To Nell Magruder, the big crate in the attic looked like a coffin.

As a girl growing up in Canton, she loved to play under the rafters in her aunt's house next door. The antique toys and strange-looking clothes were fun, but the crate always creeped her out.

John Spink/AJC (ENLARGE)

Robert Davis, an Alabama historian, became emotional when he learned of the collection recently processed at the Atlanta History Center. It included newspapers he thought he would never see.

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"We'd lift the lid and silverfish would go scurrying," she remembers.

The crate, she later learned, held a trove of Georgia history: a collection of newspapers from the 1800s, some of which are thought not to survive anywhere else, in microfilm or hard copy.

Now housed at the Atlanta History Center, the Magruder Collection fills three dozen 2-by-3-foot boxes and includes some 3,400 issues of 244 publications dating to the 1820s.

"This is one of the biggest finds in Georgia history in decades," says historian Robert Davis of Wallace State College in Alabama, a Jasper native who has written widely about his home state of Georgia.

When he examined an inventory of the collection for the first time recently, Davis was amazed to find papers he thought he would never see, and some he had never heard of.

"My jaw dropped," he says, "and tears began to well up in my eyes."

News junkie

The collection exists because of Magruder's great-great-grandfather, William Grisham, a pioneer of the Georgia upcountry who built the 1841 house where she played as a child. She and her husband, Will, live there now. It's the white-columned place on the hill overlooking the Cherokee County government complex.

The columns, the Magruders point out dryly, are hardly antebellum. The house became "antebellum" in a late post-bellum remodeling in 1957.

Nell Magruder leads the way to the entrance hall, where the only known image of her ancestor peers out from a framed photo. Grisham is a stern-looking fellow with a billy goat beard — Jefferson Davis with longer whiskers.

She chuckles. "A sour old puss if I ever saw one."

Whatever his disposition, Grisham was quite the news junkie for his time.

Born in South Carolina, he moved to Georgia in the early 1820s and opened one of the first businesses in Decatur, a general store on the square that sold everything from whiskey to lumber. When the Cherokees were removed from northwest Georgia in the 1830s, he relocated to the county named for the tribe and helped found the town that became Canton. More to the point, he became its first postmaster, a position that afforded him access to the many newspapers that were popping up in frontier communities across the area.

Grisham continued collecting papers in the 1840s when he worked at the U.S. mint in the gold rush town of Dahlonega. In the 1850s, he took a job with the federal government in Washington and saved publications from the North. A successful farmer back home, he paid special attention to agricultural journals as he purchased land and 25 slaves to work it.

"He read to them from the Bible every night," Magruder says.

Grisham bound some of his newspapers together with needle and thread. Occasionally, he stitched together papers from different cities to compare how they covered a major news event, such as the death of Andrew Jackson in 1845.

When Grisham himself died in 1876, the collecting didn't stop. His descendants accumulated more papers and magazines.

"The other day we found a 1938 issue of Time where Adolf Hitler was named man of the year," Magruder says. "We've always been a family of pack rats."

From attic to archive

As a young historian in Georgia, Robert Davis heard rumors of an attic full of 19th-century newspapers in Canton. Once someone at the public library gave him a contact name. He wrote the family, but no one replied.

Magruder isn't surprised. Her maiden aunts, who occupied the house for years, didn't care much about dusty relics.

She and her husband did. Long active in historical societies and preservation groups, they were eager to have someone knowledgeable evaluate Grisham's reading material after they moved into the house in 1983.

They invited Atlanta historian Franklin Garrett for lunch. He inspected some samples with growing excitement and urged the Magruders to donate the papers to the Atlanta History Center, where he was an institution.

After Will Magruder retired from Georgia Power in the late 1990s, he climbed the steep stairs to the attic, set up a folding table and began cataloging the contents of the old packing crate.

"It was just fascinating," he says. "But I couldn't really stop and read that much or I never would have finished."

Working during the winter — the attic was too hot during the other seasons — he completed the job in a couple of years. The Magruders gave the collection to the history center in 2001, keeping one item for themselves: an 1841 copy of The Agriculturalist in which Grisham had stashed a diary documenting the building of his house.

The collection sat unused before the staff finally began processing it last year.

"Every library and archive has a backlog because we don't have the money and staff," explains Michael Rose, director of the history center's Kenan Research Center. "We got to it as soon as we could. We always knew this was an incredible collection."

Welcome to the past

One morning this winter, Davis drove over from Alabama to take his first look at the Magruder Collection in the raw.

The historian didn't know about the papers until late last year, when he was researching an academic article about the controversial Confederate provost marshal of Atlanta during the Civil War. A Kenan librarian e-mailed him about the newly cataloged collection and attached a 119-page list of titles and issues. Davis was dumbfounded.

Setting up his laptop in the reading room, he could barely contain his enthusiasm as archivist Mike Brubaker brought out the boxes.

The papers inside were broadsheets, wider and longer than newspapers today. Some of the pages had dark spots from mildew or insects, but they were in surprisingly good shape, probably because they were printed on rag paper with a high cotton fiber content, compared with the pulp newsprint that would soon come into use.

Davis paused over an 1861 issue of the Georgia Literary and Temperance Crusader from Atlanta. "You're looking at the only known copies," he announced.

He scanned an 1838 issue of the Western Georgian from Rome, with contemporary accounts of the Cherokee removal. "I've never seen anything like this. There's a dissertation here."

Brubaker laid another stack of papers in front of Davis. They were April 1865 issues of the Daily Intelligencer of Atlanta.

Davis turned the pages and traced how news of the war's end came to the recently devastated city. For the first two weeks, oddly, there was no mention of Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox on April 9 or Abraham Lincoln's assassination on April 14.

Finally, on the 21st, the news straggled into town in reverse order. "Death of Lincoln!" a headline proclaimed. "Capitulation of Gen. Lee's Army. Sad Details!!" the paper reported four days later.

"This beautiful country is to pass out of our hands," an editorial soon lamented.

Davis thumbed through a few more days and found evidence that maybe the finality of the situation hadn't quite sunk in. "Confederate Money Wanted," an ad beckoned. Then, on May 3, there was a Fulton County sheriff's announcement regarding unclaimed property: "A small, chunky black complected Boy, who says his name is NED, about 80 years old. Will sell for jail fees expenses."

Brubaker stared at the page in disbelief. "A month after the war ended, and they're still selling slaves."

As William Grisham's newspapers show, the past is indeed a foreign country.