Wausau Pilot (Wausau, Wis.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,198 issues from 1900 to 1922, published in Wausau, Wisconsin, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Wausau River Pilot was first published in 1865 by 18-year old Valentine Ringle. The son of German immigrants, Ringle learned the printer’s trade as a boy and later also published a German-language title, the Wausau Wochenblatt. At its commencement, the Pilot competed with another Wausau weekly, the Central Wisconsin and its German-language publication Freie Presse. Being a supporter of the Democratic Party, Ringle’s Pilot mirrored his political leaning.
As one of the county seat’s first newspapers, the Pilot documents the community’s history from a lumbering town of several hundred residents to city of thousands, with a growing papermaking industry after the arrival of the railroad in 1874.
In 1884, the Wausau River Pilot was consolidated with the Wausau Weekly Review which had existed since 1882. Together, they were published as the Pilot and Review by former Review editor Eugene Thayer. Thayer, who held multiple political offices, continued the political identity of the publication. Because of its political standing and its audience in a county (Marathon) with many German immigrants, the Wausau Pilot offers an interesting perspective on the Progressive Era and World War I.
Under Thayer’s leadership, the publication became the Pilot Review in 1886 and, finally, the Wausau Pilot in 1896. Thayer ran the publication until his retirement in 1920 and was succeeded by the Pilot Printing & Publishing Company, managed by Fred A. Fuhrmann; the paper was edited by Thayer’s…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Wausau, 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