off-grid living people encounter is an array of solar panels capturing the sun’s energy and converting it into electricity, no power lines or plant in sight. What I see off-grid enthusiasts fail to consider is whether humans actually need electricity in the first place — or at least how much is truly needed in a day. Humans existed for a long time without it, after all, so for me, the most sane place to start is ensuring all vital needs can be met without electricity. Then, by all means, explore the myriad ways to generate power in a way that makes sense for your area.

Options include solar arrays (which come with a steep learning curve if you decide to DIY), wind turbines, water turbines, and methane digesters. Our area is drought-prone, often without much wind, so a small solar array secures the power we want for lighting, fans, and charging a laptop for writing (and playing games, of course). However, we designed our house to safely function without any power, so we consider all our electricity to be “dessert power,” something fun and enjoyable to have, but not impossible to live without.

Water Sources

I believe a stable supply of self-sufficient water is more important than generating electricity. Again, folks lived without electricity for most of human history, but no one lived long without water. Water can be sourced and stored from several places. I strongly recommend you secure as many different sources of water as possible. If one fails due to drought, a broken part, or a leak, you’ll not be left high and dry.

Rain catchment. Though some states have regulations for how much free water you collect from the sky, most of us can still harvest this gift with nothing more cumbersome than a permit and the ingenuity to build a catchment system. Containers of all shapes and sizes can be used to gather the rain when it falls, from 55-gallon rain barrels, 275-gallon converted IBC totes, to multi-thousand-gallon cisterns. We add more rain catchment to our land every year, favoring IBC totes attached to metal roofs. The book Water Storage by Art Ludwig is a great resource for the builder.

Surface water. Though the days of safely drinking unfiltered surface water are gone, ponds, lakes, creeks, and rivers still serve as a great battery of raw water for using on the garden or, after being purified, serving humans’ water needs.

Groundwater. Water from deep below the surface of the ground is often safe for consumption. Many homesteads and farms are blessed with a well or a spring that gives the surface this deep-hidden hydration. Our land came with a preexisting well, so we installed a manual pump to give us human-powered water access. As the resident water-pumper and lugger, I can confirm that water becomes a very mindful resource when you’re responsible for pumping and carrying every gallon of it!

Waste Management

Taking your life back into your own hands also includes some seemingly unsavory elements — specifically, handling your own waste. Gone are the days of mindlessly flushing a toilet, running the tap, or tossing anything and everything into the trash. I see this as a good thing. Outsourcing responsibility for personal waste has caused some of the world’s biggest problems. As importantly, some of that so-called “waste” is hardly waste when handled purposefully.

Toilets. Human poop and pee are pretty nasty, but when managed well, it can be transformed into something useful and harmless. Both composting and incinerating toilets function independent from sewage lines and can generate fertility for your land. They can be pricey to buy, but you can also DIY an affordable, effective composting toilet system if you’re up for the challenge. Joseph Jenkins’s The Humanure Handbook is my go-to resources on this.

Greywater. The water left over after washing clothes, dishes, or bodies can be safely and effectively used in gardens to turn what once was waste into a resource (as long as you use a greywater-safe soap). Art Ludwigs’s Create an Oasis with Greywater is a beacon pointing the way to a saner way to use water.

Trash. Unless you’re willing to shell out payments for a pick-up service to make the potentially long trek to your land, the only real option for dealing with your own garbage is to haul away or burn what can’t be recycled or composted. You can ameliorate this act by changing your lifestyle to generate as little garbage as possible. The best advice I can give is to embrace the responsibility or a near-zero-waste lifestyle.

Heating

Humans have successfully depended on fire’s warmth for millennia, so when it comes to off-grid heating, there’s no point in reinventing this wheel. If you carefully manage a woodlot on your own land, you can create a healthy forest ecosystem and provide yourself with a renewable source of fuel for heating and cooking.

When it comes to containing and using fire, humans have come up with quite a few innovative ways to bring it into their homes. Woodstoves are probably the most accessible and easiest to install, but if you are building your own home, you might consider the super-efficient, house-integrated masonry heater and its cousin, the rocket mass heater.

Cooking

There are three power sources that can be used to prepare meals in the off-grid home, and I use all three, depending on the time of year and weather.

Fire is an obvious choice and likely already doubles as your source of heat. You can do limited cooking on the surface of a woodstove, but a wood-fired cookstove is where the real cooking and baking gets done. I use a wood cookstove to both heat my kitchen and cook food through all the cool-weather months. This appliance was the most expensive purchase I’ve ever made, but I considered the long-term independence that it offered worth the price.

In the summer, cooking indoors with fire is just untenable in our non-airconditioned home, so we shut down the cookstove until frost returns. We occasionally run electric cooking appliances off our house batteries or a portable, rechargeable battery unit, but the other 99 times out of 100, I’m cooking outdoors. We built an outdoor kitchen with a wood-fired cooking area for preparing our late spring, summer, and early fall meals. If you’re already used to cooking with a wood cookstove, you’ll face little to no learning curve.

We also use a Sun Oven solar cooker for some of our baking needs. This appliance uses an ingenious set of reflectors to capture and intensify the sun’s power, creating a hot box that reaches 350 degrees Fahrenheit within about 10 minutes when I use it. There’s no “set it and forget it” with a solar cooker, however. It needs to be constantly rotated to keep up with the shifting sunlight, and if clouds roll in, your food won’t cook.

Social Considerations

Another element of the independence that off-grid life requires is social independence. Now, that’s not to say you can’t have friends — far from it! But you will have to develop a certain degree of mental self-sufficiency that’ll allow you to whether both the literal storms and the interpersonal storms of critique, doubt, gossip, misunderstanding, and criticism. Going against the grain attracts plenty of negativity from those still on the over-cultural path, trust me. Prepare to be the odd one out in most conversations, even among other off-grid folks. Remember, people who go off-grid do so for deeply personal, often disparate, reasons.

All that said, when you interact with someone who lives off-grid, take the opportunity to learn from them, even if you don’t agree with all their personal philosophies. Seeing a living, breathing off-grid life in action can often be far more instructive than a pile of books. But I caution against spending too much time in online discussions, comments, off-grid forums, and the like. Many folks have no problem venting their opinions, judgments, and decrees over what is “truly” off-grid to them, but I’ve found many online posters are armchair off-gridders who don’t actually live the life that backs up their mandates. You’re better off forging the life you want without spending your time in pointless debates.

Going off-grid was one of the worthiest, and hardest, endeavors I’ve taken on. It was an entire lifestyle overhaul. For this reason, no single article can do more than scratch the surface the considerations you’ll need to make. The off-grid life is a challenging life, but it is also incredibly rewarding. I can’t imagine living any other way.

-----------------------------------------

Wow, quite an article. And I would say, quite in keeping with the original intent of the newspaper: To present offbeat news in an entertaining way.

There was also always an entertaining classified ads section, which continues to this day. A perusal of today's issues finds classified ads for coins, do-it-yourself, poultry, crafts, and more. Plus, an extensive library of DIY books.