Seventy-nine years ago, America was just entering the Great Depression. The stock market had crashed Oct. 29, and the nation's 10-year economic decline had started.

None of that was in the Dec. 26, 1929, edition of the Maryland Gazette.

What you can find in the yellowed, brittle pages of this edition, pulled from our archives in Annapolis, is a picture of a sleepy community. Some of the news echoes our own time, but much of it is from a different world.

The owner of the paper was Talbot T. Speer, who was still the owner when the late Philip Merrill bought it in 1968. Francis O. White Jr. was the city editor, and E.C....