DAR marks the first edition of its 155th year

The Jan. 11, 2023, front page is the edition 1 of the 155th year.

At the very top of this page, just under the date, there’s some small type I wanted to highlight today. In case you’ve never looked very closely, that’s where each day we track the number of years this newspaper has been in operation and the number of editions we’ve printed in the current year.

Jan. 11 marks the first edition of our 155th year of operation in Poplar Bluff. We’re actually two years older than the incorporation of the city itself, and I’m sure our reporters were eager to cover that event in February 1870.

Local journalism is often called the first draft of history. The stories of growth, success and even tragedy have filled literally tens of thousands of editions of the Daily American Republic’s pages.

Something we haven’t done enough to share with you over the years is what happens beyond those pages and bylines.

Those pages were put together by people like the staff who later produced a single-page edition after a May 1927 tornado leveled much of the downtown area. Those reporters and press workers had lost friends and family, and had parts of their own building pulled down around them. But they hand-cleaned each letter and piece of the manually-operated press to publish the first list of the dead, as families scrambled for word of their loved ones.

They also sought in the wake of overwhelming grief to inspire their community to recovery, with the headline, “POPLAR BLUFF WILL REBUILD.”

They looked not just at the tragedy, but at the efforts of their neighbors to come together.

“Property owners seen today state that all the buildings damaged beyond repair will be rebuilt from the ground up and that rebuilding will be started at once,” a front page article proclaimed.

I like to think the DAR has proven itself to continue to be a champion of the Downtown in the years since, although I can only speak for my brief time here.

Community journalism is necessary — absolutely necessary — for the health of a region. I can point to so many examples of this in just my almost 18 years here in Poplar Bluff that I could wear you out, I know.

But we promote every day the residents who are building a better home for us with their new businesses and grassroots charities. We highlight the problems facing our community, including the rash of structure fires we’ve seen in recent weeks.

We do this because we care about our communities too, as I heard a fellow journalist say so succinctly recently.

I can guarantee you the reporters who put that first list of the dead together in 1927 had a friend or loved one on the same list they were compiling, and were mourning with everyone else. But they stepped up to do what was needed at that moment, not just with a mechanical report, but with the heart of someone who wanted to inspire their community.

I hope that today you find something in these pages that inspires you.

Thank you for joining us today, as we start our 155th year with the same hope I feel our predecessors had for this community when they pulled the very first edition off a press in a town that wasn’t even officially a town yet.

Local journalism is essential infrastructure and we are here to continue helping build a brighter future for those who come after us. Thank you for being part of that with us.

Donna Farley is the editor of the Daily American Republic. She can be reached at dfarley@gmail.com.