The Madison Journal Archive

Little is known about the early history of the Madison Journal, as only scattered issues survive from before 1912. In name at least, it was related to two newspapers published in Richmond and Delta, former seats of Madison Parish, a cotton-producing parish in northeast Louisiana near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Tallulah replaced Delta as the parish seat in 1883. The following year, Delta’s Madison Journal battled with a rival paper, the Madison Times of Tallulah, in a local election, lost its political patronage, and suspended publication. The Journal was revived in its current form in 1888 by Jeff B. Snyder and P. W. Hickey. By 1891, it was being published by William F. Marschalk, a descendant of Andrew Marschalk, the first printer in Mississippi Territory. George Spencer served as editor from 1898 to 1920. The paper eventually came under the ownership of Percy and William L. Rountree, members of a prominent family of north Louisiana newspaper publishers. W. L. Rountree managed the Journal until his death in 1968. It is still in publication as of 2011.

The Madison Journal was a fairly typical country paper of its day, containing a mix of local, national, and international news combined with fiction, poetry, and advertisements. A farm and garden column is of some interest, as is an article dated April 15, 1889, which announced that women were eligible to vote in a local election. By 1913, when the Rountree brothers acquired the paper, it had grown from a four- to an eight-page weekly. As the official journal of Madison Parish, it carried the minutes of the parish school board and police jury (the equivalent of county councils in other states), as well as the proceedings of the local levee board. Reporting in the 1910s focused on Prohibition and “blue” laws, the control of the Mississippi River, the Good Roads movement, and the effects of the boll weevil blight on the southern cotton crop. Local reporting was expanded around 1916. One of the most attractive features of the Journal in this period was a full-page photographic section, titled “News of the Week as Caught by the Camera,” with photos from national and international sources.