Baptist Courier (Columbia, S.C.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
2,398 issues from 1877 to 1923, published in Columbia, South Carolina, digitised for Chronicling America.
The weekly Greenville Baptist Courier has served as a unifying voice for South Carolina Baptists for over a century. Its pages read like a catalog of the causes Baptists have historically embraced: home and foreign missions; orphanages like the Connie Maxwell Orphanage (now known as Connie Maxwell Children's Ministries); Sunday schools; educational institutions including Coker College, Greenville Woman's College, Furman University, and Limestone College; and the prohibition of alcohol.
The Baptist Courier began as the Yorkville Working Christian, founded by Tilman Rowland Gaines in July 1869. "Diligent in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord," the Working Christian attracted 2,500 subscribers in its first year. Its contents included poems, biographical sketches of Baptist ministers, reports on the activities of Baptist associations, and sermons. A subscription cost $2.50. Where previous Baptist newspapers like the Columbia Confederate Baptist and Charleston Southern Baptist had fizzled for the lack of subscribers, Tilman Gaines kept the Working Christian afloat out of sheer determination. In May 1870, he moved the newspaper to Charleston, South Carolina, as a "necessity to save the paper and our own credit," as he later explained on October 19, 1871. When an epidemic of yellow fever hit Charleston and advertising dropped off, Gaines relocated to Columbia, South Carolina.
In 1872, Tilman Gaines sold his interest in the Working Christian to Charles Marion McJunkin…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Columbia, South Carolina, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress