Monroe Democrat Archive

Monroe County was created in 1821 from ancestral Chickasaw lands in northeast Mississippi. Established by a Scotsman as a trading post on the navigable Tombigbee River, Aberdeen was incorporated in 1837 and became the county seat in 1849. By 1910, Aberdeen had around 5,000 inhabitants and was a manufacturing and commercial center in the primarily agricultural region.

From 1842 through the first quarter of the twentieth century, Monroe County almost continuously had a Democratic four-page weekly beginning with the Mississippi Advertiser (1842–48). A series of talented and occasionally related newspapermen moved from one publication to another; Advertiser publishers William E. Smith and William D. Chapman published the succeeding Monroe Democrat (1848–52). When the next Democratic organ, the Sunny South (1856–66?), ended, Sidney Alroy Jonas and another former employee started the long-running Aberdeen Examiner (1866—2008). The Examiner, which also had a tri-weekly edition, eventually absorbed the successor to the Aberdeen Weekly (1878–1933). The Weekly's long-time publisher and editor, Thomas Tuley Deavenport, was the nephew of Matthew Deavenport, who published the Monroe Democrat toward the end of its run. Both the Examiner and the Weekly expanded from four to eight pages at some point in the early twentieth century.

All three antebellum papers had the typical mid-nineteenth century mix of content, including news, general interest articles, legal notices, and advertisements. In addition to supporting Democratic Party ideals, in its prospectus the Mississippi Advertiser claimed that it would " … convey a concise knowledge of the great Cotton markets of Mobile and New Orleans," note "the growth and prosperity of this city," and report on "the arrival and departure of steamboats." Much of the news in 1845 focused on the annexation of Texas as a state. Perhaps the most noteworthy news in the February 7, 1849 issue of the Monroe Democrat, is the constitution and membership list of a short-lived joint stock company from northeast Mississippi organized to mine ore in the newly discovered gold fields of California. In 1860, the Sunny South supported Democrat John C. Breckinridge for president.

After Reconstruction, editorials in the Aberdeen Examiner and the Aberdeen Weekly criticized northern attitudes toward the South. Both papers reported on local improvements, such as the first Aberdeen telephone exchange established in the early 1880s. Serialized stories were also popular; in 1911, the Aberdeen Weekly published the Fires of Montezuma written by the publisher's father, James Johnston Deavenport. The Weekly was better at reporting on local developments related to larger events such as Aberdeen's outbreak of yellow fever, during the regional pandemic in 1878. The November 8, 1878 edition of the paper finally announced the suspension, with exceptions, of the county's quarantine ordinance. Another such example was the October 4, 1918 report on a Liberty Loan train which stopped in Aberdeen. Twenty-four trains carrying speakers and World War I relics traveled the nation promoting the sale of Liberty Bonds which were used to defray the war debt. The Aberdeen Weekly published many temperance articles during the early twentieth century; it was a leader of the prohibition movement and opposed to the local option law.