Arizona Range News
The Arizona Range News is a weekly newspaper published in Willcox, Arizona, serving the Sulphur Springs Valley and Cochise County in the state's southeast. Founded in May 1884 as the Sulphur Valley News and renamed in January 1897, it is among Arizona's older surviving newspapers, created to serve a railroad and cattle-ranching town only a few years after the Southern Pacific reached the valley. It has been owned and published by Wick Communications since 1981. Its recorded circulation is 2,650, and it publishes on Wednesdays from Willcox, a high-desert community at the centre of one of Arizona's historic cattle ranges. The paper's long chain of owners — frontier editors, a mayor, a state newspaper-association president and finally a regional family-owned group — mirrors the history of community journalism in the Arizona borderlands.
Founded as the Sulphur Valley News in 1884
Phil Montague and George McFarlin founded the Sulphur Valley News in Willcox in May 1884. Willcox itself had begun in 1880 as a Southern Pacific Railroad stop, originally called Maley, and was renamed for General Orlando Bolivar Willcox, a former commander of the Department of Arizona — with the spelling later corrected from one “l” to the present “Willcox”. The town quickly became a shipping point for the cattle herds of the Sulphur Springs Valley, which runs nearly a hundred miles from the Mexican border region north toward the Gila River. A few months after its founding, the News merged with the Arizona Livestock Journal to form the Southwestern Stockman, a paper directed squarely at cattlemen, complete with pages of brand advertisements in an open-range era when published brands told cowboys whose cattle were whose at roundup.
A Frontier Paper Changes Hands
Dan N. Hunsaker assumed control of the paper in January 1887. When Hunsaker died in December 1890, Charles W. Pugh bought the paper from his estate in February 1891, and on April 3, 1894, Pugh relaunched it under its original Sulphur Valley News name. In August 1896 Horace E. Dunlap bought the paper, and in January 1897 he gave it the name it still carries: the Arizona Range News, a title that announced its territory — the ranges of southeastern Arizona — rather than a single valley. C.O. Anderson, who sold the Holbrook Argus to do so, bought the News in May 1900. S.N. Kemp and his brothers acquired it in December 1902, and Anderson reacquired the paper in September 1917, a rare case of an owner returning to the same small weekly after a fifteen-year interval.
Interwar Owners and a Mayor-Publisher
L.J. Fulmer succeeded Anderson in June 1926, and E.H. Beverly bought the paper in August 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression. Beverly's civic standing illustrates how central a weekly publisher could be in a small Arizona town: in April 1940 he was elected mayor of Willcox. In October 1940 Dale F. Mullenbruch purchased the paper — the name also appears as Mellenbruch in contemporary reports — and in January 1941 the Range News observed its 57th birthday with an open house. The Mullenbruch family's involvement stretched, with interruptions, across the following two decades.
Postwar Partnerships: Smith, Bideaux and the Mullenbruchs
In January 1946 Clayton A. Smith and George A. Bideaux bought the paper, in a sale that also included the San Pedro Valley News of nearby Benson. Smith was publisher of The Tombstone Epitaph, the famous paper of the neighbouring mining town, and Bideaux edited the Southwest Veteran of Tucson and had served as secretary to Senator Ernest W. McFarland. Bideaux became sole owner in April 1948. C.O. Steppe soon joined as co-owner but was bought out by Mullenbruch in January 1950, returning the earlier owner to the masthead, and in March 1955 Mullenbruch's wife Ruth acquired full ownership — one of several women to hold Arizona weeklies outright in that era. A separate strand of the paper's later administration also runs through this period: the publisher of the Eastern Arizona Courier in Safford would later oversee the Range News's operations from within the Wick group, reflecting the shared back-office arrangements common among sister weeklies.
The Roberts Era and a New Press
Grady Hollifield became a co-owner at some point in the 1950s and sold his interest to Clyde S. Roberts in May 1958; Roberts bought out Ruth Mullenbruch in January 1959 to take full control. In March 1960 the paper installed a new printing press at its Willcox plant, an investment the Arizona Republic noted at the time. Roberts ran the Range News for more than two decades and rose to industry leadership: in January 1975 he was elected president of the Arizona Newspaper Association. Former owner George Bideaux died in August 1978, and in 1981 Roberts sold the paper to Wick Communications, ending nearly a century of individual and family ownership and beginning the modern group era.
Wick Communications Ownership
Wick Communications, the family-owned media company based in Sierra Vista, Arizona, acquired the Arizona Range News in 1981 and has published it ever since. Within Wick's Arizona portfolio the Range News sits alongside papers such as the Eastern Arizona Courier and Copper Era in Safford and Clifton, the Herald/Review in Sierra Vista, the Nogales International and the San Pedro Valley News-Sun in Benson — the same Benson paper that had been bundled with the Range News in its 1946 sale. Group ownership brought shared publishing oversight: Wick announcements have described the publisher of the Safford papers also overseeing Range News operations, with an editor and office manager based in Willcox, keeping day-to-day news gathering local while production and management are shared.
Coverage: Ranching Country and Cochise County
The Range News covers Willcox and the surrounding Sulphur Springs Valley — a ranching and farming region known for cattle, for the wine industry that has grown up around Willcox-area vineyards, and for natural landmarks including Chiricahua National Monument to the southeast. Its beat is the standard weekly portfolio of city and county government, schools, courts and law enforcement, agriculture, business, sports and community life in a county-seat-adjacent town — Willcox is not the Cochise County seat (that is Bisbee), but it is one of the county's principal communities and its northern commercial hub. Publishing on Wednesdays and identified in media directories with a circulation of 2,650, it operates at the scale of the community itself: its official site is willcoxrangenews.com.
Digital Presence and the Modern Weekly
Like other Wick weeklies, the Range News maintains a website carrying local news, sports, obituaries, public notices and classified advertising between print editions, and it is listed in national media directories as a verified local weekly in the Phoenix–Prescott market area, reflecting Arizona's consolidated media-market geography rather than its actual, distinctly local readership in Cochise County. The paper's longevity through the digital transition is notable: a title launched when Willcox was a four-year-old railroad siding, renamed for the open range in 1897, and printed on a new press in 1960 continues to publish weekly well into the internet era.
Significance
The Arizona Range News matters to Arizona journalism history for three reasons. First, endurance: few Arizona papers can trace an unbroken line from an 1884 territorial founding through statehood and into the present. Second, its archive records the transformation of the Sulphur Springs Valley from open-range cattle country — the world of the Southwestern Stockman and its brand pages — to a modern agricultural and wine-growing region. Third, its ownership story is a compact history of the American weekly itself: individual frontier editors, civic-leader publishers, family owners, a woman sole owner in the 1950s, a long-serving association president, and finally a regional family group that has now owned it longer than any single proprietor since its founding era.
