Manning Monitor
Overview
The Manning Monitor is a weekly newspaper serving Manning, Iowa, a city of 1,455 people in southwestern Carroll County in western Iowa. Business records date the Monitor to February 1, 1881, and the town's detailed early history dates its first issue to November 1881 — in either case, the paper was founded the same year as the town it serves, and it is recognized locally as Manning's oldest business. Its first publisher, S. L. Wilson, started it shortly after Manning itself was founded at the crossing of two railroads. The Washington hand press on which the Monitor was printed from 1881 until 1896 survives, displayed in the journalism building at Iowa State University, as a symbol, in the university's words at the time of its transfer, of the rugged enterprise of early Iowa journalism.
The Monitor's office is at 411 Main Street in Manning, and recent business listings name Ronald Colling as publisher, with the paper reachable at (712) 653-3854. A Thursday weekly through most of its documented history — a 1919 Iowa press directory lists it as a Thursday, independent paper — the Monitor has chronicled a German-American farming community known for its preserved Main Street, its Hausbarn Heritage Park, and a civic energy that led early county historians to claim more business was transacted in Manning than in any Iowa town of its size.
Manning and Its Setting
Manning was named for Orlando Harrison Manning, a lieutenant governor of Iowa who in 1881 was attorney for the Iowa Southwestern branch of the Chicago and North Western system. The railroads came first: the Iowa Southwestern was completed in 1880, yards and a depot were built at the future town site in 1881, and the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad crossed Iowa on a parallel line the same year, the two intersecting at what is now Manning. The town grew rapidly as a trade and agriculture center on Little Botna Creek, near the headwaters of the West Nishnabotna River, in the southwest corner of Carroll County, about eighteen miles from the county seat at Carroll.
The community that formed was heavily German. County histories describe Manning's settlers as the same German stock that made Davenport and Scott County prosperous, and German heritage remains the town's signature: the Hausbarn Heritage Park preserves a German house-barn built in 1660 and reassembled in Manning, and the town celebrates its roots in annual festivals. Manning's population was 1,382 by the early 1900s and 1,455 in the 2020 census — a remarkably stable figure across a century in which many Iowa railroad towns shrank. The Monitor serves this community and its school district, IKM-Manning, from the middle of a downtown whose late nineteenth and early twentieth-century buildings survive in unusual completeness.
Founding and the Wilson Years
Manning's early history, compiled from local records and the paper's own files by the Manning historian David Kusel, gives the Monitor's first chapter in detail. The first newspaper at Manning was started shortly after the town was founded, in November 1881, by S. L. Wilson. Wilson ran the Monitor for nearly two years before relinquishing ownership to Seth Smith, one of the pioneer business men of the town. Smith in turn sold to a partnership of B. I. Salinger, L. P. Bingham and C. S. Lawrence — Lawrence having been connected with the paper as foreman since its beginning. In 1884 Salinger and Bingham sold their interest to Lawrence, who continued as sole proprietor until 1893, when failing health led him to dispose of the paper to A. L. Heicks, who soon sold to Funk and Salmen, after which the paper passed through further hands in the 1890s.
The sequence is worth recording because it is the typical childhood of an Iowa weekly, preserved here with unusual completeness: a founder-promoter, a local merchant, a partnership built around the working foreman who actually printed the paper, and a sole proprietor whose decade of ownership gave the young title stability. That foreman-become-owner, C. S. Lawrence, embodies the craft basis of the early Monitor — the man who set its type ended up owning it, and the paper's first decade rested on his labor more than on any investor's capital.
The Sherlock Era and the 1919 Directory
By the late 1890s the Monitor had become, in the words of a Carroll County newspaper sketch published in the Carroll Herald, among the best and most solidly established newspapers in Carroll County, in its eighteenth year, firmly fixed as one of the landmarks of Manning, enjoying a great circulation, liberal advertising patronage, and an editor who held the confidence of his entire community. That editor was W. E. Sherlock, who took charge of the Monitor on September 1, 1897. Sherlock, born in Lancaster, Iowa, in 1873, had taught school, served as principal of the Keswick school, and worked as a deputy county treasurer before resigning to take the paper — a career path, from schoolroom and courthouse to editor's desk, that was the standard preparation for an Iowa weekly editor of his generation.
