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A succession of newspapers rose and fell during two centuries on the Island

The first edition of Frothingham's Long-Island Herald, with a statement of intent from printer David Frothingham.

By Andrew Smith | Staff Writer

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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.