George Harrison Armistead

 

 

Induction Year:¬Ý1969

Lived: 1861-1950

 

Papers:

Nashville American

New York World

Nashville Daily News

The Review Appeal, Franklin

Nashville Banner

 

George Harrison Armistead was born in Virginia, went to college in Mississippi, and came to Tennessee to study law. But after a year at Vanderbilt University he gave up law for a job on the Nashville World. That was in 1884. And for the next 58 years, with brief time out for other activities, he was a reporter, city editor, rural editor, industrial editor, and editor-in-chief of daily newspapers.

From the World he moved to the Nashville American, where he gained a considerable reputation for his reporting of local politics and as a Washington correspondent. In 1887 he went to New York to study the new engraving methods of Pulitzer's New York World. When he returned he introduced to Nashville its first zinc engraving plant.

 

From 1901 to 1905 he was editor of the Nashville Daily News. The following year he managed the campaign of Edward Ward Carmack for the United States Senate and two years later he managed Carmack's successful race for the governorship.

 

For a number of years he published the Franklin Review-Appeal and finally, in 1924, he moved to the Nashville Banner as its industrial editor. He quickly gained fame throughout the state and the South for his unflagging efforts that brought numerous new commercial enterprises to the area. He went on to become editor-in-chief of the Nashville Banner when he was nearly 80 years old. Despite his advancing years, he was an active editor and wrote all the Banner's policy-forming editorials.

 

He retired from active editorial duties in 1942 but continued to write series of articles for the paper. The last of these, entitled "Advance of Tennessee and the South," appeared two months before his death on December 21, 1950, at age 89.