AN ISLAND NEWSPAPER IS BORN

“We shall furnish the latest news, both foreign and domestic, and in our selections we shall endeavor to unite the agreeable and the useful . . . .”

So wrote Edgar Marchant, founding editor of the Vineyard Gazette, in the first issue, published Thursday, May 14, 1846. The Gazette was the first newspaper ever published on Martha’s Vineyard – a weekly that intended to engage inhabitants for the first time in an all-Island conversation about what was happening on the Vineyard, and what the Vineyard ought to be doing to ensure its prosperity, separated as it was from the coast of southern New England by three miles of rough and open water.

Marchant acknowledged that there was something fundamentally different about the people of Martha’s Vineyard. They were whalers, fishermen and farmers at heart, he wrote, meaning they could never hope to prosper doing the same kind of work that laborers or manufacturers did on the mainland. Even taking into account this basic difference in character, Edgar Marchant in his introductory editorial did not mention the word “Island” once. To the founding publisher, Martha’s Vineyard was a world unto itself. The future of the Vineyard was a matter that the Island must decide entirely on its own. It was not an issue to be settled by any decree or charity from the mainland.

Whaling was the great enterprise of the day, and 1846 was its most prosperous year. The Vineyard was known around the planet for the skill of its whaling masters, and especially the harpooners who came from the Indian township of Gay Head (now Aquinnah). Thirteen Island whaleships were at sea the week the Gazette was born, and residents of Edgartown and Tisbury were flourishing as investors in voyages and as providers of services, such as sails, food, chandleries and brokerage houses for the sale of whale oil and bone to the mainland. Resorthood and tourism were as yet unknown to Martha’s Vineyard. West Tisbury and Aquinnah were not yet towns. Not one permanent building stood in the wilderness of what would become Oak Bluffs.

A VISIONARY FOUNDING EDITOR

But Edgar Marchant was a contrarian and a visionary, and he argued from the start that the economy of the Vineyard was neither broad enough nor vital enough to guarantee its survival. He wrote that with superb fishing to be found off its shoreline, with its open countryside and detached and quiet spirit, the Vineyard ought to try to sell itself as a “Watering-Place in the Summer Season.” The Vineyard was a world unto itself, but what made it different might be worth something to a larger world that was beginning to do well enough in enterprise to have some free time on its hands.

Resorthood: This was a new and radical idea on Martha’s Vineyard. The thought of serving idle vacationers as a business was almost unheard of when Edgar Marchant suggested it in the Gazette. It may have been the first idea ever to be proposed on paper and circulated around the Island in a single week. Certainly it was the first to be advocated by a common citizen, elected by no one, and yet in possession of an instrument – a printing press – that could set the agenda, keep a record of the debate, and publish or suppress arguments that this common man either liked or disliked. It is reasonable to suggest that during his two separate terms as editor of the Gazette, Edgar Marchant was the most influential Vineyarder of the whole 19th century.

At first, the Gazette carried a good deal of news from across the country and around the world. It was the only paper many Vineyarders received with regularity. In the last decades of the 19th century, though, its mission narrowed and its focus came home. It became an Island paper through and through, covering shipwrecks in Vineyard waters that killed hundreds, freezes that made travel across the water impossible for weeks, and the devastation wrought by gales and hurricanes and fires.

The Gazette wrote these first drafts of Island history, but from the start it recognized that Island news, at bottom, is different in size and scope from news that happens everywhere else. The best stuff in the paper, its editors believed then and now, concerns the commonplace – the comings and goings of the citizenry, the way the seasons change, how the crops grow, who marches in the Fourth of July parade, how the fishermen are faring, what the boatyards are up to, and how the quahogs are doing in the Great Ponds along the Atlantic. For the length of its life, the Gazette has covered what most other papers would overlook.



