Phillips County Herald Archive

Located on the Eastern Plains of Colorado, the town of Holyoke began in 1887 as a small camp for railroad builders on the Burlington Railway system and quickly became the commercial hub for the farming and ranching districts that surrounded it. The area thrived until the 1890s, when severe drought decimated the population. By the turn of the century, however, conditions improved, and an influx of homesteaders came to Logan and Phillips counties to take up abandoned claims and file new ones.

Holyoke's The State Herald was formerly published in La Harpe, Illinois, as The Hancock County Herald by Charles W. Painter and William N. Jordan. They had found the newspaper market of western Illinois saturated and decided to head west. As the State Herald noted, "Mr. Jordan, the junior partner, started out to find a new home and before he was half across the state of Nebraska, heard of Holyoke and its magnificent prospects; consequently he came here, and was the first newspaper man on the ground" (February 10, 1888). On September 5, 1887, Painter, with foreman R. J. Hetrick and the rest of the outfit, arrived in Holyoke, and they set up shop in a shack just southwest of the Holyoke stockyards. Painter described the first office as 14' X 18', with a tarpaper roof, cracks between the boards large enough for a common-sized man to walk through, and a sign in bold letters advertising "The State Herald, Republican to the Backbone." For four weeks, the Herald published from this "printing office on an open prairie" before moving to space in town. In a letter to his father, Judge Joseph H. Painter, dated September 12, 1887, Charles said, "We are getting a good patronage, and believe we have found the place to make money. We get $100 a column per year, more than twice as much for the space as we got in Illinois."

In 1888, Painter and Jordan dissolved their partnership. Painter took full control of the newspaper, and Jordan moved back east to Iowa to pursue a law career. Charles Painter sold the paper to attorney A. A. Spahr in 1889, but by 1891 Charles's brother, Judge J. H. Painter the younger, was editor, managing editor, business manager, publisher, and owner of the State Herald. He held this position until 1921, in addition to being a lawyer, state senator, and 1910 Republican candidate for Colorado lieutenant governor.

C. E. Damewood bought the Herald from Painter in 1921 and changed its name to the Phillips County Herald. Damewood quickly sold the paper within the year, writing:

The Herald was purchased...during the apex of high prices and is relinquished when the other extreme has been reached. With no previous experience in the publication of a newspaper we have met these changing conditions to the best of our ability... We feel a pardonable pride in the fact that we are leaving the paper with more than double the number of subscribers we found on the list when we took charge.

J. C. McCreary took over the paper, with Damewood's opinion being that "service will be greatly increased under the direction of an editor whose past experience and training better fit him for the work." McCreary came to Holyoke and the Herald via Ohio's Fredericktown Free Press, where "such a big, broad-minded man as McCreary [was] a credit to the newspaper profession" (Richland County Leader, Bellville, OH, in Phillips County Herald, November 4, 1921), and more recently, Colorado Springs, where he was also in the printing trade. McCreary boasted that he was not chased out of any of the towns in which he lived. Under him the Herald stayed true to its Republican affiliation, "though we do not believe it infallible or that the Democrats are always wrong" (Phillips County Herald, November 4, 1921). In 1923 McCreary sold the Herald to the Willis family, who managed the paper until April 1927, when The Holyoke Enterprise purchased the Herald and merged it out.