Radio Script #1141

Little Talks on Common Things
November 27, 1977

Frequently on this program we have mentioned one of Maine’s oldest newspapers, the Kennebec Journal. It is time we told you something of the origin and development of that paper which began publication in Augusta even before that city was the capital of Maine. Most of the information I now give you about the Kennebec Journal comes from its special issue of January 8, 1925, on the one hundredth anniversary of the paper’s first issue.

Maine’s first newspaper was the Portland Gazette, started in 1785, and long ago on this program I told you about my ownership of a copy of its first issue.

Eleven years later a printer named Howard Robinson published the Eastern Star at Hallowell. It lasted less than a year but was immediately followed by the Tocsin, put out by Watts and Baker, who after a few months sold it to Benjamin Poor. It was discontinued in 1797.

Both the Star and the Tocsin were published at what was called the Hook, the southern settlement of the large town of Hallowell that then included Augusta, just as farther up the river Winslow included Waterville. Hallowell’s northern settlement clustered around Fort Western and was called the Fort.

The first newspaper put out at the Fort was the Kennebec Intelligencer in 1795. It was started by Peter Edes, son of better known Benjamin Edes, publisher of the Boston Gazette, in whose printing office the Boston Tea Party had been organized. Young Peter learned the printer’s trade in his father’s shop, became too an ardent patriot among Samuel Adam’s Sons of Liberty, and during the British occupation of Boston was imprisoned on Castle Island in the harbor .

Peter Edes’ paper enjoyed a much longer life than its predecessor, lasting for 20 years until 1815. Then Peter decided he could do better in the new town growing fast up on the Penobscot River. So he moved to Bangor, where he started a paper he called the Weekly Register. It soon changed name to the Whig and Courier and was the predecessor of today is Bangor Daily News. So there is in Bangor today a paper that can claim a direct line of descent from the famous Boston Gazette, which in 1770 gave the world the first printed account of the Boston Massacre.

Before Edes left Augusta he had changed the name of the Register to the Kennebec Gazette; then as trouble with England led to the War of 1812 he patriotically. changed the name again to the Herald of Liberty. For two years after Edes left, Augusta was without a newspaper, but in 1817 James Burleigh, Jr., son of Augusta’s first postmaster and an apprentice of Peter Edes, started the Augusta Patriot. It soon died for want of patronage and Augusta was again without a paper for seven years until 1825.

By that time the movement to make Augusta the state capital was well underway. When Maine became a state in 1820, the first capital was established at Portland, but as population grew in central and eastern Maine, there came increasing demand to have the seat of government nearer the center of the state.

That was finally accomplished in 1832. But nine years earlier in 1823, the town of Augusta had appointed a committee to investigate the possibility of having a newspaper, whose principal purpose would be to agitate for moving the state capital to Augusta. The committee was headed by an agressive business man, Robinson Vose. In Boston Vose met Russell Eaton, a young man visiting that city while on vacation from his job on the National Intelligencer in Washington. Vose persuaded Eaton to come to Augusta and look over the situation. Eaton was favorably impressed.

Returning to Washington he solicited cooperation from his colleague on the Intelligencer, Luther Severance. The two formed a partnership to start a paper in Augusta. But they needed money – more money than Vose had assured them could be furnished in Augusta itself. Furthermore a heated presidential election was coming the next year in 1824. It proved to be the first election to be decided in the House of Representatives because of dispute in several states about presidential elections. Though Eaton and Severance had no way of knowing there would be such outcome that finally put John Quincy Adams in the White House, they wisely decided not to risk their Augusta venture until it was known which party would control the presidency. So they remained with the Washington Intelligencer, saving money to buy press, type and materials.

On March 18, 1824, two weeks after the election, Russell Eaton arrived in Augusta, picking up press and materials in New York and Boston. He intended to have the press come by boat from Boston to Hallowell, perhaps even all the way to the Fort. But that year the Kennebec froze over early and no vessel could get above Merrymeeting Bay. On the voyage from Boston to Bath, Eaton had met a man who was to pick up his wagon and two horses and drive empty to Brunswick. Eaton made a deal with the man to take the press by land all the way to Augusta. There Eaton set it up in a building on the southeast corner of Bridge and Water streets.

