Selma Enterprise
newspaper published in Selma

The Selma Enterprise is a newspaper which serves the city of Selma, California and surrounding Fresno County. It is published weekly on Wednesdays and its estimated circulation is 5,000.
History
On April 3, 1886, the first edition of the Selma Irrigator was published by Walter T. Lyon. A rival paper called the Selma Enterprise was first published on June 23, 1888. It was founded by editor S.J. Mathews and C.J. Walker, with backing from Jacob E. Whitson, who used it to promote his failed bid for State Assembly. The Enterprise Publishing Company was formed in 1889 and was managed by several people T.D. Calkins and H.E. Farley bought the Enterprise in January 1891. Mrs.V.I. Willis and her husband L.M. Willis bought the paper in October 1891 from H.B. Watson, and were the Enterprise's first long term owners.
In 1892, Lyon and his partner W.L. Chappell retired from the Irrigator and were succeeded at by J.J. Vanderburgh. He went on to publish the Irrigator for over three decades. In 1899, the Willis' leased the Enterprise to John W. Aiken and Frank H. Gill.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Selma Enterprise” is newspaper published in Selma. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Selma, Enterprise and newspaper, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55665726. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1886, 1888, 1889 and 1891.
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This entry incorporates text from “Selma Enterprise” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.