The Telegraph-Courier (Kenosha, Wis.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,770 issues from 1888 to 1925, published in Kenosha, Wisconsin, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Southport Telegraph was first published in June 1840 by Charles C. Sholes, who had previously run the Green Bay Wisconsin Democrat. The Telegraph reflected Sholes’ Jeffersonian Democrat leaning, as well as his support for the Free-Soil campaign of 1848, which helped Van Buren win the majority in Racine and Walworth Counties. In the 1840s and 1850s, the newspaper was utilized to promote temperance, and, although geographically far removed from Fond du Lac County, the Telegraph also covered the Wisconsin Phalanx, or Ceresco, a utopian socialist commune active between 1844 and 1850.
Shortly after its founding, Sholes’ brother Christopher Latham Sholes, also known as the inventor of the typewriter, purchased the publication. Michael Frank joined the Telegraph as well, intermittently serving as editor and publisher. Frank was the first village president and is considered the architect of Wisconsin’s free public school system supported by property taxes. The state’s first free school opened in Southport after a bill he had introduced was passed in 1845.
Located at Wisconsin’s southern-most natural harbor on Lake Michigan, the town’s newspaper covered the beginnings of formal harbor improvements and, later, its rise as a wheat shipping port for southeast Wisconsin and northern Illinois. When the town was renamed Kenosha in 1850, the newspaper changed its title to Kenosha Telegraph.
After merging with the Whig-leaning Kenosha Tribune in 1855, the weekly became the Kenosha…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Kenosha, Wisconsin, 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