Published by The Evansville Courier

Line drawings taken from photographs began to appear in The Courier in the 1880s. During the 1890s, a Courier artist improved the paper's drawings with a process that used wood cuts, chalk plates and zinc engravings. But the art still was crude and the process time-consuming. And it still was mainly used for advertisement or society pages.

It was under the leadership of Henry Murphy, Percy Carroll and Howard Roosa that art and cartoons became an important part of delivering the news.

Artist Irvin Alexander, son of an Evansville druggist, began sketching scenes at fires, murder trials and other events in the late 1890s.

His drawings during the race riots of 1903 recorded a disturbing chapter in Evansville's history. Many Alexander cartoons were blatantly racist, an attitude that could be found on the pages of most newspapers across the nation at that time.

When Karl Kae Knecht took Alexander's place at The Courier in 1906, he continued to cover news events with detailed sketches, but added a daily cartoon that reflected political, social and community issues of the day. Knecht's approach was much more tolerant of racial and social issues, and for decades he used cartoons as his commentary on life and world events.

By 1910 The Courier, modern for its day, illustrated in half-tones (images that are created with black dots) and line drawings, and included a color comic section. A huge three-deck press printed and folded 24,000 newspapers per hour, but that machine would be replaced in five years with a Hoe quadruple press capable of printing 500 papers per minute.

The Courier's first photographs appeared in 1910. They were shot by a typesetter, William Deeds. Other Courier staffers did photo assignments for the next several years until the paper bought its own Grlex camera.

Knecht mastered the heavy Graflex just as World War I got under way. Knecht's photos began to appear every day, many highlighting war-related activities in the Evansville area.

As the years passed, Courier reporters began taking photos to accompany their stories, but the film still was sent to outside laboratories for development and printing.

When Tommy Mueller became The Courier's first full-time photographer in 1936, The Courier built its own darkroom and began the work of processing its own news photos.