First Journal publisher set tone for next century of newspapers

First Journal publisher set tone for next century of newspapers

Sept. 11, 1999

By Richard Ballantine
Publisher

For John R. Curry, founding the Montezuma Journal in April 1988 on the open agricultural plains of western La Plata County must have been the easiest physically of all his numerous newspaper start-ups. The Journal was the fifth newspaper he’d founded in and near the San Juan Mountains, beginning with the La Plata Miner in Silverton in 1875.

Curry had walked over Cunningham Pass from the San Luis Valley to reach the San Juans for the first time earlier in 1875, and later covered that route on several occasions with equipment and newsprint.

After the Miner came the Dolores News in August 1879, the San Miguel Journal in July 1881, the Montezuma Journal, and the Red Mountain Pilot in 1893. Curry had a knack for starting newspapers.

In the first issue of the Montezuma Journal on April 28, 1888, Curry pledged to promote and defend the Valley, and showed he could put out a lively publication. He urged saluting the completion just a week earlier of the mile-long irrigation canal from the Dolores River by writing, “Let’s celebrate, and let it be a novel one by all taking WATER.” Curry also admitted to being a Democrat but wrote that he would not “make the Journal in any manner offensively partisan.”

The front page of the first issue of the Montezuma Journal contained a long report by a U.S. Army major of his trip down the Mancos River through what is now the Ute Mountain Tribal Park, praise of the Valley from writers in Durango and Salt Lake City, and Curry’s own plea that state lands be opened up for settlement.

It would be a year later, in April 1889, that Montezuma County would be created from La Plata County and Cortez named the county seat.

Curry was a Civil War veteran, serving in the 13th Iowa infantry. He was born in 1846 or 1847 in Yorktown, N.Y., and came west from LaMars, Iowa, where he owned the paper.

Curry and his wife, Delia, frequently wintered in Iowa, Illinois or New York in the 1870s and early Ô80s, where they probably had family. In Cortez, he reportedly also owned a store and a small ranch.

Curry sold the Journal in 1897 and returned to Silverton. His eyesight was failing, and that was likely his last newspaper. He died, blind, in Durango in 1911.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to Allan Nossaman of the San Juan County Historical Society for most of the information included in this article. Nossaman nominated Curry in 1981 for the Colorado Journalism Hall of Fame at the University of Northern Colorado.