Kenosha News - Early Years

Early Years

The Kenosha Evening News was first published on the afternoon of October 22, 1894. During its first two years of publication, the newspaper had a circulation of fewer than 400 copies. The number of copies sold daily increased to 1,100 at the turn of the twentieth century, and to more than 3,000 by 1915. During the years after World War I, the number of daily newspaper sales tripled, to nearly 10,000 in 1925. By 1947, the figure topped 18,000. Today’s Kenosha News circulation averages around 25,000 copies.

The Kenosha Evening News had been the dream of Frank Haydon Hall, whose ambition was to establish a daily newspaper for the growing community where he had settled a few years before. In those days, it was common for a newspaper to openly support one of the political parties, and the Evening News was no exception. It would be, Hall declared, “dedicated to the principles” of the then-dominant Republican Party.

In August 1891, Hall, who was also a partner in a large Chicago printing firm, purchased Kenosha’s half-century-old Telegraph-Courier from Levi Cass. The venerable weekly, which continued as a sister publication to the Evening News, became the springboard for Hall’s new daily.

The early Evening News was a simple six-column, four-page broadsheet, printed on a cylinder press and folded by hand. Its first subscriber, reportedly, was Johnson A. Jackson, secretary-treasurer of a local factory that manufactured baby furniture. Its second was Eugene R. Head, who, two years later, would own the Evening News.

In the earliest days, national and world news was reprinted, mostly from Chicago and Milwaukee papers, with the inevitable delays. In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, the News tentatively experimented with a more timely approach. It received a brief daily telegraphed summary of war news from the American Press Association.

For the first seven years of Evening News George W. Johnston was city editor, the paper’s only reporter and general jack-of-all-trades. He later bought his own newspaper, becoming editor and publisher of the Campbellsport News.

In early 1896, Hall decided to sell the Evening News and Telegraph-Courier to Head, a member of one of Kenosha’s best known families. Until he purchased the papers, the 30-year-old Head had been associated with his father’s lumber business. Head ran the business and wrote editorials, with Johnston continuing to gather and write the local news. In 1897, they were joined by George P. Hewitt of Appleton, Wisconsin. The new partners formed a successful team, with Head managing the business end of things, and Hewitt, a trained newsman, handling the editorial duties.

Almost immediately, Head and Hewitt abandoned the old practice of having “boilerplate” pages, non-timely “news,” feature material, serial novels and the like, printed in Chicago. The Kenosha Evening News became one of the first “homeprint” newspapers in Wisconsin, with the entire issue printed locally in its downtown plant.

Head and Hewitt also built a thriving real estate company. During the partnership’s first several years, substantial profits from land dealing were plowed back into the newspaper. In 1898, to accommodate advertising demands, the size of the daily was doubled, from four to eight pages. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Evening News was on a solid business footing.