USA > New Hampshire > Grafton County > Hanover > Hanover, New Hampshire, a bicentennial book : essays in celebration of the town's 200th anniversary > Part 24
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From the Eagle, started in July 1793, to the Herald, ended in July 1821, there was a period of twenty-eight years during which Hanover had a weekly paper almost without break; and during part of that time it had a second newspaper in John Wheelock's American, 1816-17, and a literary paper in the Tablet, 1803-07. The journalistic jump that Hanover got on other Connecticut Valley towns was fast disappearing, however, as new papers came into being; and it was also easier for larger papers, from a dis- tance, to reach subscribers in this region. As the old postrider cir- culation beyond Hanover dwindled, it became extremely difficult for a local paper to operate profitably. After the Herald expired, twenty years passed before another substantial newspaper effort developed in Hanover with the weekly People's Advocate, but even this was short-lived. The establishment of a newspaper of
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some permanence had to wait on the growth of the village, and it took over sixty years for such favorable conditions to come about.
In the interim, however, there were a number of brave efforts to fill Hanover's newspaper vacuum. The first commenced on March 12, 1828, with the appearance of the weekly Hanover Chronicle, published by Thomas Mann, local printer from 1827 to 1840, and an associate named Sweetser. This first issue exists but it is not known how many, if any, succeeding issues came out. Seven years later the next effort took the form of the Independent Chronicle which lasted, according to John King Lord, from Oc- tober to November, 1835. No copy of this paper is known. Not a town publication, but one of special interest to Hanover today be- cause of what it grew into, The Dartmouth first appeared as a literary monthly in November 1839.
Soon after, on May 4, 1840, Edward A. Allen began publication of The Experiment, a weekly of four 12 x 18 pages. It had a cer- tain editorial character that earlier papers lacked, and it also was a good deal more literary than its predecessors. It contained the usual poetry column, ran serial stories, and promised to be "filled with the interesting and instructive lucubrations of the village Literati." The Experiment also ran approximations of the modern editorial, and in its issue of June 1, 1840, it made a brave call for female education. It completed Volume 1 (six months) on Novem- ber 10, 1840, and the next week it appeared in a larger, 15 X 21 size, with its name changed to The Amulet and its price raised from $1.00 to $1.50 a year. "We are done with Experiments," as- serted the editors, explaining that the Experiment "was thrown out at random, as a sort of literary bait, to try the taste of the read- ing and enlightened portion of this community." As the Amulet the weekly ran from November 17, 1840 to September 24, 1841, when it too passed from the Hanover scene. Its special one-sheet issue of June 22, 1841 was probably Hanover's first "extra"; it re- ported on a temperance lecture delivered in town, printed the confessions of a reformed drunkard, and urged all to join the "Cold Water Army." On the same date there appeared a paper called Gordon Miscellany, with no publisher or editor given, but since it carried the same temperance story, with "T. Total" added as the writer, it was obviously a single-issue offspring of the Amulet.
Edward Allen, emulating Moses Davis, decided to produce a monthly literary magazine while still publishing his weekly news-
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paper. Following a specimen number distributed free, The Iris and New Hampshire Literary Record made its bow in March 1841. It was an impressive magazine of thirty-two royal octavo pages, with a blue cover, and was priced at $1.00 a year-"a cheap and at the same time comprehensive and popular literary maga- zine." The editors were announced as "An Association of Gentle- men."
The first issue contained an article about Laura Bridgman by Samuel G. Howe, and the second, by printing an engraving of Kimball Union Academy, ran what seems to have been the first illustrated article in a town publication. Volume 2, Number 5, dated January 1842, is the last issue in Baker's collection, and this is believed to have been the final Hanover number. The Iris and Literary Repository, started in Manchester later that year by W. A. Patten, a Hanover printer in 1842-43, was most likely a con- solidation of the Hanover publication and the Ladies Literary Repository of Lowell, Mass.
