Cows & Cabbage: “And that’s how the cow ate the cabbage!”
Fifty years ago this month, the Countywide News officially registered as a business. So, for the past 50 years, we have been informing our communities about the highlights — and sometimes the hard truths — of what is happening in Pottawatomie County.
But our story didn’t begin with a business registration.
Even before the Countywide News name was registered, the people who came before us were covering the news, sports, and events of our communities. To them, and to those of us who carry on that work today, this isn’t just a job. It is a calling.
We care about this county because we are part of it.
Our parents live here. Our siblings live here. Our children grew up here, and for some of us, our grandchildren are growing up here. We shop in the same stores, drive the same roads, sit in the same school gymnasiums and football stands, attend the same community events, and worry about many of the same things you do.
What affects this county affects us too. In our office are shelves filled with what we call the bound books. Inside them are copies of newspapers dating back to 1946.
That’s 80 years of Pottawatomie County history sitting on those shelves.
Open them up, and those pages will reveal names you recognize. You’ll find grandparents and great-grandparents. You’ll find businesses that have long since disappeared and others that are still serving customers today. You’ll find championship teams, elections, weddings, anniversaries, new schools, new roads and new beginnings.
You’ll also find fires, floods, accidents, deaths, disagreements and difficult decisions.
You see, recording a community’s history means recording all of it — not only the parts that are easy to tell.
I feel our history stretches back even further than those bound books.
By tracing the owners, publishers, and editors who came before us, we can find connections to weekly newspapers in this area going back many years before 1946. The history isn’t complete enough for us to put a definitive date on where one publication ended and another began, but the thread is there.
Each new publisher, editor, and reporter picked up where another left off.
We like to think that’s what we’re doing today. Technology has definitely changed how we put a newspaper together. Papers were once laid out letter by letter. Stories that were once written on typewriters are now written on computers. Photographs that once required film and a darkroom can be taken and transmitted in seconds. Our phones can now be used as our audio recorder, still camera, and video camera. Breaking news no longer waits for the newspaper to come off the press.
Yes, we still publish our print edition, but we also publish online and have an app where you can read all our weekly stories on your phone or tablet.
Information is available almost instantaneously on social media. But information and news aren’t always the same thing.
Someone has to sit through the meeting, read the documents, ask the questions, talk to more than one side, and present what actually happened in an understandable manner for the public.
That matters. It matters when your city is spending your tax dollars or when your school board is making decisions about your children’s education. It also matters when a championship is won, an anniversary is celebrated, or a neighbor quietly does something extraordinary for someone else.
For generations, newspapers have continued to show up; ask the questions; take the pictures; celebrate the accomplishments; report the decisions being made with your tax dollars; and tell you when something is wrong. And when it comes to local news, we’re often the only ones doing it.
And we still preserve a record so that 20, 50, 80, or 100 years from now, someone can open a bound book — or search through digital copies, or whatever replaces these — and discover what life was like in Pottawatomie County in 2026.
While how we gather and put together a newspaper has evolved, the responsibility of what we do has not changed.
That’s why local newspapers still matter. Many years ago, when I first joined the Countywide, I was told I would never be bored. That the ink gets in your blood and runs through your veins for life.
I will wholeheartedly admit I have never been bored.
What I wasn’t told was how special it is to watch so many kids grow up, to feel the highs and lows of the communities so deeply.
While our job is to publish the facts and remain unbiased, some moments in our communities touch our very souls. Those moments when we cry with our communities, and of course, those moments when we celebrate with them, are part of what makes this 50th anniversary mean so much to us.
We aren’t simply celebrating 50 years of a business name.
We’re celebrating the people who trusted this newspaper with their stories. The people who worked here before us. The advertisers and subscribers who kept and continue to keep this hometown newspaper alive. And we’re celebrating generations of readers who have opened these pages each week to find out what was happening in the place they call home.
This year, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Countywide name, but we are also celebrating 50 years of Tecumseh’s Frontier Days, 135 years of the City of Tecumseh, and the 250th anniversary of the birth of America. The land that ensures we have the freedom to do what we love.
For 50 years under the Countywide name — and for many years before that — someone has been here telling the stories of our communities.
Today, that honor and responsibility belong to us.
We do not take that responsibility lightly. But we do embrace it, and all that comes with it.
