Abilene Reporter-News

The paper's own claims run to firsts. The Handbook of Texas says it was the first newspaper in West Texas to fight the open range, to urge crop diversification and stock farming, and to join the Associated Press, and the first Texas daily, it claims, to ban whiskey advertising. After Bernard Hanks died in 1948 his widow ran the paper until her death in 1967, and the Harte-Hanks partnership went on to buy the Lubbock, Corpus Christi and San Antonio papers.

What the plaque says

The oldest existing business institution in Abilene is the Reporter Publishing Company, started by C. E. Gilbert. The first newspaper was printed on June 17, 1881, three months after the town was founded. Soon after Gilbert began publication, a fire destroyed several buildings in town, including his office. He rode the train to Baird (21 miles east) and, using borrowed presses, published an "extra" edition about the blaze. Two other Abilene papers were started in the 1880s. Part-time preacher W. L. Gibbs began the "Magnetic Quill" in 1882. Three years later Gilbert's printer, James L. Lowry, began the "Taylor County News." One of Lowry's early editions covered a duel between Gilbert and Gibbs, both of whom survived. Later "Reporter" owners were Dr. Alf H. H. Toler, John Hoeny, Jr., George S. Anderson, and Marshall Bernard Hanks, a former delivery boy for the paper who was publisher from 1906 to 1948. In 1911 the "Reporter" bought the "News," resulting in the present name. Hanks and Houston Harte of San Angelo formed the Harte-Hanks organization, now a national communications firm, which includes the "Reporter-News," whose motto is: "Without or with offense to friends or foes we sketch your world exactly as it goes." -Byron. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 0.3 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 13 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 14 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Abilene State Park — 17 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.

More markers nearby

• The Texas & Pacific Railway: First Railroad Across West Texas — steps away
• Taylor, Edward, James, & George — 0.3 mi
• 45th Infantry Division at Camp Barkeley — 0.3 mi
• James Harrison Parramore — 0.5 mi