One month before the Amulet ceased publication Hanover's next weekly paper, the People's Advocate, was launched in August 1841 by Alanson St. Clair and Chester Briggs as an organ of the Liberty Party opposing slavery. From their office near the Dart- mouth Hotel the editors promoted Liberty Party membership, for which St. Clair was general agent in this region, and devoted con- siderable space to anti-slavery articles. In addition to the emer- gence of slavery as a public issue, it is interesting to note that temperance also was receiving more and more newspaper space at that time. One issue of the Advocate warned its readers of the danger of spontaneous combustion in a human body saturated with alcohol and cited the sad case of human ashes found in a house with no other sign of fire anywhere around them.
John E. Hood took over from St. Clair and Briggs in the issue of July 22, 1843, and continued the People's Advocate for another six months, until its last issue on January 23, 1844. After a gap of a week, Hood brought out a new weekly called The Family Visi- tor, "a miscellaneous family paper" of eight pages, quarto. "There is no other place in New England where the facilities for con- ducting a paper are greater than in this village," wrote Editor Hood. The record makes this an overly optimistic statement, but Hood may have been emphasizing the word facilities, because on August 1, 1843 he had established The Dartmouth Press, destined
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to enjoy a continuous existence of ninety-five years until replaced by the present Dartmouth Printing Company in 1938.
The Family Visitor was strong for temperance, printed some fiction, and ran lots of advertisements about remedies for human ailments. Much of the earliest newspaper advertising was of this kind, and since self-doctoring was probably widely practiced in the country villages, the advertisers of patent medicines must have found the small weeklies a good sales medium. A medical item of a different sort appeared in one issue of the Family Visitor and it bears repeating: "Five Dollars Reward! Wm. C. Tappan, M.D., offers the above reward to any one who will give him information of the person who stuck a pin into the side of one of his mes- merized subjects, as he was waking him from the mesmeric sleep on Friday evening, to the great injury of the magnetizee."
The Family Visitor failed to appear after its issue of June 5, 1844, and the following year Hood sold The Dartmouth Press to David Kimball, a Yale graduate, who came to Hanover from Franklin and remained a printer here for twenty-two years. Kim- ball in 1845 started a monthly publication called the Parent's Monitor and Young People's Friend, consisting of eight small pages and priced at 621/2 cents a year. The first four pages were for parents and the last four for young people, to whom were ad- dressed moral essays on such subjects as covetousness, the wisdom of confiding in parents, and the dangers of bad company. The last known issue is that of March 1850, and the monthly probably ended that year.
The sporadic sequence of weekly papers, halted with Hood's Family Visitor in 1844, resumed in September 1850 when Henry Simpson and John Weeks inaugurated the Valley Star. The new weekly professed to follow the principles of Jefferson and was de- signed to answer "the absence of a journal devoted to the Demo- cratic cause in this part of the country." In the Valley Star the first semblance of modern advertising layout appears, with big display type and engravings, and the paper had a fairly large volume of it. This apparently was not enough, however, for in only their fourth issue the editors announced that they would skip the next week in order to "arrange our business affairs for a fair start." Nothing more appeared.
The next thirty-three years were virtually devoid of local jour- nalism, except for that provided by the College. A free-circula- tion monthly, the Dartmouth Advertiser, was published by Israel
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Dewey from March 1853 to June 1857 and consisted mainly of advertising. Baker Library possesses a single copy of The Wide Awake, dated Volume 1, Number 1, February 1863, with no pub- lisher named. A few local news items and personals appear in this little paper that did not live up to its name. Then on January 1, 1876, W. D. Walker inaugurated The Occasional, distributed free and containing mostly ads. It continued until June 2, 1876, on which date it printed an "extra" of 1500 copies for the Dartmouth Athletic Association, and then, deciding perhaps that it was best to go out with a bang, quit.
David Kimball had sold The Dartmouth Press in 1867 to Bela Chapin of Claremont, who later that year took as his partner Par- menas H. Whitcomb of Sutton, N. H. Whitcomb became sole owner in September 1868 and operated the press in Hanover for the next twenty-five years. May 23, 1885 is an important date in Hanover's newspaper history, for on that day, with Whitcomb as publisher, the first issue of the Hanover Gazette appeared. At long last, a weekly newspaper with staying power had arrived on the local scene.
