A Mattox Family Home Newspaper Refresh

Photograph by staff of The Henry Ford

With the opening of Greenfield Village in spring 2026, visitors to the Mattox Family Home will see a freshly—and even more advantageously—repapered interior. The Georgia Newspaper Project helped make it possible.

Rural Southerners often covered the thin walls of their homes with newspapers to plug cracks in the walls or cover gaps between wallboards. This newsprint, usually replenished each year with additional layers that added insulation, helped keep scantily built clapboard homes a little warmer in cold winter months. Like other resourceful rural Southerners, Amos and Grace Mattox of Bryan County, Georgia, lined the walls of their home with newspapers to insulate against the cold.

Interior view of the Mattox Family Home. / Photograph by Staff of The Henry Ford 

From time to time, staff at The Henry Ford refresh the reproduction newspapers on the walls of the Mattox home. For years, in the era before ready access to digital images of archival materials in library and museum collections, staff used reproductions of one Georgia newspaper in The Henry Ford’s collection, a 1933 issue of the Savannah Morning News. It suited the era of the home’s interpretation at that time, but provided little variety since the newspapers on the walls came from only that single issue.

Recently, we have altered the date of interpretation of the Mattox home to 1927 to provide opportunities for rich, new stories of the family and community. We needed, then, to find a source of appropriate newspaper images. Our search led us to the Georgia Newspaper Project, part of the U.S. Newspaper Program run by the National Endowment for the Humanities with assistance from the Library of Congress, a project whose goal is to locate, catalog, preserve, and make accessible newspapers published in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present.

The Georgia Newspaper Project included newspapers that would have been available and of interest to the Mattoxes and the people in their community. We were especially delighted to discover the Savannah Tribune, a weekly Black-owned newspaper that covered national and local news and issues related to the African American community. (Savannah was the nearest city to the Mattoxes’ Bryan County home, about 30 miles away.) The Bryan County Enterprise, a white newspaper, carried news of the local community useful to the Mattox family’s daily lives.

Our staff was graciously assisted by Donald S. Summerlin, Digital Project Archivist at the University of Georgia Libraries. Summerlin was generous with his expertise and time, guiding us through the resources available through the Georgia Newspaper Project and keeping us informed of the project’s digitization schedule for the mid-1920s newspapers we selected.

Last fall, the reproduction newspapers made from the TIFF images provided by Donnie and the Georgia Newspaper Project team went up on the Mattox Family Home’s walls, readied well in advance for the opening of Greenfield Village this spring.

Pages from the Savannah Tribune and the Bryan County Enterprise newspapers line the walls of the Mattox Family Home. Photograph by staff of The Henry Ford. / THF810605

Visitors to the home will now be even more richly immersed in the Mattox family’s world, surrounded by copies of pages from multiple issues of these mid-1920s Georgia newspapers—perhaps the very same pages the Mattoxes once read.

Click on this link to “visit” the Mattox Family Home as it receives its new newspaper layer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmljXQt70Ts

Many thanks for the assistance provided by the Georgia Newspaper Project!

Jeanine Head Miller is curator of domestic life at The Henry Ford.