Dayton newspaper history began Sept. 18, 1808, with the Repertory, four pages, 8 by 12½ inches each, of news published weekly by William McClure and George Smith.
After five issues, it was suspended until the following February when it was resumed by McClure and Henry Disbro.
News was chiefly foreign and three months old. Local news was scarce except for election notices, births and deaths. Advertisements cost $1 a column square for three weeks and 25 cents for subsequent issues.
The Repertory endorsed the principles of Jeffersonian democracy.
Publication stopped Dec. 14, 1809, and the village was without a paper until the following May when Isaac Burnet, member of the town council, brought out the Ohio Centinel, four 11-by-19-inch pages.
The Centinel kept citizens informed of the progress of the War of 1812, but by May 1813, because almost all the able-bodied townsmen had joined the army or were working for it, almost nobody had money to pay for a newspaper subscription. Burnet sold the paper to the firm of Pettit and Edwards, which changed the name to the Ohio Republican.
After the new paper changed ownership several more times, Burnet and James Lodge bought it in 1814 and continued publication. Except for the name, the Republican was indistinguishable from the Centinel.
When Burnet was elected to the Ohio legislature, James Lodge bought his interest and continued publishing until November 1816. But discouraged by failure of subscribers to pay, he sold the press, type and good will to Robert J. Skinner.
Skinner changed the name to the Ohio Watchman.
George S. Houston became Skinner’s partner in 1820. They changed the name to the Dayton Watchman and Farmer’s and Mechanics’ Journal. This is the first time that “Journal” appeared in the title of a Dayton newspaper.
When Dayton’s first postmaster, Benjamin Van Cleve, died in 1826, Houston received the appointment and retired from the paper but retained editorial control until the paper’s sale.
Judge George Holt established a second newspaper in the village and called it the Miami Republican and Dayton Advertiser.
William Campbell of Westmoreland, Pa., bought both the Watchman and the Republican and consolidated them into the Ohio National Journal and Montgomery and Dayton Advertiser. The first issue appeared Nov. 30, 1826.
Robert Skinner, dismayed to find that Campbell switched the paper’s politics from Jeffersonian to Whig, brought out a rival paper, the Dayton Herald and Miami Republican Gazette. It endorsed the Democrat party and the candidacy of Andrew Jackson.
The year 1826 marked the parting of political ways for Dayton newspapers. The Journal and Advertiser and its successors supported the Whig party until the organization of the Republican party in 1854, after which the Journal supported the Republican cause.
The Herald and Republican, despite its name, and its successors remained Democrat in politics.
The war years
The Herald and Republican Gazette was bought in 1829 by Ephriam Lindsey, who changed the name to the Dayton Republican.
The firm of Smith & Munn bought the paper in 1834 and renamed it the Democratic Herald. Over the next 25 years, it went through various owners, names and formats until it was sold to I.R. Kelley & Co. in 1860 and named the Empire.
J.F. Bollmeyer became editor of the Empire in 1860. With the beginning of the Civil War, the rivalry between the Empire and the Journal became marked. Bollmeyer attacked the policies of President Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists and endorsed the Peace Democrats, whose leader was Clement W. Vallandigham, U.S. representative from the 3rd Ohio District, leading Dayton attorney and once part owner and editor of the Empire.
Lewis Marot, editor of the Journal, just as vigorously supported Union policies and attacked as traitors Bollmeyer, Vallandigham and the Peace Democrats, or Copperheads.
On Nov. 1, 1862, Bollmeyer, while shopping, was shot and killed by a disgruntled reader. The shooting was followed by rioting between supporters of the two papers, and five companies of troops came from Cincinnati to restore order.
When Congress adjourned March 3, 1863, Vallandigham set out on a speaking tour of the state. Lincoln, he said, was destroying the Constitution and would finally destroy civil liberty in the North. The Empire carried his speeches in full.
Gen. Ambrose Burnside, commander of the Department of the Ohio, issued General Order 38, providing for the arrest and trial of all persons declaring sympathy for Union enemies. Despite the order, Vallandigham made an inflammatory speech in Mount Vernon.
Three nights later a company of soldiers surrounded Vallandigham’s home on East First Street, arrested him at 3 a.m. and took him to Cincinnati to jail.
When the town awoke the next morning, church sextons rang their bells in fire cadence. Crowds gathered around the Empire office, waiting for the paper.
“Vallandigham Kidnapped — Dastardly Outrage — Will Freedom Submit? — Your Liberties Are Endangered — The Hour For Action Has Arrived,” said headlines printed in bulletin form down the front page.
The crowd moved through the streets to the Journal building. Rocks shattered the windows. Somebody tossed a lighted turpentine rag through a window. The Journal building was destroyed and four other buildings in the block were damaged.
Rioters cut telegraph wires and tore up railroad tracks. Burnside sent troops of soldiers to place the town under martial law. They arrested and jailed 20 men. William T. Logan, Bollmeyer’s successor at the Empire, wrote a vehement editorial criticizing Vallandigham’s arrest and advocated resistance. Burnside immediately suppressed the paper.
Lewis Marot resigned editorship of the Journal and left town.
Citizens raised $6,000 to hire a new editor and rebuild the Journal. Col. William D. Bickham, at that time war correspondent for the Commercial Gazette and aide to Gen. William S. Rosecrans, accepted the editorship. The first edition of the rebuilt Journal appeared July 28, 1863. Bickham served as editor and publisher of the Journal for 20 years.
