PRINCETON — Resuming our look at the history of Mercer County, courtesy of Kyle McCormick’s “The Story of Mercer County,” (Charleston Publishing Co. 1957), we continue with a history of newspapers in Mercer County.

Bluefield went through a similar turnover in newspapers as did Princeton.  There was the Bluefield Journal in 1895; the Interstate Advertiser in 1896; the Daily Journal in 1893; the Daily Advertiser in 1900; the Weekly News in 1914; the Bluefield Evening Courier in 1912; the Bluefield Daily Times in 1915; the Labor Advocate and the West Virginia Sentinel in 1898. None of these papers lasted very long and all had difficulties.

A lasting newspaper didn’t come to Bluefield until 1896, when Hugh “Ike” Shott Sr. set up the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. Shott, a native of Staunton, Va., came to Bluefield as a railway mail clerk on the Northfolk & Western Railroad, before being injured in a railroad wreck. He used the settlement money to set up the BDT. In the 1920s, he set up the Sunset News, a Bluefield afternoon paper.

The Princeton Press, an antecedent of the Princeton Observer, operated as a four-page daily in 1917-18 during World War I. After the war, interest cooled off and it became a semi-weekly, then a weekly, thence into bankruptcy where Dr. W.H. Wallingford purchased it at a bankrupt sale, then resold to McCormick, who renamed it the Princeton Observer.

In the early 1920s, Barty Wyatt, then living in Matoaka, established the Mercer Recorder. It was soon purchased by the late Gordon Garner and moved to Princeton, where it operated as a daily for two years.

However, Princeton did not support a daily and it soon became a weekly, then went out of business temporarily, before being re-established as the Twin-City Advance by A.E. Burgess and Garner. The latter operated the paper until 1944, when he went into war work and sold the paper to the Observer.

In 1931, Charles Hedrick operated the Princeton News for about a year, before selling its circulation and goodwill to the Observer.

On February, 8, 1957, McCormick sold the Observer to the Shott family and it was combined with the Sunset News under the name Sunset News-Observer, an afternoon paper with offices in both Princeton and Bluefield. It operated until the early 1970s.

McCormick wrote, “This apparently marked the end of the weekly newspaper business in Mercer County, the weekly being out-moded by the large industrial population and modern transportation that made the distribution of papers easier.”

He wrote this in 1957. Four years later, on July 25, 1961, the Princeton Times was formed as a daily, becoming a weekly in 1964.

In the early 1950s, Bernard Jarrett, who owned and operated a commercial printing plant in Bluefield, published a tabloid newspaper called the Mountain Mirror. It lasted about one year before Jarrett’s fatal illness and subsequent death killed it off.

To comment on this column write to me care of “Mercer County Memories” at P.O. Box 1199, Princeton, WV 24740 or e-mail me at delimartman@yahoo.com or jharvey1@frontiernet.net.

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