PUBLIC INVITED TO VIEW TEXAS COUNTRY REPORTER EPISODE AT PALACE
Time was, every county and community had a locally owned newspaper, eagerly scoured by all for births and deaths, sports and sales, and events and news local, state, and national.
Today, there are fewer, and many of those have changed names, ownership or location over the years.
But the weekly Texas Spur has operated continuously from Burlington Avenue in Spur (Dickens County) since October 1, 1909—a month before the town was founded.
This Sunday, March 10, the newspaper will be honored with the Texas Historical Commission’s Texas Treasure Business Award. The designation recognizes local businesses that have been in continuous for-profit operation in the State of Texas for at least 50 years. It additionally recognizes if the business has operated in the same building for at least 50 years.
“Newspapers have always been the cornerstone of their communities,” said Kay Ellington, publisher of The Texas Spur since 2018, “but these days it’s harder for a paper to survive as a business. Our team has dedicated its energies to continuing The Texas Spur’s proud tradition and its vital place in Dickens County life.”
AWARD PRESENTATION MARCH 10. State Sen. Charles Perry and State Rep. Dustin Burrows will be on hand to make the presentation to newspaper publishers Kay Ellington and Barbara Brannon. The event begins at 2:00 p.m. Sunday, March 10, at the Palace Theater, 422 Burlington Avenue in Spur, to be immediately followed by the presentation next door at The Texas Spur. Dickens County 4-H students will handle concession stand and usher duties at the Palace.
A reception with light refreshments, and tours of the 1929 newspaper building, will follow.
The Texas Spur, founded in 1909 and eventually subsuming earlier newspapers in Dickens County, received the award in 2022, but a formal presentation was delayed by legislative-session schedules.
The Dickens County Historical Commission is sponsoring the event.
Examples of historic newspapers and publishing artifacts will be on display at The Texas Spur offices that day, and the Dickens County–Spur Public Library will also mount an exhibition of local publications in honor of the occasion.
The event is free and open to the public.
TCR SEGMENT FEATURING THE TEXAS SPUR TO AIR NEXT WEEK. That tradition will be on display in a new segment of the fan-favorite television show “Texas Country Reporter” filmed in Spur last year with hosts Bob and Kelli Phillips.
It will be shown by special arrangement at Spur’s historic Palace Theater the afternoon of the Texas Treasure presentation.
TCR, which has covered faces and places around the Lone Star State for more than half a century, and has featured Spur in three previous segments. The one that is slated to air March 10, 2024, will feature The Texas Spur in its historic newspaper building.
The TCR segment aired first on Texas television stations Mar. 2 and 3 (including KCBD 11 (NBC) Sunday, March 3 at 9 a.m.) then will run on RFD-TV Mar. 9 and 10.
TEXAS SPUR NEWSPAPER HISTORY. The Texas Spur, which will soon be 115 years old on Oct. 1, 2024, is the longest-lived newspaper in Dickens County. But the county’s newspaper history extends back a bit farther than that, in the county seats of Espuela and Dickens—and the event will honor those enterprises, too, in a 125-year celebration.
The Texas Spur preceded the establishment of its hometown, Spur, by four weeks—by design. Recognizing a need and an opportunity, publisher Oran R. McClure of Rotan launched the newspaper several weeks in advance of the first Spur town lot sale, which was scheduled for Nov. 1, 1909 by the Stamford-based S. M. Swenson Enterprises. Mc-Clure printed copies in his Rotan newspaper shop and hauled them by wagon to the Spur townsite for distribution to eager buyers. On Nov. 1, 1909—lot sale day—he hawked the newest issue to hopeful bidders as they stepped off the first train to Spur.
At that time, the newspaper did business from the back of a hardware store two blocks north of the train depot. McClure soon installed a printing press there and in due time moved into another building several doors up. By 1929 McClure had prospered sufficiently to construct a proper brick building for his enterprise, at 424 Burlington Avenue. It’s there The Texas Spur continues to operate today.
