Charlevoix County Herald Archive

The Charlevoix County Herald was established in the town of East Jordan, south of Charlevoix, in the northwestern corner of Michigan's Lower Peninsula in 1897. Located at the mouth of the Jordan River on Pine Lake, itself a southern arm of Lake Charlevoix, East Jordan--formally named with the opening of a post office in 1878--was then a community of around 1,200. Until the 1920s, the area remained heavily forested, and the town was a center of lumber production, primarily pine, hemlock, and hardwoods. It was also home to the East Jordan Iron Works, originally set up in 1883 to service the logging industry and still in operation to this day. East Jordan competed with Charlevoix and Boyne City to become the seat of Charlevoix County throughout the 1880s and 1890s, briefly serving in that role between 1884 and 1886. After the establishment in October 1901of a passenger service on the previously lumber-only East Jordan and Southern Railroad, many ambitious citizens came to see their town as being not merely in competition with its local rivals, but as a potential city. The Charlevoix County Herald printed a number of boosterist pamphlets throughout the first two decades of the 20th century in an attempt to spur growth. Typical was a series of articles lauding not only the agricultural, industrial, and tourist potential of Charlevoix County, but also the area's growing importance to the state and the country as a whole, for example, in a 1906 piece entitled "East Jordan, Michigan: The Coming Manufacturing and Agricultural Center of Northern Michigan."

The Charlevoix County Herald, a staunchly Republican eight-page weekly, was founded under the editorship of Andrew J. Suffern--although George A. Lisk, another prominent local businessman, who became editor around 1907, is also sometimes listed as editor during the paper's first decade. Suffern served in a number of other local roles including head cashier of both the State Bank of East Jordan and the East Jordan and Southern Railroad Company. Initially published on Thursdays, by 1902 the Herald, was published each Friday before switching to its final Saturday publication schedule in February 1903. The 1907 circulation of the paper, at a cost of $1 for a yearly subscription, was recorded as 950.

The Herald enthusiastically endorsed the Republican ticket of William Howard Taft in the pivotal 1912 presidential election. However, the Herald generally viewed national and international news with only passing interest, focusing instead on state news and local news from Charlevoix and the surrounding counties. In 1920, the Charlevoix County Herald absorbed its long-term rival the East Jordan Enterprise, edited by Charles L. Lorraine. In 1953 the Herald merged with the East Jordan News & the Northern Michigan Telegram to form the East Jordan News-Herald, which continued the numbering of the Charlevoix County Herald.