Vermont Watchman and State Journal (Montpelier, Vt.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
2,324 issues from 1836 to 1883, published in Montpelier, Vermont, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Vermont Watchman had its origins in the Vermont Precursor, a weekly paper founded by Clark Brown in Vermont’s new capital city of Montpelier in 1806. Brown relinquished the paper a year later to printer Samuel Goss, who published it under a new name, the Watchman. In 1810, Goss sold it to his brother Mark and one of his former apprentices, Ezekial P. Walton. Mark Goss left the Watchman in 1817.
Walton and his son, Eliakim P. Walton, owned and edited the Watchman until 1868. Under their direction, it was an influential and widely read publication. Walton changed the paper’s name three times. It became the Vermont Watchman in 1822, the Vermont Watchman and State Gazette in 1826, and the Vermont Watchman and State Journal in 1836, after Walton acquired the anti-Masonic State Journal. The Watchman featured political news, editorial opinions, and speeches. Distributed statewide, the paper was strongly antislavery. It supported the National Republican Party, the Whig Party, and then the Vermont Republican Party, which the Waltons helped found. More general news, literature, agricultural reports, and miscellaneous matter gradually replaced the extensive political content.
A second father-and-son team, Joseph Poland and J. Monroe Poland, succeeded the Waltons as owners and editors in 1868. They increased the Watchman‘s circulation and included local news from central Vermont communities.
The Polands transferred ownership of the Watchman to a young newspaperman from Maine,…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Montpelier, Vermont, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress