Printing Press Video

Printing Press Demonstrations:

Printing Press Demonstration See a demonstration at the park on the following dates:

March 2010

March 4, 9 am
March 11, 9 am
March 21, 11 am
March 25, 9:30 am

You may watch the video in full screen mode by clicking the full screen button on the lower right portion of video player interface.

The park honors Arizona's 150-year-old newspaper, The Weekly Arizonian, which is still being printed on the original hand press at Tubac Presidio State Historic Park. It took seven years to bring the historic Washington Hand Press back to its original glory. The press had been in Tombstone and was found in a garage in the back of a house in the late 1970s. It took State Parks staff and a very dedicated volunteer, many years to prepare an engineering plan and find all the parts to put it back together. They traveled to the Smithsonian to enlist the help of other experts to learn how to repair the press. This was the hand press that actually printed Arizona's first newspaper. Today volunteers operate the press on weekends for visitors, printing a commemorative edition of the original newspaper for the public.

The paper's editorial policies included getting a separate government for Arizona as it was then part of the New Mexico Territory. The press had originally come to Arizona by ship on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, then across the Gulf of Panama, to the Sea of Cortez and at Guaymas, was loaded onto an ox cart and sent to Tubac. And that was just the beginning of its history, it later went on to print a paper in Tucson and the Tombstone Epitaph.

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Printing Press Video

Printing Press Demonstrations:

March 2010