Kingston Whig-Standard
By the 1600s, the Huron and Iroquois people had settled in the region around the eastern end of the Great Lakes. After the arrival of the first European settlers, severe smallpox epidemics in the 1640s devastated aboriginal populations.
What is today the city of Kingston, Ontario was first occupied by Europeans in 1783. It grew rapidly and in 1841, became the capital of the Province of Canada.
Today the Kingston Whig Standard, like so many other Canadian dailies, is owned by Postmedia. Whig is derived from an old British party wit liberal leanings; it stood in contrast to the Tory party, which roughly corresponds to today's Conservatives.
The British Whig was founded in 1834 and in 1926 this paper merged with another daily, the Kingston Daily Standard, and became the Kingston Whig-Standard.
This past summer, Wayne Allen made an interesting find. while repairing an old barn to make it insurable. He came across some reproductions of the Whig Standard from 1929, which he speculated were possibly used in the printing process. Apparently they later served to insulate the barn walls. He also found some copies of the Daily Mail and Empire, along with a 1912 employee pass for the historic Grand Trunk Railway.