THE CLIMATE FOR LOCAL MEDIA IN 2024. Over the past decade, many newspapers across the U.S. have reduced frequency or closed entirely—largely the effect of changing reader habits and competition from digital and social media. But the weekly newspaper often remains a stalwart, as the only permanent record of local events and as the watchdog of city and county government and other public entities.
Affordable advertising rates and modest subscription prices keep weeklies like The Texas Spur viable, according to publisher Ellington, who spent most of her five-decade career with national newspaper groups such as Gannett and The New York Times before moving to Spur and investing her expertise and capital. The enterprise headed by Ellington, along with editor Barbara Brannon, has taken over four other weeklies in a contiguous area since 2020, as owners were faced with the options of selling or closing.
“We see a great strength in a Spur-based company that can lend its expertise to keeping other newspapers viable,” Ellington said. Along with The Texas Spur, the weekly Caprock Courier (Briscoe, Cottle, Hall, King and Motley Counties) and the Floyd County Hesperian- Beacon have garnered awards for news coverage in regional and state competitions in recent years.
MORE NEWSPAPER TRIVIA.
Texas Spur editor Barbara Brannon, who joined the newspaper leadership team after several years with the THC’s Texas Heritage Trails Program, prepared the newspaper’s history for its TTBA nomination, with help from numerous sources.
• Back issues of The Texas Spur have been digitized by the Texas Tech University Southwest Collection and are available for searching and downloading at no cost.
• The Texas Spur was one of the first collections of West Texas newspapers to be microfilmed by Texas Tech University in the 1940s, likely due to its connection with Clifford B. Jones, manager of the Spur enterprises and later president of Tech.
• The Texas Spur at one time competed with The Dickens Item and The Dickens News but subsumed those weeklies by the 1940s.
• An estimated 5,957 issues of The Texas Spur have been published since Oct. 1, 1909. The Texas Spur has, to our knowledge, never missed a planned weekly issue even in wartime or after the unexpected death of publisher Oran McClure, who was struck by a car walking home from the newspaper during a blizzard in March 1931. (The Texas Spur, like many weeklies, has sometimes taken a hiatus during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when there is little benefit to advertisers during their own holiday closures.)
• While relatively little is documented about the construction of the newspaper headquarters at 424 Burlington Avenue, a couple of architectural clues remain: the cornerstone of the adjacent 1929 Spur Masonic Lodge, and, at the back of the newspaper shop, the newspaper team’s names inscribed in cement freshly poured in the 1940s.
• The Texas Spur is a member of the Texas Press Association, which promotes the welfare of Texas newspapers, encourages higher standards of journalism, and plays an important role in protecting the public’s right to know as an advocate of First Amendment liberties.
TPA is one of the nation’s oldest and largest newspaper trade associations. As of January 2023, TPA represents 328 paid-circulation newspapers in publication — 40 dailies and 288 nondailies.
The Texas Spur has earned numerous firstplace awards in the Texas Press Association’s annual Better Newspapers Contest, including the statewide Community Service Award for its coverage of Covid-19 information in 2020.
• The late Joe and Jo Ann Harrison, owners and publishers of The Texas Spur newspaper from 1958 to 1996, were inducted posthumously into the Panhandle Press Association Hall of Fame in 2021. Son Chuck Harrison and his wife, Nancy, accepted the honor.
ABOUT THE TEXAS TREASURE BUSINESS AWARD.
• Business history is local history, claims the Texas Historical Commission, the state agency whose mandate is preservation of the state’s historic resources. Information and a nomination form for the Texas Treasure Business Award can be found on the agency’s website.
• Since 2005, over 500 Texas businesses have been honored for their historic significance, from wellknown establishments like H.E.B. and Bill Miller BBQ to small-town bakeries, florists, general stores, and many more.
• By 2020, an estimated 30 Texas local newspapers had received the Texas Treasure Business Award.
