Uinta County Herald
The Uinta County Herald is a newspaper published in Evanston, Wyoming, serving Evanston and the surrounding communities of Uinta County in the southwestern corner of the state, near the Utah border. It began publishing on August 12, 1937, and has been published continuously since, with library records listing the title from 1937 to the current day. The Herald is published twice each week, on Tuesday and Friday, and covers local news, sports, business, jobs and community events for a county of more than twenty thousand residents, about twelve thousand of whom live in Evanston itself. It is owned by News Media Corporation.
Evanston is the county seat of Uinta County and one of Wyoming's older railroad cities. A twice-weekly newspaper there serves a community that is larger and more economically varied than many Wyoming county seats — shaped by the Union Pacific Railroad, Interstate 80, energy development in and around Uinta County, a state hospital, schools, and proximity to the Utah Wasatch Front — while also covering smaller Uinta County communities and the Bridger Valley to the east. The Herald's own description of itself, carried on its site, is direct: the best source for breaking and local news serving Evanston and Uinta County, Wyoming.
Founding in August 1937
The Herald was started in August 1937 by Oliver Oscar Rickert in partnership with Loraine Bollins, publisher of the Bridger Valley Enterprise. Rickert's obituary, preserved in Uinta County genealogical records, gives the founding story in biographical form. Rickert was born December 3, 1885, at Jamestown, Indiana, lived in Elkhart, Indiana, in his early manhood, and first came to Evanston in 1905. He later lived in Bountiful, Utah, where he worked for several years as a printer on the Bountiful Clipper. He returned to Evanston with his family in 1919 and was employed on the Wyoming Times by its publisher, George Ewer. He founded and for several years published the Evanston Booster and operated a printing shop, before joining with Bollins in August 1937 to start the Uinta County Herald.
That biography matters because the Herald was not founded by an outside chain. It was founded by a printer who had worked on Evanston's existing papers, run his own booster paper and job shop, and knew the advertisers, officials and readers of Uinta County personally, together with a partner who published in the Bridger Valley. Rickert remained co-publisher of the Herald until February 1953, when he sold his interest in the company to the publishers who then carried the Herald forward. He died in Evanston in November 1959, at seventy-four, and was buried in the Evanston City Cemetery.
Consolidation With Evanston's Earlier Papers
Library of Congress newspaper-directory records describe the Herald's lineage with the formula that it was consolidated with the Wyoming Times, consolidated with the Wyoming Press, and associated with the title Herald-Press. Evanston's earlier newspaper history explains that language. The U.S. Newspaper Directory tradition lists a succession of Evanston titles: the Evanston Age in the 1870s, the Evanston Register from 1879 to 1893, the Uinta Chieftain from 1879 to 1889, the Wyoming Press from 1896 to 1946, the Wyoming Times from 1908 to 1938 and, much later, the Evanston Post from 1982 to 1988. The Herald began in 1937, as the Wyoming Times was ending, and absorbed the Wyoming Press — a directory note records that the Herald absorbed the Wyoming Press in December of the relevant year — emerging as the county's continuing title.
In practical terms, consolidation meant that Evanston would have one principal newspaper of record rather than competing titles dividing a small advertising market. The numbering of the early Herald included the numbering of the Wyoming Times, a bibliographic detail that shows the new paper presenting itself as the successor to an established Evanston publication rather than as an entirely new venture. For readers and researchers, the Herald therefore stands at the end of a chain of Evanston journalism stretching back to the territorial 1870s, even though the Herald title itself dates to 1937.
Evanston: The Railroad City the Herald Covers
Evanston was settled in 1868 in the Bear River valley by workers on the Union Pacific Railroad. The town was founded during construction of the first transcontinental railroad, named for James A. Evans, a civil engineer or surveyor for the Union Pacific. Harvey Booth opened a saloon and restaurant in a tent near what is now Front Street in November 1868; the rails reached Evanston in December and the first train arrived on December 16. When railroad managers ordered the end of the line moved twelve miles west to Wasatch, most of Evanston moved with it within days, and the town appeared destined to become another abandoned end-of-track settlement. In June 1869 headquarters returned to Evanston and it continued to grow; a machine shop and roundhouse were built in 1871, giving Evanston a permanence other railroad towns lacked.
Residents voted to move the county seat to Evanston in 1870, the city was first incorporated in 1875, and its present form of city government was adopted in 1882. Evanston became a major Union Pacific stop, a refuelling point supported by timber and water along the Bear River and by coal mined at Almy, a few miles north. Its roundhouse complex, completed in its later form in 1912–13 with twenty-seven stalls, serviced the Union Pacific system for decades. A newspaper founded in 1937 thus entered a city already seventy years into a railroad identity — and its reporting on railroad employment, coal, and later on the decline of steam facilities and passenger service, formed a long thread in the paper's columns.
