LAURINBURG — The Laurinburg Exchange is almost finished packing and will be moving to a new location on Monday.
The process of moving, which started in the fall of 2016 after its current building at 211 W. Cronly St. was sold, took its final step with the removal of Laurinburg’s last newspaper printing press.
The local newspaper is moving to The Oaks Professional Building at 915 S. Main Street Unit H in Laurinburg. Hours of operation will remain the same from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
“The new building will offer customers more convenient parking, nicer accommodations, and it will be a better use of space for staff,” said Althea Simpson, The Laurinburg Exchange general manager.
Taking out the printing press, which was built in the 1980’s, took three days to complete — this included cleaning the machines pipelines, removing the ink reserve, and taking out each of the printers nine sections — each weighing thousands of pounds.
On Sept. 4, 2008, The Laurinburg Exchange’s machines printed the last paper, before shutting down due to the paper’s owner, Civitas Media, switching to a “hub printing system,” where multiple newspapers are printed at a centralized location for economic reasons.
“It’s because of changes like that, which have allowed small papers like ours to stay in business,” Simpson said. “The removal of the press is the last step in the consolidation process we have been going through over the last five to six years.”
The relocation is not its first taste of change. The Exchange traces its heritage back to 1882, when O.L. Moore began the newspaper as a weekly publication printed every Thursday, eventually growing to two days a week and then three. The newspaper is now published Tuesdays through Saturdays.
For more than 130 years, The Laurinburg Exchange has served the people of Scotland County as their primary source of news, as well as a guide to satisfy the community’s appetite for goods and services through advertising of local merchants, and will continue to do so from its new building.
The removal of the press was handled by Doug Holladay, Overland Trading Company president, who has taken down 60 printing presses in the last eight years. Holladay has removed presses for publications as small as the Laurinburg Exchange, and as large as The New York Times.
The Overland Trading Company, which does rigging and liquidation services has been up, down, and across the U.S. to take down print presses, has taken Holladay to interesting places.
“I took down a Jewish newspaper’s press in Brooklyn in 2013 and it was built in the 1920’s,” he said. “They actually had a full-time machine shop on site, because they had to custom make any parts they needed for the press because it was so old.”
Holladay, who grew up in a newspaper family, with his father being a publisher and his mother being the editor of a small town paper in Kansas, said it is sad to see presses coming down, but with the machines being decades old, and the coming of digital printing, the metal giants, which saw rolls of paper zipping up, down, and across their motored arms in their glory days, the time has come for their retirement.
“The Laurinburg Exchange’s press was a small press compared to some I have taken down, but she was tired,” Holladay said, who plans to take the press to the scrap yard. “It would take a lot of work to get the press back into working order.”
Laurinburg native, Michael Johnson, helped in the removal process and said the coolest thing was seeing the old remnants of the past. “I found old microfilm that had really old papers printed on it — it’s cool to find history.”
Holladay, who doesn’t have employees, but hires workers in the areas he works, hired Johnson for the job and said, “it is refreshing to come across a worker that actually wants to work.”
The two, along with other hired help worked from the early morning until past 6 p.m., to take down and clean up what is surely the last press of its kind left in Scotland County.
