Allamakee Journal
Overview
The Allamakee Journal was a weekly newspaper published in Lansing, Iowa, in Allamakee County in the state's far northeastern corner, and also associated in directory listings with Waukon, the county seat. The United States Newspaper Directory tradition, as summarised in genealogical listings of Allamakee County newspapers, records the Allamakee Journal as published at Lansing and Waukon from 1882 to 1922. In 1922 it was combined with the Lansing Mirror to form the Allamakee Journal and Lansing Mirror, which the same directory tradition lists as published from 1922 onward, with Library of Congress serial number SN87057173.
The Journal therefore belongs to the second generation of Lansing newspapers: the generation that consolidated the town's crowded nineteenth-century press into fewer, longer-lived titles. Its forty-year run under its own name, and its continuation inside the combined Journal and Mirror title, made it one of the principal papers of record for Lansing and for Allamakee County between the 1880s and the twentieth century's middle decades.
Lansing's Crowded First Press
Lansing, a Mississippi River town founded in the 1850s, supported a remarkable succession of early newspapers. The national directory record for the town lists the Lansing Intelligencer of 1852 to 1853; the North Iowa Journal, first from 1862 to 1866 and again from 1872 to 1879; the Lansing Weekly Union and Weekly Union of the Civil War years; the Lansing Mirror from 1866 and again from 1874 to 1922; the Lansing Daily Mirror, briefly, in 1868; the Lansing Chronicle from 1867 to 1871; the Mirror and Chronicle from 1871 to 1874; the Allamakee Democrat from 1870 to 1871; the Lansing Patriot from 1871 to 1872; and the Lansing Journal from 1879 to 1882.
The 1882 History of Allamakee County fills in the human detail of that early press. It describes the North Iowa Journal as the first Democratic paper started in Lansing, established in February 1860 under the name the Democrat by McElroy and Parker, renamed the Argus under Christian Lomann, restored to the North Iowa Journal name in 1862 by J. G. Armstrong, converted to the Chronicle by Taylor and Haislet and conducted as an independent paper until its office burned in 1871, with its material saved and sold to the publishers of the Mirror. It traces the Allamakee Democrat, started in the summer of 1870 by R. V. Shurley and sold through the Sherburns to T. C. Medary, who restored the old North Iowa Journal name and published it until December 1879, when he removed to Mason City.
Succession: From the Lansing Journal to the Allamakee Journal
The immediate predecessor in the Journal's line was the Lansing Journal. The county history records that Medary's successors, the Dunlevy Brothers — John J. and Thomas Dunlevy, described as excellent practical printers and able editors — issued the first number of the Lansing Journal in January 1880. Since its establishment, the history says, the Lansing Journal had been devoted to the interests of Lansing and the Democratic Party, and it praises the paper as, in its local character, without a superior in northeastern Iowa and by many considered without an equal in that part of the state.
National directory listings date the Lansing Journal from 1879 to 1882 and the Allamakee Journal from 1882 — the natural reading being that in 1882 the Journal broadened its name and its claim, from a town title to a county title, as its ambitions expanded from Lansing to Allamakee County as a whole. The association of the Allamakee Journal with both Lansing and Waukon in the directory record points the same way: a paper published in the river town but addressing, and at times produced in connection with, the county seat inland.
The Journal, 1882–1922
For forty years the Allamakee Journal carried Lansing's and the county's news under its own name. Those decades transformed its territory: Lansing's early importance as a Mississippi River landing and milling point, built in part on the river and the railroads that followed, gave way to a steadier agricultural economy across Allamakee County's townships, and the county's population of largely German, Norwegian and Irish settlement filled the paper's social and church columns.
As a Democratic-leaning county paper in the tradition of its Lansing Journal predecessor, the Journal's pages joined county government, courts and politics to the ordinary weekly fare: school items, church services, farm and market news, river and railroad intelligence, obituaries, marriages and the personal correspondence of neighbourhoods across the county. Its longevity through the 1880s and 1890s — decades in which Lansing's earlier papers had typically lasted two or three years — marks the Journal as the town's first truly stable newspaper institution since the Mirror, the very paper with which it would eventually combine.
