Two years ago, when I (Managing Editor Jordan LaHaye Fontenot), publisher James Fox-Smith, and former Arts & Entertainment Editor Alexandra Kennon set out to wade through forty years of our magazine’s print archives as part of an anniversary project—I found myself in a state of overwhelm and quiet panic.
[Peruse our 40 Stories from 40 Years Archive here.]
Since Dorcas Brown, sitting in a deer stand drinking beer with a friend in 1983, decided to publish a periodical that celebrated the happenings in small town Louisiana, thousands of stories have emerged. Stories about beloved local institutions, family recipes turned small town classics, secret nature trails, hidden history, and damn good times. Those stories are preserved in print, in piecemeal fashion, all across Louisiana in personal collections. But I couldn’t help but fear that so many of these editions, especially the early ones, were rare enough to be at risk of being lost forever. Since the early 2010s, Country Roads has been online as well as in print—so a web archive exists. But it is imperfect, and only represents around a third of the magazine’s long history.
So, it is to my preservation-oriented heart’s delight to share that as of a few weeks ago, thanks to the good folks at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, Country Roads magazine is now available in its entirety (from 1983–2020) as an online archive with Newsbank.
(Since 2020, we’ve been publishing e-book versions of the magazine via Issuu, which can be accessed at issuu.com/countryroadsmag).
Readers can now access every single edition of the magazine, e-book style and searchable by date, or even by keyword. This means that you can search for articles by Country Roads contributors past and present, or for that article you read years ago about your mom’s favorite restaurant. Find old editions of beloved old columns, like Leon Standifer and Ed O’Rourke’s “Lawnchair Gardeners” and Ruth Laney’s “Antiquarians”; all of Lucile Bayon Hume’s eccentric investigations on local critters (possums, stink bugs, crows); and Alex Cook’s wanderings into Louisiana’s most exciting dancehalls. Plus, oh Lord, so much more.
Anyone with an East Baton Rouge Parish Library card can now access the Country Roads magazine Newsbank archive at ebrpl.co/countryroads. In addition, residents living in Ascension, Assumption, East Feliciana, Iberia, Iberville, Livingston, Pointe Coupee, St. Helena, St. Tammany, Tangipahoa, Washington, West Baton Rouge, and West Feliciana parishes can access the archive using a reciprocal borrower card. Learn more at ebrpl.com/library-services/borrow/cards-borrowing.
