Grand Prairie News (Stuttgart, Ark.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
437 issues from 1917 to 1927, published in Stuttgart, Arkansas, digitised for Chronicling America.
Stuttgart, in east-central Arkansas, is known as the “rice capital of the world.” Arkansas is the biggest producer of rice in the U.S., and Stuttgart is one of the largest centers of rice production in the state. Currently, rice is Arkansas’s leading crop, but it was not until the 1900s that rice was successfully grown on a large scale in the state.
One of two Arkansas County seats, Stuttgart is in the Grand Prairie subregion within the Mississippi Delta. When European settlers arrived in the Grand Prairie, it was flat grasslands. After agricultural innovations and experimentation with Grand Prairie soils, farmers developed techniques to grow rice, a water intensive crop, and turn rice farming into a thriving industry. As a result of these advances, most grasslands in the area were converted to farmland.
In 1916, Walter Leslie Kennedy, Sr. and Mary Elizabeth Walker Vore founded the Grand Prairie News, named for the grasslands surrounding the town around Stuttgart. The pair shared the work as publishers and editors, issuing the Democratic paper weekly on Thursdays. The paper’s motto was “A smile is the same in all languages.” By 1920, the News had a circulation of 1,100. The News focused much of its content on promoting Stuttgart and the rice industry in the area. In 1921, the masthead began including the slogan “Eat Rice” on either side of the newspaper name.
Kennedy was married to Clara Marie Buerkle Kennedy. The Buerkles, Kennedy’s in-laws, founded Stuttgart in 1878.…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Stuttgart, Arkansas, 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