By Darren Alsabrook, The Alliance Gazette
In May 1919, a brief notice in Eastland’s Oil Belt News offered a revealing measure of the oil field’s appetite for information: eight hours.
Under the heading “An Oil Field Daily,” the May 16 issue announced a newspaper for Ranger. The proposed Ranger Daily Times would specialize in the field’s oil news. The notice described it as an Associated Press member and said it aimed to reach Ranger, Eastland and surrounding towns eight hours ahead of papers already arriving there.
For readers, the selling point was time. Oil news was prominent enough to anchor the pitch for a new daily, and nearby Eastland was explicitly part of its intended audience. The announcement presented the venture as evidence of the area’s rapid growth.
A promise in print
The notice described an ambition. It did not provide delivery records or comparisons proving that the new paper consistently achieved an eight-hour lead. Its proposed schedule was afternoon editions and a Sunday-morning paper.
Two dates in the record
The same announcement named Sunday, May 25, 1919, as the planned start. A later source gives a different date: the Ranger Daily Times’ own front-page masthead on May 14, 1947, stated that its first edition appeared June 1, 1919.
Those dates are seven days apart. The 1919 item records a plan; the 1947 masthead records the newspaper’s later account of its beginning. These two pages alone do not explain the difference or establish whether an issue appeared on the earlier date.
What survives is a small, specific piece of Eastland County’s boom-era history: a newspaper promoted faster access to oil-field news, with an eight-hour advantage as its promise. The surviving claim is clear. Whether that advantage was delivered remains unverified.
Sources
The Oil Belt News, May 16, 1919, page 7, “An Oil Field Daily,” University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History; crediting Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1836322/m1/7/
Ranger Daily Times, May 14, 1947, page 1, masthead, Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University.
https://newspapers.swco.ttu.edu/bitstreams/522c8296-9461-465a-9981-f6aef82aaa31/download
