The Albany News
Albany, Shackelford County, Texas
Marker Inscription
IN 1866, A UNION ARMY REGULAR, HARRY HALL (H.H.) McCONNELL (1837-1895), LEFT PENNSYLVANIA AND TRAVELED TO FORT BELKNAP NEAR JACKSBORO. A NATURAL JOURNALIST, HE WAS A TALENTED WRITER WITH AN INQUISITIVE MIND AND SENSE OF HUMOR. ALONG WITH HIS PARTNER, R. CHANDLER, McCONNELL BEGAN A NEWSPAPER IN JACKSBORO CALLED THE FRONTIER ECHO ON JUNE 30, 1875. LATER THAT YEAR, CAPTAIN GEORGE W. ROBSON (1837-1918), A UNION OFFICER FROM KANSAS, BOUGHT THE ECHO. IN 1878, ROBSON RELOCATED TO FT. GRIFFIN AND RENAMED THE NEWSPAPER THE FORT GRIFFIN ECHO, AND FROM 1883-1884, IT WAS NAMED THE ALBANY ECHO. ROBSON’S NEWSPAPER WAS A SUCCESS WITH MUCH TO SAY ABOUT CRIME, RELIGION, POLITICS, CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY AND PUBLIC MORALS. IN 1879, EDGAR RYE, A KENTUCKY MAN WHO BRIEFLY WORKED WITH ROBSON, BEGAN A NEWSPAPER CALLED THE ALBANY TOMAHAWK. FOR FOUR YEARS, ROBSON’S AND RYE’S NEWSPAPERS RIVALED EACH OTHER THROUGH PRINT. FINALLY, IN 1884, RYE PURCHASED THE ECHO, MERGED WITH THE ALBANY STAR TO FORM THE ALBANY NEWS (ALSO KNOWN AS THE ALBANY WEEKLY NEWS FROM 1891-1894). WITH THE TALENTS OF DON H. BIGGERS OF BRECKENRIDGE, RYE’S NEWSPAPER WAS LIVELY, UNUSUAL AND EXCELLENT FOR THE WEST TEXAS JOURNALISM WORLD OF THE 19TH CENTURY. THE 20TH CENTURY EDITORS, PAUL BAKER FROM 1908-1917, COL. DICK McCARTY FROM 1917-1944 AND JOHN McGAUGHEY FROM 1939-1971, GAVE THE NEWSPAPER MORE CREATIVITY AND STABILITY. MANY HISTORIANS REGULARLY USE THESE NOTEWORTHY NEWSPAPERS FOR HISTORICAL RESEARCH AND TO GAIN INSIGHT INTO WEST TEXAS HISTORY. THESE SIGNIFICANT PUBLICATIONS AND CONTRIBUTORS GAVE FUTURE TEXANS KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF FRONTIER LIFE, PEOPLE AND EVENTS.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The newspaper known today as The Albany News traces a lively lineage of frontier journalism, beginning with a Union veteran's Frontier Echo founded at Jacksboro in 1875 and carried west to Fort Griffin and then Albany. Rival editors sparred in print through the 1880s until the Echo, Tomahawk, and Star merged into a single paper prized for its coverage of crime, politics, religion, and public morals. A succession of long-serving 20th-century editors gave it stability, and historians still mine its columns for insight into West Texas life.
Why it matters
These frontier papers are a first-draft record of West Texas settlement, preserving the everyday texture of law, faith, and politics on the late-19th-century Texas frontier.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The lineage behind today's Albany News begins in the years right after the Civil War, when West Texas was still raw frontier and a newspaper was one of the first signs that a settlement meant to last. In 1866 a Union Army regular named Harry Hall (H.H.) McConnell left Pennsylvania and made his way to Fort Belknap near Jacksboro — one of many veterans who drifted west into a country of army posts, cattle trails, and buffalo range once the war was over.
This was the world of the Reconstruction and Gilded Age frontier: forts anchoring thin lines of settlement, boom-and-bust towns rising around them, and a population hungry for news, law, and a sense of shared community. Into that world came the printing press, and with it the peculiar, opinionated, deeply local journalism that flourished on the edge of American settlement.
The story then follows the frontier itself as it shifted — from Jacksboro to Fort Griffin to Albany — the paper moving with the people, changing its name as it went, and maturing alongside the country around it from the wild years into the more settled twentieth century.
People & events
McConnell was a natural journalist — a sharp, curious writer with a sense of humor — and in 1875, with his partner R. Chandler, he founded the Frontier Echo in Jacksboro. Later that same year Captain George W. Robson, a Union officer from Kansas, bought the paper. Robson had a newspaperman's restlessness and a nose for a story: he moved the Echo to Fort Griffin in 1878 and renamed it the Fort Griffin Echo, then briefly the Albany Echo in 1883–84. His pages had plenty to say about crime, religion, politics, civic responsibility, and public morals — the full moral ledger of a frontier town.
Then came a rivalry. In 1879 Edgar Rye, a Kentucky man who had worked briefly with Robson, launched a competing paper, the Albany Tomahawk. For four years the two editors sparred in print, the kind of spirited newspaper war that gave frontier towns much of their color. It ended in 1884 when Rye bought the Echo and merged it with the Albany Star to create the Albany News (known for a few years as the Albany Weekly News). With the talents of contributors like Don H. Biggers of Breckenridge, Rye's paper became lively, unusual, and — by the standards of nineteenth-century West Texas journalism — genuinely excellent.
What kept it alive across the generations, though, was steadiness. A run of long-serving twentieth-century editors — Paul Baker from 1908 to 1917, Col. Dick McCarty from 1917 to 1944, and John McGaughey from 1939 to 1971 — gave the paper the creativity and stability that a young frontier sheet needed to become a lasting institution.
Its place in the American story
Frontier newspapers like these are among the most valuable records America has of how the West was actually lived. Long before historians arrived, the local editor was writing the first draft of history — recording who came and went, what crimes were committed, which sermons were preached, and which political fights consumed the town. That's why historians still mine these very papers today for insight into West Texas life; the marker rightly calls them a source of "knowledge and understanding of frontier life, people and events."
There's a national pattern here, too. That two Union veterans — one from Pennsylvania, one from Kansas — should end up founding and building the newspapers of a Texas frontier town is a quiet reminder of how the post-Civil War generation scattered across the country and helped knit it back together, town by town, page by page.
And the paper's long survival speaks to the role of the local press in American civic life. A community that sustains its own newspaper for a century and a half — through mergers, rivalries, and changing ownership — is a community that has insisted on keeping its own record and holding its own conversation.
If you visit
Albany is a West Texas county seat with deep frontier roots, and a marker devoted to its newspapers is really an invitation to think about the town's memory of itself. Standing here, consider how much of what we know about this whole region first passed through a printing press just like the ones this marker honors.
Let the chain of names sink in as you read — Frontier Echo, Fort Griffin Echo, Albany Echo, Tomahawk, Star, and finally the Albany News. Each renaming marks a move, a merger, or a rivalry, and together they trace the arc of the frontier settling down into a stable community.
If your travels are taking you through the old Fort Griffin country, this marker pairs naturally with the region's other frontier sites. The soldiers, ranchers, and settlers you'll read about elsewhere are the very people these editors were writing about in real time — and their columns are a big part of why those stories survive for you to find at all.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · H. H. McConnell
- · George W. Robson
- · Edgar Rye
Themes & tags
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