Preston County Journal
The Preston County Journal is a newspaper based in Kingwood, West Virginia, the county seat of Preston County in the state's northern highlands. Published for well over a century and a half in its lineage, the Journal is one of the foundational institutions of Preston County public life. Today it appears as part of the Preston County News & Journal, owned and printed by NCWV Media, which publishes the Journal on Tuesday and the Preston County News on Friday — a pairing that keeps a Kingwood newspaper in front of readers twice a week while preserving the Journal name that readers have known since the nineteenth century.
Kingwood is a small city, with a population of 2,980 at the 2020 census, set in the Allegheny Mountains above the Cheat River valley and forming part of the wider Morgantown area. Preston County itself is large, rural and spread among many small communities, from Terra Alta and Masontown to Rowlesburg, Reedsville, Tunnelton, Albright and Brandonville. A county newspaper based in the county seat must therefore do more than cover one town: it must connect courthouse, schools, farms, churches, businesses and borough and district communities across a wide mountain county. That has been the Journal's work throughout its history.
Founding and the First Years
Preston Publications, a later Kingwood publishing venture that traced the paper's lineage, recorded that the first Preston County Journal was published on May 19, 1866, in Kingwood by Levi Klauser. The paper was produced and printed in offices in the basement of the courthouse, until a fire destroyed that building, and all of the Journal's printing equipment, in March 1869. Starting a newspaper within a year of the end of the Civil War, in a county that had been divided by that conflict, was an act of civic reconstruction as much as a business venture. West Virginia itself had only become a state in 1863, and Preston County's residents needed a local forum for law, politics, land, commerce and news.
Library holdings reflect both the paper's age and the incompleteness of early files. The West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University lists duplicate microfilm of the Kingwood Preston County Journal for June 29, 1873 to 1875 and for January 7, 1897 to December 18, 1899, and later listed the Journal among West Virginia newspapers available in sporadic digital form for 2005 to 2009. A commercial historical archive reports scans of the paper beginning in the early 1880s and totalling more than thirteen thousand pages. Differing start dates in secondary summaries should be treated with care; what the contemporary Kingwood record and the Clio historic-site entry agree on is the later nineteenth-century Journal established in Kingwood and housed from 1880 in its own Main Street building.
William O. Dawson and the Journal Building
The Journal Building in downtown Kingwood was built in 1880 by William O. Dawson, who established the Journal in the form remembered in Kingwood's historic district and later became Governor of West Virginia. Dawson, whose papers are held by West Virginia University, is described in university archival material as a Preston County editor, Republican politician and the state's twelfth governor, serving from 1905 to 1909. His career illustrates a familiar nineteenth-century path in which a county newspaper editor became a political leader: the editor knew every community in the county, understood its roads, schools, taxes and grievances, and had a printing press with which to argue his case.
The building itself, at Main Street in the Kingwood Historic District — a district added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994 — is part of the newspaper's story. Kingwood was formally established in 1811, made county seat of the new Preston County in 1818 and chartered in 1853, and was named for a grove of tall, stately trees. A newspaper building erected in 1880 on its main street placed the Journal physically at the centre of county government and commerce, near the courthouse and the businesses whose advertisements supported it.
The Whetsell Era and Mid-Twentieth-Century Ownership
According to the Clio entry for the Journal Building, based on Bryan Ward's Kingwood Preservation Plan produced for Main Street Kingwood, James W. White was the next owner after Dawson until 1899, when he sold the paper to Horatio S. Whetsell. The Whetsell family then owned the Journal for sixty-eight years. That long tenure — spanning from the end of the nineteenth century to 1967 — gave the paper unusual stability. During those decades the Journal chronicled Preston County through the timber and coal booms, two world wars in which county residents served, the Great Depression, the decline of rail, the paving of mountain roads, and the consolidation of schools.
The Whetsell name also became connected with preserving county history itself. In February 1907, H. S. Whetsell of the Preston County Journal asked historian Oren F. Morton to prepare sketches on salient facts of local history and on the families descended from Preston's pioneer settlers. Morton accepted, serial articles appeared in the Journal, requests came in for the material in book form, and Whetsell ultimately assumed personally the expense of completing the manuscript that became Morton's history of Preston County. The episode shows a county editor acting as a publisher of history, using the newspaper first as a serial platform and then helping turn its contents into a durable book.
In 1967 the Journal was purchased by Delbert and Linda Benson. They later sold it to Gary and Tina Bolyard and Dennis and Carol Peters. A business directory listing in the late 1990s named Tina Bolyard as editor, with the paper at 110 Main Street, Kingwood. The pattern in this period was still recognisably the traditional one: local owners, a local editor, and a paper whose fortunes were tied directly to Preston County advertisers and subscribers.
