R-C celebrates 120 years since merger

It has been 120 years since The Record-Courier rose from the ashes after the owners of the Gardnerville Record, which burned down, created one of the oldest nameplates in Nevada.

Editor George Smith signed off as the paper’s long time editor, turning the keys over to Stoddard and Charles Southworth on April 1, 1904.

Smith, who started newspapering in Genoa in 1880, remembered his  “many years of service in all kinds of weather, political storms, and civic conditions.”

“We have no regrets to offer as to our course in the past, feeling that we have done our duty, as we saw it, to the last,” he said of his tenure that started in the 1880s.

Smith and Del Williams moved the paper from Genoa to Gardnerville after building new offices for it on Eddy Street in 1899, according to “Newspapers of Nevada.”

That made Gardnerville a two-newspaper town for a few years.

The year before, smarting from the significant controversy over the 1897 lynching of Adam Uber, Gardnerville residents raised enough fees to buy a printing press.

Violin instructor George “The Fiddler” Lamy published the first edition on July 12, 1898. Moving the Courier resulted in an old-fashioned newspaper war between Lamy and Smith that didn’t settle until Lamy sold the paper to the Southworths in 1902.

Two years later, the fire claimed the Record and a big chunk of the town, resulting in the creation of one of Nevada’s oldest nameplates.

While the nameplate is 120 years old, the Courier was already more than 40 years old when the merger occurred.

Seeds for the publication were planted by A.C. Pratt who began printing the Carson Valley News in 1875. In 1880, Pratt sold the paper to Boynton Carlisle, who renamed it The Genoa Weekly Courier. Not long before the sale, John Cradlebaugh opened the Genoa Journal, and the first Douglas newspaper battle was joined. Smith purchased the paper from Cradlebaugh. Carlisle lasted six months in Genoa before Smith took over the Courier, combining it and the Journal, without hyphenating the name.

It has been a year since The R-C achieved the hat trick of being in all three of Carson Valley’s towns when it opened in Minden on Feb. 1, 2023.