A 1919 state press directory lists the Manning Monitor as a Thursday weekly, independent in politics, under F. J. Mantz. The independent label marks a change from the openly partisan era of the county's first papers, and it matches the Monitor's twentieth-century identity: a community paper whose allegiance was to Manning itself. The directory places the Monitor between its neighbors — the Manning Herold, a German-language contemporary, and the Carroll County weeklies — in a county that then supported more newspapers than it had towns of size.
The Washington Hand Press
The Monitor owns one of the best physical artifacts in Iowa newspaper history. An August 1956 issue of the paper reported a letter from the Department of Technical Journalism at Iowa State College, in Ames, confirming that the Washington hand press standing in the hall of the journalism building there was the press on which the Manning Monitor had been printed from its founding in 1881 until a more modern press was acquired in 1896. After its fifteen years printing the paper, the press had served in the Monitor plant as a proof press for forty-five additional years. The college observed that the press had also served at least three other towns' centennial celebrations, and held it up as a reminder of the role of the rural press in developing Iowa's prairies into an agricultural powerhouse.
The Monitor's then-publisher, A. Sanders, appears in that 1956 correspondence as the paper's proprietor — one more named link in the ownership chain between Sherlock's era and the modern paper. The survival of the founding press, and its preservation by the state's journalism program rather than by the paper itself, says something true about the Monitor's standing: by the 1950s it was already old enough that its equipment was museum material, and the university treated a Carroll County weekly as a founding document of Iowa journalism.
Coverage and Community Role
The Monitor's documented subjects are Manning's own: city government, IKM-Manning schools and sports, agriculture and livestock, churches, veterans, business and the festivals of a town that markets its German heritage and its historic Main Street. Its files, sampled in the town history compiled from them, preserve the granular record of the community's first decades — bond votes for a railroad depot, the organization of the Grand Army of the Republic post in 1883, church dedications, council purchases of cemetery land — the raw material from which Manning's local history has been written ever since. The paper's longevity makes it the memory of the community in the most literal sense: summaries of Manning between 1881 and 1910 are drawn, episode by episode, from the Monitor's columns.
That role continues in a different key today. The Monitor is counted as Manning's oldest business, founded in 1881, in profiles of the town's economic life, and it operates from Main Street among the historic storefronts it has covered for a century and a half. For a community investing in heritage tourism — the Hausbarn, the preserved downtown, the German festivals — a hometown paper older than nearly every building it reports on is both a news source and an exhibit of the continuity being sold.
Manning's Other Papers
The Monitor was not Manning's only newspaper historically. The town also had the Manning Herold, a German-language paper listed in the 1919 directory as a Wednesday publication, and later combinations reflected in titles such as the Manning News Journal and The Daily Monitor that appear in the Manning Historic Preservation Commission's newspaper holdings. The survival of the Monitor as the town's title, among these comings and goings, follows the usual rule of Iowa journalism: the first paper in a railroad town, if it secured the legal notices, the job printing and the merchants' advertising, tended to outlast the challengers and the ethnic press as those communities assimilated. The Monitor, founded with the town and owned within five years by its own foreman, had those advantages from the start.
Editions, Archives and Availability
The Manning Monitor publishes weekly from 411 Main Street, Manning, Iowa 51455, under publisher Ronald Colling in recent business listings, and is present online through community news channels and its Facebook-era successors. Its historic files are preserved by the Manning Historic Preservation Commission, whose digitized Carroll County holdings include the Manning Monitor along with the Carroll County Monitor and related titles, and selected issues are available through commercial newspaper archives, including a 1956 run. For Manning — a railroad town of 1881 that kept its population, its Main Street and its German character — the Monitor is the one institution that has witnessed the whole story from the first depot vote to the present, and printed it.
