The Somerset Reporter (Skowhegan, Me.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,302 issues from 1885 to 1909, published in Skowhegan, Maine, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Somerset Reporter was a significant newspaper published in northwest Maine’s rural Somerset County. Existing between 1868 and 1987 but going by the title Independent-Reporter between 1909 and 1955, the weekly was the hometown newspaper for communities from Mercer to Palmyra, Fairfield to Jackman, and based in Skowhegan, the county seat, known for shoe and paper mills along the Kennebec River.
Newspapers had been published in Somerset County beginning in 1823. The Reporter began in 1868 when Moses Littlefield sold the Republican Clarion to Colby College graduate and Civil War veteran Zembro Augustus Smith. The Clarion reprinted state and national news, but Smith changed the name and focused the Reporter on county and local news. Smith moved from the Water Street office to the old town hall, where the Reporter remained for 40 years, even through a fire in 1881.
The owners of the paper in 1870s were W.K. Moody, 1872-1875; C.H. Kilby and C.A. Woodbury, 1875-1878; and Joseph O. Smith (brother of Zembro) and his brother-in-law E.H. Mayo from 1878 on. J.O. Smith left the paper to become Maine’s Secretary of State between 1880 and 1885, but he returned, buying out Mayo in 1886 and remaining until his death in 1905.
Elmer E. McNeelie joined the Reporter as a printer’s apprentice in 1877, working his way up to writer, manager, and eventually proprietor in 1905.
Although other papers published concurrently, the first real challenge to the Republican Reporter came in 1892 with…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Skowhegan, Maine, 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