Watertown’s history now available online

The Codington County Historical Society, the Watertown Regional Library, and the Watertown Area Community Foundation have teamed up to digitize past editions of the Public Opinion.


As the director of the Codington County Heritage Museum, Christy Lickei’s passion is preserving the history of Watertown and the surrounding area.

With the help of the Watertown Regional Library and the Watertown Area Community Foundation, she has taken a big step toward that goal by digitizing every edition of the Watertown Public Opinion from 1887, when the PO began, through 1954.

The content of those editions is now available to anyone, free of charge, on a searchable database on the Internet.

As the area’s leading source of information until recent years, the Public Opinion has recorded every birth, death and major news event for more than 100 years.

Christy Lickei

“Since the time I started at the Historical Society, I’ve wanted to scan the newspapers, but that seemed to be a huge project,” Lickei told the Watertown Current. “When the PO closed and we moved all the books, we were talking about doing it then. So, I’ve been trying for a while.”

When the Public Opinion moved out of its building on Third Avenue Northwest, board members of the Codington County Historical Society feared Gannett, corporate owners of the PO, would simply trash the hundreds of bound copies of the newspaper, like it did with other papers it acquired.

As the best source of Watertown history, preserving those archives became a major goal of the Historical Society. Lickei negotiated with Gannett to take possession of those bound copies and moved them out of the former newspaper offices and into a safe storage spot in downtown Watertown.

“We did not want to see all of that history end up in a dumpster,” Lickei said.

Giving people access to them was the next step, which has now become a reality.

Photographing each page of the voluminous bound copies and creating a searchable database proved to be a staggering process that was prohibitively expensive. So Lickei reached out to Watertown Regional Library Director Maria Gruener to use the library’s microfilm copies of the papers.

“The cost of scanning the microfilm is pennies compared to taking high resolution photos of each page,” Lickei said.

And while the condition of much of the microfilm was not great, they are definitely readable.

“The computer has a harder time reading the microfilm than your eyes, so sometimes the search process is a little iffy,” Lickei said. “But you can still easily read every edition.”

The Watertown Area Community Foundation awarded the Historical Society a $30,000 grant to kickstart the project. Lickei is now seeking other grants to finish the project.

In later years, the newspapers got bigger with more pages, so scanning the remaining 70 years will cost another $60,000.

The first round of scanning microfilm was done by Advantage Archives of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a company that focuses on the preservation and digital accessibility of historical collections and documents so that a community’s history is available for current and future generations.

Editions of the Public Opinion from its beginning in 1887 through 1954 are now available online at https://watertownlib.historyarchives.online/home.

They can be searched by keyword and read or printed free of charge from any computer with Internet access.

So far, 176 of about 600 rolls of microfilm have been digitized.