Postville Herald

Overview

The Postville Herald is a weekly newspaper based in Postville, Iowa, in Allamakee County in the far northeastern corner of the state. It publishes on Wednesdays from an office on North Lawler Street in Postville, and it serves as the official newspaper of the city of Postville and as one of two official newspapers of Allamakee County. The paper describes its territory as sitting at the hub of four counties — Allamakee, Clayton, Winneshiek and Fayette — and its reporting has long covered Postville city government, the Postville Community Schools, and the smaller nearby communities of Castalia and Frankville as well as news from across the four-county region.

For most of its modern life the Herald was a small, locally rooted weekly with a circulation listed at about 1,000 and a readership of about 2,500. Its long-running motto presented it as a live newspaper for a live community, with a founding date of 1892 carried in that slogan. The fuller history the paper itself published is more layered: the Herald was created in 1918 out of a German-language predecessor, which in turn traced its roots to 1891, so the present title rests on one of the longer continuous newspaper lineages in northeastern Iowa.

Before the Herald: The Postville Review

Postville had a newspaper before it had the Herald. According to the Herald's own published history, in the community's early years there was no local paper at all, and national and state news arrived through letters from friends and relatives and through travellers passing through town, while local word spread through informal conversation in shops and saloons. That changed in the early 1870s, when F. M. McCormack of Decorah took an interest in starting a weekly in Postville. After a meeting of leading citizens, a name was chosen, and the first issue of the Postville Review came off the press on March 19, 1873.

McCormack sold his interest in 1875 to W. N. Burdick, who published the Review until his death in 1901. The paper then passed to Burdick's sons, A. E. and A. S. Burdick, who continued it until it ceased publication in 1921. The Review therefore overlapped for decades with the German-language paper from which the Herald directly descended, and the two titles together gave Postville a two-paper tradition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Review also supplied the Herald with one of its most important early staff members, as described below.

A German-Language Beginning

The Herald's direct ancestor was the Iowa Volksblatt, a German-language newspaper founded to serve the many German settlers in the Postville area who, as the paper's history puts it, could read and write German but not English. Local residents discussed the idea of a German newspaper with their pastor, the Rev. J. Gass, and in 1891 Gass began publishing the Volksblatt. In 1895 he transferred management of the paper to his printers, Henry Brechler and Gustav Dietsch of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. By then, the history notes, the paper was well established.

Dietsch bought out his partner's share in 1897 and published the Volksblatt on his own until 1908, when he sold the plant and the office building to Paul Ronneburger and Sam Hoesly of Monroe, Wisconsin. That ownership, rooted in the German-speaking communities of both Iowa and Wisconsin, carried the paper through the First World War era, a period in which German-language publishing in the United States came under intense pressure and in which a change of language and name became, for this paper, the path to survival.

1918: Becoming the Postville Herald

On June 1, 1914, William J. Klingbeil of Monroe bought Sam Hoesly's half interest in the paper. In 1918 Klingbeil also bought Ronneburger's interest, giving him full control. He then changed the name to the Postville Herald and began publishing in English rather than German. The Herald's own history is explicit about the lineage: the Herald was a direct descendant of the Volksblatt, with roots dating back to 1891, even though the Herald name itself dates from 1918 and the paper's motto used 1892 as its founding year.

To help the new English-language paper succeed, Klingbeil hired Bert Tuttle of the rival Review, described in the paper's history as the dean of Postville's newsmen. Tuttle served as assistant and managing editor for more than 55 years, an extraordinary tenure in a small newsroom, and the history credits him with knowing more about Postville and its newspapers than anyone else in the community. Local tradition recorded in the same history also credits Tuttle with single-handedly persuading the Ringling Brothers Circus to come to Postville in 1916.

The Klingbeil Era and Mid-Century Ownership

Klingbeil served as editor and publisher of the Herald until 1948, with the exception of about two years. On leaving, he sold his interest to C. W. DeGarmo and Fred L. Martin. After DeGarmo's death, James Seeley became a partner with Martin, and Seeley continued in partnership until Martin's death. This pattern — a working editor-publisher, a partnership, and succession within a small circle of local newspapermen — was typical of Iowa weekly journalism in the middle of the twentieth century, and it kept the Herald under owners who lived with the consequences of what they printed.

