Readers of the “Looking Back” column in The Summerville News have long realized what a gold mine of local and regional information could be found in back issues of the local paper. The Summerville News Editor and Publisher Gene Espy (whose family has been associated with the News since May of 1900) and the Chattooga County Historical Society recently came together in partnership with Georgia Public Library Service and the Digital Library of Georgia to help make that information more accessible.

Thanks to this partnership, available titles from the 1800s through 1949 are now available at the Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive.  The Archive is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG), a part of Georgia’s Virtual Library GALILEO and is based at the University of Georgia Libraries. Since 2007, the DLG has partnered with universities, archives, public libraries, historical societies, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions to digitize historical newspapers from around the state.

Donnie Summerlin, Archivist at the Digital Library of Georgia, provided some interesting detail about all that is now available pertaining to Chattooga County at the historic newspapers site.  There you will find issues of two forerunners of the News, the Summerville Gazette (1884 to 1885) and the Chattooga News (1888 to 1896) as well as scattered issues of papers like the Chattooga Advertiser.  The new project has added the Summerville News with issues dating from 1896 to 1949.  “For the three newspaper titles, we have 21,096 pages from 2,797 issues!”

Historical Society president Gene McGinnis commented, “Our organizational mission is to promote, preserve, and protect the history of Chattooga County. The digitization of The Summerville News allows a significant part of our history to become easily accessible. State funding allowed the years 1909-1930 to be digitized. The Historical Society was happy to fund digitization of an additional twenty years. In keeping with our mission, we will eventually help to fund the digitization of additional years of the News as well as other papers that have been published in the county through the years.”

Local researchers have been using the Archive as a source of information for more than a decade.  “A few Chattooga newspapers as well as all the early issues of the Walker County Messenger have provided useful information to local genealogists and history researchers for years,” according to Historical Society program vice president Reba Welch.  “The images are clear and the index created through the digitization process is thorough and easy to use.”

The archive is free and open for public use and includes over one million Georgia newspaper pages between 1786 and 1986. These titles are word searchable along with over two million pages in the Georgia Historic Newspapers website at https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/.