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A history of news: Newspapers have long legacy in Frisco
By Anthony Tosie, atosie@starlocalnews.com
Believe it or not, Frisco’s had a newspaper for all but two years since 1902 – even before it was an incorporated town.
Currently, Frisco is increasingly becoming a place where news is regularly made. The city is home to professional soccer and baseball teams, routinely attracts major business relocations and has the fastest-growing population in the United States.
It wasn’t always that way, however.
The Frisco Journal, unaffiliated with The Frisco Enterprise, first started publication sometime in 1902 and was purchased later that year by O.L. Hamilton, who also served as its editor, documents at the Frisco Heritage Museum state.
Because it collects items pertaining to the city’s history, the museum has amassed a collection of information from the city’s first newspaper. Additionally, it also operates a journalism exhibit that shows how early newspapers were printed.
In addition to The Journal, Frisco news occasionally appeared in The Democrat, a McKinney newspaper, and The Denison Daily Herald in the early 1900s, according to records maintained by The University of North Texas’ Portal of Texas History.
Hamilton routinely shared news with those newspapers, such as a call he made to The Democrat in 1905 explaining the murder of a 16-year-old boy named George Taylor Bell.
“Back in those days, there was only one telephone in the entire town,” said Rick Fletcher, a Heritage Association board member and volunteer at the museum. “You couldn’t be a railroad town without a telephone, as the railroad required the town to have one at that time. So we had a telephone, no radio and the newspaper – so the newspaper was extremely important.”
Fletcher added that one of the best ways to gather news at the time was to simply talk to people coming off trains at the railroad depot, which made Frisco an obvious choice for a newspaper.
In 1914, M.E. O’Neill became the publisher of The Journal and helped the paper expand. O’Neill was well known in the town, Fletcher said, and served as publisher for about two decades.
During those early years, newspapers were created by manually selecting individual letters and aligning them in a tray to create words. The individuals creating the words – typesetters – would then transfer the completed product to paper by rolling ink over the tray, which was then transferred on paper.
“A lot of times reporters would verbally relay information to typesetters, who would technically write the stories,” said Bob King, a volunteer at the Heritage Museum. “That’s probably why most newspapers at the time were weekly – getting the paper made took a long time.”
Despite his success with the newspaper, O’Neill faced setbacks. In 1922, a fire burned down The Journal’s headquarters as well as several other buildings in downtown Frisco. Because of the extent of the fire, nothing was salvaged from the building; the earliest item the Heritage Museum has from The Journal is a mid-1920s metal logo that was used in typesetting.
Local businessmen helped provide financial support for The Journal following the fire until it was sold to a Plano newspaper owner named Arthur A. Bagwill, a Heritage Museum document states.
Though The Journal continued to be respected in the community, it ceased operation in the late 1950s, leading to the brief two-year period when the town had no newspaper. Following that period, The Frisco Enterprise began publication in 1959.
The Frisco Enterprise was founded by Forrest Kyle. Ironically, the Enterprise came to be owned by the same group that owns the Plano Star Courier, which was previously owned by the Bagwill family. Arthur Bagwill got his start in journalism at another newspaper owned by the group, the McKinney Courier-Gazette.
The McKinney Courier-Gazette also has ties to The Frisco Journal, as it was created when The Democrat – the newspaper O.L. Hamilton collaborated with – merged with the Daily Gazette.
If Fletcher’s right, however, maybe it has less to do with coincidence and more to do with fate.
“We’ve come a long way since Frisco was a town that survived almost solely because of the railroad,” Fletcher said. “There were about 10 little towns in the area, such as Lebanon, because they were absorbed by Frisco. If not for the railroad, who knows what city we’d be in right now.”
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