The Monitor turns 100

McALLEN — When the city of McAllen was incorporated in 1911, The Monitor was there to cover it.

Mayoral races, international bridge openings, hurricanes, civil rights disputes — you name it, and The Monitor has been there over the past 100 years, providing full coverage of the day’s events.

For as long as there’s been a city of McAllen, there’s been The Monitor.

McAllen’s newspaper of record celebrates its centennial today and its years of covering the city and the Rio Grande Valley at large.

As McAllen has gradually developed from a small border settlement of about 1,500 to the center of a bustling region of more than 700,000, The Monitor has chronicled its history.

“We’ve always subscribed to The Monitor,” said George Gause, a special collections librarian at the University of Texas-Pan American. “It has documented everything that has happened here.”

A group of nine businessmen published the first issue of The Monitor —then a weekly — in 1909. The paper’s birth took place “amid a huge expanse of mesquite and cactus in a struggling village numbering a few hundred souls,” as one 1961 Monitor article put it.

In the pages of The Monitor’s archives, one can see the sweep of the city’s history.

News about crops, produce markets and weather dominated the newspaper’s pages in the early half of the century as agriculture drove the Valley’s economy.

As the region’s economy began to diversify a bit more in the1930s, headlines in The McAllen Daily Press — one of the paper’s four names over the years — told of “winter tourists” and the oncoming of a major oil boom.

The paper became a true daily newspaper — The McAllen Daily Monitor — in 1934 under two Valley land investors, Ralph G. Brady and Arthur H. King.

In 1951, the current owner, then known as Freedom Newspapers Inc., purchased the paper along with the Valley Morning Star and The Brownsville Herald.

Ten years later, The Monitor moved into its former building at 1101 Ash Ave.

Later that year, the sports section front page of the McAllen Valley Evening Monitor shouted, “Donna Beats Quanah; First Valley Team to Win State Title.” A late comeback victory had made Donna High School the first — and so far the last — Valley high school football team to win a state title.

The paper has changed ownership nine times over the years. But coverage of McAllen and the Valley has continued, year after year.

“From the library point of view, the paper has been an invaluable resource for the library staff and patrons over the decades,” said Valley native Jose Gamez, McAllen’s library director. “It has helped to answer questions on many, many levels and, of course, to preserve our history.”

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Nick Pipitone covers McAllen, PSJA, the Mid-Valley and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4446.