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Daily Chronicle History Desk Thursday, May 7, 2026
On May 7, 2026, The Daily Chronicle’s “A Look Back in Time” reached back to the Saturday, Sept. 25, 1926, edition. That small-town page reported the arrest of Centralia resident Bob Devereaux after 157 bottles of home brew were found in his house. In the same retrospective, readers see a teenage bride filing for divorce from a Centralia man and the paper marking the debut of a new website. The original items were brief, but together they show how much — and how little — has changed in community news.
Devereaux’s arrest came during National Prohibition, which had been in effect since January 1920. Washington was already dry under state law when the 18th Amendment arrived. Home brew occupied an awkward place in that world. Some families made beer for their own tables, but that did not stop law enforcement from seizing every bottle when the supply looked too large.
The phrase “157 bottles” suggests more than a casual evening batch. In a 1926 Centralia household, that was a sizable stock. Whether Devereaux was selling it, sharing it, or simply storing it, the discovery turned a private stash into a public arrest. The paper did not say how the find happened, but such tips often came from neighbors in an era when city courts relied on word of mouth.
No disposition appeared in the short item. Devereaux may have paid a fine in Lewis County court, or a jury may have dismissed the charge months later. Without the docket, the final outcome sits just beyond the reach of the old column. Local historians who mine those court ledgers can often fill in the blanks, and the records are well worth digging through.
The same old page noted a teenage bride had filed for divorce from a Centralia man. The names were not in the headline, which was typical of earlier summaries, and no reason was given. Yet the filing itself was newsworthy. In the 1920s, divorce had to be justified in court, often through cruelty, desertion, or long separation, and it rarely made sense to go through that process quietly.
The unidentified bride would have had to appear in court or supply testimony. Washington law did not allow quick paper divorces; a judge had to be satisfied. A young woman bringing that action made the paper because her age made the case unusual. It also points to a reality that polite society often ignored: not every early marriage lasted.
The postwar 1920s were a time of changing social rules. Flappers, looser public morals, and new legal protections for women were all part of the news. Still, in a town the size of Centralia, a teenage bride filing for divorce was enough to land in the daily paper. Her story is shorter than the home-brew item, but it is just as memorable.
The third flashback in this installment is the paper’s website debut. That story sounds almost ancient now. The internet was not built with local news in mind, and a newspaper website in the early days often meant little more than scanned headlines. But it opened a new era for papers like The Chronicle.
Readers who once picked up a physical edition at a Lewis County drug store can now find the same brand on phones. The “A Look Back in Time” feature itself is part of that shift. It was designed for print readers, but it works beautifully on the web because search engines love dates, names, and concrete details like “157 bottles.”
That home-brew story from 1926 has likely been read more times online than it was when it first appeared on newsprint. The same can be said of the teenage divorce item. Local history once stayed in local libraries; now it can reach anyone researching family or regional history from across the country.
The Saturday clipping falls into a larger pattern of Prohibition-era reporting in Washington. Articles from the mid-1920s were often short, matter-of-fact, and short on follow-up. Police courts dealt with many liquor cases, and editors did not assign reporters to track every fine. The result is a fragment: no lawyer, no bond amount, no next court date.
Today’s readers should not assume the fragment tells the whole story. The 157 bottles may have come from friends or family and not from bootlegging. The bride’s divorce may have ended in reconciliation. Neither detail is known, and the honest way to treat hundred-year-old news is to present it as an opening, not a final verdict.
For deeper research, a good starting point is the Washington State Archives regional branch, which holds court records for Lewis County. The Library of Congress’s Chronicling America database also has free scans of many newspapers from the Prohibition era, though coverage varies by town. Genealogy groups in Lewis County have indexed obituaries and marriage records that can connect a 1926 name to later life.
The Daily Chronicle itself continues to publish “A Look Back in Time” regularly. Each new entry adds another layer to Centralia’s past. Sometimes the update is a murder trial; sometimes it is a man with 157 bottles; sometimes it is the newspaper proving it can embrace a new website. All of those moments matter because they show local reporting changing with the times.
A hundred years ago, Centralia residents read about Devereaux’s arrest over breakfast. They may have laughed at the number, wondered about the teenager, or simply turned the page. The old edition did not need to be perfect; it only needed to show up. The same obligation applies today. Local journalism’s best archive is not just old paper; it is the trust that a new story, or an old one, will be told straight.
