Hopkinsville Kentuckian (Hopkinsville, Ky.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
3,518 issues from 1889 to 1918, published in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Hopkinsville Conservative was founded in 1866 by Col. J.M. Dodd as the first newspaper in post-Civil War Christian County. In ten years’ time, Dodd had taken a man named Wallace as his publishing partner. They used the partnership to change the paper’s title to the Hopkinsville Democrat, a name that more accurately reflected changing postwar attitudes in Kentucky’s Pennyrile Region. By January 1879, and in declining health, Dodd sold the paper to William A. Wilgus and William T. Townes. It is unclear what became of Wallace. In 1879, Wilgus and Townes established their weekly as the South Kentuckian. In 1881, Charles M. Meacham bought Townes’ share of the paper.
Meacham was a prominent politician in central and western Kentucky. He became president of the Kentucky Press Association in 1893 and was elected Mayor of Hopkinsville from 1906 to 1914. A devout Baptist, Meacham also served as president of the Board of Trustees of the Hopkinsville Bethel Women’s College. The Baptist-run school opened in 1856, making it one of the oldest institutions of higher education for women in America.
Meacham and Wilgus began printing a daily edition soon after Meacham came aboard. It was called the Daily South Kentuckian and it ran concurrent to the weekly. Both papers were Democratic agents for the three congressional districts that surrounded Christian County at the time. After a short two years, in 1883, Wilgus and Meacham combined the editions to form a single publication, the…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Hopkinsville, 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