About

Following the closure of the Homer Weekly Journal in May 1890, a company of forty stockholders formed the Banks County Publishing Company and founded the Banks County Gazette in Homer, Georgia. Based on the issue numbering of the paper, the stockholders saw the Gazette as a continuation of the preceding Joseph Barton-owned Weekly Journal. During its early years, the paper identified politically with the Farmers’ Alliance, which later organized as the People’s Party. After Henry Brewster took over as editor and publisher in December 1892, he shifted the paper’s politics to align with the Democratic Party. On January 6, 1896, Brewster left the Gazette to work for the Cherokee Advance in Canton, leaving S. L. Cox as lead editor and publisher. On February 15, 1897, Cox merged the Gazette with the Harmony Grove Echo to create the Harmony Grove Echo-Gazette. The Gazette didn’t stay in Harmony Grove long as Homer residents pressured owner Dr. W. B. Hardman to return the paper to their city on April 1, 1897. Upon the publication’s homecoming, Hardman changed its name to the Banks County Journal.

Initially, the new iteration of the paper printed every Saturday, but the publisher shifted to Thursday editions within the first year. The Journal was an eight-page Democratic publication that cost subscribers fifty cents per year in 1897. Within a month of its return to Homer, Hardman leased the Journal to several different proprietors with little success. By January 4, 1900, the Banks County Journal was organized under the Journal Publishing Company, with C. A. Meeks listed as the editor and publisher. The paper expanded significantly under Meeks’ ownership and finally achieved financial stability. Meeks left the paper in 1913 to become editor of the Carroll Free Press. Andrew Jackson Hilton took over as editor on January 8, 1914. Hilton and his son Pat Hilton remained associated with the Journal for over fifty years. In 1968, the Journal became the Banks County News and continues today as the area’s legal organ under the ownership of MainStreet Newspapers.