Dorrance Currier was editor of the new paper, published every Saturday, and Chester E. Carey was publisher's assistant. The Gazette called itself "an independent journal, with Democratic proclivities, and interested in the material welfare of our town, county and state." For three cents a copy, or $1.25 a year, the reader got a large paper of seven columns that printed little real "news" but was filled with personals about residents of Hanover, Hanover Center, Norwich, West Lebanon, Enfield, and other nearby towns. Perhaps this emphasis, lacking in its predecessors, was the secret that enabled the paper to make a go of it. The in- augural issue ran the first four chapters of A Strange Desire: or the Dying Request by Arthur J. Brandt, and for many years there- after serialized stories were a regular feature.
The Gazette deserves credit for being the first Hanover paper to use type of readable size. Said The Dartmouth: "Our new local contemporary, the Hanover Gazette, makes a neat and creditable appearance. Typographically the first issue compares favorably with any paper, and the fullness of its news and the care shown in the selection of other matter gives promise of a not inferior posi- tion among the strictly local papers of this state."
Currier's name disappeared from the masthead as editor after the issue of September 10, 1892, but Whitcomb continued as pub-
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lisher until he sold The Dartmouth Press to Linwood C. Gillis of Manchester in 1893. Gillis assumed the publisher's role with Vol- ume 9, Number 28 (November 25, 1893) and dropped all political affiliation, announcing that "the mission of the paper will be to publish the local news." Five weeks later he changed the publica- tion day to Friday. His editorial efforts in general did not match those of Currier and the paper lost some of its attractive appear- ance.
With the issue of July 7, 1899, the publisher and editor of the Gazette became Frank A. Musgrove of Bristol, who purchased The Dartmouth Press shortly after graduating from Dartmouth in 1899. When Musgrove bought the press it was in the rear of the Main Street block where Hanover Hardware is now located. He purchased the old Huntington house on the opposite side of Main Street and set up a new office on the street floor. This build- ing burned in 1914, and on the same site the present red-brick Musgrove Building was erected in 1914-15.
Three and a half years after he assumed control, Musgrove gave the Gazette a thorough typographical overhauling. Among the changes were bigger headlines and a new logotype that has re- mained essentially the same ever since. At that time the weekly also introduced editorials. Four months later, in May 1903, the Gazette grew from four pages to six, although of smaller size, and in June it went to eight pages. The present publication day of Thursday was adopted on March 30, 1905. All the while these physical changes were taking place, Hanover's weekly paper was greatly increasing its coverage of local news, as well as its adver- tising volume, and was holding to its emphasis on the personal items that readers welcomed. In the late twenties and thirties the present character and format of the Hanover Gazette were pretty definitely established.
Musgrove died on February 27, 1932. His wife, Lilla H. Mus- grove, carried on the Gazette for a little over a year and then sold it to Earl S. Hewitt of Enfield, whose name appeared as editor and publisher in the masthead of April 20, 1933. Then in the issue of August 2, 1934, the Cory-Hewitt Press, Inc., was listed as pub- lisher, with Hewitt as editor and manager. David D. Hewitt, Dartmouth graduate of 1945, joined his father as managing editor in 1949, and on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Earl Hewitt's edi- torship, May 22, 1958, the paper's publishers became Earl S. and David D. Hewitt. Upon the death of his father on June 27, 1959,
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David Hewitt assumed his present full direction of the weekly as editor and publisher.
Not surprisingly, the Hanover Gazette during Earl Hewitt's long editorship reflected much of his personal interest in state and local politics, education, and a close and friendly relationship be- tween Town and College. The primary purpose of the paper, to cover the local news, was well and comprehensively fulfilled; and to the news and personals that had already become standard fare in the Hanover weekly he added feature stories, interviews, and occasional by-line articles as regular contents. This new trend in the Gazette was no doubt accelerated by the arrival in June 1952 of a new daily paper, the Valley News, which could get the town news into print far ahead of a weekly paper. Under the Hewitt family editorship, the Gazette has enhanced its reputation as one of New Hampshire's leading weeklies, and it continues, after seventy-five years, to make its distinctive contribution to the Han- over community. The editorial operations of the paper are pres- ently conducted at its office on Allen Street, to which it moved in 1943 after renting space in several Main Street establishments. The printing has been done at the Cory-Hewitt Press in Lebanon since 1934.
