Free Newspaper Archives in the USExplore 250 Years of US Newspaper Archives, Free of Charge
History, Politics, War, Sports, Family Background, and Plain Old Everyday News
The MidWest
Ah, the heartland. Here are the free newspaper archives from the mid-United States.
Colorado Colorado Newspaper Archives from 1859-1923. Cowboys and gold miners galore!
Illinois
Barrington Review, Barrington, IL, 1914-1930
Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection, 1903-1945, at the University of Illinois
Carries the college newspaper, the Daily Illini, and the Urban Daily Courier in full page image format, with full text searching.
Quincy Illinois Historical Newspaper Archive 1835-1890
New Sterling, IL Newspaper Archives, 1854-2007. The Sterling Gazette, Sauk Valley Sunday, and others.
Indiana
Muncie Post Democrat Newspaper Collection at Ball State University, 1921-1950
Full text searching and full page images, but not the most user-friendly interface.
New Evansville Press, ?-1998. Newspaper clippings only; can be searched by title and keyword. Collection is poorly described, but includes a lot of material on the University of Indiana, especially basketball, and Bobby Knight.
New Vevay/Switzerland County Newspapers, 1840-1901. Courtesy of the Switzerland Co. HS, scanned page images (no text search, no keywords) of papers including The Vevay Times and Switzerland County Democrat, and The Vevay Reveille.
Iowa
Adams County, Iowa Newspaper Archives, 1876-2000
Cedar Rapids Library Newspaper Archives with a number of Iowa newspapers, 1857-1998.
Charles City Daily Press, Floyd County, 1930-1931.
Sioux County Newspaper Archives, in Iowa, from 1872-2000.
New The Des Moines Newspaper Archives, 1970-2007. Includes West Des Moines Express, and Polk County News.
New The Malvern and Mills County Archives, 1864-2002. Includes the Malvern Leader, and Mills County Journal.
New The Carroll Newspaper Archives, 1884-2007. The Carroll Daily Times Herald, other papers, and early atlases of Carroll County.
New The Buffalo Center Tribune, 1894-2003.
New The Muscatine City Directories, 1856-1959. No newspapers but I included this anyway, as it includes a set of directories from the Musser Library, and they had to go somewhere!
Kansas
New The Kansas Memory site, from the Kansas Historical Society, has thousands of digital items, including several hundred newspaper articles from the 1800's and early 1900's. The collection is poorly described, but includes newspapers from Topeka, Wichita, and Lawrence, among others.
Kentucky
The Kentuckiana Digital Library, 1886-1912 for papers across Kentucky, Includes the Bluegrass Blade in Lexington, and the Owensboro Vindicator (gotta love those names!). Full text searching, but an awkward interface.
New Northern Kentucky Newspaper Index, 1841-current. This collection from the Kenton Library is a strange mix of full text, full image newspapers, and newspaper indexes. Select the "full text" option to restrict search results to images.
Louisiana
Louisiana Newspaper Access Program, 19th and early 20th century. Part of the Louisiana Digital Library Collection, this is a cool collection of English and French language news. Wish it had a better user interface, though.
Michigan The Saugatuck-Douglas Library in Michigan has digitized the Commercial Record, 1868-1959 (site warns against using Internet Explorer, and suggests FireFox).
Minnesota
Holt Weekly News and Northern Light, 1911-1952. From the "Home of the Largest Co-operative Creamery in Marshall County" a terrific rural newspaper archive.
The Winona State University Newspaper Archives in Minnesota includes a number of papers from 1855-1946. This is a surprisingly diverse collection.
Missouri
Missouri Newspaper Archives, late 1800's to the present, but dates and coverage are not well described at the site.
Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, 1889-2008. A large archive of two newspapers that eventually merged into one.
North Dakota
Frontier Scout, North Dakota's first newspaper, 1864-65. About 20 issues are available online in full image format, but they are not text-searchable.
Ohio
New Cleveland Press, 1878-1982. Several thousand article clippings, with full text search. Not a very friendly interface, I'm afraid.
Oklahoma
The Oklahoman, 1901-current. This is a fee-based archive, but it's all there is from OK, so I included it. It can be searched and headlines retrieved for free.
Texas
San Antonio, TX Daily Light, 1886-1907.
New The Weimar Mercury, and other papers, 1885-1960, from the collection of the Nesbitt Memorial Library.
New The Wellington Leader, 1909-2006.
New The La Marque Times, 1970-1998.
Wisconsin
Wisconsin Newpaper Archives, mostly from the period 1860-1940, thousands of searchable newspaper clippings.
Other MidWest Archives
Ancestry.com is an excellent source for historical research...fee-based, but well worth it.
Other pages at this site: