DANVILLE COMMERCIAL-NEWS
Newspapers heritage as old as town
A hog stampede occurred on Main street, last Sunday.
A drove of about 300 were driven toward the railroad,
when they took fright at an engine and ran back up Main
street at their best speed. Some of them are perhaps still
on the rampage.
These words appeared on the pages of the Danville
Commercial on Dec. 24, 1868.
The Commercial-News and the city it covers have
changed a lot since the days when bands of hogs roamed
the streets. The transi tion has been a mutual one, with
the papers fortunes rising and falling along with those of
the industries and residents of Danville.
R. H. Bryant established the Weekly Inquirer in 1832,
just six years aft er the founding of Danville.
The paper, which was a Democratic or gan, quickly
experienced the liberties of free market capitalism by
going out of business in 1839.
In the following decades, the Weekly Inquirer was
succeeded by a series of 15 other newspapers, nearly
all of which fell on a spectrum ranging from immediate
failure to short-lived success.
Th e first paper to prove financially viable over an
extended period of time was the Danville Commercial,
the presses of which first rumbled to life on April 5,
1866. News items featured on the front page included the
nomination of Gen. Ulysses Grant for president, advice
about how to start early potatoes, and an impassioned
editorial about the recently resolved Civil War.
“(I)t would be impolite and unsafe in the extreme to
admit the representative of the insurrectionary States to
34 OUR ILLIANA COMMUNITY LIFESTYLES 2020 — SUMMER 2016
their much coveted places in the Congress of the United
States,” argued the central graph of the front page.
In 1903, the Commercial merged with the Danville
News, which began operation in 1873, and the resulting
paper became known as the Commercial-News.
Twenty-four years later, the paper swal lowed another
publication, The Danville Morning Press, itself the
project of several mergers.
The fortunes of Danville and the Com mercial-News
started to wane in the last quarter of the century. Blue
collar jobs across the country disappeared as America
under went a dramatic shift from an industrial-based to
a service-based economy.
As the economic situation in Danville sta bilized, the
Commercial-News underwent another major transition.
Gannett sold the newspaper to the Alabama-based
CNHI in 1998, but the Commercial-News remained
focused on local news coverage despite the change in
ownership.
The approach allowed the paper to enjoy the same
resurgence as the rest of the com munity.
In the past year, the Commercial-News moved from
its longtime building on 17 W. North Street to a new
location a short distance away at 2 E. Main Street, Suite
128, Towne Centre. The newspaper continues to focus
its attention on providing readers with strong local news
coverage in its print edition and 24/7 digital edition at
Commercial-News.