The Forrest City Times Archive

Forrest City, the seat of Saint Francis County in northeast Arkansas since 1874, is located on the western slope of Crowley's Ridge, a series of rolling hills in the Mississippi River Delta. Originally known as "Forrest's Town," the community grew up around the commissary established by Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest after the Civil War to supply workers clearing Crowley's Ridge for the Memphis & Little Rock Railroad.

Among the early businesses in Forrest City was the Forrest City Times (1871-1919), established by Thomas Fleming Oury Sr. the year the town was incorporated. Oury sold the weekly newspaper in 1883 and left Forrest City to work in Little Rock. In 1885, T.J. Hicks bought the Times, selling it one year later to Edward Lincoln Vadakin. Vadakin's father-in-law, Colonel Edwin Landvoigt, soon joined Vadakin as a co-proprietor/publisher and senior editor. During their tenure, the Times absorbed a competing newspaper, the Forrest City Democrat (1877-87) and in 1891 switched the day of publication from Saturday to Friday. A few years after Vadakin's death in 1915, the newspaper consolidated with the Forrest City Herald (1917-9) and became the Forrest City Times and Herald (1919-3?). A stock company was assembled to run the newspaper in 1918, with Landvoigt as vice president. Throughout 27 years of publication, the Times varied in size between four and 12 pages, with advertisements for December holiday shopping occasionally inflating its page count to 18.

Typically, content included local, state, and national news, plus a fictional story. Select international news was included, and by the start of the First World War in 1914 it became a prominent part of the newspaper. The railroad was important to the economy of Forrest City, and alleged freight discrimination in the form of inequitable freight rates became a problem in the late nineteenth century. In November 1894, a public remonstrance meeting was held against the Little Rock & Memphis Railroad Company, and a committee elected with Vadakin as secretary. The committee pushed for legal protection against unjust freight rates, which led to the formation of the Arkansas Railroad Commission in 1899. Politically, the newspaper was Democratic, and the October 8, 1887, issue stated, "The Times is, and has always been, and hopes ever to be, thoroughly Democratic. It has ever supported the Democratic nominees, and has always been sought after by the leading politicians."