In a column and story that appeared in its Feb. 12, 2025 issue, the Burnett County Sentinel in Grantsburg celebrated its 150th anniversary.
“It was a very cold Friday in the deep winter of 1875 – still considered one of the coldest
on record – when the very first edition of the ‘Burnett County Sentinel’ was printed in Grantsburg by Judge Matthew (or Marion, it’s unclear) Westcott,” wrote Sentinel editor Greg Marsten in a front page story.
Marsten also noted in an accompanying column that he has served just 2.35% of the time the paper has been in existence. “In my over 40 years in both radio and print, going back to high school, the standard practices for both industries would seem dinosaur-ish compared to today: Recording on reel-to-reel tape and physically editing interviews and news stories using a splicing block and a razor blade,” Marsten wrote in his column.
“It was magic going to a ‘word processor’ and being able to print out your stories to adjust for size and column width, allowing for things like kerning, spacing, ‘gutters’ and other graphic designers’ terms that are still over my pay grade,” Marsten wrote in his column. “While it was much more difficult to produce a paper or magazine back then, it was miles beyond what the late Judge Westcott had to do to create that first edition Sentinel in February 1875.”
In the story, Marsten recalled the recent ownership of the paper — from Wilbur “Bill” Nelson in July 1962 to its sale in 1994 to Mainstream Publications, to 1998 when current owners Eugene Johnson purchased it. The Sentinel was subsequently joined by several regional newspapers in Osceola, Baldwin and Amery with sibling publications in rural Minnesota and the Twin Cities.
“The world has changed dramatically since that first 1875 striking of the press, which predated the Edison lightbulb by several years, and decades before any World Wars. We look forward to continuing those innovations in technology, as we are also in pending efforts to digitize that amazing legacy and history in grand fashion, keeping those memories, stories and photos alive for the next 150 years or so,” Marsten wrote. “Maybe even longer!”
