Batesville's Newspapers

• Batesville Budget, Vol. 1 No. 1 — front page, September 10, 1887 (Historical Center scan)
• Batesville Newspapers — typed history of Batesville's papers, with the Herald office photograph (Historical Center scan)
• The Herald-Tribune — front page, January 1, 1931 (Historical Center scan)

Batesville's first newspaper was the Prairie Farmer, published by Gilland & Otterkirk in the mid-1880s. Its offices were destroyed by fire, and it went out of business. The Batesville Budget was started in September 1887 by George H. Gabler, who later published the Tri-County Greeting in Sunman. The Budget became the Batesville Independent in July 1889, and later the Ripley Independent on October 25, 1890. For several years it printed a number of pages in German. In January 1891, Donald McCallum took over the Independent.

In 1892 the Herald Publishing Co. was organized as a Democratic newspaper, and on June 22, 1893, the Independent Record became the Batesville Tribune, a Republican paper. George Gelvin bought the Batesville Herald in July 1896. On February 15, 1930, the Batesville Tribune was sold to the Herald, and on March 13, 1930, the first Batesville Herald Tribune was published. The Batesville Herald had stood on the northeast corner of Boehringer and Main Streets before it became the Herald Tribune in 1930.

That history comes from a typed page in the Historical Center binder — reproduced here as a source document below — and the two front pages on this page are the bookends: the Budget's first issue in 1887, and a Herald-Tribune front page from New Year's Day, 1931.

• The Budget's body text is too small and faded to read at this scan resolution — a higher-res re-scan is needed before the full front page can be transcribed.
• Who are the five people outside the Herald office in the photograph?
• Who wrote the typed 'Batesville Newspapers' history, and when?