The story arrived on our shores after being printed in the Liverpool Courier the previous November.

That a St. Catharines paper would lead its news with overseas coverage rather than the local goings on is not surprising in itself. That's still the practice today in many cities' daily papers if the story is big enough.

However, back then, and for a long time after, that was the rule rather than the exception.

Alex Ormston, curator of the St. Catharines Museum from 1972-79, has studied many of the newspapers that have served St. Catharines and says there's a good reason for that type of coverage.

It's what the readers wanted.

"They knew the local news already because the paper was a weekly and gossip travelled faster," he said. "It's the other stuff they wanted to hear about from outside the area."

Considering Niagara is home to the first printing press in Canada, it should come as no surprise the region is also home to more than 100 newspapers which have come and gone over the years.

The Mackenzie Printery in Queenston houses the press which was used to print the first edition of William Lyon Mackenzie's newspaper The Colonial Advocate in 1824.

Jim Hill, superintendent of heritage for the Niagara Parks Commission, which operates the Printery, said while Mackenzie later became known as the leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion, his views on reform were a lot more subtle at the time.

"Certainly he had reformist leanings even then, but you had to look for it," Hill said.

In St. Catharines, one of the earliest and longest-running newspapers was The Farmers' Journal and Welland Canal Intelligencer, which was first published in 1826 by an American named Hiram Leavenworth and was partly owned by William Hamilton Merritt, who used it as a vehicle to promote the canal.

Over the years, the city had more than 30 newspapers, and several which competed against each other. Ormston said many of the papers had overt political leanings, and two, the Journal and the Constitutional, took opposing sides of the American Civil War, with the Journal siding with the north and the Constitutional siding with the south.

These leanings affected the news coverage as well as the editorial stance, he said.

"It was rather interesting," he said. "You'd read the same story and they reported it completely differently. They'd be twisted to their point of view."

Of a particular battle, he said, "they'd both be calling it a great victory for their side and you'd never know who'd won."

Information about the newspapers of St. Catharines is being gathered by the museum, which maintains preserved copies of many. Volunteer Linda Kurki said one source of information is old city directories, which contained detailed information about people, including their profession.

"It helps you zero in on dates and who the publishers were," she said.

She said the papers looked very different from today. Much larger in sheet size, they were also smaller in page count. Along with news from overseas, front pages were also dominated by advertising, and it was often difficult to determine where the ads stopped and the stories, some of which would be contained in the same column, began.

"There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason where they put the articles," she said.