Macon Telegraph Archive (1826-1908)

Tarver Library's latest database, The Macon Telegraph Archive (1826-1908), is now available online. You can access this database from Tarver Library's alphabetical database listing on the library web site, or through GALILEO.

The Macon Telegraph Archive provides online access to early issues of the Macon Telegraph ranging from its inception as a weekly newspaper in 1826, through the daily issues of the early twentieth century. Consisting of over 50,000 newspaper pages, the archive provides historical images that are both full-text searchable and can be browsed by date.

Launched just three years after the city of Macon was incorporated, the Macon Telegraph provides an inside view into the initial years of the city's growth. Macon's central location within the state provided the paper with a unique perspective of the news through a period when middle Georgia was both geographically and politically a focal point of the state. During the early publication of the newspaper, Macon and its surrounding areas were guided politically, economically, and racially by the growth of cotton. Through that lens the paper provides historical insight into the development of the state during the sectionalism of the antebellum period, the devastation of the Civil War, and the rise of the "New South" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Macon Telegraph Archive is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia as part of the Georgia HomePLACE initiative. The project is supported with federal LSTA funds administered by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Georgia Public Library Service, a unit of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.