Ralph M. Voorhees
This young man came to West Union June 17, 1823, and began the publication of the Village Register. He continued to publish it until his sudden and unexpected death on March 6, 1828, at the age of twenty-eight. He was sick but nine days of a congestive bilious fever. He is buried in the Kirker Cemetery. He had married Mary Kirker (the daughter of Gov ernor Kirker) in 1825, and had two children. One of these, Thomas Voorhees, was a steamboat captain on the upper Mississippi River for almost twenty years. His widow married Hayden Thompson, of Ripley, and was living in 1880.
Mr. Vorhees conducted his paper according to his best lights but it had no local news. In that day, local news was not thought worthy of publication. There were plenty of legal ads, sheriff's sales, auditor's notices, tax collector's notices, many estray notices—nearly all horses, a number of runaway apprentices, occasionally the notice of a reward for a runaway slave with fifty to a hundred dollars reward. The merchants used the paper to advertise their goods and dun their customers. These files, which have come to us, were preserved by the late John P. Hood, who worked in the office, when a boy. The proceedings of Congress and of the State Legislature were given very fully; also the Governor's and President's messages. Foreign news in plenty was given, but local news was absolutely tabooed. The very facts we would like to know now are suppressed. The people then knew all the local news. It passed from mouth to mouth, and it was thought idle folly to repeat it in a newspaper. The paper aimed to be neutral in politics, but the editor was a Democrat- Republican. It was largely filled with literary extracts from magazines and books which we would not at all look at now, but to tell us what people of the time thought, their political and religious views, what interested them most, or at all, there is not a word. The local news of that day is lost except from tradition.
It is difficult to write of a subject after the mists of seventy-one years have obscured him. There is some light on the life and character of Ralph M. Vorhees to be gathered from the old and yellow files of the Village Register. What it is, is clear and distinct, and the picture it reveals is as clear as yesterday. The parts that are left out are, however, forever lost. His widow is long dead. His son is either dead or cannot be traced, and we must rest content with those few fragments which have been handed down to us.
Ralph Voorhees was a man much loved by those who knew him. He was a young man who had but few enemies and they found much in him to admire. He was true and loyal to his friends and treated those who did not like his course with great consideration. He undertook to conduct an independent local paper, an impossibility, and the only enemies he ever made was in this attempt. He offended some because he favored his father-in-law, Governor Kirker, for office, but had he not favored the Governor, he would not have been human. Had he lived, he would, no doubt, have succeeded with his paper and made a respectable citizen, but alas, that fate which none can control, took him from his young wife and infants, from the society and companionship of his friends and cut short a career of great promise.
From "History of Adams County, Ohio from its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time" - by Nelson W. Evans and Emmons B. Stivers - West Union, Ohio - Published by E. B. Stivers - 1900