The Lansing Mirror and the 1922 Combination
The Mirror was the Journal's senior partner in longevity. Directory listings record a Lansing Mirror from 1866 to 1871 and the Mirror as a continuing title from 1874 to 1922, with the Mirror and Chronicle interlude of 1871 to 1874 linking the two papers' families even earlier — the Chronicle's material having been sold to the Mirror's publishers after the 1871 fire. Lansing thus had, by the early twentieth century, two durable weeklies where the 1860s and 1870s had seen a dozen experiments.
In 1922 the two survivors combined as the Allamakee Journal and Lansing Mirror. The combined title, recorded in the national directory from 1922 onward with its own Library of Congress serial number, SN87057173, and WorldCat record OCLC 15744247, preserved both names — and both subscriber lists — in a single paper. Such combinations were the standard economics of the 1920s country press: advertising and subscription bases that could support two papers in 1890 could support only one by 1922, and merger kept a Lansing paper alive where competition might have killed both.
Place and Community
Lansing occupies a distinctive place in Iowa: a small city on the Mississippi River in Allamakee County, in the driftless area of bluffs and valleys that sets Iowa's northeastern corner apart from the prairie counties. Waukon, the county seat, lies inland to the west. The Journal's county-wide title claimed both worlds — the river town with its landings, mills and bridges, and the inland farm townships and county-seat business that generated the legal notices, court news and supervisors' proceedings a county paper lived by.
The county history of 1882 conveys the young community the Journal served at its founding: Lansing's first religious services had been held in a log cabin on Front Street in the winter of 1848–49, and by 1882 the town counted nine religious societies with church buildings — the dense church life, across German, Norwegian and English-speaking congregations, whose services, suppers and celebrations would fill the Journal's columns for the next forty years.
Preservation: The Meehan Memorial Library Collection
The Journal's record is preserved principally through the Meehan Memorial Lansing Public Library, whose digitised newspaper collection forms the core of Lansing's online newspaper archive. Iowa newspaper source guides list, among the library's holdings, the Allamakee Democrat, the Lansing Chronicle, the Lansing Journal, the Lansing Mirror, the Mirror and Chronicle, the North Iowa Journal, the Daily Journal, the Lansing Morning Journal, the Lansing Patriot, the Lansing Weekly Mirror, the Lansing Weekly Union and the Weekly Union — and, centrally for this entry, The Allamakee Journal and The Allamakee Journal and Lansing Mirror.
That a small river-town public library holds and digitises the near-complete sequence of its town's newspapers is itself part of the Journal's story. Lansing's press history — from the Intelligencer of 1852 through the Journal and Mirror combination — is unusually reconstructable precisely because the community kept its papers. Researchers tracing Allamakee County families, land, churches and politics can move title by title and decade by decade through the library's archive in a way that is possible for few Iowa towns of Lansing's size.
The Journal's Line in County Context
Allamakee County's newspaper map, as the genealogical listings summarise it, shows the Journal's world clearly. Lansing's many titles dominate the early record; Postville, in the county's southwest, had its own German and English papers, the ancestors of the Postville Herald; Waukon, the seat, had the Democrat and later the Republican and Standard lines that became the Waukon Standard; and small towns such as New Albin had their Courier, Globe and Spectator in the 1870s to 1900s. The Journal's forty-year run and its merged continuation place it among the longest-lived of all these titles.
The Journal also illustrates the political character of the nineteenth-century county press. Born from a Democratic paper praised in 1882 for its devotion to Lansing and the Democratic Party, succeeding a North Iowa Journal line that had itself been the county's first Democratic paper, the Journal belonged to the era when a county's two parties expected two papers, and when a title's politics were part of its identity in a way modern readers can underestimate.
The Allamakee Journal in the Directory
For WorldNM's directory, the Allamakee Journal is recorded as a weekly newspaper of Lansing, Allamakee County, Iowa, published under its own name from 1882 to 1922 and continued from 1922 in the combined Allamakee Journal and Lansing Mirror. Its entry preserves the distinction between the two: the Journal as the county-titled paper founded in 1882 out of the Lansing Journal line of the Dunlevy brothers, and the combined paper as its successor, whose archive rests today with the Meehan Memorial Lansing Public Library.
Read together with the county's other profiles, the Journal's story completes a picture of a river county that took newspapers seriously from 1852 onward — founding them, burning and rebuilding them, merging them, and finally archiving them — and of the Journal itself as the title that carried Lansing's news from the age of the North Iowa Journal's hand presses into the twentieth century.
