page_title: The Hazard Herald
section_title: 1950–1959
hierarchical_section_title: The Hazard Herald / History / 1950–1959
caption_attribution_description: English: Front page from the March 9th, 1956 edition of The Hazard Herald
context_page_description: The Hazard Herald is a weekly newspaper based in Hazard, Kentucky. The newspaper was founded by Bailey P. Wootton in 1911. The paper celebrated 100 years on June 22, 2011. Today the paper is located on High Street on downtown Hazard and comes out every Wednesday morning.
context_section_description: The Hazard Herald continued as a daily paper throughout most of the 1950s, switching to a twice weekly in the latter part of the decade. The newspaper was printed six days a week through 1956. In the early 1950s the newspaper continued to use the AP's wire service. The paper continued to be owned and printed by the Hazard Publishing Company. Fred B. Bullard was the publisher with John Potisek as editor. In 1953, the newspaper started to focus more on local news. After several years, the paper stopped using the wire service. The newspaper started to print fewer pages but with more of their own reporting. During this time, Kyle Whitehead was made publisher and managing editor and Otis Perkins was editor. The year 1956 marked a large amount of change in Perry County as well as in The Hazard Herald. Perry County Schools began to be integrated in the fall of 1956 after the school board decided to close the only African American school in the county by the end of the school year in 1957. Students were given the choice to stay at their African American school for that year or enroll at a different school. That year also saw a change in ownership for the Herald. The owners of the Mountain Eagle, Martha and Pearl Nolan, of Whitesburg, Kentucky, decided to sell their paper and bought the Herald . The Nolan's turned the paper into a twice a week paper that printed on Mondays and Thursdays. W.P. Nolan was the Publisher and Fred W. Luigart Jr. managing editor. In 1956, the Nolan's moved the Herald offices to a building on North Main Street. Previous to the move, the newspaper had been in the Herald Building, which was built by the paper's founder, Bailey P. Wootton.
  The largest flood recorded in Hazard happened on January 29, 1957. The North Fork of the Kentucky River rose 38 feet and flooded all of Main Street. Businesses all along Main Street were destroyed. According to records, over 50 homes were swept off their foundations. The Hazard Herald's new office was hit hard by the floodwater. The office lost a lot of equipment, but more importantly nearly all of the archived newspapers from the early days of the paper were destroyed. The only copies of the papers from before the 1940s that exist can be found on microfilm at the Perry County Library.
caption: The March 9, 1956 issue of The Hazard Herald.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "200", "Image YResolution": "200", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2011:07:22 15:24:54", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6476", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3450", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "4368"}