Edgefield Advertiser: South Carolina's Oldest Newspaper, Publishing Since 1836

The Edgefield Advertiser is a weekly newspaper published in Edgefield, South Carolina, and it holds a distinction no other paper in the state can claim: it is the oldest newspaper in South Carolina to publish continuously under the same nameplate. The Advertiser began publication on February 11, 1836, and its direct ancestry reaches back even further, to a predecessor first published in 1811. From its office at 117 Courthouse Square in Edgefield, the paper has covered Edgefield County, a rural county on South Carolina's western edge near Augusta, Georgia, through the eras of slavery and secession, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the textile and peach economies, and into the twenty-first century.

Few American newspapers can match that span, and fewer still have kept the same name, the same town and the same community mission throughout. The Advertiser today is a small weekly, owned and edited within the Mims family tradition that has guided it since 1937, devoted, as it redefined itself in 2003, to community news and the concerns of Edgefield County's people.

Overview

The Advertiser is a weekly newspaper serving Edgefield County, including the towns of Edgefield, Johnston and Trenton. It publishes local news, community events, opinion and local sports, and offers local businesses access to the county's most established readership. Reference listings describe a very small operation, a handful of employees, which is typical of a rural weekly produced close to the community it covers.

Its circulation has always been modest. The South Carolina Encyclopedia recorded an estimated circulation of about 500 copies weekly in 2003. What the Advertiser lacks in scale it makes up in continuity and standing: when South Carolinians discuss the state's oldest newspaper, they mean this one, and its sesquicentennial edition in 1986 drew congratulatory messages from President Ronald Reagan and South Carolina Governor Richard W. Riley, among others.

History

The Advertiser's lineage begins on May 27, 1811, when Thomas M. Davenport began publishing the Anti-Monarchist and South-Carolina Advertiser at Edgefield Court House, supporting President James Madison's plans for stronger national defense on the eve of the War of 1812. After that war, Davenport sold the paper to Benjamin McNary, who renamed it the South-Carolina Republican and moved it to nearby Pottersville. In 1824 McNary sold it to John Lofton and Abner Landrum. Five years later, Francis Hugh Wardlaw, John Bacon and Warren Mays bought the paper and returned it to Edgefield Court House, and at some point James Parsons Carroll acquired it and renamed it the Edgefield Carolinian.

The modern paper dates from 1836, when Maximillian LaBorde and James Jones bought the newspaper and changed its name for the final time, to Edgefield Advertiser. The first issue under that name appeared on February 11, 1836, and the nameplate has remained unchanged since, the foundation of the paper's claim to be the state's oldest continuously named newspaper.

Under editor William Francis Durisoe, the Advertiser became an ardent advocate of southern rights in the years before the Civil War. After the war, as the South Carolina Encyclopedia records candidly, the newspaper protested the new freedoms given to African Americans and backed Wade Hampton, the Confederate general turned governor whose campaign ended Reconstruction in South Carolina. The Advertiser's antebellum and Reconstruction stances are part of its documented history: it was a paper of its place and time, speaking for the white leadership of a county that was also a center of South Carolina's political establishment. An honest account of the paper includes both its longevity and the causes it championed.

Ownership

Through the nineteenth century the Advertiser passed through the hands of a sequence of local proprietors: Davenport, McNary, Lofton and Landrum, the Wardlaw group, Carroll, and then LaBorde and Jones. That pattern of local ownership by printers, lawyers and political men was standard for antebellum newspapers, which often functioned as organs of the community's leadership.

The paper's modern ownership era began in 1937, when William Walton Mims assumed control of the Advertiser. Mims ran the paper for sixty-five years, retaining the editorship through the end of 2002, one of the longest tenures in American newspaper history. Under Mims the paper was staunchly conservative and, as the encyclopedia notes, not afraid to take unpopular stands on local issues. On January 1, 2003, his daughter, Suzanne Gile Mims Derrick, became editor, and reference sources list her as the paper's owner, publisher and editor. Under her leadership the Advertiser reoriented itself explicitly as a weekly newspaper devoted to community news and concerns. The paper's headquarters remains at 117 Courthouse Square in Edgefield.

