A sad goodbye to the Pennington County Courant community newspaper

Ravellette Publications, Inc. announces the closure of the The Pennington County Courant newspaper.  "I regret that we will no longer be publishing the Courant and this week will be the final issue of the Pennington County Courant," said publisher Don Ravellette. "We basically had no choice, with the lack of employees to help run the newspaper. We are extremely sad that we could not find employees or a buyer for a profitable, well established business in Wall. With the fear of spreading the other employees' work load too thin," noted Ravellette, "we had to make the tough decision to discontinue publishing the weekly newspaper in Wall." 

Dale Lewis sold the weekly newspaper to Les and Belle Ravellette and Ravellette Publications, Inc., September 1, 1978. 

The Courant was established in 1907 in Quinn, SD, by E.S. Johnston. It was called the Quinn Courant. In 1926 the business was moved to Wall, SD, and was named the Eastern Pennington County Courant, and later it was changed to the Pennington County Courant. R.F. Lewis purchased the newspaper in 1929, while still teaching school. His son Dale purchased the newspaper in 1965.

Three generations of the Ravellette family have published just under 47 years worth of events, feature stories, family and school news, government public notices, and local business promotions. "To our readers and advertisers, we thank you, from the bottom of our hearts for the friendship and working relationship since the summer of 1978," said Don Ravellette. "We have published over 2,400 weekly editions of the Pennington County Courant."

"The Pennington County Courant dates back to the first issues in the early 1900s and we have the old paper yearbooks from every issue," said Ravellette. "We are donating those issues to the City of Wall and they will be stored there for the city’s use and information. 

We will still be printing and mailing The Profit, our total market coverage advertising piece that goes to every box holder in an 11 county area, between Rapid City and Pierre. There will be community advertising from the Wall area included, like it has been in the past. We mail to 6,000 box holders every week.  

The area cities, schools, and other entities, that have used the Courant as their legal newspaper will have the choice of The Hill City Prevailer or the Rapid City Journal, for their legal newspaper. Pennington County, (by law) will continue to publish in both of the two remaining legal newspapers in Pennington County.

Once again we say thank you for the 47 years of allowing us to publish a paper every week and print area news in The Pennington County Courant.