From Local Ownership to NCWV Media
The decisive modern change came in December 2014, when NCWV Media began publishing the Preston County News & Journal and the weekly Pennysaver shopper in Kingwood. NCWV Media — the group behind WV News, The Exponent Telegram in Clarksburg and The State Journal, West Virginia's statewide business and government newspaper — brought the Kingwood papers into a regional network. The group later expanded further, acquiring the Mountain Statesman in Grafton and the Record Delta in Buckhannon in 2022, and its publications have included the Bridgeport News, Fairmont News, Weston Democrat, Mineral News & Tribune and other West Virginia titles.
Under NCWV Media, the Journal name continued within the combined Preston County News & Journal. John Dahlia served as editor of the Preston paper for two years and seven months before being promoted to NCWV Media business editor, with responsibility for business content across the group's platforms, particularly The State Journal; Joseph Hauger was named to replace him as editor in Kingwood. NCWV Media's president, Brian Jarvis, credited Dahlia with elevating the Preston paper's print, digital and social audiences and noted its recognition as Preston Chamber of Commerce Business of the Year. That recognition suggests a paper that, even within a larger group, was being judged locally — by the chamber and community of Preston County itself.
Publication Pattern and Premises
Clio's account, reflecting the NCWV arrangement, states that the papers are owned and printed by NCWV Media, which publishes the Preston County Journal on Tuesday and the Preston County News on Friday. Business listings for the combined Preston County News and Journal have given addresses on Main Street and Morgantown Street in Kingwood, including 208 West Main Street, with weekday office hours, and earlier listings gave 247 Morgantown Street for the Journal-News-Pennysaver operation. Such changes of office within the same small downtown are normal as papers consolidate printing and business functions while keeping a Kingwood storefront for news, advertising and subscriptions.
A media database listing for the Journal has described it as a local, English-language newspaper in the Pittsburgh media market, published weekly, while the twice-weekly News and Journal rhythm gives the combined operation a more frequent presence online. In practice, the modern reader encounters the titles together — Preston County News & Journal — on WV News platforms, where county stories are published digitally between print editions and shared to a social audience that NCWV's own media material has measured in the hundreds of thousands of Facebook reach for this title. Print remains anchored to the Tuesday Journal and Friday News pattern described by the historic-site record.
Coverage of a Mountain County
The Journal's subject matter is the government and community life of Preston County. That includes the Preston County Commission and Kingwood city government, courts at the county courthouse, Preston County Schools and Preston High School, road and infrastructure questions in a county where distance and winter weather matter, agriculture and timber, energy, small business, churches, veterans, obituaries, and the annual rhythms that define the county, including the Preston County Buckwheat Festival hosted in Kingwood and known for its buckwheat pancakes. A county fair and festival of that kind is both an economic event and a reunion, and its coverage in the county paper is part news, part community album.
Geography shapes the reporting. Kingwood sits above the Cheat River valley; the river, its tributaries and the Allegheny ridges divide the county into distinct communities with their own schools, churches and histories. A story about a bridge, a school consolidation, a mine, a flood or a county budget lands differently in Terra Alta than in Rowlesburg. The Journal's long value has been that it treats those places as part of one county conversation, printing names and details that a Morgantown or Pittsburgh outlet, covering Preston County only on major news, would not capture.
Archives and Research Use
For historians and genealogists, the Journal is a principal source for Preston County. Its nineteenth-century issues survive in part on microfilm at West Virginia University, its courthouse-basement beginnings and 1869 fire are a reminder of why early runs are incomplete, and modern digitisation has made scattered later years searchable online. Family historians use its obituaries, marriage and court notices, school items and community correspondence columns to reconstruct lives that left few other written traces. Local historians use it to follow the Dawson governorship from a Kingwood perspective, the growth of coal and timber towns, and the serial publication of Morton's pioneer-family sketches in 1907 and 1908.
The Journal is also a member-paper in the West Virginia newspaper tradition recognised by the West Virginia Press Association, and it has been listed among the state's newspapers received by the West Virginia Archives and History Library. Those listings, routine as they sound, mark the paper as a publication of record: a copy is preserved by the state, and its contents become part of West Virginia's documented history.
The Journal's Continuing Role
Preston County has changed since Klauser printed the Journal in the courthouse basement in 1866 and since Dawson built its Main Street home in 1880. Coal and timber employ fewer people, many residents commute toward Morgantown, and news now arrives instantly by phone. What has not changed is the need for an accountable local record compiled by people whose job is Preston County specifically. School board votes, commission decisions, court filings, road closures, festival plans and neighbours' milestones still happen whether or not a regional outlet notices them.
The Preston County Journal, carried today within the Preston County News & Journal under NCWV Media, continues that record. Its history — courthouse-basement founding, fire, a governor-editor, sixty-eight years under one family, local owners in the later twentieth century, and regional group ownership since 2014 — is a concise history of American community journalism itself, told from one Main Street in Kingwood.
