Feliciana Sentinel (St. Francisville, La.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
301 issues from 1877 to 1892, published in Bayou Sara, Louisiana, digitised for Chronicling America.
The West Feliciana Sentinel, a four-page Democratic weekly that was published as the Feliciana Sentinel beginning in 1877, was established in 1876 as the official journal of West Feliciana Parish and the towns of St. Francisville and Bayou Sara. Located on the Mississippi River between Natchez and New Orleans, these towns were an important cotton shipping center for one of the wealthiest plantation districts in the nineteenth-century South. Settled in the late eighteenth century as part of the colony of British West Florida and then governed by Spain (1783-1810), West Feliciana Parish attracted predominantly American settlers in the early nineteenth century and lacked the strong French cultural influence found in neighboring parishes. The second Protestant church in Louisiana, Grace Episcopal, was founded in St. Francisville in 1827 and became one of the more prominent Episcopal churches in the state.
Except for the years 1884 to 1887, when the Feliciana Sentinel was edited by the attorney Hunter C. Leake (1859-1946), the paper’s founders, George Wilson Reese (b. 1817) and John Dawson Austen (1840-1892), took turns serving as its editor. Reese, a native of Pennsylvania, also edited the East Feliciana Democrat in Clinton, Louisiana. Austen, a Catholic, moved with his family from Philadelphia to St. Francisville as a child. Educated by the Jesuits in St. Louis, he worked as a telegrapher before going into partnership with Reese.
Discussions of Reconstruction-era politics…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Bayou Sara, Louisiana, 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