Although Mrs. Musgrove sold the Hanover Gazette to Earl Hewitt in 1933, she continued to operate The Dartmouth Press until 1936, when Paul C. Belknap of Bellows Falls, Vermont, took over the management. Two years later, when financial diffi- culties had overtaken the press, the business was bought out in April 1938 by Arthur B. Rotch of Milford (Dartmouth '08) and Kenneth W. Foley of Littleton (Dartmouth '24), who formed a new firm called The Dartmouth Printing Company. The next year, in October 1939, Foley became the sole owner. He moved the printing company to newly built and considerably larger quarters on Allen Street in 1945. There, with modern presses and expanded production capacity, the company today handles book and magazine printing as well as the usual job printing-a far cry from the "small though neat printing-office" that Alden Spooner set up in the "south end of the College" in 1778.
Although a student publication and not strictly a part of this historical account of the town's newspapers and presses, The Dart- mouth has long had a special place in the Hanover community; for more than forty years, from 1910 on, it provided the town with its only local daily. After being a monthly from 1839 to 1843,
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and again from 1867 to 1879, The Dartmouth became a bi-weekly, then a weekly, and in 1907 it began to come out twice a week. In 1910, a short period of publishing three issues a week led to the paper's becoming a daily in September 1910, and this it has con- tinued to be, if one doesn't count the days skipped for holidays, College vacations, and examination periods.
The lonely splendor of being the Upper Valley's only daily pa- per was lost to The Dartmouth when Volume 1, Number 1 of the Valley News appeared on June 9, 1952. The new evening paper, published daily except Sunday and holidays, designated the tri-town area of Hanover, Lebanon and White River Junction as its main beat; but it covers in fact a much larger region up and down the New Hampshire and Vermont sides of the Connecticut River. Bought out by the daily when it began publication was White River Junction's weekly paper, The Landmark.
Alan C. Butler was the first publisher of the Valley News, and associated with him in founding the paper were Allston Goff; James L. Farley, managing editor; and Michael J. deSherbinin, city editor. Farley and deSherbinin, who later became editor, were both members of the Dartmouth class of 1942. The Valley Publishing Company, Inc., which these founding officers formed, built a modern small newspaper plant on Hanover Road in West Lebanon, where editorial rooms, business office and printing plant are all consolidated.
"Our idea," stated the publishers in their first issue, "was to have a newspaper original and yet conservative in appearance, which would both inform and entertain the people of the Upper Valley; a newspaper we would be proud to print and others would be happy to read." Not long after its founding, the Valley News in a nationwide competition won a 1953 Ayer Award for excellence in makeup and typographical appearance among small daily pa- pers of less than 10,000 circulation, and in 1959 in the same Ayer competition it won first place in its circulation class. Since Febru- ary 1, 1956 the Valley News has been the property of Walter C. Paine, publisher, and James D. Ewing, president, who also pub- lish another New Hampshire daily, the Keene Sentinel. Paine as publisher, and more recently also as editor, has personally di- rected the operations of the Valley News.
Hanover has by now grown accustomed to having a daily paper reporting its local news, and this function the Valley News fulfills professionally and comprehensively in both text and pictures.
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The daily paper demonstrates the same spirit of community serv- ice that characterized the long string of Hanover weeklies going back to the Dresden Mercury and the Eagle in the late 1700's.
As was stated at the outset of this chapter, the story of Hanover's newspapers, covering a span of 182 years, is a disjointed one. But what it lacks in neat continuity it more than makes up for in its variety, vitality, and historical interest. Few New England towns have a journalistic history to match Hanover's in these respects. If there is a common denominator among all the weeklies, monthlies and literary journals leading up to the established publications of the present time it is the idea held by publishers and editors that their Hanover readers are intelligent, enlightened citizens deserving of journalistic efforts of the highest level. They have all defined their work in terms of community responsibility, and that is why the life blood of Hanover has always contained a good measure of printer's ink.
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Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital 1893
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Dartmouth College 1803. Drawing by George Ticknor showing the Wheelock Mansion on the right
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The Wheelock Mansion became the Howe residence on West Wheelock Street. Here Miss Emily Howe and her mother start for a drive.
