MARYSVILLE — “How many papers do you know that have been around 118 years?” Marysville Historical Society President Ken Cage asked. “Because I don’t know many.”

The Marysville Globe celebrates its 118th birthday this year, and as far as Cage is concerned, the history of The Globe is Marysville’s history.

“In the early days, they tried to cover everything,” said Cage, as he hauled out bound stacks of newspapers from the Historical Society archives. “It’s interesting to dig around and see the folksy stories that they printed originally.”

In 1910, The Globe not only covered City Council meetings and Town Clerk reports, but also printed poems and notes about minor injuries of townsfolk. The front page of the Jan. 10 issue featured an ad for the Marysville Opera House, selling tickets for 35 cents a seat.

“Here’s a story about a Mrs. Merrick entertaining in her home,” Cage pointed to the Jan. 14, 1910 issue. “The paper printed serialized fiction stories, but in spite of Washington being only the fifth state in the Union to adopt women’s suffrage around this time, I can’t recall seeing many articles on it.”

By 1933, The Globe had begun carrying local business owner John Hilton’s “Two by Six” column, featuring tips and jokes, and had expanded to include separate sections for “Local,” “Personal” and “Neighborhood” news, with entire subsections devoted to Sunnyside, Kellogg Marsh and Shoultes, as well as whole pages devoted to the “Farm Department” and “Snohomish County Grange News.”

“This was right around when Marysville’s economy was converting from lumber to farming,” Cage said.

The average front page of a 1955 Globe included a dozen different stories, including marriage licenses and birth notices. By 1969, The Globe was covering fishing news and Boy Scout bulletins, as well as a long-running column called “Ye Ol’ Ghost.”

“They never put a byline on it,” Cage said. “It would talk about everything from snow cleanups to people who’d had stays in the hospital or made wedding announcements.”

The year 1969 also included coverage of the boat races on Ebey Slough, that used to be part of the Strawberry Festival, as well as a front-page story on the train crash of June 12, in which two people were killed.

“The engineers were either asleep or incapacitated, and they blew through two or three signal notices,” Cage said. “The police were following the train on State Avenue in their cars.”

The May 18, 1980, eruption of Mount St. Helens made it into The Globe as well, since it left a light coating of ash in the area.

“There were a lot of funny stories that were published about people who were collecting huge amounts of ash to sell later,” Cage said. “The problem was, everyone had huge quantities of ash, so they didn’t have anyone to sell it to.”

Looking back on The Globe’s evolution, how does Cage think the modern version of the paper compares to its predecessors?

“The size is smaller, but the writing style is better now,” Cage said. “It used to be very chatty, but it’s become direct and to the point.”