The Van Buren Press (Van Buren, Ark.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,398 issues from 1859 to 1912, published in Van Buren, Arkansas, digitised for Chronicling America.
Van Buren, the Crawford County seat, is in northwest Arkansas near Fort Smith and the Oklahoma border. It sits on the northern bank of the Arkansas River, just south of the Ozark Mountains. Van Buren was one of the earliest ports and trading centers in Arkansas due to its position on the river. Later, the introduction of railroads continued to support the mercantile city. Van Buren was a strategic location in Arkansas during the Civil War, with nine military exercises in the city. Union forces captured it in December 1862.
Joseph Starr Dunham founded the Van Buren Press in 1859. He owned and edited the paper until his death in 1912. Dunham was from Connecticut. At the age of 13, he apprenticed to his uncle, William Duncan Starr, to learn the printing trade. In 1859, he left Connecticut and moved to Van Buren, where he started the Press by midyear. His son, Joseph Starr Dunham, Jr. worked at the Press briefly in its later years before his death in 1888. Carl H. Schuppe also helped produce the paper.
The Press was a Democratic paper published every Wednesday. Toward the end of its first year, the paper moved to Fridays in response to the closure of the Arkansas Intelligencer (1842-1859), which had published on Fridays in Van Buren. After the Intelligencer closed, the Press was the only paper running out of Van Buren until the mid-1870s. By 1900, the Press had a circulation of 550.
In its early years, the Press was largely concerned with the politics and events leading up…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Van Buren, Arkansas, 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