This digital collection of Logan's local newspaper spans 1879 to 1898 when Logan is busy building its infrastructure of roads , waterworks, and public buildings. During these years, Logan builds its Mormon temple, Ogden installs gas street lights, and the Territory of Utah becomes a state. The Utah and Northern Railway is the area's railroad while Utah Agricultural College is its first state college. Logging, railroads, and runaway horses account for most of the reported accidents. People entertain themselves with balls, lectures, traveling circuses and dramatic productions, as well as Mormon church activities.
Ads are replete with miraculous curatives: cancer can be cured by drinking red clover tea; hop bitters can revitalize “feeble ladies”; Warner's “safe” remedies are good for just about everything, from constipation and diabetes to nervous prostration; and $10 audiophones can help the deaf hear through their teeth! The fashions, culture, and economy of the times can be gleaned from both articles and ads. Logan businesses tout their goods alongside ads for San Francisco hotels, retail stores, and professional services. In addition to news and ads, the paper offers cautionary tales, romances, and other stories to entertain and educate its readers. Quotations and sayings liberally sprinkle its pages. National and foreign news items cover politics, trade, trials, and wars, as well as chatty gossip about English royalty and the troubles in Ireland.
What's inside the issues:
The paper uses regular columns to compile assorted small news items. For example, local news is commonly supplied in columns entitled Local Lines and Cache County Cross Cuts . Gossip snippits from afar are reported under Personal or Western Whispers . Regional news is collected under Territorial Talk . National and international news appear in recurring columns called Wafted on the Wires and Intelligence Items. Due to the small population size, death and birth news is often reported in brief notices entitled Died or Born rather than via long official obituaries.
To get the most out of this unique historical record of Logan and Cache Valley, volunteers from the Library and community are busy reading and transcribing these scanned pages, article by article, ad by ad, so that every single word possible is searchable and readable. Currently, 1879 has been completely transcribed and we are working on 1880 and 1881. To see an article's transcription, change the “view” in the drop-down box (left column, above list of contents) to “ page & text ” and click Go . The transcriptions are much easier to read than the image of the original article. Other enhancements of this digital collection include adding titles to the list of contents in some cases where articles lack them. As a further aid to readers and researchers, we are indexing articles under more than fifty searchable categories or topics such as Polygamy, Crimes, Humor, Railroads, etc.
Before becoming today's Herald Journal , Logan's newspaper had four different titles: Logan Leader (1879-1882), Utah Journal (1882-1889), Logan Journal (1889-1891), and Journal (1892-1931). This digitized collection begins in 1879 with the Logan Leader and ends in 1898 with the Journal . Interested in other Utah newspapers? Find more at the Utah Digital Newspapers.
This collection was created through a collaboration with the University of Utah's Utah Digital Newspapers Project and the Church History Library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who generously lent some original newspapers. USU Project Team: Cheryl Walters; Heather Leary ; Library Systems ; Volunteer transcribers who generously contributed their time and effort are credited in "page description" view of each article.
Volunteer to join us in correcting our historical newspapers transcriptions so that every word in the entire newspaper can be searched. Currently searches are run against extremely poor computer-generated transcriptions and yield few results. Our transcription project will improve search results immensely. We are looking for volunteers to read articles and rekey them word for word into a Word or WordPerfect file, then save & send the typed articles to us via email. We will replace the old transcript with your new version and credit you in the record as the transcriber (optional; you can opt to remain anonymous). All you need to participate is a web browser, computer with internet access and email, and either Word or WordPerfect. To register as a volunteer, click here. Instructions and Repeat Text files are available to assist in this work.