David Julian Whichard said in 1984 that his first real contact with his father's newspaper was in 1899 when, as a 4-year-old, he helped retrieve materials from the office during the downtown Greenville fire. He spent much of his time there as a child. At age 6, he left school early to start working at the paper and in other jobs. He was a copy boy and errand boy at the newspaper office, where he learned to read.

He also delivered cotton reports to a businessman's office a block from The Daily Reflector, earning 10 cents daily. He sold an almanac, earning 2.5 cents for each of the 10-cent copies that he sold. At the newspaper, he folded newspapers and addressed them in pencil, and at age 8 he took over a newspaper delivery route. He later became a manager, earning $12.50 a week.

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STAFFERS at the paper use early equipment to examine dot patterns on photographs for the paper. The tiny dots would transfer ink to paper to create black and white images.

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IN 1901 the paper moved to a two-story building at Third and Evans streets. The second story was later demolished, and the lower story is occupied by a restaurant.

By the late 1890s and early 1900s, The Daily Reflector was publishing some of its information based on accounts from rail passengers and through a group of neighborhood correspondents in such communities as Ayden, Winterville, Grimesland and Oakley.

David Julian Whichard noted in 1984 that the personal columns by correspondents gradually disappeared as the news gathering process became quicker and more people traveled by automobile. (News gathering improved considerably in the late teens, when the paper became a member of The Associated Press news wire service.)

The Daily Reflector had relocated in 1894 out of the schoolhouse to a wooden building at Evans Street near Fifth Street and Dickinson Avenue (formerly occupied by Higgs Sisters-Fashions & Millinery) and again in 1901 to a two-story building near Evans and Third streets. David Jordan Whichard told readers in 1905 that he planned to make improvements to both Reflectors, and the daily expanded to eight pages.

The Daily Reflector did not replace The Eastern Reflector. Both newspapers continued to publish through the first decade of the 20th century — The Daily Reflector as a six-day-a-week paper, and The Eastern Reflector as a semiweekly.

During those first years of its existence, The Daily Reflector had acquired a reputation for being, in the words of the Raleigh News & Observer, "a clean, progressive, honest newspaper, an institution of which Greenville and Pitt (County) are justly proud." This was written at the time of the daily paper's 11th birthday in 1905.

The Wilmington Messenger said at the same time the Greenville paper was considered "a leader in and moulder of public opinion on questions involving the welfare and interests of its people."

One example: in the early part of the 20th century, the newspaper embarked on a campaign to generate support for a teacher's college in Greenville. David Jordan Whichard wrote editorials over several months strongly supporting the idea of a teacher training school in Greenville, which was established in 1907.

The Daily Reflector started "one of the most aggressive editorial campaigns as it encouraged its readers to support the efforts to locate a teacher training school in Greenville," John S. Whichard, who retired in 1990 as co-publisher, recalled in 1997.

Several towns in eastern North Carolina bid on the school. Communities were to offer at least $25,000 in cash and at least 25 acres of land. Greenville won out with a bid that included $100,000 in cash and land.

(Years later, the newspaper would take similarly aggressive stances in support of, among other things, a nursing school, a medical school, the desegregation of public facilities and accommodations, the combination of county and city schools and economic development in the region.)

Also in the earliest years of the 20th century, the newspaper added more modern printing equipment. In 1909, the first Linotype machine was installed, which converted molten lead and into lines of type. This replaced so-called movable type, in which letters and punctuation marks were set individually by hand in a tray.

As David Julian Whichard recalled in 1984, the pre-Linotype process was tedious.

"Each letter, even down to the smallest size, was a separate piece. ... Each word had to be spelled out in individual letters, and we had to space between words and sentences. We had all sizes of spaces as well as letters, both of which we bought already made.

"We put letters to make up words and spaced between them in what we called a type 'stick,' a metal tray with pica measurements, until we had a line of type. When we had enough lines to make a galley, we started on the next galley and repeated this process until we filled a 'chase,' which was the size of a newspaper page."

Whichard remembered cranking a cylindrical press by hand; that manual process ended with the advent of electricity, which meant that the press could be powered.

The Daily Reflector's Linotype machine could set 10 lines of type each minute. Whichard recalled that in the 1940s, the press at The Daily Reflector could turn out about 8,000 newspapers an hour. By comparison, some of today's largest and fastest newspaper presses can produce 75,000 copies an hour.

In August 1910, David Jordan Whichard renamed The Eastern Reflector as the "Carolina Home and Farm and the Eastern Reflector," and it continued for two more years. But in late December 1912, The Eastern Reflector suspended publication and was absorbed into The Daily Reflector.

In 1913, his son, David Julian Whichard, became a part-time employee of the U.S. Post Office, and in 1914, he became an assistant acting postmaster for Greenville. After joining the Army in 1918, he served in France during World War I. During his service overseas, he learned that his father was considering selling the newspaper.

"I wrote him. I asked him if he'd hold off until I got home," Whichard later recalled.

After returning to North Carolina, he borrowed $300 and bought the paper in 1919 from his father. In addition to now owning the daily newspaper, he also acquired debts of more than $15,000.

David Jordan Whichard died in 1922, and David Julian Whichard continued as sole owner and proprietor of the newspaper until 1948, when he and his wife and brother-in-law incorporated as The Daily Reflector Inc.