About

The Commerce News traces its history back to N. S. Alexander’s founding of Harmony Grove’s first newspaper, the Harmony Grove Age, in the late 1880s. Alexander published and edited the paper for about two years before selling it to Dr. W. B. Hardman in 1891. Hardman organized the paper under the Hardman-Shankle company and changed the masthead to the Harmony Grove Echo in 1893. On February 15, 1897, Hardman purchased the Banks County Gazette and published the merged papers as the Harmony Grove Echo-Gazette until April of that same year, when the Gazette returned to Homer, Georgia. Beginning in 1894, Hardman leased the Echo to John M. Carson for roughly a year, but Hardman stayed on as a manager until 1895 when he sold the newspaper in total to John F. Shannon. Following Harmony Grove’s reincorporation as the town of Commerce in 1903, Shannon changed the masthead of the paper to the Commerce News. The people of Harmony Grove felt the city’s new name better reflected their commercial role in the north Georgia cotton trade and also wished to solve an issue where mail was going to a town of the same name in Dawson County. The paper aligned politically with the Democratic Party and published every Thursday at a cost of one dollar per year. Shannon remained owner and editor of the paper until his death in 1934. The Commerce News continues publication today under the ownership of MainStreet Newspapers.