Dycusburg Once Had Its Own Newspaper

At one point in the past, The Crittenden Press wasn’t the only news source on the scene in the county! Apparently, Dycusburg had its own newspaper some 118 years ago, called the Cumberland Advance. During some archival research, we found this interesting (perhaps sexist) item printed in an 1889 issue of The Washington Post. I wonder, if somewhere stashed away in an attic or a museum, if a copy of this newspaper exists?

We, Too, Have Wept
The Courier-Journal quotes a paragraph and suggests a little scene that is somehow strangely familiar:

A young lady, whose name appears nowhere on her paper, and hence cannot be reproduced here, has become the editor of a small paper at Dycusburg, in Crittenden County, called the Cumberland Advance. She asks the indulgence of her readers till she can learn more, and says:

“Experience! Reader, you do not comprehend the meaning of that one word here. If you had ‘cried’ over a page of typographical errors blotched with printer’s ink; if in your imagination you had seen people sitting back laughing a your mistakes—and heard them say you would never do any better, you might speak out in meeting.”

How characteristic! There is one word in this paragraph which reveals the writer’s sex unerringly and it is not necessary to indicate it. Who but a sweet, helpless young girl would “cry” over difficulties or hardships. Here’s hoping she will have less and less cause to cry and that finally her blessed countenance may be in a perpetual smile.

From The Washington Post, July 7, 1889.