The Arkansas Gazette, known as the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi River, and located from 1908 until its October 18, 1991 closing at the now historic Gazette Building, was for many years the newspaper of record for Little Rock and the State of Arkansas. The Arkansas Gazette began publication at Arkansas Post, the first capital of Arkansas Territory, on November 20, 1819. When the capital was moved to Little Rock in 1821, publisher William E. Woodruff also relocated the Arkansas Gazette. The newspaper was the first to report Arkansas' statehood in 1836.
After enduring 12 years of a bitter and fiercely contested newspaper war, the Arkansas Gazette published its final edition, ending what had become a 172 year-old business. The assets of the newspaper were sold to Walter E. Hussman, Jr., owner and publisher of the competing Arkansas Democrat. Hussman renamed the surviving paper the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The surviving newspaper proclaims itself a descendant of the Arkansas Gazette, but this viewpoint is disputed by the 726 full-time and 1,200 part-time employees of the Arkansas Gazette who lost their jobs with the demise of their newspaper.
Famous quotes containing the words arkansas and/or gazette:
“The man who would change the name of Arkansas is the original, iron-jawed, brass-mouthed, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of the Ozarks! He is the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on his mother’s side!”
—Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Every gazette brings accounts of the untutored freaks of the wind,—shipwrecks and hurricanes which the mariner and planter accept as special or general providences; but they touch our consciences, they remind us of our sins. Another deluge would disgrace mankind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)