This reprint of the Sept. 7, 1918, Bend Bulletin is our fourth historic edition. (Click on the images below to read the reproduced pages.)

We chose it in large part because it offers a glimpse of a timeless annual tradition: going back to school. The passage of a century, the city’s growth and the accumulation of technological advances have changed education here enormously. Even now, though, going back to school involves reporting to a specific building and classroom at a specific time in order to learn from a teacher.

Another annual back-to-school ritual? Shopping for school supplies. To that end, an advertisement for the Owl Pharmacy on Page 4 urges parents and students to buy pencils and paper and receive a free ruler.

Bulletin readers may recall that the proprietor of the Owl Pharmacy, Ralph Poindexter, drowned a few months earlier in Crescent Lake while fishing with Bend attorney Vernon Forbes. The story led the July 8, 1918, edition of The Bend Bulletin, which we featured as a historical section in July of this year.

Among the (many) other interesting advertisements in this edition is a plea for people to sell their black locust trees for use in wartime ship building. Black locust, it seems, produces very hard and rot-resistant lumber. There’s also someone who wants to trade horse and wagon team for a car.

And, demonstrating just how much has changed during the past century, the Bend Water Light & Power Company couldn’t wait to tell readers that “Your wife wants an electric range” to “help make her kitchen work easy.”

Once again, The Bend Bulletin’s news content is dominated by World War I, then in its final months. Our November historical edition will re-create the Nov. 7, 1918, Bend Bulletin announcing the end of the war. First, though, our October historical section will show the city’s struggle to cope with a flu epidemic and feature another episode in Sheriff Roberts’ crusade against bootleggers.

Our goal is to replicate the experience of reading the newspaper 100 years ago. Listing historically significant events, as The Bulletin does regularly, is a useful, but limited, exercise. A digest of highlights doesn’t tell you which films were playing locally 100 years ago, which products businesses were advertising and who was staying at local hotels. Only reprinting the entire paper can do that.

The process of reprinting a century-old paper works as follows. First, we review our microfilm archive and pick an edition. Next, we transcribe news content and rebuild century-old ads. The Bulletin’s Creative Services team has chosen fonts similar to those used 100 years ago, reworked photos (where possible) and rebuilt all of the ads. The newsroom’s page designers have rebuilt the pages using text transcribed by news intern Ellen Chandler.