Content Update: Going International

This month we head north of the border to introduce you to recently added newspapers. While the greatest concentration of Newspapers.com titles are from papers published in the United States, there are currently 42 titles from Great Britain and 3 from Canada.

If you’re looking for news from Ottawa, Winnipeg, or Chilliwack, you’ll find nearly a century’s worth within Newspapers.com’s virtual pages. You likely know that Ottawa is the capital of Canada, and that Winnipeg is the country’s gateway to the west, but you may ask, “Chilliwack? Where the heck is Chilliwack!?”

Located about 100 kilometers east of Vancouver, along the Fraser River in British Columbia, Chilliwack was a frontier town with a bit of a gold rush in the 1850s but it is mostly an agricultural area. It can best be appreciated through the pages of The Chilliwack Progress where, in its first issue in 1891, the salutatory message promised to serve the interests of the citizens in the “beautiful Chilliwack Valley.” It’s a community where a story about new potatoes can garner a column inch of front-page space a hundred years ago. Also featured, is an update on a poultry fattening station, how the city council took exception to a false report that “Chilliwack Doesn’t Want Any More Settlers, No Matter How Wealthy They Are” (it was “the other fellows” who said it), and a weekly feature with news of Chilliwack of Twenty Years Ago (that would have been 1893).

Chilliwack may have felt isolated from the rest of the country as supported by a 1946 headline asking, “Where is Toronto?” Chilliwack’s championship cherry pie eating contest, won by an Ontario mayor and possibly “the smallest chief magistrate in Canada,” apparently made front-page news 4,000 kilometers away in a “special article,” with a picture of “the champ.”

Chilliwack didn’t often make news in Ontario, but when Prime Minister King visited British Columbia in 1941 to gain first-hand knowledge of Canada’s war effort, his attendance at a church service in Chilliwack earned a note in The Ottawa Journal on 30 June 1941. Closer to home, Chilliwack made wild and woolly headlines in The Winnipeg Tribune in 1949 as a man there was accused of good old-fashioned “cattle rustling.”

Explore all three Canadian newspapers in the growing collections of international news on Newspapers.com.