The Weekly Register (Point Pleasant, Va. [W. Va.])
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
2,049 issues from 1862 to 1909, published in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Point Pleasant Weekly Register premiered on March 6, 1862, in Point Pleasant, Mason County, Virginia (now West Virginia). George Ways Tippett, a printer from Maryland who had been working in Point Pleasant as a compositor since 1855, served as sole publisher and proprietor from 1862 until his death in 1902. The Register published four pages per week and played an important role in regional political discourse. The newspaper initially supported the preservation of the Union, though not the abolition of slavery. It favored the Republican Presidential ticket of Lincoln-Johnson in 1864 and advocated radical reconstruction following the Civil War. Its editorials were often antagonistic, and on October 23, 1862, Lewis Wetzel, the newspaper’s editor, was murdered for a bold editorial criticizing the local military. His killer, John Hall, a prominent Republican politician, was convicted of manslaughter and heavily fined. Following brief tenures by two subsequent editors, Tippett took over that role by August 1867.
The newspaper’s viewpoint shifted, apparently with prevailing political winds, to support for the Democratic Party in 1871, the year after Democrats swept both houses of the West Virginia legislature and the governorship. Tippet contended that the Register represented a Democratic county and should serve its patrons, and that he would always oppose John Hall. However, the newspaper’s contents suggest that Tippett had in fact lost faith in Republican rule, and he…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Point Pleasant, West Virginia, 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