The Wisconsin Tobacco Reporter (Edgerton, Wis.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,242 issues from 1899 to 1922, published in Edgerton, Wisconsin, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Wisconsin Tobacco Reporter was published in Edgerton between 1877 and 1950. It was preceded by the Edgerton Independent, merged with the Edgerton Eagle in 1925, and later continued as Edgerton Reporter. As its title suggests, the Wisconsin Tobacco Reporter was a weekly newspaper devoted to the interests of the state’s tobacco industry.
Edgerton, located in Rock and Dane County, is locally known as “Tobacco City” because of the central role it played in the tobacco industry in southern Wisconsin. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was home to dozens of tobacco warehouses. Tobacco was one of the earliest and most enduring of Wisconsin’s specialty crops, first sold commercially in the 1850s. Tobacco boomed during the Civil War when the secession of southern states created a strong market for the crop. By the 1880s, tobacco was grown across southern Dane county and in Rock and Jefferson counties. In the 1900s, a second area of production developed in Vernon and Crawford counties. Tobacco prices fell during the Great Depression but the Agricultural Adjustment Act helped to solidify the market by restricting the number of acres in production.
Although tobacco cultivation was not native to Norwegians, they soon became strongly associated with it due to the large number of immigrants who worked on tobacco farms. Two editors of the Tobacco Reporter reflected this Norwegian heritage. Dilly Ristad, editor from 1919 to 1931, and Christian Hoen, editor from 1931 to…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Edgerton, 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