History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884, Volume 3

By John Thomas Scharf, Thompson Westcott

The Frankford Gazette formerly the Holmesburg Gazette was commenced in the spring of 1868 by William F Knott who continued to publish it until Oct 1 1883 when he disposed of his interest to James France The Gazette was commenced and continued to remain as a thoroughly independent local paper The originator of the enterprise commenced publishing the paper without one cent of capital borrowing enough to purchase the white paper for the first issue renting type etc and doing the entire work connected with its publication for the first six months himself The Gazette is published every Friday at the southwest corner of Main and Church Streets Frankford.

That is quite an illustrious history.  The original Frankford Gazette ended publication sometime in the 1930s.   It resumed on May 25th of 2007 when I wrote our first post which was about the Historical Society of Frankford new web site.

The genesis of the idea came the day when my son Jim told me to stop sending him emails about Frankford and to start blogging about it.  I had heard about blogging but didn’t get the point.  Then I found Blogger.com and started thinking about the possibilities.  There was nothing to lose in trying it out and so we did.  And thus the Frankford Gazette was resurrected.

I had no idea what to do except that I was tired of reading and hearing all about what was wrong with Frankford from people who knew little or nothing about the people who live here.  My plan was only to balance out the story by making sure that some of the positive got covered.  That is what we started to do.

We have evolved a bit along the way.  At first it was all words and then we tried to get graphic with pictures.  We have done a lot of video in the last two years.  Our YouTube channel has over 14,000 views.  Last Summer we began a collaboration that lead to a monthly print edition that is distributed along the Frankford Avenue business corridor.

What started out as my voice alone has now morphed into a group of collaborators.  My wife Pat is a specialist in education and has written extensively on the schools and childcare.  My son Jim finds things of interest that I do not even see coming (as well as being our web master and technical expert).  He sniffed out the Globe Dye works long before I knew anything about it.  The Frankford CDC is a major contributor mainly about the Frankford Avenue business corridor.  Our special interest collaborators like the parks and Garden club are welcome additions.  We have some new people coming along in the next few months from other parts of this large community that will give voice to a greater number of people.

Thanks to all who have contributed.  This would be nothing but some old guy talking to himself without you.  It has been an interesting five years.