The White River Valley Herald recently celebrated its 150th anniversary at Chandler Music Hall with some good news about the history of the paper, thanks to hard work of many local people and partnerships with BALE and Newspapers.com. Such great news about the news!

People may not know that many back issues of the Herald, along with other Vermont newspapers, are already free to read online thanks to a program from the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration (VSARA). Here’s how you can get access

Sign Up to Get Access

If you want to get access to this wonderful resource, follow these simple steps.

1. Go to VSARA’s Newspapers of Record page
2. Follow the link to set up a MyVermont account
3. From your My Vermont page you can follow the link to Newspapers.com which will give you special access to Vermont newspapers.

Search by keyword, or just browse by date or by newspaper. You can even make clippings to share with people who don’t have access. There are 544 papers in the collection, with  5,567,481 total pages, all scanned and searchable.

A Brief History of Local News

The Herald has been publishing for over 150 years, but it wasn’t Randolph’s first newspaper. That honor goes to the Weekly Wanderer which published from 1800 through 1810.

It was printed by Sereno Wright (later joined by John Denio) back when an S was printed like an F and the location of the paper was identified by how many rods it was away from the meeting house.

The Herald itself used to be several Heralds. In 1877 when it was owned by Lewis P. Thayer, the Green Mountain Herald consolidated with the Chelsea Post and the Vermont News out of Bethel.

By 1889 the Herald and News was printing reporting from over thirty communities. The paper got purchased by Luther B. Johnson in 1894 and added local editions for Rochester and South Royalton.  In 1943, right at the end of his tenure, Johnson consolidated all of his papers, including the Herald and News, the Bethel Courier, the Rochester Herald, the White River Herald, and the Chelsea Herald, into a single publication called the White River Valley Herald.

This newspaper was taken over and run by John Drysdale and then M. Dickey Drysdale (who changed its name to the Herald of Randolph) and now Tim Calabro who changed the paper’s name back to the White River Valley Herald in 2020.

A Lot of Local Specialties

There were many other newspapers operating in the region which are accessible through Newspapers.com.

Thetford Academy (1852) and Goddard College (1938) both had early school newspapers which were short-lived.

Of course agricultural matters were well-represented including the New England Farmer out of Brattleboro, the Vermont Farmer and Northern Silk Grower out of St. Albans and  the Vermont Farm Journal out of Wilmington.

Right here in town there were a number of short lived newspapers including Every Other Month from the Congregational Church in West Randolph and Patrons Rural for “the progressive farmers of Vermont.”

What Will You Find?

I often like poking around seeing what other people have found in these archives. While Newspapers.com is not social media, there are ways to see what other people have “clipped” from these old papers. Here are a few things I liked.

• Weird Writer in Our Midst – about H. P. Lovecraft’s visit to Guilford in 1928.
• A Cruel Joke – an apology from the paper after someone sent in an obituary for the local undertaker who was not, in fact, dead
• Unusual Lights Reported in the Sky – UFOs in Fairlee?
• The Old Covered Bridge – a memorial to the bridge which used to cross the Third Branch by where Cumberland Farms is now

Back to the original topic, here are some old stories from and about the old Herald(s).

• Obituary for Luther Johnson when he passed away at the age of 93, called the “dean of Vermont newspapers”
• When the circus came to town (1905)
• Schedule for Randolph 4th of July celebration (1905)
• Fished out of the flood – 1927 paper reports on 1876 paper found in flood detritus
• Tribute to Lewis P. Thayer about his sixty years in the newspaper business (part 2)
• Randolph Normal School – new building opening (the red school house), with floor plans. You can read about the rededication of this building 116 years later, also in the Herald

And, of course, I could browse old advertising forever.

Let us know if you find any treasures.

A version of this article appeared in the Randolph Vibe.