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The newspaper came late to Long Island.Ninety-nine years, seven months and two weeks after America's first newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was published in Boston, Frothingham's Long-Island Herald was issued from a small house on Main Street in Sag Harbor on May 10, 1791.

Although Long Island already had been settled by Europeans for about 150 years, it had taken this long before any single community was large enough to support a newspaper.

The Herald, published by printer David Frothingham until 1798, was Long Island's only newspaper during its existence and was circulated from East Hampton to New York City. Like many country papers, however, it had barely any local news. Frothingham, after the custom of the time, preferred to fill his four pages with essays on politics and religion, poetry, some ads and weeks-old news from across the Atlantic and around the new United States of America. Newspapers were unnecessary as a source of local news in days when people rarely left their small villages. Most things worth knowing in town could be gotten by word of mouth.

In time, Long Island newspapers and their editors would grow in influence to become community leaders. The decades-long campaign to create Nassau County, for example, was led by editors of the Glen Cove Gazette and the South Side Observer of Rockville Centre. Nineteenth Century newspapers championed temperance, pushed for public education and raucously debated issues great and trivial.

Larger communities, such as Hempstead, Jamaica and Sag Harbor, supported several competing newspapers. And at the beginning of this century, daily newspapers flourished in Brooklyn, Flushing, Jamaica and Rockville Centre.

But in Frothingham's day, sparsely populated Long Island had trouble supporting a newspaper, especially when papers from New York City were easy to get. Several papers came and quickly went in Sag Harbor, the major port on Long Island at the start of the 19th Century. After Frothingham's Long-Island Herald folded, the Suffolk County Herald was published in Sag Harbor from 1802 to 1804.

Alden Spooner published the third Sag Harbor paper, the Suffolk Gazette, from 1804 to 1811. It was livelier and had more news of local interest than its predecessors, but it, too, fell victim to the usual forces. In the last issue of the paper, Spooner wrote: "This County has many enlightened and patriotic citizens whose friendship I shall long remember; but they are, indeed, too few for the support of a newspaper."

Spooner traveled to the other end of Long Island, to the growing village of Brooklyn, where he took over the Long Island Star, founded there two years before by Thomas Kirk.

Spooner's move was not unusual for the time, said historian Vincent Seyfried, an expert on Long Island newspapers. "If the pickings were very small, the editor would pack up his press and try some place new."

Brooklyn proved a fertile ground in which the Star could grow, and in 1835 the Star began publishing twice a week -- the first paper on Long Island issued more often than weekly.

On Oct. 26, 1841, the Brooklyn Eagle, Long Island's first daily newspaper, was born. In the 50 years since Frothingham's Long-Island Herald, much had changed. The Eagle at first focused almost exclusively on Brooklyn, largely ignoring the rest of Long Island, New York, the nation and the world. Unlike the Herald -- but like many of its peers -- the Eagle was rabidly partisan, blindly supporting Democrats and their causes.

The Eagle's early focus on Brooklyn was of no concern to the rest of Long Island. By the 1840s, the Island had numerous other newspapers, particularly in Queens County.

The village of Jamaica supported two papers -- the Long Island Democrat and the partisan Republican Long Island Farmer. The Farmer grew to become what was then the Island's most durable newspaper. In 1921, long after farmers had left Jamaica, it changed its name to the Long Island Daily Press and lasted until 1977.

In Hempstead, then the largest town in Queens, the Inquirer survived a flurry of name and editor changes before becoming one of the most respected papers in 19th Century Queens.

In more pastoral Suffolk, The Long Islander -- today the Island's oldest continuously published newspaper -- in Huntington, the South Side Signal in Babylon and, The Corrector in Sag Harbor and the Sag Harbor Express were the leading papers.

Although these newspapers all provided more local news, they continued to attract readers with fiction or poems on the front page. Indeed, even the Civil War or the deaths of presidents did not prompt editors to change the decades-old practice of keeping news inside.

Alongside the news, editors often acted as agents for political parties, engaging in florid political jousting. The Hempstead Inquirer and the Long Island Farmer, for example, feuded for decades, although both were Republican newspapers. The Farmer, in its March 29, 1832, issue, responded to an Inquirer accusation that it would support whichever party paid it best:"He does not know how to provoke a controversy -- he has been trying hard for several months, thinking that if he can only get us to enter into a quarrel, he will then degrade us to his own level. . . . The editor of the 'Inquirer' and his associates have gone so far in their downward course, that we entertain but slight hopes of their reformation."

The Eagle remained the only daily paper for much of the 19th Century. Eventually, the Flushing Journal, the Long Island Farmer and a few others converted to daily publication, but the Eagle remained the dominant newspaper on Long Island into the 1940s, before closing in 1955.

