Brown City Banner
Overview
The Brown City Banner is a weekly newspaper serving Brown City, Michigan, and the surrounding country in the southern Thumb, where Sanilac, Lapeer and St. Clair counties meet. The Banner traces its beginning to January 23, 1891, when it debuted as the Brown City Bee, and it has published weekly ever since, making it one of the longest-running community papers in the Thumb. Since 2009 it has been owned by View Newspaper Group. In June 2025, in what its publisher called a slight bend in the road, the Banner moved from publication inside The County Press to appearing each week inside the Sanilac County News, the weekly for the county in which Brown City sits — its 139th year of publication by the paper's own count.
The Banner's story is a compact history of American community journalism: a nineteenth-century founding by a newspaperman building a small chain of weeklies, more than a century of independent local publication, acquisition by a regional group, a downtown office closed after more than 125 years, a pandemic-era combination with a sister paper, and a final re-homing into the county paper where its readers and advertisers said it belonged — with the Banner name, and its Brown City coverage, preserved through every change.
Founding as the Brown City Bee in 1891
The Michigan newspaper history for Sanilac County records that the Brown City Bee began publishing on January 23, 1891, under James A. Menzies. Menzies was a Canadian-born Michigan newspaperman — born in Amherstburg, Ontario, in January 1860, educated in Detroit, and trained in the office of the Armada Telegraph — who had founded the Weekly Expositor at Brockway Centre, the paper that became the Yale Expositor. In 1891 he sought to expand his newspaper holdings by establishing the Brown City Bee eleven miles northwest of Yale in neighbouring Sanilac County. It soon became clear, the Yale Expositor's archive history records, that the Expositor required all of his attention, so Menzies sold the Bee to Charles H. Fox, who renamed it the Brown City Banner.
The Bee ceased on December 11, 1891, and the Brown City Banner began publishing on December 18, 1891, under Charles H. Fox, according to the county newspaper history. The paper has counted its age from the 1891 Bee ever since: it marked its 127th year in 2012–2013 and its 128th year the following cycle in its annual sample editions, and in 2025 it described itself as in its 139th year — reckonings that differ slightly in arithmetic but agree that Brown City has had its own paper continuously since 1891.
Brown City and Its Region
Brown City is a small city in Burnside Township, Sanilac County, near the county's southern border, on M-53 and M-90 in the Thumb's farm country. Its hinterland reaches into the neighbouring communities the Banner has served — Peck and Marlette among them, the towns to which the paper's annual sample edition has been delivered by mail to all households alongside Brown City itself. The region is agricultural, with small-town schools, farm businesses and the recreational-vehicle industry among its historic employers; the Banner's retrospective columns recall, for example, Brown City's Frank Motor Homes becoming Travco Corporation in the 1960s, and the Burnside School listed for sale in the 1970s.
For such a community the weekly paper is the record of first resort. The Brown City library holds every edition of the Banner from 1891 to 1971 preserved on microfiche in a fire-proof safe, together with dozens of bound editions — a resource the library promotes to anyone researching the history of Brown City, on the straightforward ground that the paper is where that history was written down.
Coverage and Features
The Banner covers Brown City and its surrounding townships: city government, schools, high school sports, business, church and community news, obituaries and public notices. A long-running signature feature, Those Were the Days, republishes material from the Banner's own pages of fifty and forty years earlier — grocery prices from 1962, a high school play rehearsing in 1963 under a Banner cover that pictured President John F. Kennedy, theatre programmes, bank asset figures and school news — turning the paper's archive into a weekly conversation between the present community and its past.
The paper's annual sample edition, delivered by mail to all households in Brown City, Peck and Marlette, has served as its yearly introduction to potential readers and reintroduction to past ones. In those editions the publisher has traditionally addressed readers directly, in a memo from the publisher explaining the paper's design, its ownership and its place in its group — the channel through which the Banner announced its 2016 redesign, its office closure and, eventually, its moves between sister papers.
View Newspaper Group Ownership
View Newspaper Group acquired the Brown City Banner from the Journal Register Group in 2009, in a multi-paper deal that also included The County Press in Lapeer, the Sanilac County News, the Jeffersonian, the Buyers Guide, the Chesaning-based Tri-County Citizen and the Huron County papers that were later combined into the Huron County View. View, founded in Lapeer in 2003 by Rick Burrough, is a locally owned Michigan group that grew to 22 community newspapers by 2025, and the Banner became one of its smaller, older titles: its publisher's memos described it at various times as one of fifteen, and later one of the group's many, community papers.