The Dayton Daily News
The Empire Co. was organized in August 1863 and started a new paper with the same name as the suppressed Daily Empire. Later, renamed the Daily Ledger, it changed owners several times and became the Herald and Empire under John C. Doren from 1870 to 1876. J. McClain Smith and George Neder brought out a competing paper, the Dayton Democrat, in 1874.
Doren bought the Democrat in 1876 and consolidated it with the Herald Empire, retaining the name Democrat.
The Evening Monitor, a Democratic weekly, was started in 1886 by G.C. Wise, W.W. Faber and J.E.D. Ward. It became a daily in October 1887.
Charles H. Simms and Frank T. Huffman bought the Democrat and the Monitor and for a time published the Evening News and Morning Times.
James M. Cox bought both papers in 1898 for $26,000.
The first edition of the Dayton Daily News appeared August 15, 1898. Cox was 28 years old. He read all the copy, did the makeup, wrote editorials and answered business correspondence. He had four reporters and a women society editor.
By 1903 the paper became a business success and the leading Dayton newspaper in circulation. In 1910 it moved into a new building at the northwest corner of Fourth and Ludlow streets.
The Journal celebrated its centennial on Sunday, June 10, 1908, by issuing a 124-page edition, the biggest single issue of a newspaper published in the state to that time. It carried historical sketches on the city, sample editorials showing changes in ownership over the years and a portrait of Major Bickham, who had died in 1894.
E.A. Burkham and Parmely Herrick bought the Journal in 1910. In 1911 Burkham bought control of the Dayton Evening Herald, a politically independent paper that had been established in 1881.
Wendell sold the paper to H.H. Weakley in 1894, “Weakley was a quiet, home-loving man,” said Tom Howard, a Herald employee for 63 years. “He played up home and society and played down crime. And talked home ownership. Maybe that’s the reason Dayton has always been a home-owning town.”
Weakley died in 1906; his widow retained ownership but turned the management over to Charles J. Guyer. Five years later the paper passed into Burkham’s ownership.
The 1913 flood
Meanwhile, back at the Dayton Daily News, owner Cox was elected to Congress from the 3rd Ohio District by a large majority in 1908 and re-elected in 1910. He was elected governor of Ohio in 1912.
The Miami River overflowed its banks on the morning of March 25, 1913. The entire downtown area was under water for several days. “There were 12 feet of water in the ground floor of our newsroom,” Cox said. “The basement was flooded and paper rolls weighing over a ton floated from it to the accounting room.”
The Journal did not publish until April 2, when it was issued at the Palladium offices in Richmond. The News staff put out a handbill-sized paper in the job department at National Cash Register, now known as NCR. Robert F. Wolfe, a newspaper publisher in Columbus, shipped a secondhand press to Dayton and erected it in the street, enabling the News to resume publishing.
Cox was defeated in 1914 for re-election as governor and returned to his duties at the News. “Spot news, so-called, was being well covered,” he said, “but conditions out of which came the drama of human activities had scant attention. To both Kent Cooper of The Associated Press and John N. Wheeler of the North American Newspaper Alliance I predicted that if newspapers did not move into the field, weekly news magazines would. Those words were more prophetic than could possibly have been realized at the time.”
The Herald moved into a new four-story building on East Fourth Street between Jefferson and St. Clair on March 7, 1925. President Calvin Coolidge started the presses rolling by means of a special telegraph line from the White House.
Frank Knox, owner of the Chicago Daily News, bought the Journal and the Herald in April 1935 and appointed Lewis B. Rock to manage the newly formed Journal-Herald Publishing Co. Rock announced that both papers would be Republican but would not necessarily support the party’s candidates for office.
Because experience in other cities as well as Dayton proved that few cities could support two Sunday papers, Rock sold the Sunday publishing rights to James M. Cox in 1945. Four years later he sold both papers to Cox.
At first Cox planned to continue the Herald but not the Journal. But that would have left Dayton without a morning paper. So he combined the two into a morning paper and named it The Journal Herald.
“What I cannot too strongly emphasize,” he said, “is that the editorial and news policies of The Journal Herald will be controlled exclusively by Dwight E. Young as both publisher and editor.” The first issue of The Journal Herald appeared Jan. 10, 1949.
A new building
The 1910 Dayton Daily News building at Fourth and Ludlow streets had been enlarged in 1923. A new six-story building next to the old one was dedicated in June 1957, with the News editorial offices on the third floor and Journal Herald on the fifth. Both papers shared printing, advertising and circulation functions.
Cox was 87 when the new building was dedicated, and although his health had begun to fail, he continued to work in his office in the old News building. He last visited his office July 10, 1957. He died at his home of a stroke five days later.
Ownership of the Cox papers passed into the hands of the three Cox children, James M. Cox Jr., Anne and Barbara. James Cox Jr. died in 1974.
Arnold Rosenfeld became the first editor of both the Dayton Daily News and The Journal Herald, although the two papers retained editorial independence. In a move to cut costs in 1982, the reporting and editing staffs of both papers were combined.
It became evident as the years passed that changing economic conditions indicated Dayton could no longer support two newspapers, and the papers combined with morning and afternoon editions in September 1986. The combined effort was named the Dayton Daily News and Journal Herald.
The Journal Herald name was dropped from the paper’s flag on Dec. 31, 1987. The series of transitions was completed on Sept. 26, 1988, when the Dayton Daily News became a morning-only newspaper.