About the Milledgeville Historic Newspapers Archive

The city of Milledgeville was established in 1803, specifically to serve as the new centrally located capital of the state. It was named after the then current Georgia Governor, John Milledge. According to historian James C. Bonner in Milledgeville: Georgia's Antebellum Capital, "newspaper editors and printers were relatively numerous and formed an important and highly respected segment of the town's early society." A. McMillan published Milledgeville's first newspaper, The Milledgeville Intelligencer, in 1808. The paper ceased publication that same year. The Georgia Argus also began publication in 1808, and remained in print for over a decade. Virginians Seaton and Fleming Grantland established the Georgia Journal in Milledgeville in 1809, the same year they moved into town. The paper had a major presence in the earliest years of the state capital and leaned toward the John Clark political faction, as opposed to the Georgia Argus, which supported the George Troup faction. The Georgia Journal was so successful during Milledgeville's earliest years, it even absorbed smaller publications like the Reflector, which ran independently from 1817 to 1819. In 1847, the Georgia Journal merged with the Georgia Messenger in Macon, which in turn would merge with the Macon Telegraph in 1869.

Seaton Grantland and Richard Orme, both of whom had previously worked on the Georgia Journal, began printing the Southern Recorder in February of 1820. The paper leaned politically toward the state's rights doctrine and became an extremely successful publication in the state capital. Not to be outdone, Tomlinson Fort, a prominent Milledgeville physician and future mayor of the city, established the Federal Union in 1830, and steered its politics in the direction of unionism over state's rights. These two prominent papers would compete for readers in Milledgeville for the next forty years. The Southern Recorder and Federal Union opposed each other politically during the antebellum period, with the Southern Recorder supporting the Troup Faction and the Whig Party, and the Federal Union supporting the Clark Faction and the Democratic Party, with each paper serving its own political constituency. The competition between the two papers was fierce, even to the point of physical confrontation between editors. Editor Thomas Haynes joined the journalism mix when in 1834, he moved his unionist newspaper, the Standard of Union, to Milledgeville from Sparta.

With war looming in the late 1850s, Milledgeville's newspapers supported the idea of state's rights, but stopped short of calls for secession, particularly the Southern Recorder, which published articles suggesting that compromise was possible and preferable. Once Georgia and the rest of the South seceded, the papers aligned themselves firmly behind the Confederacy. The Federal Union, in January of 1861, removed the American flag from its banner and changed its name to the Southern Federal Union, and would in the following year change its name again to the Confederate Union, a name that would only last until the end of the war.

The war forced a shortage of both funds and material for the Federal Union and the Southern Recorder. The problem became so significant by 1864, both newspapers were forced to reduce their weekly issues from four pages to two. In November of that year, General William T. Sherman and his forces marched through Milledgeville, forcing the Federal Union to hide its equipment in the forest to prevent its destruction.

The post-war period brought great change to Milledgeville when Georgia's capital moved to Atlanta in 1868. The city's newspapers had plenty to report on, however, with the establishment of two new colleges, a military institute called the Middle Georgia Military and Agricultural College (known today as Georgia Military College) and a women's college, Georgia Normal and Industrial College (known today as Georgia College & State University), along with the growth of the Georgia State Sanitarium into the nation's largest such institution.

In 1872, the owner of the Southern Recorder, A. J. Orme, sold the paper to his competitor, the Federal Union. The two newly merged papers became known as the Union and Recorder, eventually adopting the paper's contemporary name, the Union Recorder, in 1886. In the early twentieth century, the Union Recorder was faced with competition from the Milledgeville News, which was established by W. J. Vaughn in 1901, and later sold in 1909 to city councilman H. E. McAuliffe, a former editor of the Atlanta Journal. The Future Citizen also began its circulation in Milledgeville in the early twentieth century. The paper was published by the boys at the Georgia State Reformatory school under the motto "A Paper with a Purpose, printed by the Reformatory Boys Doing the Best They Can." The paper was eight pages per issue at the cost of one dollar per year, and remained in print for over two years.

The Union Recorder continued to prosper during the remainder of the twentieth century, and today serves as the primary news organ for the city of Milledgeville. Under the ownership of Community Newspaper Holdings, the paper publishes issues five days a week with a circulation of over 7,000.

Sources:

James C. Bonner, Milledgeville: Georgia's Antebellum Capital (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978).

Louis Turner Griffith and John Erwin Talmadge, Georgia Journalism, 1763-1950 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1951).

Robert J. Wilson III, "Milledgeville," New Georgia Encyclopedia, 2008.


Scope:

The Milledgeville Historic Newspapers Archive spans the years 1808-1920 with over 49,000 images, and includes the following titles:

  • Federal Union, 1830-1872
  • Future Citizen, 1914-1916
  • Georgia Argus, 1810-1815
  • Georgia Journal, 1809-1845
  • Milledgeville Intelligencer, 1808
  • Milledgeville News, 1909-1922
  • Reflector, 1817-1819
  • Southern Recorder, 1820-1872
  • Southron, 1828
  • Standard of Union, 1836-1841
  • Union Recorder, 1872-1920

Library of Congress Subject Headings

  • Milledgeville (Ga.) --Newspapers.
  • Baldwin County (Ga.) --Newspapers.

Creation of the Web site: The following UGA Libraries employees contributed to the production of the Milledgeville Historic Newspaper web site:

  • Kristyn Blackburn
  • Brittany Emge
  • Philip Fitzpatrick
  • Erin Gentry
  • Toby Graham
  • Felicia Johnson
  • Jeannie Ledford
  • Meagan Logsdon
  • Sheila McAlister
  • Kelly Nielsen
  • Donnie Summerlin
  • Mary Willoughby
  • Jennifer Wang
  • Constantine Wright

Publisher: The Digital Library of Georgia, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, GA 30602

Date: 2009

Master image file details: 400 ppi, TIFF 4.0

Credit: The Milledgeville Historic Newspaper database is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia as part of Georgia HomePLACE. The project is supported with federal LSTA funds administered by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Georgia Public Library Service, a unit of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.