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The Howe residence became the Howe Library
2 I The Chain of Libraries by Margaret Beck McCallum
F Eleazar Wheelock brought to Hanover somewhat less than the fabled five-hundred gallons of New England rum, he brought also much more than a gradus ad Parnassum. In his baggage train there came north from Connecticut the nucleus of the Dartmouth College library and though its history belongs more to the story of the College than to the history of Hanover, the presence of a college library has from the beginning been a stimulus to the intellectual life of the community. Most of Dr. Wheelock's books, scattered through the years, have found their way back to the College and may be seen in Baker Library, gath- ered in a room furnished with eighteenth century pieces, a small museum of the seeds of learning in Hanover.
This original library was housed first in the home of Bezaleel Woodward, on the site of what is now the College Street en- trance of the Dartmouth library, and was described in 1774 as "not large, but there are some very good books in it." From 1783 to 1791 it was kept in the "President's Mansion," built by Eleazar Wheelock and then occupied by his son, John Wheelock, second president of Dartmouth. After the lapse of over a century the President's Mansion was destined to house a library again, this time to serve the whole Hanover community.
The early college library was in no sense a "town" facility. Even for Dartmouth students and faculty its use was prudently limited to an hour a week until 1864 when it was kept open for undergraduates an hour a day. It was not until 1928, when the new Baker Library hospitably opened its doors to readers in and out of the Dartmouth family, that the college library began to serve more than a closely defined part of Hanover.
"The College District" was still "at one corner of the town and remote from the main body of the inhabitants" when the first town library was incorporated in Mill Village or Etna. On June 12, 1801 there was established by special state charter "The Pro- prietors of the First Social Library of Hanover," incorporated by Joseph Curtis, Zenas Coleman, Leonard Dow, John Durkee, Otis
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Freeman, Isaac Houston, Samuel Kendrick and Silas Tenney. Little is known of it, but by inference membership was through subscription and the book collection moved from house to house as different members took charge. From the evidence of volume 143, still existent in 1926, the collection was reasonably large.
Contemporaneous, and with even more phantom records, was what Prof. John K. Lord in his History of Hanover intriguingly calls "an infidel library" at Mill Village which spread the views of an incorporated society of "deists, Universalists and Demo- crats." The leading spirits seem to have been Benjamin Miller, Eleazar Wright and that John Durkee who was also active in or- ganizing the First Social Library. It is speculative to wonder if these two libraries, the "infidel" and the First Social, were ever merged, but it is a fact that something developed that was re- ferred to as the "first union Library so called" and members who owned a share in this were considered to have paid the first dollar assessment for membership in The Second Social Library Associa- tion in Hanover, which was chartered June 29, 1819.
The incorporators of this library which was to serve readers for fifty-five years were Henry D. Chandler, Silas T. Vaughan and Harvey Chase. As the minutes of its first meeting, September 13, 1819 noted, it was "calculated to facilitate intellectual improve- ment in useful knowledge, enlarge the understanding, and particularly to promote and cultivate the principles of Morality, Harmony, Benevolence, Charity, and Liberality toward each other in all matters of speculative opinion." A catalogue pub- lished in 1835 by L. Wyman Jr. of Hanover shows 183 books on the shelves and at its peak the library contained over 700 volumes.
M. L. Peabody, its one-time librarian, wrote in 1887 that books were drawn the last Saturday of each month and that "from 1840 until 1874 the Library was kept in the north end of the hall oc- cupied by the Town of Hanover for town purposes." This was Hayes Hall or Barrows Hall, depending on the current ownership of the store beneath it, and Town Meetings were held there until it burned down in 1922.
Nine years after the Second Social Library disbanded in 1874 another effort was made to establish a library and cultural center when The Etna Library and Debating Society was formed in De- cember 1883. This was a seasonal organization, meeting weekly from Christmas to the Mud Season, and at the height of its popularity numbered seventy-seven members. Approximately
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three hundred books were purchased through two-dollar member- ship fees and book fines and were kept at the home of a member who acted as librarian and was eventually paid five dollars a year for this service. The meetings included debates on highly aca- demic subjects, dialogues, "readings" and songs presented by some of the younger members, and also, for a time, the reading of "The Etna Enterprise," a hand-written paper edited by a member. The Society perhaps demanded too much of its members and during its closing decade only four meetings were held. Its books were given to the Hanover Free Library which was opened to the pub- lic in 1899 in Etna Village.
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