Crawford Co., AR - Biographies - Joseph Starr Dunham

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SOURCE: History of Benton, Washington, Carroll, Madison, Crawford,
Franklin, and Sebastian Counties, Arkansas. Chicago: The Goodspeed 
Publishing Co., 1889.
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Joseph Starr Dunham, editor and proprietor of the Van Buren Press, was 
born in Connecticut in 1823, and is a son of the late William H. and 
Frances (Starr) Dunham, he being the third of a family of five 
children. He was apprenticed to his uncle, William D. Starr, at the 
age of thirteen, thus learning the printer's trade, at Middletown, 
Conn. In 1859 he left Middletown and immigrated to Van Buren, where he 
established the Van Buren Press the same year, having purchased the 
materials for a printing office in Cincinnati. For a few years he was 
assisted in the management of the paper by his son, Joseph Starr 
Dunham (deceased), but with that exception has been the sole 
proprietor. He is a strong writer, a leading journalist of 
Northwestern Arkansas, and his paper is the oldest in the county, It 
contains the current news and has a weekly circulation of 550 copies. 
In 1846 he married Miss Mary C. Ward, who was born in Middletown, 
Conn., in 1825, and bore him four children: Frank Augustus (deceased), 
Mary Starr (deceased), Fanny Ingersoll, (wife of Phillip D. Scott, 
superintendent of ice factory at Van Buren), and Joseph Starr, Jr., 
who died June 23, 1888, in Van Buren. aged twenty-five. Mr. Dunham is 
a Democrat, and at the commencement of hostilities was for the Union, 
but afterward seceded with the State of Arkansas. He conducts the 
paper on strictly Democratic principles, and is a firm advocate of the 
nominees of that party. He supported Douglas in 1860. George B. 
McClellan in 1864, and all of the Democratic candidates in succession, 
to the present date. He also supported Baxter in the famous Brooks and 
Baxter quarrel, in Arkansas. He is a prosperous man, a stockholder in 
the Van Buren Ice and Coal Company, and a citizen of high standing.