The Hazel Green Herald (Hazel Green, Wolfe County, Ky.) 1885-19??
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
797 issues from 1885 to 1917, published in Hazel Green, Kentucky, digitised for Chronicling America.
Established by Spencer Cooper, the Hazel Green Herald was Wolfe County’s first newspaper. A native of Lexington, Cooper came to Hazel Green in 1885 and, within a month, had printed the first issue of the four-page Herald. Below its masthead the paper would read: “The Oldest, Most Popular, Most Widely Circulated and Most Quoted Paper in the Kentucky Mountains.” It is unclear exactly when the Herald ceased publication, but copies of the paper are available only through 1917.
Wolfe County and the town of Hazel Green are located in the Eastern Coal Field Region of Appalachian Kentucky. It is one of the poorest areas of the Commonwealth today, just as it was in Cooper’s time, when the editor offered cash-strapped readers the opportunity to barter meat and produce for subscriptions to the Herald. The county population was just under 6,000 in 1880, barely reaching 7,000 120 years later. It is remarkable that a newspaper of any size or quality could have survived nearly four decades in such a sparsely populated area. But the Hazel Green Herald did survive and did so with exceptional print quality–a great incentive for businesses to advertise their merchandise. The paper also covered state and regional news and all the gossip the county could handle. It was not unusual for Cooper to use archaic terms that locals would understand, like “milch” for milk, making the Herald a very comfortable news source for many of his subscribers.
In 1880, the same year Cooper arrived in Wolfe…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Hazel Green, Kentucky, 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