Meanwhile Severance had arrived. Before he came, Eaton had put out a prospectus which had secured 450 advance subscriptions at $2 a year. The name first suggested for the paper was the Augusta Journal, but Severance insisted that was too narrow a designation for a paper intended to appeal to a wide area of Central Maine. So the name finally agreed upon was the Kennebec Journal.

Its first issue came from that overland transported press on January 8, 1825. Eaton was business manager and did the press work. Severance was editor, not only writing the editorials and many of the news items, but also helping set the type. In fact, so good a type-setter was he that, like the renowned Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, he set his editorials directly into type without first writing them on paper.

From the beginning the Kennebec Journal backed the party of John Quincy Adams and had no use for the opponent who ousted him in 1828, Andrew Jackson. But even in 1825, the Federalist Party of Adams’ distinguished father, the nation’s. second president, John Adams, was dying, and its adherents formed a new party called Whigs. For the entire life of that Whig Party, until the 1850’s one of its most vigorous supporters in the nation was the Kennebec Journal.

Even in its early days the KJ was not without competition. In 1827 there was started a Jacksonian paper called Maine Patriot and State Gazette. It was succeeded in 1831 by another paper called the Age. Many a political battle was waged in the columns of the Democratic Age and the Whig Kennebec Journal.

When the Legislature first assembled in the new state house at Augusta in 1832, the KJ started a bold venture. Eaton and Severance decided to put out a 4-page daily during the legislative session. It was a small sheet, only letter paper size, 12 by 9 inches, and it was circulated for $1 subscription during the session. Meanwhile the weekly paper continued to come out. The publisher kept up the practice for future years. Maine legislators then met annually, and governors were elected every year. In 1835, they changed from daily to tri-weekly issues during the session, and that practice continued for 35 years, until 1870.

In 1833 Eaton sold his share in the paper to Severance, and six years later Severance sold a half interest to John Dorr. Meanwhile Luther Severance was gaining a wide and favorable reputation. In 1844 he was elected to Congress, serving in the House of Representatives with another freshman congressman, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. In 1850 Luther Severance retired from the Journal, and four years later he died.

The KJ was sold to a partnership of Wheeler and Simpson, with John Dorr retaining a financial interest. The quality of the paper slipped and Dorr saw that bold means must be taken to save it. On a railroad train from Portland to Boston, Dorr fell into conversation with a young man from Philadelphia whom Dorr had already met in Augusta, where the man’s wife had her ancestral home.

The young man was James G. Blaine. The result of that conversation was that Blaine resigned his post in Philadelphia and formed a partnership with Joseph Baker to take over the Kennebec Journal. Baker was a prominent Augusta attorney, and it turned out he had little time for the paper. So his place was taken by John L. Stevens, a former Universalist minister. At that time Stevens was 35 years old and Blaine only 28. The partnership was successful, and they remained in control of the KJ for 38 years.

James G. Blaine was quick to see the fading appeal of the Whig Party. Soon after the founding of the Republican Party in 1854 he became one of its promoters, and he was one of Maine’s representatives to the Republican National convention in 1856 that nominated the pathfinder, General Fremont for President.

In the next year, 1857, the Kennebec Journal was made the official paper of the State of Maine. In October of that year Blaine felt he could not resist an attractive offer to become editor of the Portland Daily Advertiser. But Blaine kept up his interest in the Kennebec Journal and frequently contributed to its columns.

Blaine’s partner, John Stevens, controlled the paper until 1869, then Alden Sprague had it until 1887, when it was taken over by Edward Burleigh, who was its owner for 29 years until 1916, when it came into the hands of Roy Flynt, whose family still controlled it when their l00th anniversary edition was published.

Soon afterward it was purchased by the Augusta publisher of magazines, William H. Gannett, whose family still controls it and other Maine papers in 1977.

Year: 1977