Publication Pattern and County Role
The Herald is a twice-weekly paper, publishing on Tuesday and Friday. That rhythm suits a county seat with a city council, a county commission, a school district, courts and a hospital whose business does not wait a full week. Uinta County records show the Herald functioning as the county's official newspaper: county commission minutes record a motion, seconded and carried, to designate the Uinta County Herald as the county's official newspaper at the request of the county clerk. Official-newspaper status is the formal side of a local paper's work — it is where legal notices, meeting notices, bid announcements and other public records are published so that residents are legally and practically informed.
The Herald's coverage, as described in media directories, includes local news, sports, business, jobs and community events, in categories spanning arts and entertainment, society and shopping as well as hard news. Its pages carry the record familiar to Evanston readers: city and county government, Uinta County Sheriff's Office incidents and arrests, court proceedings in the Third Judicial District, Evanston High School and other Uinta County schools, energy and land questions — including proposals affecting the Bridger Valley and the Moxa Arch gas area of eastern Uinta County — health columns submitted by local organisations, obituaries, classifieds and public notices. Its site describes the paper as covering top stories, classifieds, entertainment, school sports, an event calendar, real estate and public announcements for Evanston and Uinta County.
Ownership by News Media Corporation
The Herald is owned by News Media Corporation, a newspaper company founded in 1975 by John C. Tompkins. Media-directory summaries of the corporation describe it as publishing dozens of newspaper titles — seventy-six titles in nine states in one such summary — operating in smaller cities and towns with populations between five thousand and fifty thousand. In 2012 the company created News Media Digital as the unit responsible for its digital marketing and advertising ventures. Evanston fits that profile precisely: a community above the smallest weekly towns but below metropolitan scale, where a twice-weekly print paper plus a digital site is the sustainable model.
Within Wyoming, the Herald works alongside a sister paper in the same county: directory and archive summaries note that the Uinta County Herald is the twice-weekly paper covering Uinta County while the Bridger Valley Pioneer is the weekly paper covering the Bridger Valley, and the two have shared publishing personnel, including a publisher whose contact address was at the Herald. That pairing mirrors the county's geography — Evanston and the Bear River side in the west, the Bridger Valley towns of Lyman, Mountain View and Fort Bridger in the east — and allows the company to cover a long, east–west county with two locally focused titles rather than one stretched edition.
Recognition and Professional Standing
The Herald participates in the Wyoming Press Association, the state's newspaper trade association, and its work has been recognised at the association's conventions. Evanston reporting in early 2025 noted that the Uinta County Herald was recognised during the 126th annual Wyoming Press Association convention, held in January of that year at Little America in Cheyenne, following the pattern of peer-judged contests in which Wyoming papers are honoured for reporting, photography, design and community service. For a twice-weekly, such recognition is both a professional benchmark and a signal to local readers that their paper is being measured against papers across the state, not only against the memory of its own past issues.
The paper's longevity also makes it an institution that other Evanston institutions use. Local health and community organisations submit regular columns to the Herald, county and city bodies place their notices in it, schools depend on its sports and achievement coverage, and families place obituaries in it as the record their community will keep. Its Facebook and web presence extends those functions to former residents and to readers in Utah and elsewhere with Uinta County ties.
Archives and Historical Record
Because Evanston's newspaper history predates the Herald, researchers use the Herald together with its predecessors. Plains to Peaks Historic Newspapers and the Wyoming Digital Newspaper Collection preserve the Evanston Post for 1882 to 1988 in listed runs, the Evanston Register for 1893 to 1896 and other early titles, while the Wyoming State Archives houses the largest and most complete collection of Wyoming newspapers in existence from 1867 to the present. The Herald itself, listed by the U.S. Newspaper Directory tradition as 1937 to current, is the title for which libraries retain current issues, and its run from August 12, 1937, forward is the continuous contemporary record of modern Evanston — through the Second World War, the post-war railroad changes, the energy booms of the late twentieth century, and the digital transition.
Genealogists draw heavily on that record. Rickert's own obituary, printed in the Herald tradition and later transcribed into Uinta County obituary collections, is itself an example: without the local paper's death notices, the founding partnership of the Herald and the career of its co-founder — printer on the Wyoming Times, publisher of the Evanston Booster, co-publisher of the Herald until 1953 — would be far harder to reconstruct. Every issue performs that service for less prominent residents as well.
The Herald Today
Evanston today is a city of about twelve thousand people at the western edge of Wyoming, minutes from the Utah line, still a stop on the Union Pacific main line and on Interstate 80, still the seat of a county of more than twenty thousand, and still the commercial centre for the Bear River side of Uinta County. Its newspaper is no longer one of several competing Evanston titles, as in the days of the Age, the Register, the Chieftain, the Press and the Times. It is the consolidated survivor of that history — founded by two local publishers in August 1937, successor to the Times and the Press, designated the county's official newspaper, published twice a week under News Media Corporation, and recognised by its peers in the Wyoming Press Association.
The Uinta County Herald's story is therefore two stories at once: a twentieth-century founding by a printer named Oliver Rickert and a partner from the Bridger Valley, and a much longer Evanston newspaper tradition that the Herald inherited and continues. Both stories meet in the present-day paper that arrives in Evanston on Tuesdays and Fridays, in print and online, carrying the county's news as its predecessors have done, under one name or another, since the railroad age.
