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opinion page A4
When the first banks were established in Poplar Bluff in the late 1800s, the Daily American Republic was there to report on the institutions created to help customers finance home purchases.
Poplar Bluff is now home to five banks with assets totaling more than $3 billion.
When Jim Hogg used the land that is now Mansion Mall as pasture for the animals he sold in his meat markets in 1920, the DAR was publishing from a storefront on Main Street.
When the first pavement that would become Westwood Boulevard was poured in 1936, the DAR had been in its current home on Poplar Street for a year.
When the Poplar Bluff Industrial Park, where more than 2,000 people work today, was created in 1945 as a home for the International Shoe Company, the DAR was three-quarters of a century old.
Today's Progress edition looks back at some of the events that helped change the face of Poplar Bluff, again providing a permanent record of the residents that make their homes here.
This annual review of the positive strides made by the community is also a tradition spanning decades.
The DAR is also included in the pages, as it celebrates 150 years of providing coverage to the region.
Among the millions of stories that have been recorded and retold in the pages of the DAR, there was John Bradley, the man who was hired to bring the first printing press to Poplar Bluff.
At the age of 106, Bradley's advice for a long life was simple, "Tend to your business and let God tend to His."
Fit enough to manage 2-mile daily walks in good weather -- rain, sleet or snow -- Bradley believed in doing each task to its best, neither looking back with regret nor forward with fear.
Bradley was 26 years old in 1869, a jack-of-all-trades in the years after the Civil War, when he was hired to move a Washington Hand Press weighing as much as a ton from Jackson by ox team.
The private had once been sentenced to die by firing squad at dawn in Paducah, Kentucky. Bradley had been convicted as a Confederate spy. He told reporters with the DAR in 1949 that he escaped by killing a guard who had fallen asleep on watch.
Poplar Bluff was still months from officially becoming a city when the first pages were printed. The young county had less than 4,300 residents.
In 1884, reporter and county historian Richard Metcalfe would write, "As a paper of the people it stands as an honest advocate of right and justice, with an eye ever open to the interest of our city and county."
Originally published as the Black River News, the paper had become the Poplar Bluff Citizen by that time. It was later absorbed by the Poplar Bluff Republican. After about a dozen name changes, as papers were started and absorbed, it officially became the Daily American Republican in 1928.
"This newspaper will be conducted along the lines of modern newspaper ethics and principles. Its news columns will belong to the public for the dissemination of news and for the promotion of community life," editors wrote in 1923, in a statement of policy for the The Daily Republican. "Every effort will be made to keep the news fair and impartial, accurate and honest and to convey to the reader the facts so that he may form an intelligent opinion for himself.
"The news columns will not belong to individuals nor to groups of individuals."