The Newberry Weekly Herald Archive

The Newberry Herald and News arose in Newberry County, South Carolina, at the end of the Civil War, during a time of scarcity and uncertainty. Guided by stalwart editors like Thomas Ferguson Greneker and Elbert Herman Aull, the Herald and News not only survived obstacles and changes in ownership, but it ran for over sixty years. It served as witness to a number of historical developments including the rise of sharecropping after the war, the building of the Newberry and Chester and Newberry and Augusta railroads (chartered in 1873 and 1874, respectively), and the emergence of the cotton industry beginning in 1884 with the establishment of the Newberry Cotton Mill.

When Thomas and Richard Greneker launched the Newberry Tri-Weekly Herald in March 1865, they were struggling with high printing costs and were without access to reliable information sources. General William T. Sherman and his troops had recently marched through the area, destroying houses, businesses, and railroads. The Confederate currency was worthless, and basic services like mail delivery were intermittent. Unlike the publishers of the nearby Abbeville Press and Anderson Intelligencer, the Greneker brothers were printers by trade, not bankers or lawyers, and so had no other career to fall back on in the event the Tri-Weekly Herald failed. The first issues carried repeated pleas to would-be subscribers to pay up in advance. On June 7, 1865, the Greneker brothers lamented that recalcitrant subscribers “believe that a printer lives on his imagination, his neighbor’s gas, on air, on anything else than bread and meat.”

The Tri-Weekly Herald was apparently intended to serve as a counterpart to the weekly Newberry Sun, but by June 1865, the Greneker brothers had discontinued the Sun and re-launched the Herald as the Newberry Weekly Herald, a paper “devoted to the dissemination of general information.” In August 1865, they settled on the title Newberry Herald. Richard Greneker departed in 1873 to edit the short-lived Newberry Progressive Age. In October 1879, Thomas Greneker published a one-off newspaper, the Newberry Daily Herald Bulletin, to promote that year’s Newberry County fair.

The Newberry Herald was consolidated with the Newberry News and renamed the Newberry Herald and News, the first issue of which appeared on August 28, 1884. Two years later, lawyer and historian Elbert Aull took over as owner. For over three decades, Aull became synonymous with the Herald and News as was his predecessor, Thomas Greneker. Under Aull’s management, the newspaper moved from a weekly to a semiweekly publication schedule. In the early 20^th century, circulation rates for the Herald and News generally averaged around 1,800 subscriptions.

In 1937, the Herald and News was continued by the Newberry Daily Herald, of which no copies are known to exist. The Daily Herald shortly thereafter merged with the Newberry Observer and was renamed the Newberry Observer and Herald and News. The latter newspaper continues to this day, its name a reminder of the historic role the Herald and News has played in the Newberry community.