Surviving mid-century issues show the paper performing the classic functions of a county weekly. A January 1964 front page, for example, carried the sale of a century-old local family store, church decisions, school and community notices, and the paper's designation as official newspaper for Allamakee County and the town of Postville. Newspapers.com's archive of the Herald holds more than 22,000 searchable pages dating from 1893 to 1976, a run that reflects both the Volksblatt-to-Herald continuity and the paper's role as a record of births, marriages, deaths and public business in and around Postville.

Competition, the Herald-Leader Years, and New Owners

In 1985 James Seeley sold the Herald to Patrick Huber of Clarksville, Iowa, who was the paper's sole publisher from 1985 to 1991. In 1991 the Wisconsin-based News Publishing Company of Mount Horeb started a competing publication in town, the Postville Leader. Later the same year, the Herald was bought out by the Leader, and the combined publication was renamed the Postville Herald-Leader. For nearly two decades Postville was therefore served by a merged title rather than by competing weeklies.

At the end of October 2009, the Herald-Leader was purchased by Meyer Information Technology and renamed, once again, the Postville Herald, restoring the name the paper had carried from 1918 to 1991. Then, effective January 1, 2015, the Herald was purchased by Mid-America Publishing of Hampton, Iowa, the regional newspaper group that owned a string of small-town Iowa weeklies. Under Mid-America the paper continued its Wednesday publication, its city and school coverage, and its four-county brief, from its North Lawler Street office.

Covering the 2008 Raid and Its Aftermath

The most nationally scrutinised period in Postville's modern history came in May 2008, when a large federal immigration raid was carried out at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant, then the town's dominant employer. The Herald-Leader, as the paper was then titled, reported the raid and its long aftermath in its own community. That local reporting is now preserved as a research collection: the Postville Project, organised by Luther College and the University of Northern Iowa, collects newspaper articles published by the Herald-Leader relating to the 2008 raid, alongside other materials documenting the community before, during and after the event.

The existence of that university-held collection underlines the paper's documentary importance. For historians of the raid, the Herald-Leader's coverage is a primary local source — the record produced by journalists who lived in the town whose workforce, schools, churches and businesses were reshaped by the enforcement action and by the plant's subsequent bankruptcy and closure proceedings. Few Iowa weeklies of its size have had their reporting on a single event archived and exhibited in this way.

Place and Community

Postville sits in the southwestern part of Allamakee County, close to the Clayton, Fayette and Winneshiek county lines, which explains the Herald's four-county brief. It is a small farming and food-processing town whose population has, over the paper's lifetime, included the German and Norwegian settlers of its founding generations and, in more recent decades, the new immigrant communities drawn by plant work — the readership change that the paper itself lived through when it switched from German to English in 1918 and that it lived through again in the Agriprocessors era.

The Herald's stated coverage list — Postville city government, Postville Community Schools, Castalia, Frankville and the four surrounding counties — describes a classic rural weekly's patch: council meetings, school boards, sports, farm news, church and social notes, obituaries and legal notices. As an official newspaper for both the city and the county, it also carried the public notices on which local government transparency in Iowa depends, a function that gives even a 1,000-circulation weekly a civic weight out of proportion to its size.

The End of Mid-America Publishing

In March 2026, Mid-America Publishing announced that it would cease operations, with its closure set for April 2, 2026, and that the Postville Herald, the Monona Outlook and the Calmar Courier would be shuttered unless a buyer could be found. Regional reporting at the time listed the Herald among the Mid-America papers in Allamakee County whose future was in doubt, while some other papers in the group attracted last-minute purchasers. The announcement therefore placed a title whose lineage ran from an 1891 German-language weekly through more than a century of continuous local publication at risk of ending with its parent company's debt and losses.

Whatever the Herald's final disposition, its historical significance is secure. It carried Postville from the era of news by letter and saloon conversation, through German-language settlement journalism, two world wars, the farm economy's transformations and the 2008 raid, and its pages — in library holdings, in commercial archives of more than 22,000 pages, and in the University of Northern Iowa's Postville Project collection — remain one of the fullest records of life in this four-county corner of northeastern Iowa.

Availability and Archives

The Herald published weekly on Wednesdays and maintained a website at postvilleherald.com, with its office listed at 101 North Lawler Street, Postville, Iowa 52162, and telephone (563) 864-3333 in its own directory information. Readers and researchers can consult its back run through several channels: the Postville Public Library's local newspaper holdings, which include the Herald and its predecessor and companion titles; the Newspapers.com archive of Herald pages from 1893 to 1976; and the Postville Herald-Leader collection of the Postville Project at the University of Northern Iowa, which preserves the paper's raid-era reporting for public research.