Connecticut Western News (Salisbury, Litchfield Co., Conn.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
2,505 issues from 1871 to 1922, published in Canaan, Connecticut, digitised for Chronicling America.
All accounts of the birth of the Connecticut Western News note that its printing press arrived in the small Litchfield County town of Salisbury on the very same day, “and almost the same hour,” that a locomotive of the Connecticut Western Railroad inched forward into the village on just-laid track. Editor and owner Joseph L. Pease wrote in the first issue of July 14, 1871: “Thus, the two engines of civilization keep pace with each other.” The arrival of the railroad and the press were both expected to dramatically increase the economic well-being of the state’s northwest corner. A “salutatory” in issue No. 1 explained that those who had invested in the publishing enterprise were motivated by the “almost entire absence of a practical means of advertising through this region” and a reliance on posters and circulars. The earliest commercial pages of the Western News were filled with notices of goods and services aimed at persons employed by the native iron industry, in rail car wheel manufacturing, or farming. Newspaper readers could find here purveyors of clothing, groceries, banks, watches, organs, sewing machines, and lumber, as well as carpentry, tailoring, and baking. Other ads tried to entice Connecticut farmers and mechanics to try their hand in the West. Striving first and foremost to satisfy its advertisers, the Western News promised to “stand aloof” from all political parties and to appear at all times as a “respectable family newspaper.”
Potential advertisers were…
- Genres
- Westerns, News
- Published in
- Canaan, Connecticut, 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