Port Tobacco Times, and Charles County Advertiser (Port Tobacco, Md.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,082 issues from 1845 to 1890, published in Port Tobacco, Maryland, digitised for Chronicling America.
Elijah Wells, Jr. and G.W. Hodges established the Port Tobacco Times in 1844 to supply the residents of Charles County, Maryland, with a weekly newspaper that supported the Democratic Party. In 1845, the paper was renamed the Port Tobacco Times, and Charles County Advertiser. Elijah Wells came from Annapolis where he had learned printing as an apprentice under Jeremiah Hughes, publisher of the Maryland Republican. After Wells’s death in 1877, his son Solomon O. Wells ran the Times before turning it over to a cousin, Charles F. Daley, in 1880. Daley’s partner F. Marcellus Cox announced in 1889 that Daley was leaving Port Tobacco to pursue opportunities elsewhere.
Southern Maryland’s residents were decidedly pro-Confederate in their sympathies; thus, at the start of the Civil War, Federal authorities moved quickly to secure Charles County by stationing troops in Port Tobacco, the county seat, and other strategic locations. On October 3, 1861, Wells had to assure alarmed readers that Union soldiers had not seized the Times. He had merely allowed the soldiers to use his printing equipment to issue a newspaper for the troops stationed nearby. After the war, the Port Tobacco Times documented the continuing economic decline of the county. Depressed land values and falling prices for tobacco were topics of concern. Politics remained a subject of great interest, and Port Tobacco had two newspapers representing opposing political parties. In 1885, F.M. Cox, of the Times narrowly…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Port Tobacco, Maryland, 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