The Big Sandy News (Louisa, Ky.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,488 issues from 1885 to 1922, published in Louisa, Kentucky, digitised for Chronicling America.
Lynn Boyd Ferguson was 18 years old when he bought H.T. Lyttleton’s Lawrence County Index, from W.O. Johnson. Anderson Webb, also 18, was to be his partner. They called the paper the Big Sandy News, and August 27, 1885 marked their first issue. Printed in the Lawrence county seat of Louisa, the four-page weekly carried the slogan, “Aut Invenium Viam, Aut Facium” or “Either Find a Way or Make One,” The News was a “sprightly Democratic paper” that reached deep into Kentucky’s Eastern Mountain coalfields along the Big Sandy and Tug River Valleys. Coverage also included adjacent Wayne County, West Virginia.
Ferguson, son of Judge Col. Milton Jemison Ferguson, was an outspoken Democrat, and wealthy enough to finance the Big Sandy News, but not for long. After only four issues, Webb “failed, for some cause unknown to me [Ferguson], to buy one-half interest…as he has agreed.” By September 17, Ferguson had sold that half-interest instead to 16-year-old Milton Forrest Conley. A month later financial strains forced the pair to cut “outside matter,” allowing for more advertising dollars and also providing room for Ferguson’s increasingly dogmatic editorials.
Conley was “a man of broad mental ken, mature judgment, utmost civic loyalty, and insistent patriotism” (William Elsey Connelly and Ellis Merton Coulter, History of Kentucky, Vol. 4, 1922). Conley was Louisa’s postmaster from 1893 to 1897, and in 1904, he helped organize the Louisa National Bank in which he served as director…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Louisa, Kentucky, 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