Recognized at commissioners court
The Williamson County Sun entered its 150th year of operations Tuesday, May 19, by publishing Issue 1 of Volume 150.
Each volume of the Sun represents one year of news coverage. Williamson County Commissioners Court honored the Sun and its 150th volume during its May 19 meeting.
“It is an honor to be recognized, and as we enter our 150th anniversary year, we’re thinking a great deal about the past,” Sun co-publisher Clark Thurman said during Tuesday morning’s recognition. “The Sun's work in the early days to now is to report what is often called the first draft of history. It covers six generations of life at the county seat. Sometimes, in looking for a fact from the past, we often open a bound volume in the archives and come across an obituary, and we remember we saw that name in another volume decades earlier - a birth announcement, a wedding announcement, a new business, an election. With the Sun, we remember those names.”
The Sun published its first newspaper — Volume 1, Issue 1 — on May 19, 1877, in Georgetown.
At the time, it was owned by Jesse Eugene Cooper and edited by Gus Ivy. Hailing from Ohio with experience as a reporter and a printer, Mr. Ivy wrote a salutatory opening address in the May 19, 1877, publication:
“We are aware of the many difficulties that are attended upon the establishment of any newspaper, and we therefore do not propose to make any rash promises. We simply propose to run a paper that will represent the whole interests of Williamson County.”
That started what’s now a written record that spans more than five generations of life in Williamson County.
D. S. Chessher, who served as Williamson County judge in the late 1880s, said Mr. Cooper was “a straightforward, reliable and successful businessman, true as steel and honorable in every way. His success in business has been attained in a quiet manner and he has never bored anyone with his paper.”
The Sun has always been a family business. Key early staff members were Robert Theodore Cooper, Jesse’s younger brother; Cooper Sansom, Jesse’s brother-in-law; and Matthew Darrell Sansom, another son-in-law.
That family tradition continued when Don Scarbrough, of Taylor, purchased the Sun in October 1948. Mr. Scarbrough ran the paper with his wife — writer and local historian Clara Sterns Scarbrough — for decades.
Their daughter, Linda, grew up working at the Sun, stuffing newspapers and proofreading livestock auction galleys and, after college and working at the New York Daily News, became the Sun’s editor in 1978.
Linda and her husband, Clark Thurmond, purchased The Williamson County Sun from her parents in 1986. They both continue to co-own and publish the paper today, and the paper stands as both the oldest publication and continuously operating business in Williamson County.
Linda and Clark oversee a staff today that consists of five full-time employees and about 20 total contributors — reporters, columnists, distributors, admins, a photographer and a designer — who help publish the paper twice every week.
“That’s a long time, 150 years, especially for a newspaper,” said Commissioner Valerie Covey, who read the proclamation honoring the newspaper. “We've lived in Georgetown for 32 years and have taken the paper ever since we moved here. While our boys were going through school, all of the wonderful opportunities to see them and their friends in the paper really made it special for us. I still look through it and see familiar faces.”