Aberdeen Herald (Aberdeen, Chehalis County, W.T.)

• 1890–1917
• Newspaper

Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.

1,979 issues from 1890 to 1917, published in Aberdeen, Washington, digitised for Chronicling America.

Aberdeen is the largest city in Grays Harbor County (known as Chehalis County until 1915), situated on the central Washington coast. Named for Aberdeen, Scotland, the city is located at the confluence of the Chehalis and Wishkah Rivers, just east of Grays Harbor itself. The first white farmers settled in the area in the 1860s; in the following decades, Aberdeen blossomed into an industrial city that boasted numerous sawmills and salmon canneries. By the 1920s Aberdeen declared itself “The Lumber Capital of the World,” but the following decades saw a decline in industrial activity, the economic effects of which are still felt today.

Hunt and Kaylor’s Washington, West of the Cascades (1917) describes the Aberdeen Herald as the city’s first newspaper. Politically, the paper supported the Democratic Party. According to J. Orin Oliphant’s “Newspapers of Washington Territory,” the weekly Herald started publication on October 20, 1886, under 18-year-old Harford Charles “Harry” Telfer. In 1887, according to Ayer’s Directory of Newspapers, control passed to Edward C. Finch, a real estate man who ran the paper for one year before leaving to found the rival Aberdeen Bulletin. For a short period beginning in 1889, the paper was called the Aberdeen Weekly Herald. Over the next decade, under a series of editors, the paper’s circulation dwindled, amounting to just 450 readers by 1897. In 1898, the Herald was acquired by one of Grays Harbor’s most prominent citizens, John J. Carney, a…

Genres

News

Published in

Aberdeen, Washington, 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