So what was the clipping about? A connection to the original owner, perhaps?

It is fun to find these things. We found out our wall was insulated with shirt boxes from a store long gone.
Diane

We found a Teddy Roosevelt campaign button.

My parents were digging through an abandoned cabin in the rockies and found a newspaper with the date of their wedding.

This was the "building paper" inside my enclosed porch (enclosed in 1938 according to the newspaper's date)

The paper literally crumbled to dust when removed.

Casey

That car would have been much neater if it had suicide doors in back, like a '47 Dodge I used to own!

We found newspaper "shims" in the walls; papers were dated 1939. We also found bottles of alcohol in the ceiling between the upper and lower floors and a secret trap door in the ceiling of the little pantry off the kitchen.

Even more exciting is that local old-timers insist the house was build by a moonshiner. They say the basement, which is currently sealed off, housed a still and the whole moon-shining operation.

Someday I'm drilling into that basement!

We found the Memorial Day editions of the city and college paper from 1935 under the subfloor in our main floor bathroom.
Laid out nicely.

Very exciting! When I was a teenager I was stripping (MANY layers of) wallpaper from inside my bedroom closet, and the next to the bottom layer was a newspaper dated 1895! As with the OP, not a huge surprise since the house was clearly built sometime in the second half of the 19th century, but it was interesting to see, both because old newspapers are cool and because it was nice to find some concrete evidence of the age of the house. (I assume they did not stick up extremely old newspapers and those papers were current at the time....)

when we pulled up our CARPET there was a 1920-era piece of newspaper with an ad for a Model T between the floorboard and the carpet pad. It's kinda gross, if you think about it, that they didn't clean the floorboards between 1920 and 1989 when they installed the carpet. Also found 1940's era paper in the air ducts...and we have "building paper" in the kneewall attic too...nothing very interesting, dated about 1935, I think. I'm about to tear it out, I think I'll do that project in January (lol).

:)

Today I found a piece of old wallpaper while stripping the 1989 wallpaper, very interesting pattern.

kterlep - someone might have intentionally put that newspaper there. Growing up we used to make "time capsules" all over the house - under carpeting and in various nooks and crannies. There is a closet under the staircase, and when I was younger I realized that the back of the closet did not go all the way to the bottom of the stairs... it ended about halfway. I became obsessed with the idea of opening it up, realizing there was a hollow space there, and rather lenient parents allowed me too. (It was closed with boards, not lathe and plaster.) There were some weird old kitchen tools and some religious pamphlets in there. I don't know why they would have been closed up back there and I think they were intentionally put there. We took the tools to use for decoration in the kitchen but left the pamphlets, along with some newer items. I would wonder if someone found the old newspaper while doing work in your house and then decided to close it up under the carpet as a surprise to be discovered in the future.

lizzie_nh, I haven't found any cool stuff in my house, but I am, like you, leaving little bits and pieces all over. My daughter and I wrote on the walls in the kitchen before the new cabinets went up. I put a Brookstone catalog and the real estate section of the paper on top of the cabinets before the molding was attached, sealing them in. I put pictures of us and the house on top of the built-in bookshelves that we installed in the room we made into a library. I love the thought of someone finding all that.

vjrnts - it can also be pretty cool if you live in a house long enough to rediscover some of that, too. When my parents bought their house in the 1970s, it had hideous 1970s finishes covering wood floors and plaster walls - gold wallpaper, gold shag carpeting. Now they have the plaster walls exposed and painted, but early on, they just put up new wallpaper. When they stripped the old wallpaper to put up the new, we kids, young at the time, wrote all over the walls. Fast-forward 20 years and they decided to take down the "new" wallpaper and paint the walls. They exposed all our old, often hilarious, writing! Alas there was no way to preserve it all, but my mother left one area bare and placed a framed picture over it.

Maybe, Lizzie. From what I understand the 1989 owners didn't lay the carpet themselves, so prolly what happened was the carpet guys came and pulled up whatever the old spinsters had, and then laid down the new carpet (a floral bouquet on light green that I feel a little bad about pulling up but it was stinky and made my eyes hurt). All I have to say is that the original owners (1889-1980's) left me much more interesting things (diamond ring, copper plate for calling card, cast iron w/enamel shelves baker's rack, enamel sign with 3 digit phone #) than successive owners did (skid marked BVD, old toilet, and the last flipper left a lot of garbage and there's old paint cans from the 1950's till now.)