The following article is the property of The Iowa Almanac and was posted with permission from the author, Professor Jeff Stein.
Iowa had barely been a state for a dozen years when a new weekly publication was born in Waterloo.
It was called The Blackhawk Courier, and the first issue was published on January 18, 1859. Published on Tuesday evenings, the newspaper was founded by W.H. Hartman and George Ingersoll. Subscriptions went for $1.50 per year, payable in advance.
Under the masthead on the front page, the new newspaper declared itself to be "devoted to general news, agriculture, science and the diffusion of Republican principles". The Republican Party was not even five years old at the time, having been founded in Iowa in 1854, but it was growing in popularity. The Republicans elected their first president just one year later in 1860--Abraham Lincoln.
That first edition of the paper featured headings for front page stories such as House and Farm, Poetical, and Miscellaneous. Stories on that first front page included information about the penalties of slave trading, how to properly ascertain the gross and net weight of swine, the production of sorghum in Iowa, and a new law regulating elections that were tied to schools.
The Blackhawk Courier was a weekly until 1890, when it began publishing on weekday afternoons. The name of the paper changed over time, as well, to the Waterloo Evening Courier and Waterloo Daily Courier. For a while after a merger with a newspaper in Cedar Falls, the official name was Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, but we now know it as simply The Courier. In 2023, the paper reduced its printing schedule to three days per week…Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday…with an online edition published seven days per week. The current circulation is around 14,000.
But that first edition, of the weekly Blackhawk Courier, was published on this date in 1859.
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