It’s not often you get to celebrate your 150th birthday.
On Wednesday afternoon, The Iola Register gets such an opportunity, and we hope you’ll join us at 1:30 p.m. at the library of Allen Community College for refreshments and brief remarks.
The Register’s history walks hand-in-hand with that of Allen County’s.
What happens across these 505 square miles — and beyond — is reflected on our pages.
The gas boom days of 1895 to 1910 helped launch The Register from a weekly publication to a daily in 1897.
My, those were heady days.
With Iola’s population soaring past 11,000 we were seemingly on a path with no arc.
A week’s worth of 1904 publications shows full-page advertisements by downtown merchants including Ramsay Brothers Department Store, The Globe, Frishman’s Dry Goods, Famous One Price, The Golden Eagle, New York Dry Goods & Shoe Co., and Shields Shoe Store. On sale were corsets and petticoats, topcoats and fascinators (hats), bolts of material such as English cashmere, Panama cloth and “imported Zibeline” (mohair.)
When the gas wells ran dry and the smelter industries closed, that pulled the plug on all but the most stalwart of retailers. Even so, the stage was set for Allen County to be an industrial center, which it remains today.
Through thick and thin, the Register has covered the news of our friends and neighbors from our nascent years of a quiet country village with horse-drawn carriages and wood sidewalks to today’s talk of installing…no, not an electric park, that was 1907, but charging stations for electric cars as proposed last year by Ryan Sparks at a community forum.
A newspaper is the messenger of good and bad news.
As men enlisted to fight World War I their names appeared on our pages. By July 1917, Allen County had passed its quota of 263 by 13 soldiers. Iola’s Ben E. Brown, son of Mary Brown, had the distinction of being the first Iola boy to arrive in France.
That’s the easy part.
On Dec. 11, 1917, the Register had the unfortunate responsibility to report Justice Roberts of LaHarpe was the first Allen County boy to die in service, contracting pneumonia while stationed at Fort Sill.
During the war the Register published first-hand reports sent by area soldiers. In April of 1918, Harold P. Ausherman wrote: “The truck companies haul ammunition to the front every night, without lights. The roads are very narrow with deep ditches on each side … a man lies on the right front fender and watches the ditch for shell holes.”
Similar accounts were published in these pages for World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. It’s only been in more recent times that such communications have dried up.
