^e Courier £ mice . 3
CENTENNIAL = fl©©
Roxboro, N.C. December, 1 982
Our 100th Anniversary Issue
8 Sections— 136 Pages
THE COURIER.
From the publisher
Foreword
Producing The Courier-Times Centennial Edition was
an especially difficult and sometimes exasperating ex
perience, mainly because it was all done by our staff in ad
dition to getting out each of our regular editions.
In spite of the extra work and increased pressure it was a
lot of fun and very rewarding to all of us who worked on the
issue; that is what we will remember about it — a rewarding
experience that taught us something about our past.
The four-person news staff and I divided the decades and
combed through every available issue, attempting to extract
the more important events, humor, and news items as space
allowed. It has taken almost three years.
Our advertising sales staff also did an enormous amount of
work in contacting business and industry, securing the
history of each and presenting it in words and pictures. These
ads, 160 of them, add tremendously to the historical
value of the publication and we take this opportunity to ex
press our appreciation to each and every advertiser.
Our photographer, the many people who submitted
photographs, our typesetters who labored long hours to
produce all of the composition in this issue, and our pressmen
who took extra pains in the printing of the centennial — all of
The Courier-Times staff — deserve recognition for a job well
done.
Some men only take from that which is provided for them
in life; others repay in part by putting something back into
their communities by service and good deeds. We fully
realize that we could not begin to adequately recognize the
thousands of Personians who have contributed positively to
this county over the past 100 years. But, we are proud that
this newspaper could in part meet its on-going obligation to
its community by the presentation of this centennial issue.
Another important thing learned from this experience is
humility. There are countless thousands who have come
before us who have, through their pride in this county, added
historically to its development. It really makes one feel
rather small, but it also plainly points out the tremendous
obligation we all have, not only to do our jobs well, but to also
give thanks for our success by helping to make this a better
community in which to live.
JERRY M. CLAYTON
Publisher
The Courier-Times family takes great
pleasure in presenting this special
Centennial Edition, which com
memorates this newspaper’s 100 years of
service to the people of Roxboro and
Person County.
The Centennial Edition has been in the
making for nearly three years. It is, in
fact, presented one year later than
originally intended, largely because we
miscalculated the time required to do the
job.
When we began making plans for this
edition, we anguished over the approach
we should take. Should the Centennial
Edition be limited to recounting the
history of The Courier-Times? Should it
be a retrospective of Person County
history from the county’s founding to the
present day? Or should it merely focus
on the progress made here since 1941 and
thus be somewhat of a sequel to the
highly successful Sesquecentennial
Edition published by The Roxboro
Courier in 1941?
The concept that finally emerged was a
compromise among all these ap
proaches, and the result is unique,
because nothing quite like this Cen
tennial Edition has ever been published
in Person County before. What we have
here is, in a manner of speaking, a 100-
year almanac of Roxboro and Person
County—a capsulized look into the
various periods of the life of this
newspaper and the Roxboro-Person
County Community.
The information that appears in this
voluminous edition is backed by coun
tless hours of research that involved
members, of our staff combing every
single edition of The Roxboro Courier
and The Courier-Times that has survived
publication and remains in our files. If
our Centennial Edition is not the
definitive history of Roxboro and Person
County for the past -100 years, it is the
closest thing to it yet published. And we
defy any reader to go through these
pages without finding something about
Roxboro and Person County that he did
not know before he started.
Readers will find herein a summary of
the news highlights of each year of the
past century, organized according to
decade. The summaries are augmented
by news stories and features that are
printed verbatim as they originally
appeared in The Courier-Times and.its
predecessors. There also are feature
stories prepared especially by our news
staff for this edition.
We have attempted to assemble all this
into a comely package in the hope that
Personians will retain the Centennial
Edition to enjoy in the days and years to
come and that they will view it as a link
to a rich heritage.
To paraphrase the editor’s words
appearing in a 1910 edition of The Rox
boro Courier: We hope The Courier-
Times Centennial Edition will be a
welcome visitor to every home in this
county.