About Delavan Times

Delavan Times

The Delavan Times is a weekly newspaper published in Delavan, in Tazewell County, Illinois. Founded by Joseph F. Reed, its first issue appeared on September 5, 1874, and in September 2024 the paper celebrated its 150th anniversary with a detailed history published in its own pages and carried by the Illinois Press Association. The Times is published on Wednesdays, delivered by mail, from the middle of the 300 block of Locust Street in Delavan's historic business district. It remains a family-edited "home" newspaper: its current editor, Sandra Larimore Denman, is the third consecutive generation of her family to run it, following her grandfather J. Ross Arnold and her mother, Ruth Marie Arnold Larimore.

Delavan's first newspaper: the Advertiser

The Times was not Delavan's first paper. The Delavan Advertiser first appeared on November 30, 1867, as an independent newspaper under C. R. Fiske, printed in a building on the west side of Locust Street where the Christian Church was later located. After two years Fiske sold the paper to John Culbertson, whose strong Democratic views soon gave its editorial comments some spice; the Times's anniversary history laments that only one side of the ensuing debate survives, as no copies of the Advertiser are known to exist. During the 1872 campaign the Advertiser supported Charles O'Connor for president — probably, the history says, the only newspaper in Illinois backing that candidate. Culbertson published the paper for nearly forty years before selling to T. H. Smedley, who disposed of it to Keefer and Keefer.

Founding of the Times in 1874

Seven years after the Advertiser's founding, Joseph F. Reed published the first issue of The Delavan Times on September 5, 1874, from an office upstairs over the post office. Reed announced his policies as the best interests of Delavan and vicinity, the promotion of intelligence and morality, and the support and maintenance of Republican principles. He published his paper every Saturday morning, at a subscription price of $1.50 per year, invariably in advance. The early Times was a four-page, eight-column paper, much of it set in six-point type. No local news appeared on the front page, which was devoted exclusively to state, national and foreign news. Because of its competition with the Advertiser, the Times carried more than a little spice in its editorials, soon won favourable comment, and developed a large circulation for a country weekly.

The first issue and early features

The anniversary history preserves the flavour of that first issue of September 5, 1874. Its local items reported four dressmaking establishments plying the needle in Delavan, a new awning going up in front of Reinheimer's clothing store, and nearby Green Valley building a $4,000 schoolhouse, a parsonage and six or seven dwellings. Its church directory listed Methodist Episcopal, Presbyterian, Baptist, Universalist and Catholic congregations. Its advertisers ranged from a watchmaker and a new photograph gallery to dry-goods stores, mills, a jewellery house and druggists. A column called "Times Jottings" carried the short community items that later appeared under names such as "Around the Town" and "Main" Street. Advertising, too, was sold on a yearly basis: in 1874 a full column of advertising space in the Times for an entire year cost $75. During the years when the first Tazewell County Fair was held in Delavan — on grounds where the Delavan schools now stand, at the south edge of town along Locust Street — the Times was published daily for the fair; the fair itself ran in Delavan for forty years before disbanding in 1919.

Consolidations: Times-Press and Advertiser-Press

In 1880 the Times was acquired by the firm of Boyd and Quigley and sold a short time later to Newman and Beatty. Newman left the firm, and Guy Beatty operated the paper alone until 1889. Then Guy and his brother Starr Beatty purchased the Tazewell County Press, a third Delavan newspaper recently started by Reed himself, and combined the Times and the Press as the Delavan Times-Press. In the 1890s Starr Beatty became sole owner; one account dates his sole ownership to 1895 and another to 1893, when the name became the Tri-County Times for a period. Under Starr Beatty the paper became the outstanding Republican organ of Tazewell County. In 1918–1919 a further consolidation with the Advertiser changed the name again, to the Delavan Advertiser-Press. In little more than four decades, Delavan's three competing papers had been merged into one.

J. Ross Arnold and the return of the Times name

In 1928, J. Ross Arnold acquired the paper and restored the name The Delavan Times, which it has carried ever since. Arnold operated the newspaper until 1953. During his tenure, newspapers in several neighbouring towns were printed in the Delavan Times printing plant, and Arnold ran a job press almost daily, printing envelopes, stationery, handbills, posters and invoices for customers. Arnold had learned the printing trade's wider world before Delavan: he had operated newspapers in Vermont and in Ipava, Illinois, and had worked for the Canton Daily Ledger before coming to Delavan, and he had learned the trade itself at the Astoria Argus — a circle that closed decades later when the Argus printed the Times for a time.

James Foster and the rescue of 1963

In 1954 Arnold sold the newspaper to James Foster, a former Peoria Journal Star employee. Over the next several years Foster hired a series of transient editors, among them Roland Gray, Kenneth MacLeod and Robert Schenk. By 1963 Foster was no longer interested in keeping the paper, and Delavan was going to lose its newspaper. It was saved by Arnold's daughter: Ruth Marie Arnold Larimore leased the business from Foster and kept the newspaper going. She and her husband, Harold, later purchased the building and the business outright.

Ruth Marie Larimore's editorship

Ruth Marie Larimore edited the Times from 1963 until 1998 — a thirty-five-year tenure. She continued the popular "Main" Street column, wrote a column called "Ink Smudges," and produced, in the anniversary history's words, lots and lots of news items of community interest. The "Main" Street column had itself begun in 1942, when Ella Ryan started "Main Street with Oddy" as a letter from home to local men who had entered military service, so servicemen could follow the doings of their former neighbours and friends; it proved very successful and was enjoyed by the servicemen and their comrades. Under Ruth Marie's editorship the Times reached an all-time high readership of approximately 1,200. Also during her tenure, printing moved out of the Times building: the paper was printed for a time at the Astoria Argus, then at Martin Publishing in Havana, and more recently at P&P Press in Peoria.

Sandra Larimore Denman and the paper today

In 1998 Ruth Marie turned the paper over to her eldest daughter, Sandra Larimore Denman, who remains its editor. The Times is still published weekly, on Wednesday, and is delivered by mail. Its reach extends far beyond Tazewell County: the anniversary history records that the paper goes to subscribers in thirty-three different states — from Florida and New York to New Mexico, Montana and Connecticut — and to about seventy-five towns and cities in Illinois. Many subscribers are former residents who treat the Delavan Times as their link to their old hometown. The paper explicitly welcomes community submissions — engagements, marriages, births, promotions, vacations, reunions, anniversaries, birthdays and graduations — and describes itself, in its anniversary appeal, as still a "home" newspaper that supports its town.

A small paper in a changing town

The Times's own anniversary account is candid about the economics of its survival: with few businesses left up and down "Main" Street, and with the electronics of today's society, publishing a community newspaper is an almost impossible chore. Delavan itself is a small city — its population was about 1,545 in 2024 — yet the Times has outlasted the town's other papers, its local printing plant, the county fair it once covered daily, and generations of competitors. That it marked 150 years in 2024 under the third generation of the same family, still on Locust Street in the historic business district, makes the Delavan Times one of the more remarkable continuity stories among Illinois weeklies.

Legacy

The Delavan Times's history, preserved in unusual detail because the paper wrote it down for its sesquicentennial, traces the whole life cycle of the American country weekly: partisan founding in 1874, rivalry and spicy editorials, consolidation of three papers into one, a long family proprietorship interrupted and then resumed, rescue from closure by the founder-family's daughter, and a modern existence sustained by mail subscribers scattered across the country who still want news from home. Few Illinois weeklies of its size can document their story so completely from their own pages.