Group ownership brought redesigns and shared production. In January 2016 the Banner appeared with an updated design and layout, presented by the publisher as a more attractive package of news, sports and information about Brown City and the surrounding area. Later that month came a sadder announcement: after more than 125 years, the Banner would no longer have an office in downtown Brown City, and the office would close at the end of the week, though the newspaper itself would continue publication every week as it had since its debut as the Bee. The Banner's editorial operations were thereafter based with its sister papers — its editor's contact ran through the group's mihomepaper.com system, and a Sanilac County industry directory later listed the Banner with a Sandusky address alongside the Sanilac County News.
The Pandemic Combination and the 2025 Move
View Newspaper Group continued to publish the Banner as a standalone paper until April 2020, when, during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was combined with the Wednesday edition of The County Press, the group's Lapeer County paper. The Banner's pages thus reached readers as an edition within the County Press for five years. In 2025 the group reconsidered: feedback from Banner readers and advertisers, and from Brown City area community leaders, convinced the publisher that pairing the Banner with the Sanilac County News was a better fit — Brown City being a Sanilac County community, its natural county paper was the Sandusky-based weekly.
Group Publisher Wes Smith announced the change on June 4, 2025. The Banner would appear each week in the Sanilac County News; it was published in both the Sanilac County News and the Wednesday County Press on June 4 and June 11, and thereafter in print only inside the weekly Sanilac County News, with the Banner pages also available online at mihomepaper.com. Smith invited Banner readers who were County Press subscribers to move to the Sanilac County News with a subscription offer, and closed by thanking readers for reading the Brown City Banner. The group's 2026 progress edition summarised the move as leadership opting to move the Banner into the Sanilac County News to better serve its Brown City readers in the Thumb.
Editions, Format and Archive
The Banner is a weekly edition. In its standalone years it published as its own paper for Brown City; from 2020 to 2025 as a distinct section within the Wednesday County Press; and since June 2025 as the Brown City edition within the weekly Sanilac County News, with its pages also posted at the group's website, mihomepaper.com, where its standalone site, browncitybanner.mihomepaper.com, long presented its articles under the group's banner. Its editor historically used the group's bcbeditor@mihomepaper.com address, and its telephone contact through the Sanilac County News operation in Sandusky is (810) 648-4000 for subscriptions.
The historical archive is unusually accessible. The Digital Michigan Newspaper Portal at Central Michigan University's Clarke Historical Library lists the Brown City Banner for 1892–1963 and for 2009–2020, and the Brown City Bee for 1891, among its freely available digitised Sanilac County papers; the Brown City library's microfiche run covers 1891 to 1971, with bound editions beyond it. A researcher can therefore follow Brown City's paper from Charles H. Fox's first Banner of December 1891 almost continuously to the present.
People
Across the Banner's modern era its public voices have been its editors and the group publisher. Its news and feature writing in the 2010s carried bylines such as Steven Kovac, whose address at the paper appeared on its library-archive and community stories, and its editorial contact was held for a period by Jeff Hogan, listed as the Banner's contact in the Sanilac County industry directory. Above them, group publisher Wes Smith signed the memos that announced the paper's redesigns, its office closure and its two changes of home — the direct, explanatory voice through which View Newspaper Group has managed the Banner's transitions.
In its earlier history the defining figures are its founder James A. Menzies, who planted the Bee as an offshoot of his Yale paper and sold it within the year, and Charles H. Fox, who gave the paper the Banner name it has carried since December 1891. Between Fox and the View era stand the generations of Brown City editors whom the paper's own retrospective columns quote — the publishers of the Kennedy-era Banner and of the centennial issues — preserved in the library's bound volumes rather than in outside records.
Role in the Community
The Banner's importance to Brown City is documented in the community's own institutions. The library preserves its editions in a fire-proof safe and points researchers to them as the record of the town's history. The paper's sample editions are mailed to every household in Brown City, Peck and Marlette because the publisher regards every household as a prospective reader. And when the paper's placement within the group was reconsidered in 2025, it was the stated feedback of Banner readers, advertisers and Brown City community leaders that decided the question — evidence of a readership that still regards the Banner as its own, whatever paper carries it.
That persistence through consolidation is the Banner's distinction. Many Michigan weeklies of its vintage closed; the Banner adapted — losing its office, then its standalone form, but keeping its name, its Brown City reporting and its weekly presence in the county paper — and entered its 139th year still publishing.
Availability
The Brown City Banner now appears each week inside the Sanilac County News, published in Sandusky, Michigan, with Banner pages also available online through mihomepaper.com. Subscriptions to the Sanilac County News can be arranged at (810) 648-4000. Historical issues are available through the Brown City library's microfiche and bound collections and through the Digital Michigan Newspaper Portal. Readers in Brown City, Peck, Marlette and the surrounding Sanilac County townships rely on the Banner pages for their city, school, sports and community news, as Brown City readers have since 1891.
