Fairport Beacon (Fairport Harbor, Ohio)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
932 issues from 1935 to 1953, published in Fairport Harbor, Ohio, digitised for Chronicling America.
This weekly community newspaper series served Fairport, Ohio (officially renamed Fairport Harbor in 1959), from 1932 to 1960. Initially titled the Merchants News before being renamed the Fairport Beacon in 1935, it was circulated by the Neal Publishing Company, a printing business run by two Fairporters, Neal and Carl Katila. Issues were free until rising costs forced the Katilas to start charging for subscriptions in late 1942. Though the paper was normally published on Fridays, special or holiday editions were sometimes distributed on other days of the week.
Built along the mouth of the Grand River where it empties into Lake Erie, and 30 miles east of Cleveland, Fairport was a maritime industrial town notable for its large immigrant population of Hungarians, Slovaks, and (especially) Finns. Per A History of Fairport Harbor Ohio, produced by the Fairport Harbor Bicentennial Committee, fully half the town’s population was Finnish by 1912, while another quarter was Hungarian or Slovakian. Finnish Americans were therefore heavily represented in the Fairport Beacon series. Its pages brimmed with Finnish organizations and names, including Katila, and articles like “Famed Finnish Editor Will Speak at Kasvi Hall Here,” from September 9, 1949, were commonplace.
Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Fairport was best known for its docks and shipping. In 1912, the chemical manufacturing industry took on a much greater role with the establishment of the Diamond Alkali Company,…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Fairport Harbor, Ohio, 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