The Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
3,944 issues from 1906 to 1922, published in Hammond, Indiana, digitised for Chronicling America.
Sidmon McHie (1863-1944), a wealthy Chicago grain and stock broker, purchased the Hammond Daily Tribune in 1906, with the intention of promoting the young industries and businesses of Lake County, Indiana. Not content with marketing the news only to Hammond, he changed the paper’s name to the Lake County Times and pushed sales in neighboring towns. The energetic new owner used the paper to “get Hammond to believe in itself,” as described in a 1943 tribute. Consequently, the daily’s circulation, which stood at just 137 when McHie bought it in 1906, jumped to almost 5,000 within a year and nearly exceeded 10,000 in 1920, when Lake County’s population stood at 82,000. As an investment scheme, McHie circulated many free copies to promote the city. By 1943, the paper was reaching 130,000 readers.
McHie hired Chicago sportswriter Hugh E. Keough to be the Lake County Times‘s first editor. Best known for his sports column (“In the Wake of the News”) in the Chicago Daily Tribune, Keough’s tenure on the Lake County Times was short-lived, and Percy A. Parry soon replaced him, guiding the Lake County Times – renamed the Hammond Times in August 1933 – for over 30 years until his death in 1938.
With McHie and Parry at the helm, the Lake County Times became a flamboyant paper with strong sales. Although not known for its deep investigative journalism, front-page stories in the 1910s and 1920s provide insight into the social issues of that age – from the scandalous rise in American…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Hammond, Indiana, 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