After the Eagle's first editor, William Marsh, died in 1846, Publisher Isaac Van Anden hired a young writer and school teacher -- Walt Whitman -- from South Huntington who had worked at several other newspapers.

By the time he came to the Eagle, Whitman had founded and folded The Long Islander in Huntington and worked at the Long Island Democrat in Jamaica and the Long Island Star in Brooklyn. The Long Islander was reborn under a new editor in 1839, the year after Whitman closed it. No issues of the Whitman-edited Long Islander are known to exist.

Whitman gave the Eagle a personality unlike any other.

"We really feel a desire to talk on many subjects, to all the people of Brooklyn; and it ain't their ninepences [the cost of a weekly subscription] we want so much either," Whitman wrote in the June 1, 1846, issue. "There is a curious kind of sympathy (haven't you thought of it before?) that arises in the mind of a newspaper conductor with the public he serves. He gets to love them."

Eventually, around the turn of the century, a few papers emerged as regional voices, Seyfried said. The Flushing Evening Journal became the voice of northern Queens. The Hempstead Inquirer covered what was then eastern Queens -- modern-day Nassau. The South Side Observer covered southern Queens, first from Freeport and then from Rockville Centre. The Babylon-based South Side Signal was the voice of southern Suffolk, while The Long Islander and the Port Jefferson Times were the more significant northern Suffolk newspapers -- the Times even circulated in Bridgeport, Conn., thanks to the ferry.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Long Island Farmer came closest to serving as Islandwide papers, but even their coverage remained firmly rooted in Brooklyn and Jamaica.

The turn of the century also saw the look of papers change. Following the lead of New York City dailies, the Eagle, the Farmer and the Flushing Evening Journal began to put news on the front page. Steam-operated presses allowed newspapers to print more than four pages -- and that in turn allowed them to decrease the sizes of the page, which had become quite unwieldy as editors tried to cram articles and ads into the usual four pages. Indeed, some newspapers pages would dwarf a modern New York Times page.

Engravings, headlines and photographs, all of which had been common in advertisements for decades, began to find their way into news columns.

Newspapers began to cover new things, like sports, society, gossip and fashion. Crime coverage became more lurid. With the daily papers leading the way, most weeklies adopted the same formula in the years after World War I.

Seyfried speculates this was a result of editors -- and readers -- becoming more worldly, thanks to the war, faster transportation and quicker communication by telegraph and telephone.

Soon, with the arrival of the Depression, newspapers began to merge and disappear. The Hempstead Inquirer and several other papers combined to form Nassau's first daily, the Nassau Daily Review -- published in what it called "Metropolitan Long Island," otherwise known as Freeport. Hard times and competition from city dailies killed weaker, smaller newspapers, leaving only weeklies in larger communities and the big dailies -- the Eagle and the Daily Press.

As Long Island emerged from the Depression, it was beginning to evolve into a suburb, tied more directly to New York City than ever before. It was becoming a place unlike those served by more traditional newspapers and would soon require a paper that served both its rapidly growing, yet diffuse population.

Newsday, founded in 1940 in Hempstead, has attempted to fill that gap since then. Long Island's other daily papers -- the Flushing Evening Journal, the Nassau Daily Review-Star, the Long Island Press and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle -- all died, either because of labor problems or competition from city papers and Newsday. The Suffolk Sun, founded in Deer Park in 1966, made a serious attempt to compete with Newsday on Long Island, and it bled money until it went out of business three years later.

Many weekly papers remained and thrived, but their role shifted from being the primary source of general news to providing community news that larger dailies could not cover.

Editor's Note:

The selection of newspaper articles reproduced in this section were obtained primarily from microfilm. We have tried wherever possible to reproduce these stories as they first appeared, even though flaws in the microfilm show up. Where legibility became a problem, Newsday typeset the text again, and it is shown in hypertext markup language.

Microfilm was obtained from the following sources: Nassau County Museum Collection/Long Island Studies Institute; John Jermain Library; Queens Library, Long Island Room; Melville Library at State University of New York, Stony Brook, Special Collections Room; the East Hampton Public Library, and Newsday's own collection.

About This Site:

Editors, Noel Rubinton and Rick Firstman; designer, Jon Pillet; photo editor, Jeff Schamberry; photo researchers, Kathryn Sweeney and Susan King; lead reporter, Andrew Smith.

Web production and design by Carlos Ruiz and Connie Mango.

Copying of all microfilm was done by researcher Susan King, and production was handled by technicians Gary Miller, Sal D'Aguano and Julia Pelish.