Present, former newspaper staffers tour the Potomac News' previous location

Mary Scites walked about five feet into the Dumfries Laundromat in the Triangle Shopping Plaza and pointed to her left.

“That’s where my desk was,” she said amid the swish of the washers and tumbling of the dryers in the 6,000-square-foot laundromat.

Present and former staffers of the Potomac News were recently invited to tour one of the first locations of the 50-year-old daily newspaper of Prince William County.

Of course when Scites started at the Potomac News in 1970, the paper was only about 11 years old and a small weekly community paper.

“It was a very small operation,” Scites said. “We were like a small family back then.”

The Dumfries resident began writing a weekly neighbors column in 1962 from home.

“I heard they were looking for someone to write a column so I called,” she said. She continued to write her homespun news by hand — she didn’t have a typewriter — for two years.

Scites’ husband would carry his wife’s column to the Potomac News’ original office, which was housed in an old, white two-story farmhouse near the corner of Washington and Main streets in Dumfries. The house was behind the old Dumfries Post Office that used to be across the street from the Dumfries Town Hall.

By the time Scites started working part-time as a proofreader for the paper in 1970, the Potomac News had moved its operation into the space now occupied by the laundromat. Longtime county residents would remember the space as the site of the Rite-Aid drugstore for many years.

“I could check for grammar, punctuation and style, but I couldn’t change anything else,” Scites remembered. She was later promoted to being a full-time copy editor, a job in which you could make changes. Scites continued to work at the paper as a copy editor until she retired two years ago.

Walking around the laundromat, Scites pointed out the locations of the newsroom — which housed two reporters and a part-time photographer — the publisher’s office, advertising and classified and the press.

“There were big rolls of paper by the press and the publisher’s children liked to play on them,” Scites said. “We kind of babysat them.”

And when the press was running, it was noisy.

“It was all open in here. One big room,” she said. “You could barely hear yourself think,” she said.

Touring the space was the idea of sisters Ginger Trest and Wendy White, a couple of the owners of the family-run laundromat.

“We had been told that the Potomac News office used to be here by many people,” Trest said.

When work began to remodel the old drug store space into a laundromat a few years ago, new floor tiling was laid. And while pulling up the old flooring, they found black stains in the back of the building on the old cement floor, White said.

“That would have been ink from the press,” said Susan Svihlik, executive editor of the News and Messenger. The Potomac News and the Manassas Journal Messenger merged last October.

Trest and White said they were thrilled to find the physical proof that their business was once the site of the Potomac News. Aside from running their family business, both have been newspaper carriers for years, first for the Washington Post and now also for the News and Messenger.

“We think of this as a good omen,” White said. “If the Potomac News can be in business for 50 years, then we can be just as successful and be around in 50 years.”

Scites then led the group upstairs from the laundromat to office space that became the Potomac News in 1971 until it moved to its current location on Smoketown Road in 1979.

She pointed out the reception area, classified, the newsroom and other departments. The press remained downstairs. The space was much larger and the newspaper had more employees.

“We were growing,” Scites said. “We really felt we had moved up in the world when we got here.”

Svihlik said she was surprised when she saw the upstairs office space. “This is nothing how I imagined it. I thought it would look like an attic.”

Scites said she had not been in the building since the newspaper offices moved out.

“It brings back a lot of memories,” she said. “It’s been fun. I’m glad I came.”

Staff writer Aileen Streng can be reached at 703-878-8010.