The Adair County News (Columbia, Ky.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,185 issues from 1900 to 1922, published in Columbia, Kentucky, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Adair County News covered south-central Kentucky’s eastern Pennyrile region, but its appeal extended beyond the small county seat of Columbia. In 1909, subscriptions included advertisements for businesses in Columbia and nearby towns, including Lebanon, Russell Springs, Greensburg, and Jamestown. Charles S. Harris established the Adair County News in 1887 as a Democratic counter to Alvin A. Strange’s Republican Columbia Spectator, with hopes, according to the first issue, that it would be a true Democratic paper, come to advocate honest convictions and defend noble principles.
Turn-of-the-century Columbia was an isolated community. In 1910, local farmers and businessmen still traveled almost 20 miles to Campbellsville, Kentucky to receive goods or ship their products on the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. Unsurprisingly, the prospect of a railroad connection to Columbia was newsworthy, although it was a prospect that never materialized. The Adair County News included reports of Columbia and Louisville agricultural markets, social news, and correspondence from nearby towns. (A Gradyville, Kentucky, correspondent declared in the paper’s first issue: The election excitement has quieted and everybody has gone to business.) Adair County News also chronicled pivotal events in Columbia’s history, including the founding of the Lindsey Wilson Training School in 1903, later to become Lindsey Wilson College. In 1919, Judge Rollin T. Hurt, writing under the pseudonym John Avroe…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Columbia, 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