Colfax County Press
The Colfax County Press is a weekly newspaper published in Clarkson, Nebraska, a small city in the northeastern corner of Colfax County in east-central Nebraska. The Press, under its present name since 1954 and with roots in Clarkson journalism reaching back to the beginning of the twentieth century, serves Clarkson and the surrounding farm communities of Colfax County. From its office at 242 Pine Street, it covers city and county government, schools, agriculture, churches and community events in one of Nebraska's most distinctly Czech-American communities — the town known statewide for its annual Czech Days festival.
Origins and the Clarkson Herald
Clarkson's newspaper history begins with the Clarkson Herald, which the United States Newspaper Directory records as publishing in the first years of the 1900s through 1916. In 1916 the Herald was consolidated with the Colfax County Press, and for nearly four decades the combined paper appeared under the long masthead "The Colfax County Press and the Clarkson Herald Consolidated." Library of Congress records preserve the sequence precisely: the Clarkson Herald under control number sn95073031, the consolidated paper under sn95073032, and the modern Colfax County Press, published from 1954 to the present, under sn95073033. The shortening of the name in 1954 marked the point at which the consolidated weekly settled into the identity it still carries.
The consolidated paper's volumes document a community in transition. Surviving issues cataloged by Wikisource include the paper's 1929 and 1931 volumes, a notable 1933–1934 series titled "Pioneer Czechs in Colfax County" — published in twenty-eight installments between November 1933 and May 1934 — and obituary coverage of the county's Czech clergy into the 1950s. That a small Nebraska weekly devoted half a year of issues to a serialized history of the county's Czech pioneers says much about the Press's readership and its role as the community's memory.
A Czech-American newspaper town
Colfax County was settled heavily by Czech immigrants, and Clarkson remains one of the most Czech communities in Nebraska. The county even supported Czech-language journalism: the weekly Domaci Noviny ("Local News") was established in Clarkson in December 1904 by publisher-editor Anton Odvarka, passed to his sons Anton Jr. and Otto in 1910, and was later sold to the Narodni Pokrok. County seat Schuyler had several Czech papers of its own in the 1880s and 1890s. The English-language Press grew up alongside this immigrant press tradition, and its pages — including the "Pioneer Czechs" series, prepared with the involvement of Rose Rosicky, the era's leading chronicler of Czech Nebraska — bridged the community's Czech past and its American present.
The heritage remains Clarkson's public identity. The town's Czech Days festival, held each June, marked its fifty-third annual celebration in 2015 and draws visitors for Czech music, food, dancing and cultural programming staged around Memorial Park and venues across town. Festival materials list the Colfax County Press — together with Evans Printing Company — among the community's businesses, a pairing that reflects the paper's long association with the Evans family's printing operation in Clarkson.
A private law of Congress
The Press holds an unusual distinction in American newspaper history: its publisher was the subject of an act of Congress. In 1973 the United States Congress passed, and the President approved on December 8 of that year, Private Law 93-37, "for the relief of James Evans, publisher of the Colfax County Press." The law relieved Evans of liability for a $1,342.48 postage deficiency that the Postal Service had assessed after he mailed supplemental publications together with a regular issue of the Press at second-class rather than third-class rates — a mailing he had undertaken in reliance on an oral ruling by the Clarkson postmaster, Morris Odvarka, that the practice was permissible under the paper's second-class permit. The same law authorized the Postal Service to settle the postmaster's corresponding liability. The episode, preserved in the enrolled text of H.R. 3044 of the 93rd Congress, captures both the economic fragility of a small weekly — a four-figure postage bill worth an act of Congress — and the intimate scale of a town where publisher and postmaster knew each other by name.
Colfax County and Clarkson
Clarkson is a city of roughly a thousand residents in the rolling Platte River tributary country of east-central Nebraska. Colfax County's seat is Schuyler, on the Platte River to the southwest, and the county's other newspaper towns include Howells, served by the Howells Journal, and Leigh, served by the Leigh World. The county's economy is agricultural — corn, soybeans, cattle and hogs — with meatpacking and manufacturing in Schuyler, while Clarkson's identity rests on its Czech heritage, its schools, its churches (including SS. Cyril and Methodius parish) and its businesses along Pine Street. The Press office at 242 Pine Street, reachable at (402) 892-3544, sits in the middle of this small downtown, and business listings credit the paper with a staff on the order of nine people, including its printing operations — the newspaper being published in Clarkson even where some production steps occur off site.
Coverage and role
The Press performs the standard and essential work of the Nebraska county weekly: Clarkson city government, Colfax County proceedings, Clarkson Public Schools news and athletics, farm reporting, church and social notes, obituaries, legal notices, classifieds and local advertising for businesses seeking to reach the county's households. Advertising references have estimated its readership at approximately one thousand. In a county where three small towns each sustain their own paper, the Press's franchise is Clarkson and its countryside — a community small enough that the newspaper office is a landmark, and coherent enough that the paper's century-old lineage, from the Clarkson Herald through the consolidated title to the modern Press, maps neatly onto the town's own history.
The Press today
The Colfax County Press continues to publish weekly in Clarkson, listed in the Library of Congress directory as current since 1954 and among Nebraska's active weekly newspapers. Its survival rests on the same foundations visible throughout its record: a tightly knit Czech-American community that still celebrates its heritage publicly each June, a farm economy that still transacts its business locally, and a print shop tradition that has kept the Evans name attached to Clarkson publishing from the era of postage disputes to the present. Few American newspapers can claim a private relief act in the Statutes at Large; fewer still pair it with a hundred-year run in a town of a thousand people. The Press has done both.
Records and preservation
The Press's documentary trail is unusually well cataloged for a paper of its size. The Library of Congress's newspaper directory preserves the full chain of titles and control numbers from the Clarkson Herald forward, and WorldCat records allow libraries and researchers to locate holdings. Individual issues of the consolidated paper have been singled out for preservation on Wikisource, including the installments of the "Pioneer Czechs in Colfax County" series and notable obituaries from 1929 through 1953 — evidence that the paper's value as a historical source has been recognized beyond Nebraska. For descendants of Colfax County's Czech settlers, the Press and its predecessor are often the only printed record connecting family memory to the county's past.
Place among Nebraska weeklies
The Press is one entry in the long roster of Nebraska weeklies cataloged by the state and by Wikipedia's list of Nebraska newspapers, where it appears alongside the neighboring Howells Journal and Leigh World as Colfax County's surviving titles. That three small towns in one agricultural county still support separate newspapers is itself a measure of the county's civic density — and of the Czech-American community's determination, visible since the days of the Domaci Noviny, to keep its own record in print.
