Lovelock Tribune Archive

Lovelock, like other towns across northern Nevada, began as a rest stop near the Humboldt River on the Overland Trail to California. The valley provided lush pasture and water for cattle, horses, oxen, and people before they headed west across the dreaded Forty Mile Desert of the California Trail. A few homesteaders first settled in the valley to harvest the wild rye as well as to cut and sell the alfalfa for hay. The town took its name from George Lovelock, an English settler who had travelled into Nevada from California after the Civil War. Lovelock bought about 320 acres and the water rights in the Humboldt Valley from the local resident squatters. Eventually, Central Pacific Railroad passed through, and Lovelock donated 85 acres for the site of a depot that would take his name. Lovelock also discovered mineral deposits in the surrounding areas, became the town's first postmaster, and owned the Big Meadows Hotel. By 1900, Lovelock was a bustling town with a school, churches, and a business district and the town supported no fewer than three weekly newspapers.

The Lovelock Tribune was the first local newspaper, established in 1898 by S.R. Young and George W. Peltier, incorporated as the Lovelock Publishing Company with Charles McKnight Sain as editor and manager. In 1905, the Lovelock Argus, owned and edited by the Riddle family since 1900, consolidated with the Tribune. Howard W. Cherry took over the paper in 1907, and in 1908 George Riddle joined. Cherry then left the Tribune to start his own paper, the Vernon Review in neighboring Vernon, but before long, he returned to Lovelock with his newspaper, which he now published as the Lovelock Review.

John S. Case took over the Tribune in 1908. Case, originally from Winnemucca, graduated from the State University of Nevada. Case and a former classmate leased the Daily Silver State newspaper and ran it as managers and editors. When the downstate Tonopah Daily Bonanza noted his wedding in 1910, Case was referred to as "one of the [most] well-known newspapermen in the state." He represented the Lovelock Tribune at the organizational meeting of the Nevada Editorial Association in Reno in 1911, for which he served on the executive committee.

Case expanded the Tribune to a semi-weekly, but in February 1912, he suspended publication of the Tribune and moved briefly to the Review-Miner before he gave up the newspaper business altogether. He then returned to Winnemucca, where a fellow editor reported in the Carson City Daily Appeal, "the former editor of the Lovelock Tribune will engage in the merchandizing business in Paradise Valley, having forsaken the newspaper game. It is a hard game, John, and success to you in your new venture."

Lovelock was incorporated as a city in 1917 and became the seat of Pershing County in 1919 when its famous round courthouse, designed by Frederick Joseph DeLongchamps, was built. Periodic mining activity, agriculture, and tourism sustain Lovelock to this day.