Coverage and Content

Historically, the Advertiser combined political advocacy with the full range of a county paper's content: court and legislative news from a county seat that punched far above its weight in state politics, agricultural intelligence, market and land notices, and the local items that recorded Edgefield life. Edgefield County produced governors, senators and military leaders out of proportion to its size, and the paper's columns tracked their careers and the county's intense political culture.

Today's Advertiser concentrates on community news: Edgefield County and town government, schools, churches, local sports, obituaries, social news and opinion, including letters and editorials in a forthright style the paper has maintained throughout its history. Its coverage area is Edgefield County alone, and its authority comes from proximity. Readers know that the paper's small staff lives in the community, attends the same churches and schools, and will answer for its coverage on Courthouse Square.

Community Role

In Edgefield, the Advertiser is less a business than a piece of the county's furniture, present at every stage of the community's recorded life. It marked its own sesquicentennial in 1986 with a special edition, Volume 151, Number 4, published March 5, 1986, that covered the history of Edgefield through the 150 years the paper had been published. That edition, preserved in the Louise Pettus Archives at Winthrop University, included congratulations from President Reagan, Governor Riley and Texas Governor Mark White, a measure of how a 500-circulation weekly can carry symbolic weight far beyond its size.

The paper's community role also includes serving as the county's memory bank. Its files and the digitized issues held by the Historical Newspapers of South Carolina project are the first resort for anyone reconstructing Edgefield families, land, churches and politics, because for most of two centuries the Advertiser was the only institution writing the county down, week after week.

Print and Digital Presence

The Advertiser has been a print weekly for essentially its whole life, produced in Edgefield and distributed by subscription and local sale across the county. Its early technological history followed the trade: hand-set type and hand presses in the nineteenth century, mechanized composition in the twentieth, and modern offset and digital production in the twenty-first, all under the same nameplate on the same square.

Its digital home is edgefieldadvertiser.com, where the paper posts news, obituaries and community information and offers readers contact with the office. The website uses standard modern publishing tools, and the paper maintains social media channels including Facebook. For a weekly of its size, the site functions mainly as a complement to print, posting items between editions and serving former residents who follow Edgefield from afar, while the print paper remains the edition of record for the county.

Audience and Reach

The Advertiser's audience is Edgefield County, a rural county of peach farms, small towns and commuters to Augusta and Aiken. Its estimated weekly circulation of about 500 copies in 2003 understates its household reach, since small-town papers are traditionally shared and read in public places, but it does describe the paper's essential economics: this is a publication sustained by loyalty rather than scale.

Its reputational reach is much wider. As South Carolina's oldest continuously named newspaper, the Advertiser is cited in state histories, encyclopedias and journalism lore, and its archives draw researchers from well beyond the county. Scholars of the antebellum South, of Reconstruction and of Southern politics all have reason to read the Advertiser, because Edgefield's outsized political role made its local paper a witness to state and national events.

Notable People

The paper's notable figures begin with its founders: Thomas M. Davenport, who launched the lineage in 1811; Maximillian LaBorde and James Jones, who gave it its permanent name in 1836; and William Francis Durisoe, who made it a leading voice for southern rights before the Civil War. LaBorde is a significant figure in South Carolina letters in his own right, a lawyer, scholar and editor associated with South Carolina College as well as with the Advertiser.

Above all stands William Walton Mims, who controlled the paper from 1937 through 2002. Sixty-five years at one newspaper is an almost unmatched record, and Mims's Advertiser reflected his voice so completely that the paper and the man were inseparable in Edgefield life. His daughter Suzanne Gile Mims Derrick succeeded him on January 1, 2003, and continues the family's stewardship as owner, publisher and editor, with staff including managing editor Sandra Reece in listings of the paper's team.

Recent Developments

The Advertiser's recent history is one of deliberate continuity. Under Suzanne Derrick's editorship since 2003, the paper reoriented itself as a weekly devoted to community news and concerns, a shift in emphasis from the political combativeness of earlier eras toward service journalism for Edgefield County, while retaining its willingness to editorialize. It continues weekly publication from Courthouse Square, maintains its website and social presence, and covers the county's schools, peach economy, local government and community events.

In an industry where newspapers of far greater size have closed, the Advertiser's persistence is itself the story. A paper founded when Andrew Jackson was president, which has never missed its place in Edgefield's week for nearly 190 years under one name, enters its third century of community memory still doing the job its name describes: advertising, in the old sense, the life of its county to its people.