Macon Beacon (Macon, Miss.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
2,002 issues from 1860 to 1922, published in Macon, Mississippi, digitised for Chronicling America.
Macon, the seat of Noxubee County, is a small town in fertile farmland in east-central Mississippi known as the black prairie. Although not the earliest paper in Macon, the Macon Beacon is the county’s lone surviving paper.
Edmond W. Ferris came to Noxubee County from Washington, D.C. in the mid-1840s and established a drug store and weekly newspaper named The Noxubee Rifle. When his brother Henry C. Ferris, a printer, came to Macon in 1849, they changed the name to the Union Beacon reflecting their opposition to the dissolution of the union. The name was changed to the Macon Beacon in 1859 when secessionist sympathies prevailed in the state. By January 1860, Henry Ferris was the sole proprietor of the paper and remained so throughout the Civil War.
The Civil War was the most notable event covered by the Macon Beacon. Although often reduced to two pages by 1862, the weekly paper was published throughout the war. Early in the conflict, the paper included news of the formation and muster of locally raised regiments; in 1863 stories of the Jackson and Vicksburg campaigns were prominent. After the siege of Jackson in July 1863, the seat of state government left Jackson; in March 1864, the legislature convened in Macon, where it remained for the rest of the war. By 1864, the Beacon included pleas for cooked food and assistance at hospitals set up in local schools and churches. Towards the end of the war, notices appeared calling soldiers to report to their units or be reported…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Macon, Mississippi, 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