Portsmouth Herald Seeks Its Own Birth Date |
HISTORY MATTERS
The metaphorical party hats were on and the imaginary cake all decorated for the 125th birthday of the Portsmouth Herald. According to newspaper records, the Herald was born on September 23, 1886. Then the editor asked the darned historian to check the date. Sorry to spoil the party, folks. You got your own birth date wrong. (Continued below)
The first copy of the newspaper actually appeared two years earlier on September 23, 1884. And it wasn’t exactly the Herald. Back then it was called the Penny Post because the “spicy” little, four-pager sold for a single penny. By 1886 the Post claimed to be the most subscribed penny newspaper in
Rags to riches
To sort out the confusion we must take a quick trip to upstate
He started at the bottom, serving as a newspaper carrier and “office devil” for the Manchester Daily Union in
Still in his late teens
“I think that’s when Frank Jones grub-staked FW to buy the Herald,” says Portsmouth Herald publisher John Tabor today.
Tabor rummages through the surviving Herald history “archive” located in the top drawer of his desk, the same desk, he assumes, occupied by publishers dating back to
“You’re my boy,” Tabor says, imagining Frank Jones speaking to
Frank Jones had a lot to gain by investing in the local media. A former NH congressman and
CONTINUE PORTSMOUTH HERALD UNBIRTHDAY
Journalism as blood sport
Newspapers in the 19th century served as soap boxes for diverse and often contentious political factions. Editors pulled no punches in the war of words, often insulting one another in print. “Politically, we’re so tame,” Tabor says of modern journalism compared to an era when fair and balanced reporting was not necessarily the goal.
The competing Republican daily, the Morning Chronicle, described the start-up Penny Post in 1884 as “well made up and well printed,” while noting that “it flies a republican flag of the largest size.” But in 1892, soon after
According to Brighton,
Fuzzy math
This is where the story gets murky and much more digging is needed. No paper or microfilm copy of the Post (elsewhere called The Evening Post) dated beyond 1890 could be found at the public library or the Portsmouth Atheanuem. The Post seems to disappear from the City Directory by 1893. Possibly
The first mention of
Stop the presses
Another last-minute sweep of the top floor Portsmouth Athenaeum archives has just turned up the earliest known cache of the Portsmouth Herald dated from July 1, 1897 to the end of the year. The heavy cardboard cover has long since broken from its binding. The pages are brown and extremely brittle. They have apparently never been copied onto microfilm. The start-up paper sold for two cents, and a tiny box in the upper right corner read: “Hasn’t 5,000 circulation, but this is good growing weather.”
Yet this fragile, perhaps one-of-a-kind collection from 1897 still does not appear to contain the very first Herald. There may still be earlier copies. There is no bold introduction by the editor as with other
But we are left, at this writing, with no precise idea what transpired between
“As far as I know nobody’s ever dug deep enough to get the hard facts,” says Steve Fowle, editor and publisher of the fortnightly New Hampshire Gazette. Fowle has devoted years to studying the complex and contentious history of newspaper publication in
With the constant shifting of newspaper names, offices, editors, and publishers, Fowle says, it is not surprising that mistakes are made. Since 1884 the Herald has moved from
“Newspapers are too busy trying to get out the next paper and scurrying around trying to find out who’s doing what to whom on the city council,” Fowle says. “Every day you put out a newspaper you have the opportunity to make a new mistake.”
History is always an abbreviated best guess. Facts get fudged, lost, and truncated. One historian reports what the last one wrote. Harford considered the Herald an extension of the Post and did not restart the clock when his new daily appeared in 1897. This is a common practice, Fowle says. In the same vein,
PORTSMOUTH HERALD HISTORY continued
And then there was one
There were six newspapers in the city when
FW’s only son Justin Downing Hartford ran the paper from 1938 until his own death in 1963. JD is credited with moving his father’s newspaper away from partisan politics, and making the Herald, in
Steve Fowle, who acquired and revived the NH Gazette in 1989 pays homage to the Hartfords for keeping Daniel Fowle’s 1756 paper on life support all those years. He is, he says with a sly smile, Daniel Fowle’s third cousin, five times removed,
“FW had deep sentimental attachment to the Gazette as the nation’s oldest newspaper,” Fowle says, “and he went to considerable effort and expense to keep the paper alive rather than letting it die on his watch.”
The twentieth century trend away from highly partisan newspapers and the rise of corporate ownerships, Fowle says, was happening all over the country. FW Hartford was simply a bit more successful than many small city publishers, and a little ahead of the curve.
“By buying and shutting down all the other newspapers in town,” Fowle explains, “he lowered his overall expenses and increased the revenue to that one paper. It was an efficiency thing. It also meant there were no competing editorial voices, and that had to have an appeal to him. And that’s why plutocrats love monopolies.”
Setting the record straight
The uncertain birth date of FW Hartford and the murky early years in
The confusion that launched this report comes from a 1997 Portsmouth Herald clipping in which the editor mistakenly dated the paper to September 23, 1886. That erroneous date likely came from a brief history of the Herald found in the files of the Portsmouth Public Library. The typed two-page essay apparently written in 1980 is unattributed, offers no sources, and gets other dates wrong. Meanwhile, a rare print copy of the authentic Penny Post dated September 23, 1884 remains on file in the same library archive.
“We have an obligation to be as accurate as we can,” says publisher John Tabor, who notes that history is a work in progress. “We revise and correct in real time,” he says.
Tabor agrees that a deeper study of the Herald’s true origins is now in order if a history volunteer or student intern can be found. “It would be a fun thing to do,” he says.
The result might just change history. Should the Herald stick to its 1884 roots in the Penny Post? Or does it actually begin with the arrival of FW Hartford in 1891? Or should the paper search for its lost 1897 first-issue and adopt a more accurate date?
If the latter, then the Herald’s true 125th birthday party will arrive in 2022. That could be perfect timing because the following year is 2023. That date marks the 400th celebration of the founding of the city in 1623, and promises to be an exciting gala for historic
Copyright © 2011 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved. Robinson’s “History Matters” column appears in the Herald every other Monday and exclusively online at his independent history Web site SeacoastNH.com. His most recent book is Maritime