Peninsula Enterprise (Accomac, Va.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
3,211 issues from 1885 to 1963, published in Accomac, Virginia, digitised for Chronicling America.
In 1880, Virginia’s Eastern Shore–Accomac (until 1940, spelled without the k) and Northampton Counties–had changed little in generations. The region’s population worked as watermen, shipwrights, and farmers. In Accomac County, small towns such as Onancock dotted the peninsula, with boatyards, piers, and docks for shipping seafood and produce. Inland hamlets–such as the county seat, Accomac Court House–offered small businesses attuned to both the Bay and the many agricultural communities.
Because of its distance from Virginia’s main centers of commerce, residents of the Eastern Shore relied on several steamship lines serving Accomac and Northampton. Commerce was centered on Baltimore rather than on Hampton Roads. Despite the relative isolation of the region, newspapers were slow to take hold. For example, the Accomac National Recorder survived only one year, 1862. The expansion of the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad in the late 1870s and early 1880s helped spur economic growth. New markets opened up for Eastern Shore products, from produce to seafood, and industries as diverse as lumbering and tourism grew. By the early 1900s, the population of Accomac was still small, at 300, but the county had grown to 27,000. The economic boom generated a flowering of newspapers in the region. In Onancock alone, there were: the Eastern Virginian (1873–87), the Tidewater News (1889–90), the Accomack Democrat (1890–93), and the Eastern Shore Press (1893–96).
The Peninsula…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Accomac, Virginia, 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