Newspaper Archive of
The Sumner News Index & The Sumner News Review

The Sumner Historical Society is fortunate to have a newspaper collection comprised of almost every edition of  Sumner weekly newspapers published from 1889 to 1990.

Over the span of 101 years, nine weekly newspapers served Sumner’s citizens.  A couple of the nine were just a change in name; the ownership stayed the same.  Some had a very long life, some ran for only a few years.  For 41 years  Sumner enjoyed two local weekly papers at the same time.  

From the turn of the century to the mid 1920’s the local weekly was the freshest source of reading material in most households.  This was an era when most farmers and many small town residents did not subscribe to daily papers from nearby large cities.

The earlier Sumner papers carried some world and national news but most of that was copy from services that provided the same pre-written,  typeset, ready to print material to local papers.

Local area news was gathered, written, typeset and printed by the editor, sometimes with the help of a partner, family or an employee. The workload limited the size of the paper to four to eight pages each week.

Over time, improved printing technology allowed Sumner's papers to grow larger but they still focused just on Sumner and the surrounding valley leaving  national news to the local dailies.

The last wholly local newspaper was the Sumner News Review, it ended in 1990.

The digitized issues of the collection are available on this site. Most of the rest are available as paper issues and on microfilm.