A RECORD OF SERVICE

Published Fridays all year-round, with a second edition appearing on Tuesdays from June through September, the Gazette has never missed an issue in the last century and a half. But like the Island it serves, the paper has known hard times. After the death of whaling early in the 1870s, the Vineyard endured an epoch of 50 years that were more lean than bounteous. The resorthood that Edgar Marchant envisioned in 1846 took root after the Civil War with the building of the village of Oak Bluffs (then known as Cottage City). But the summer season was short, and for ten months of the year the Island had to live off of what it mostly made in the other two.

The Gazette struggled too. Through the early 1920s it seldom had more than two people to print the paper – and those workers came in only on printing days. The editor wrote most of the main news stories and set them by hand, one letter at a time. It was nearly impossible for him to cover all the news of Martha’s Vineyard while serving as the only full-time reporter, editor, compositor and printer on the staff. At the end of World War I, the circulation of the Gazette stood at something less than 600 papers a week.

It was under the joint editorship of Elizabeth Bowie and Henry Beetle Hough – beginning June 3, 1920 – that the Gazette embarked on its modern course. Mr. Hough had grown up as a summer resident of the Vineyard. Mrs. Hough was a native of Pennsylvania. The couple received the paper as a wedding present from Mr. Hough’s father George, a newspaper editor in New Bedford. Quickly the Houghs bought modern printing equipment and hired new reporters. The Gazette leapt upward in size and in breadth and depth of coverage.

In the 1920s, with the advent of the automobile and modern steamboat service, the Vineyard attracted a summer population that grew larger and stayed longer than ever before. The Houghs recognized that what kept these visitors coming was the fact that the Vineyard was so unlike the places they had traveled from. And so the Gazette began to argue for the preservation of an Island way of life. This idea went beyond the saving of open space and the conservation of wildlife. It meant saving the character of Martha’s Vineyard in human terms – reporting and perpetually underscoring what was unique about the way Islanders worked, the way they lived together as neighbors, the way they regarded the world from an offshore and individual perspective.

AN UNWAVERING PURPOSE

Through most of its history the Gazette has been run by only three families — the Marchants, the Houghs and the Restons. James and Sally Fulton Reston bought the Gazette from Henry Beetle Hough in 1968 and introduced the modern technologies of cold type and the first computer typesetting system. In 1988, Richard and Mary Jo Reston were named publishers. Under their stewardship, the paper doubled its circulation, expanded its coverage of news, established the most comprehensive calendar of events on the Island, introduced a Commentary page to increase public debate in the paper, and created this website to make the Gazette available to readers around the world. Five times in the 1990s the New England Press Association has honored the Vineyard Gazette by naming it Newspaper of the Year, and again in 2001, 2004 and 2010.

In November 2010, the newspaper was acquired by Jerome and Nancy Kohlberg, longtime seasonal residents of the Island who live in and operate businesses from Mount Kisco, N.Y. The Kohlbergs have been quiet philanthropists on the Vineyard for many decades, especially in the areas of conservation and education.

As part of the transaction, the Kohlbergs gave the historic Edgartown building where the newspaper has been published since 1938 to the Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Trust. The arrangement allows the newspaper, and the Island’s only printing press, to remain in perpetuity in the building. The building dates to 1760.

“My goal is to give back to the Vineyard and to the Gazette,” Mr. Kohlberg said in a statement announcing his acquisition of the paper. “I have been a seasonal resident of Martha’s Vineyard for more than half a century, since first coming to the Island in 1943. Throughout that period, I have been a devoted reader and great admirer of the Vineyard Gazette, which has been blessed with remarkable publishers. I want the Gazette to be a vibrant voice for the Vineyard community far into the future, continuing the wonderful traditions from the past, offering excellent, in-depth journalism, reaching the Vineyard’s diverse communities, and adapting, as necessary, to the changing economic conditions which are affecting print media all across the nation.”

After a nationwide search, the Kohlbergs hired Jane Seagrave, a former Associated Press executive with broad experience in new media publishing, to run the newspaper. Ms. Seagrave became publisher of the Vineyard Gazette in April 2011.