James A. Cowardin

In 1850, when James A. Cowardin founded the Richmond Dispatch, Richmond was a bustling river port with about 30,000 residents. Stretching from the bend of the James River almost to the current site of the Robert E. Lee Bridge, the city’s economy was booming. Richmond boasted 43 tobacco companies, an ironworks that had wrested the Southern trade from Pittsburgh and grain mills that competed with mills in Minneapolis.

Like the town, the Dispatch was fast-growing and pace-setting. Within 11 years, the newspaper had a circulation of 18,000 and had become a trailblazer in the use of the double-cylinder press.

Richmond and its newspapers did not experience such prosperity again until years later, after the Civil War. The Dispatch was the only Richmond newspaper to survive those times. When the austerity of postwar Reconstruction finally yielded to economic rebirth, new voices took up the Richmond story.
The Richmond Dispatch, 1850		  
 
Maj. Lewis Ginter		 Major Lewis Ginter founded The Daily Times and served as its first publisher; Capt. Page McCarty was the paper’s first editor.
The Times building, 1893
 
Joseph Bryan		 The Daily Times took a step forward when Ginter gave the newspaper to his friend and attorney, Joseph Bryan. Under Bryan, it became the first Southern newspaper to set type by the Mergenthaler Linotype. In 1890, the paper became The Times.
Linotype machine
    J.F. Bradley and Ben P. Owen Jr. launched The Leader in Manchester, a town that later became part of South Richmond.
The Leader building, 1888
    Joseph Bryan acquired The Leader and on Nov. 30 published Vol. 1, No. 1 of The Evening Leader.  
   

Harvey L. Wilson founded The Richmond News. A year later,  John L. Williams acquired it. Williams also had acquired The Dispatch in 1890.

Richmond and its 81,000 residents enjoyed growth and prosperity. Five major railroads crisscrossed the busy trade center.

  
   
    Joseph Bryan’s newspapers, The Times and The Leader, competed for local dominance with the papers owned by John L. Williams, The Dispatch and News. A shift in ownership and an agreed division into morning and afternoon publications avoided an even more intense rivalry.