July 16, 2018 / Joanne Yeck

Virginia’s Historic Newspapers

It’s official!

The Library of Virginia’s collection Virginia Chronicle now has 1 million digital images of historic newspapers. Click here to read the details in a blog post at “Fit To Print:”

EXTRA, EXTRA! VIRGINIA CHRONICLE REACHES 1,000,000 PAGES!

As genealogists and historians know, newsprint is fragile and disintegrates rapidly. Still, it is remarkable how much has survived. Some forward thinking people saved their newspapers. In an unusual plea published in the Virginia Citizen (Irvington, VA), the editor encouraged his readers to save and bind their newspapers.

“By taking a little trouble,” he wrote, “a paper . . . may be preserved to form a permanent and valuable addition to the reading matter with which all families and individuals should be supplied.” He continued:

The VIRGINIA CITIZEN finds that many of its devoted subscribers are endeavoring to preserve a complete file of their local paper, and some have succeeded in saving every issue from the paper’s birth, over thirteen years ago. What a valuable chronicle of events and men of this section to be found in such a complete file!

Where they have shown such flattering interest we have decided to help those careful friends to keep perfect files as a valuable encyclopedia of local affairs or to hand down to posterity, and with that in view will agree to bind yearly volumes of the CITIZEN for them at $1 per volume.

If only more publishers had encouraged such preservation!

Thanks, again, to the dedicated staff at Virginia Chronicle for preserving Virginia’s local history in digital form.