The Daily Sentinel
Nacogdoches, Nacogdoches County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The first newspapers in Texas, beginning in 1813, all had direct links to Nacogdoches. The leading family in the newspaper business was that of Col. R.D. Orton and his nephews, Robert W. (R.W.) and Giles Haltom. In 1899, following years of weekly newspapers, R.W., Giles and W.H. Harris established a daily newspaper under the name The Daily Phone. After six months, the paper became The Daily Sentinel. Initially, R.W. edited and managed The Daily Sentinel and Giles operated the presses. In addition to editorials, the Sentinel featured special editions to push for civic improvements, to note community accomplishments or to highlight the amenities of the region. A Weekly Sentinel was founded in 1900 and operated until 1936. When R.W. was elected to the Texas State Legislature in 1904, Giles took over the paper. The change became permanent when R.W. became ill and died in 1907. In 1918, responding to the clamor for news during World War I, an Associated Press wire service was added which drastically changed the format and content of the paper. Giles Haltom led the Sentinel until 1944 when it was sold to a local consortium. After World War II, Victor B. Fain returned to the Sentinel as editor. Fains editorials, leadership and positive influence guided Nacogdoches through many crises. The paper moved locations in October 1950 to North Fredonia Street and featured modern efficient equipment. In 2007, the Sentinel was honored with the Gov. James M. Cox public service award. Over the last century, the Sentinel emerged from its frontier past to become a record of the movements, history and progress of Nacogdoches. (2012)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Nacogdoches was the cradle of Texas journalism, home to the state's earliest newspapers beginning in 1813. The Daily Sentinel grew out of that tradition in 1899, guided for decades by the Haltom family, and used its pages to champion civic improvements and chronicle the town's life; the addition of an Associated Press wire during World War I transformed it into a modern daily still publishing today.
Why it matters
A long-lived local newspaper is a community's running memory, carrying a frontier town's story into the age of wire services and modern media.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the turn of the twentieth century, Nacogdoches was a town proud of a past far older than the state around it. Deep in the pine country of East Texas, it had been a crossroads since Spanish and colonial days, and by 1899 it carried the memory of being a cradle of the printed word in Texas — the place from which the state's first newspapers, going back to 1813, drew their roots.
The late 1890s were a hopeful, restless time for American small towns. Railroads were knitting the country together, the telegraph was shrinking distances, and a local paper was no longer just a weekly sheet of notices — it was becoming the daily heartbeat of civic life. Communities measured their arrival into the modern age partly by whether they could support a paper that came out every day.
Into that moment stepped a family already steeped in the trade. The transition from occasional weeklies to a genuine daily marked Nacogdoches's step out of its frontier past and into the Progressive Era, when towns everywhere were paving streets, wiring for electricity, and arguing in print about what kind of place they wanted to become.
People & events
The story here is really the story of a family business and the town it served. The newspaper trade in Nacogdoches ran through the line of Col. R.D. Orton and his nephews, and in 1899 two of them — R.W. Haltom and his brother Giles, together with a partner — launched a daily. It first appeared under one name, then within half a year settled into the identity it would carry for generations: The Daily Sentinel.
In the early days the brothers split the work the way small papers always have. R.W. edited and managed, shaping the paper's voice and its causes, while Giles ran the presses and kept the machinery turning. A sister weekly edition was added in 1900 to reach readers out in the county. The paper did more than report — it campaigned, using special editions to push for civic improvements and to celebrate the town's accomplishments.
Then life intervened, as it does. R.W. won election to the Texas Legislature in 1904 and handed the paper to Giles; when R.W. fell ill and died in 1907, that handoff became permanent. Giles carried the Sentinel for decades, through the arrival of an Associated Press wire in 1918 that transformed a local sheet into a modern daily, until he sold it to a group of local owners in 1944. After the Second World War, Victor B. Fain returned as editor, and his steady, positive editorial hand helped guide the community through hard passages — the kind of quiet local leadership that rarely makes the history books but shapes a town all the same.
Its place in the American story
Every American town of any size once had a paper like the Sentinel, and their collective story is one of the great untold threads of national life. Local newspapers were how ordinary people learned who had married, who had died, what the county commissioners had decided, and — after the wire services arrived — what was happening in Washington and across the ocean.
The Sentinel's turning point in 1918 is a national story in miniature. The First World War created an unprecedented hunger for news, and papers everywhere added wire service connections to feed it. Overnight, a reader in a small East Texas town could open the morning paper and find dispatches from the front lines of Europe. The local paper became a window onto the whole world, and the world became something small towns followed daily.
That a single paper survived from the frontier era into the modern age — earning national recognition for public service along the way — speaks to something durable in American civic life: the conviction that a community deserves its own voice, its own record, kept by neighbors rather than distant owners.
If you visit
Nacogdoches wears its age comfortably; it bills itself as one of the oldest towns in Texas, and its historic brick downtown is the right place to stand and imagine a daily paper being set into type and rolled off the press.
As you read the marker, think about what a newspaper office meant to a town like this — a place where people walked in with news, arguments, and obituaries, and walked out having become part of the record. The marker traces more than a century of that work, from hand-operated presses to modern equipment.
Make it part of a slow wander through the old commercial district, where the story of a Progressive-era town — its civic ambitions, its family businesses, its pride in itself — is written into the storefronts. It's an easy stop on any East Texas history route, and a reminder that the first draft of local history was written by people who lived just up the street.
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
- · R.W. Haltom
- · Giles Haltom
- · Victor B. Fain
Themes & tags
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