Lampasas Area Newspaper Collection

Lampasas is located on the Sulphur Creek, at the junction of U.S. highways 183, 281, and 190, in south central Lampasas County. Charles A. Woolridge published the first county newspaper, the Chronicle, beginning on June 1, 1859. The first census of the county, in 1860, recorded a population of 872 residents.

The railroad arrived in 1882, and the town prospered with the creation of spas and resorts at Hanna and Sulphur Springs. The famed Park Hotel was located near the present-day Hancock Springs bathhouse, before it burned in early 1885. The city of Lampasas was officially incorporated in 1883. Disastrous fires destroyed a number of the downtown frame buildings in 1884. Then, sixty-three years to the day since the destructive flood of 1873, Lampasas experienced the worst flood on record in 1936. The businesses around the county courthouse were the most heavily damaged. And once again, on Mother’s Day in 1957, after seven years of drought, up to 12 inches of rain fell on the area west of town. This was worse than even the 1936 flood. Five people drowned, and more than 100 homes and businesses were destroyed or damaged, including county records in the Courthouse.

For more than 100 years, the Lampasas Dispatch Record and its early predecessors have been published in the same building on the west side of the downtown square. Only six issues of the Lampasas Blade, first published in 1906, have survived Lampasas’ various floods and fires, but the last known issue was August 8, 1918. Its successor, Brandon’s Weekly, was thought to have been published between August 1918 and August 1920, though no copies of it are available. The first issue of the Lampasas Record hit the stands in August 1920, and in January 1958, the owner sold the business to the owner of The Lampasas Dispatch, which was only 10 years old at the time. They continued to publish both papers before merging to form the Lampasas Dispatch Record in 1985. The Dispatch Record reached its centennial in 2006 under the tenure of Jim and Gail Lowe, who still own the newspaper.