The Evening Dispatch (Provo, City, Utah)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
564 issues from 1894 to 1895, published in Provo, Utah, digitised for Chronicling America.
Founded in 1849 as Fort Utah, the city of Provo was the first Mormon “colony” outside the Salt Lake Valley, and, as such, never completely broke free from the authority of Mormon leaders in Salt Lake City, about 45 miles away. For two decades, Provo relied on the Church-run newspaper from the “metropolis,” the Deseret News. That changed in 1873, however, with the founding of Provo’s first newspaper, the Provo Daily Times. That paper, which survives today as the Daily Herald, proved surprisingly durable, perhaps because it always seemed ready to pick a fight with any competitor who launched a newspaper in Provo.
It was no different for the Evening Dispatch, which appeared in January 1891, a time of political turmoil in the territory of Utah (the Mormon Church had recently announced an end to plural marriage in a bid to achieve statehood) and an economic boom in the city of Provo. Almost immediately, the fledgling newspaper found itself under attack by the dominant Provo paper, a successor to the Daily Times, known then as the Daily Enquirer. The Enquirer accused the interloper Dispatch of being nothing more than the “organ of the new Democratic Club.” Nevertheless, the Dispatch proved to be a formidable foe, and for the next five years, it consistently competed with its well-established rival for the advertising dollars and readers of Provo.
The Dispatch began as a semiweekly, published on Wednesdays and Saturdays, available for a nickel per copy or, according to the…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Provo, Utah, 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