Erwin Record
The Erwin Record is a weekly newspaper published in Erwin, Tennessee, serving Erwin and Unicoi County in the mountains of northeast Tennessee. The Tennessee State Library and Archives dates the Record from January 27, 1928, and the paper has published ever since, building an archive of nearly a century of life in a railroad town on the Nolichucky River. For generations its masthead carried one of the most distinctive slogans in American community journalism — a boast, printed on its front page in the 1930s and 1940s, that it was the only newspaper in the world that gave a hang about Unicoi County. That remains an accurate description of its editorial mission today.
Newspapers in Erwin Before the Record
Erwin's press history begins in the 1880s, when the town was still a small community in a county formed in 1875. The state archives list the Erwin Unakean, published from 1887 to about 1890, and then the Erwin Magnet, which appeared from about 1891 until 1927 under a variety of frequencies. The Magnet was for decades the county's principal paper: a 1911 Tennessee who's-who entry for merchant and former legislator J. Frank Toney credits him with establishing the Magnet in 1890 and describes it, while he still owned it, as the only newspaper in Unicoi County. In the 1920s the field briefly crowded. The Erwin News published in 1924 and 1925, the Erwin Times from 1926, the combined Erwin Magnet-Times in 1927 and 1928, and the Unicoi County Progress from March 1928 into 1929 all competed for the county's readers. Out of that crowded decade, the Record — listed by the archives from January 27, 1928 — emerged as the survivor, outlasting the Magnet, the Times and the Progress. A later rival, the Erwin Observer, published from 1937 to about 1942, and a twenty-first-century journal, the Valley Beautiful Beacon, appeared from 2006 to 2011, but neither displaced the Record.
Harvey Payne Broce and the Early Record
The Record's formative publisher was Harvey Payne Broce. Broce was a veteran East Tennessee newsman: before coming to Erwin he had been connected with the Kingsport Times for about four years and had also worked on the Bristol Herald Courier, the Johnson City papers and a Roanoke, Virginia, newspaper. His obituary, published in the Kingsport News on October 29, 1942, states that he had been engaged in publishing the Erwin Record since 1924, working alongside his wife, Alma Mauk Broce — a few years earlier than the 1928 start the state archives assign to the title, a discrepancy that may reflect a predecessor venture under the Record name in the mid-1920s. Broce died at the Appalachian Hospital in Johnson City in October 1942 after several years of declining health, and his funeral was held from the family residence on Love Street in Erwin, with burial in Evergreen Cemetery. His widow and his son Keith survived him. Under the Broces the Record settled into its identity: a five-cent weekly — two dollars a year in advance in its 1930s editions — devoted entirely to Unicoi County.
The Railroad Town's Paper
The community the Record chronicled was shaped by the railroad. Erwin remained a village of fewer than 200 people until the Charleston, Cincinnati and Chicago Railway arrived in 1888; the line, reorganized in 1908 as the Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway — the Clinchfield Railroad — made Erwin a division point with a major yard, and the Clinchfield was the town's largest employer from 1908 through 1954. The Record's pages therefore documented a working railroad town: yard expansions and wrecks, railroad families and retirements, and the industries that followed the rails, including the Southern Potteries plant that produced Blue Ridge hand-painted dinnerware in Erwin from 1916 to 1957. The Clinchfield itself disappeared into the Seaboard System, now CSX, on January 1, 1983, but railroading remains part of the town's identity, and the Record remains its chronicler. Erwin also carries older curiosities in its history that its newspaper has retold for generations — the town was meant to be named Ervin, for D. J. N. Ervin, who donated land for the county seat in 1879, until a postal clerk's error fixed the spelling as Erwin for good.
A Century of County Coverage
As Unicoi County's weekly, the Record covers the county commission and the Erwin Board of Mayor and Aldermen, Unicoi County Schools and Unicoi County High School, the courts, churches and civic organizations of Erwin, Unicoi, Flag Pond and the county's rural communities. Its contemporary coverage mixes that record-keeping with service journalism: a recent edition reported the Tennessee Department of Labor's unemployment figures, noting Unicoi County's August rate of 3.6 percent against its neighbors in Washington, Carter and Greene counties. The paper also keeps a running conversation with its own archive — its "years ago" features revisit items from past decades, such as the 1956 item it recently reprinted about an industrial expert hired by the county citizens' committee and housed at the Hotel Erwin. In 2026, the paper's columns have marked two anniversaries at once, the 250th anniversary of the United States and the 150th anniversary of the town of Erwin, which dates its founding to 1876.
The Apple Festival and Community Life
No event defines the Record's community calendar like the Unicoi County Apple Festival, held in downtown Erwin each October since 1978. The festival grew from a small local gathering into one of the Southeast's recognized fall events: a 2010 Tennessee House resolution honoring it noted that the 2009 festival filled more than 350 vendor spaces, presented four entertainment stages and drew a record crowd of more than 100,000 visitors to a town of a few thousand, and that it had been named repeatedly to the Southeast Tourism Society's Top 20 events and had won the Northeast Tennessee Tourism Association's Pinnacle Award three times. The Record's festival coverage — vendors arriving from across the region and beyond, the crafts, food and music spread across six blocks of Main Avenue — is a centerpiece of its autumn editions, alongside coverage of the Appalachian Trail hikers who resupply in Erwin, the Nolichucky River's whitewater season and Cherokee National Forest recreation.
The Record as Archive
Nearly a hundred years of the Record survive for researchers. Newspapers.com holds some 33,905 searchable pages of the paper, spanning 1928 to the present, rich in the birth, marriage and obituary announcements that make a county weekly indispensable to genealogists. The Tennessee State Library and Archives holds scattered Erwin newspapers from 1887 and a complete run from 1941, and East Tennessee State University's library lists the Erwin Record on microfilm from 1928 to 2023. Few counties of Unicoi's size — fewer than 18,000 people in recent counts — possess so continuous a written account of themselves.
Digital Presence
The Record publishes online at erwinrecord.net, where its current stories are also distributed through national newspaper-archive and news-library services that carry its text for readers and researchers far beyond Unicoi County. Its web presence extends the print weekly's franchise — county government, schools, obituaries, opinion and the Apple Festival — to the large number of former residents who follow hometown news from Johnson City, Knoxville and beyond. Erwin sits on Interstate 26, about twenty miles south of Johnson City and forty-five miles north of Asheville, and its newspaper's digital reach follows the same corridor its readers travel.
Only Newspaper That Gives a Hang
Weekly newspapers survive on indispensability, and the Record built its brand on exactly that claim, printed in its own nameplate in the middle of the last century. Erwin has had dailies within reach in Johnson City and Kingsport for its whole modern history, but none of them ever covered Unicoi County the way the Record does. From Harvey Broce's tenure in the 1920s and 1930s to the present, the paper has done one thing: record the life of a single mountain county, completely. As it approaches its centennial in 2028, the Erwin Record remains what its slogan promised — Unicoi County's own newspaper, and its longest memory.
