In the United States in the nineteenth century, there were literally dozens of Presbyterian newspapers.
Our focus here and the subject of our digitization project is The Mid-Continent, as published in St. Louis, Missouri and with a series run from 1888-1896. It was the successor title to The St. Louis Evangelist, which was operated by J.W. Allen and which was issued as Vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1875) through Vol. 13, no. 19 (8 December 1887.

Then at the end of 1887, a merger with a Kansas City, Missouri paper known as The Mid-Continent, operated by F.W. Butterfield & Son [series run 1.1 (1880) - 8.41 (10 December 1887)], created a new entity which operated briefly as The St. Louis Evangelist and the Mid-Continent [13.50 (15 December 1887) - 13.52 (29 December 1887)], with the name then reverting to The Mid-Continent, though the publication now issued from St. Louis instead of Kansas City. In its final form, the paper ran from vol. 14, no. 1 (5 January 1888) through vol. 22, no. 52 (30 December 1896), after which it was merged with The Herald and Presbyter.

Due to the way in which our collection of this title is stored in boxes, this digitization project will begin with the final year of the series. The physical paper which was used for this publication has now become quite brittle. It is at the point where it must be handled no more than absolutely necessary, and we are particularly grateful to now have the equipment which allows us to move forward with this project. The full provenance of our collection is not known at this time, though subscription stamps on these issues indicate an original ownership by the Kansas Historical Society. The PCA Historical Center came into possession of this collection at some point prior to September of 1998.

Each of these digital files is approximately 9mb in size.