Windham County Observer (Putnam, Conn.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
2,092 issues from 1905 to 1949, published in Putnam, Connecticut, digitised for Chronicling America.
In 1900, Nathan Waldo Kennedy combined the Weekly Observer (Dayville) and the Windham County Standard to start the Windham County Observer, a weekly newspaper that was published in Putnam, Connecticut, from 1900 to 1962. Starting in the early 1800s and lasting into the mid-1900s, eastern Connecticut was an important site for the United States textile industry. Putnam was home to one of the earliest cotton factories built in the U.S., the Pomfret Manufacturing Company, which opened in 1806, and the town later became one of eastern Connecticut's main textile manufacturing towns, home to numerous cotton, wool, and silk mills.
In 1909, the Observer passed to Horace F. Wilder, a newspaper editor from Marlborough, Massachusetts. Wilder sold the paper two years later to George L. Padgett and Henry C. Meinken, both from New York City. In 1929, the Observer was purchased by Walter N. King, a longtime Putnam resident who had been employed by a local textile company prior to his acquiring the Observer. King published the Observer for close to 20 years, until 1946, when he sold the paper to Stanley R. Evans and Muriel Evans.
Published on Wednesdays, the Observer billed itself as "a weekly family newspaper" and focused mainly on local news and notes from Putnam and neighboring communities in Windham County. The newspaper was politically independent, and editorial commentary was sporadic over its early years, with increased editorials about local issues starting in the 1930s. During…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Putnam, Connecticut, 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