Mystery of the Acworth printing press

It was a Chandler & Price, an 8-by-12-inch platen letterpress manufactured in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1911 or 1912.

“The press was in amazingly good shape,” said Clemens Bak of the Red Onion Press in Kennesaw. “These old machines were built like tanks. They’re very solid and heavy, made of cast-iron parts.”

In the early 20th century, before laser printers and photocopiers, before even mimeographs and ditto machines, a fair-sized company or institution might have had one of these presses in a back room. They were useful for running off a few hundred pieces of printed matter at a time – railroad shipping forms, say, or school enrollment applications.

But how did this press – which got the name, “Old Stilesboro” – end up in the wilds of Cobb County? The question had to wait. First, the machine had to be rescued.

Acworth Ald. Tim Richardson alerted the Red Onion, a nonprofit founded in 2014 by the Acworth Cultural Arts Center to educate and to preserve the craft of fine art printmaking and letterpress publishing.

A little larger than a washing machine, Old Stilesboro weighed an estimated 1,200 pounds and wouldn’t fit through the doorway of the shed. With the landowner’s permission, Bak and his volunteers punched a hole through a wall, dragged the press out on wooden skids, borrowed a contractor’s crane and hoisted the unit onto a truck.

The rescuers also recovered about 1,000 pieces of metal type. The fonts had been put away in wooden drawers, but the cabinet had rotted and dumped its contents on the ground. “Our guys were knocking off spiders and insects digging it out,” Bak said.

Back at the Red Onion, the print shop crew took the machine apart; cleaned and painted it; located a missing carriage back plate on eBay; got new ink rollers; ordered a new leather drive belt; machined a set of roller bearings, and cleaned the brushes and polished the stator of its one-half horsepower electric motor.

Meanwhile, a group of residents, Save Acworth History, put the word out on social media. They soon heard from relatives of a man who ran a printing business in the 1960s out of a grocery store on Old Highway 41 between Acworth and Kennesaw.

According to the family, Sam Galloway was a photo engraver who quit the Cartersville Tribune in disgust when it replaced its letterpresses with modern offset machines. (The offset process commonly uses photography to create a printing plate. A letterpress uses inked, raised metal type, a technology that goes back to Gutenberg.)

At some point, Sam Galloway bought a second press, the Chandler & Price. He sold the grocery in the 1970s and moved with his wife Clara to Summerville. Sam took his first press and left the second with his son James “Jimmy” Galloway, who lived on Old Stilesboro.

The elder Galloway died in 1987. The following year, Jimmy moved to Summerville to care for his mother; she had Alzheimer’s disease and died in 1995.

“I had to leave my press behind because I had no way to move it,” said Jimmy Galloway, who today lives outside Summerville. “I thought maybe I could retrieve it later, but I never did.”

“I’m glad it’s been restored. Better than gathering rust for the rest of its life and not doing anybody any good.”

Family members turned out at the Red Onion on a rainy Sunday in January for a first press run and reception in honor of Sam Galloway.

To start the press, Bak turned on the motor, gave the flywheel a push, and threw a lever to engage the drive belt. One might have expected the ancient contraption to be a clattering, ink-spraying beast. Not so. The little press ran like clockwork, ticking softly like a 21st century office copier.

Twin rollers transferred ink from a big round plate to the type. The machine then closed like a clamshell (“Watch your fingers!”) and applied hundreds of pounds of pressure to the type against the card stock on the platen.

When the clam opened, Bak snatched out the finished product: A beer coaster. Imprinted with the “Red Onion Press” logo and the words, “Letterpress is to printing what craft brewery is to beer.”

“We want to work with Georgia craft brewers to have them buy coasters from us to promote their product, and to get the word out on what we’re doing,” Bak said. The aim is to bring in enough business to support Red Onion’s educational mission.

Since then, Bak and company have retrieved Sam Galloway’s other printing press and plan to restore it. It sat on a front porch in Summerville for 30 years. The family donated the machine and 20 drawers of type to Red Onion.

What’s an old letterpress worth? It’s hard to say. “It’s not really a commercial product; it’s a historical product,” Bak said. “Like any old vehicle or machine, value is in the eyes of the beholder. It’s a work of art.”