Entry Category: Newspapers and Magazines - Starting with B

The Batesville Daily Guard has been published continuously since 1877, the only Batesville (Independence County) newspaper that has survived from about two dozen that were started in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Originally a weekly publication, it later became an award-winning daily newspaper. The founder of the Guard, Confederate Civil War veteran Franklin Desha Denton, was born in Batesville in 1841. In 1868, Frank Denton married Martha Adelia “Mattie” Lewis. According to the Goodspeed history of the area, Denton was attending Center College at Danville, Kentucky, when the Civil War broke out, and he came home to enlist in the Confederate army. He was twice wounded, captured by the Union army, and exchanged to fight again. After …

The Baxter Bulletin newspaper was established in 1901 in Mountain Home (Baxter County) by J. G. “Uncle Jess” Copeland, who had previously worked for both the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Over the years, it became a popular weekly turned six-day-a-week publication with a circulation of around 11,000. Copeland sold the Bulletin in October 1903 to Joe Doehring and Will M. McNair. He then moved to Cotter (Baxter County) and established the Cotter Courier. Doehring was serving as both editor and publisher when the newspaper was sold to Tom Shiras in 1905. The next year, Enness Shiras joined his brother as co-owner of the paper. They owned and operated the paper for approximately forty years. In …

On May 5, 1883, J. C. McKetham and brothers B. F. Kelley and Robert J. Kelley established the Brinkley Argus newspaper in Brinkley (Monroe County) and went on to serve as its proprietors and editors. Robert J. Kelley soon sold his interest to McKetham, and William Blount Folsom purchased the newspaper in 1891. Folsom, serving as editor, published the paper with his wife, Harriette M. Doty Folsom, who was the paper’s business manager. Published weekly, the four-to-eight-page newspaper advertised itself as having the largest circulation of any paper in Monroe County in the 1890s. The Brinkley Argus focused on local news in Brinkley and Monroe County. The paper regularly published church service schedules and Bible lessons from local churches. The …