Reading on Company Time: Virginia Corporate Newspapers in Virginia Chronicle

Virginia Chronicle, the Library of Virginia’s freely-accessible digital newspaper database, has recently added something new to its archive—corporate newsletters. These newsletters are vital records about their respective companies, but with news of births, graduations, marriages, anniversaries, holidays, promotions, bonuses, retirements, and so much more, they are also a wide-ranging and colorful record about the many people who worked for those companies. Additionally, they are filled with countless photographs, capturing timeless moments of employees and their families across generations.

Not too long ago, the Virginia Newspaper Program received the following message from Andy Doss, a fourth-generation employee of Bassett Furniture, who tells the story of how he came to discover, archive, and scan Bassett Furniture’s newsletter, the Bassett Pioneer. It perfectly demonstrates why these resources are so important and shows how a community can join forces to preserve and share its history:

When I joined Bassett Furniture in 2017, I became a fourth-generation employee — something I carry a lot of pride in. Not long after settling in, I got curious about whether the company had any old records or materials related to my great-grandfather and grandfather. I asked our HR department about it, and they pointed me toward the Bassett Pioneer newsletter archive, a drawer in an old file cabinet.

I had no idea what I was walking into.

Published for over forty years, the Bassett Pioneer was far more than a company newsletter. It was essentially a community newspaper for Bassett town, full of milestones, family stories, local events, and the kind of everyday history that rarely gets preserved anywhere else.

I started simply enough, just scanning photos that featured my grandfather and my mom. But a co-worker looked over my shoulder one day and said something along the lines of “why not just scan all of them?” That was all the nudge I needed.

So that became my mission. Coming in early, staying late, scanning during lunch breaks. The process was slow and deliberate, as some pages had faded over the decades and the contrast had to be carefully edited and corrected to produce clean, readable images.

As I worked through the collection and started posting photos to a Facebook group I had created called Bassett Looking Back, Moving Forward, which has since grown to over 14,000 members, something unexpected happened. I noticed gaps in the archive. Over the years it seemed that employees had quietly helped themselves to issues that featured their own photos, which is honestly hard to blame anyone for. But it left holes in the record.

Then the community did what communities do. Members of the Facebook group started reaching out, donating their personal copies, and one by one the missing issues were filled in. Today, at least thirty years of the Bassett Pioneer are completely intact.

With all of that work done, I found myself at a familiar crossroads. I had done the work, but the material was essentially locked away where few people could benefit from it. Virginia Chronicle came to mind right away, as I had been using the site for years in my own genealogy and historical research and already knew firsthand what a powerful resource it was. It seemed like a natural home, a place where former employees, their families, and descendants could find and search this material long after any of us are around to share it personally.

After talking it over with leadership here at Bassett, the timing felt right for another reason too. 2027 marks the company’s 125th anniversary, and opening up this piece of history felt like a meaningful way to celebrate that milestone, not just internally, but for the broader community that grew up around this company and this town.

We are incredibly grateful to Mr. Doss for sharing the scanned issues of the Bassett Pioneer and for sharing his story. Thanks to his work, this fantastic collection is preserved and accessible to everyone on Virginia Chronicle.

Along with the Bassett Pioneer, visitors to Virginia Chronicle can also now find 1946-1956 of Crown Rayon News and Avisco News, published by the Front Royal branch of the American Viscose Corporation, a producer of rayon and artificial silk from 1940 until 1990. A big thank you must go to Hannah Fletcher-Perez, Museum & Archives Manager at the Warren Heritage Society, who coordinated the loan of these materials, as well as additional issues of the Warren Sentinel, to the Library of Virginia for digitization.

Each page from this ten-year run of Crown Rayon News, and its successor, the Avisco News, is filled to the brim with stories and photos of the town, the plant, and its employees and their families at work and play. From naming individuals receiving promotions to recognizing birthdays, marriages, and anniversaries to reporting on the company’s baseball team, the newsletters detailed everyday happenings and important milestones in the lives of the company’s many employees. The company newsletter followed its staff so closely, in fact, it even named individuals out sick, wishing them a speedy recovery.

One final newsletter added to Virginia Chronicle, the Middlesex County NAACP Newsletter, comes out of Middlesex County, located in Virginia’s Middle Peninsula. Volume 1, number 1 of the newsletter explained that it would “be issued each quarter, and will appear in your church the second and third Sundays respectively, in that quarter.” The publication’s goal was to deliver “loads of information,” and it did just that. The three issues of the Middlesex County NAACP Newsletter that have been digitized were published from 1982-1983 and include General Assembly items, voter registration information, meeting updates, scholarship recipients, election and membership news, and goals and accomplishments of the local chapter. Though there are a precious few issues of the newsletter, the collection offers an informative snapshot of the NAACP in Middlesex County in the early 1980s.

The Middlesex County NAACP Newsletter was digitized by the Library of Virginia thanks to Tyler Radabaugh, a dedicated volunteer with the Middlesex County Museum and Historical Society in Saluda, who shared scans of the newsletter so they could be hosted on Virginia Chronicle.

Keep an eye out for one more company newsletter, the Fries Textile News, published in Grayson County, which will be coming to Virginia Chronicle soon.

In addition to the newsletters, these newspapers were also added to Virginia Chronicle this month: the Caroline Progress, the Charlottesville Messenger, the Ginter Park Citizen, the Hayes Store News, the Leesburg Spectator, the New River Free Press, as well as additional issues of the Brackety-Ack, the Virginia Gazette, the Warren Sentinel, and the Westmoreland News.  Visit Virginia Chronicle today and check out all that is new!