Greene County Arkansas

Paragould, AR

Centennial Edition

                                                                                                                                                                      

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   In almost every line of effort in
Greene county and Paragould fortunes have been accumulated except in newspaper business. Since 1872, when Bro.Cobb launched the first newspaper at Gainesville, Greene county has had editors owning news-papers and printing offices but not one of them has ever accumulated any property that would suffice to class him among the rich or even the well-to-do. Lawyers have gotten rich, bankers have gotten rich, merchants have gotten rich, doctors have gotten rich, some farmers have gotten rich, but no newspaper man has ever gotten rich in Greene county, yet the newspapers have done more to adver-tise the resources of the county, to ex-ploit the advantages of Paragould and the country surrounding than all the lawyers, bankers, doctors, merchants and farmers combined. They have sounded the praises of the town and the county to the world, they have gone to all parts of the earth singing the praise of Greene county, of Paragould and Arkansas. They have defended the good name of the town, the county and the state. They have fought the battles of the people against imposters, fakes and frauds, yet they have in years gone by received a meager patronage, have often been starved out

and the wreckage of defunct newspapers papers in Paragould, if its history was told in detail, would unfold a tale that would make the timorous shudder, the thoughtful nervous and the sympathetic weep.
   The editor of the Soliphone has given
the best years of his life to newspaper
work in Paragould.  But he has often
seen his mistake, considered from a
financial viewpoint, of settling in sparsley settled country where there were com-paratively few people to take his paper, until recent years when the population has increased and there is a perceptibly
increased demand for newspapers. For the newspaper man the metropolitan centers always offer the most inviting field, but perhaps this is known only to those who have tried the other kind.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

  getting another outfit, which was easy done as the outfit
was to cost nothing. M. F. Collier had dabbled in a newspaper at Pocahontas before coming to Paragould and like most business men who do such a thing had gotten his fingers burnt. He wanted somebody to take the outfit which fell to him as the result of his investment, off of his hands. It was stored away in a barn at Reno, in
Randolph county. We went there and looked at it. The
chickens were roosting on it and it had hayseed in its
hair, but we concluded to make Collier an offer for it.
The offer was as follows: Collier was to let us have the
outfit at a rental price of $50 a year for a period of four years, with an option to purchase at any time during the		  

 

NEWSPAPERS ( continued) and AGRICULTURAL SCHOOL

 

Transcribed by: PR Massey

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