Mid-nineteenth-century Perth was a successful linen- and whisky-manufacturing town and a port on the River Tay, with a population of some 24,000. It was also, from 1866, a key railway junction. Perth's first weekly, the Perth Courier, was established in 1809 by the Morison brothers and became the Perthshire Courier & General Advertiser for the Central Counties of Scotland in 1822. In 1834 the sub-title of Farmers’ Journal & Scottish Central Advertiser was added. In 1853 ownership passed from Messrs Morison to the bookseller and Lord Provost, James Dewar, who had been associated with the Northern Warden. Under Dewar's ownership the paper became Palmerstonian in the 1850s and 1860s. James Dewar died in 1861 but the business was continued by his son, also James Dewar. In 1869, in association with the printer Robert Mitchell, the company became Dewar, Mitchell & Co.

Dewar seems to have been manager, compositor and editor for much of the time, as well as acting as the town's registrar, and under him in the 1870s and 1880s the paper vigorously opposed unification of the Free Church and the United Presbyterians. He was assisted initially by a schoolteacher, Frederick Laing, but Laing soon went back to teaching. In 1876 Thomas K. Robertson was the lead reporter and he found himself before the Free Church Presbytery for refusing to divulge the author of a critical letter in the paper. The language in editorials against deviants from what it regarded as traditional belief, such as those experimenting with the use of the organ, could be quite venomous. Dewar seems to have retained the editorship until 1889, when Peter McGlashan came in. McGlashan, however, was killed on the railway track in September 1890.

In 1891 ownership passed to Alexander Wright, a local bailie and former compositor on the Constitutional, and James Barks was his main reporter. In 1901 Robert E. Steedman of the Alloa Journal, the secretary and treasurer of the Scottish Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, took over the Courier but he in turn soon sold to a partnership of Colin Smart and John McKinley. They had both trained as compositors and had both worked on the China Mail in Hong Kong. They acted jointly as editors until Smart's early death at the age of 38 in 1912, after which McKinley became editor until his death in 1929, when the Perthshire Courier was merged with the Perthshire Advertiser.