Robert Quillen

Verni Robert Quillen (March 25, 1887 – December 9, 1948) was an American journalist and humorist who for more than a quarter century was "one of the leading purveyors of village nostalgia" from his home in Fountain Inn, South Carolina. In 2012, his office and library was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Quillen was born in Syracuse, Kansas, near the Colorado border, and was reared in Overbrook, Kansas, a hamlet south of Topeka, where his father, J. D. Quillen, published the local newspaper. Robert early learned to set type and as a teenager sold pen-and-ink drawings and published a monthly magazine. In 1904, shortly before his seventeenth birthday, Quillen joined the U.S. Army under an assumed name (swearing he was 21), but by mid-1905, he had been released from military service. He then spent a few months working for newspapers in the northeastern United States where he had been discharged.

In 1906, he answered an ad seeking an editor for a weekly that a publisher hoped to establish in Fountain Inn, South Carolina. Although after his first encounter he remained in Fountain Inn only three months, Quillen there met and married Donnie Cox, a milliner, five years his senior. He moved on to Americus, Georgia, and then took his new bride to Washington State, where Quillen joined forces with his father and worked at publishing newspapers and magazines in Winlock, Anacortes, and Port Orchard. Quillen later wrote that he had gone "busted" in the West.

In 1910, when his brother-in-law in Fountain Inn offered to sell him a weekly advertising sheet called News and Notions, Quillen bought it and borrowed money to purchase his own press and type. In the following year Quillen began editing and publishing the newly christened Fountain Inn Tribune, "a well-organized publication overflowing with news of Fountain Inn and outlying communities."

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