The rich and venerable history of the Croton press: A visit to the archives with Village Historian Marc Cheshire.
Our village historian has traced Croton journalism back to the late 19th century--a long tradition with only the briefest of gaps.
Many Crotonites know Village Historian Marc Cheshire from the frequent village history walks and other tours he leads, or from the talks he gives in the Croton Free Library, or perhaps from having stopped in to the Croton Historical Society’s offices in the municipal building on a Tuesday when it is open, or perhaps from the profile the Chronicle did of Marc as one of its early articles.
What villagers may know less about are all the works in progress Marc has going behind the scenes, which we normally only find out about when he has completed them. One of them, of great interest to us at the Chronicle, is his research into the history of the Croton press. His interest in this topic should not be surprising, since both of his parents were journalists, and Marc has had a long and successful career in book publishing.
But what really got him started was his interest in online scanned newspaper sources. Yet he found that there was little available for Westchester County, and nothing at all for Croton—even in major repositories like the Library of Congress and New York state newspaper archives. One of his goals was to try to fill those gaps, using newspaper collections here in Croton, often donated by residents who have stored them in their attics or the like. The project is still in the early stages, and he has uploaded a lot of material on a Google drive account; he is now looking into employing a cloud service and doing storage off site.
The project is critical to research into Croton’s history. “Of all the history resources for a small town like Croton, the newspapers are the best for the sheer volume of information,” Marc told us.
Here is the chronological history of the Croton press in a nutshell:
The School Journal, the earliest known Croton newspaper, appears to have been a short-lived publication from 1893. (See scan above.)
The Croton Mail, thought to have published around 1894.
The Croton Journal, 1894-1910.
The Croton-Harmon News, 1910-1930.
The Croton-on-Hudson News, 1930-1955.
The Croton-Cortlandt News, 1955-1984.
The Croton-Cortlandt Gazette, 1986-present, now known simply as The Gazette.
The Croton Chronicle, 2023 to present (online only.)
Sharp-eyed readers will notice that there was a gap, about two years, between the Croton-Cortlandt News and the Croton-Cortlandt Gazette. That awkward journalistic hiatus was so painful for the village that it even made it into the New York Times, in an article entitled “No Newspaper is Bad News to Croton Residents.”
The short version is that a publication called The Patent Trader, published by one Carll Tucker of Mount Kisco (yes there are two l’s in his first name), bought the Croton-Cortlandt News and then deep-sixed it soon afterwards. Gary Cahill, the current editor and publisher of The Gazette, explained to us that in 1986 Croton resident Charles A. Nelson came to the rescue of the local press and started what we today know as The Gazette.
In a Publisher’s Statement in the October 9, 1986 issue of the new paper, entitled “Born of Necessity” (and kindly provided to us by Marc Cheshire), Nelson wrote:
“One way or another, in some form, Croton and its neighbors would have had to have had a paper because its absence is intolerable.”
The Gazette’s first editor was Sara Tykol, who had earlier been with the Croton-Cortlandt News; she left the paper in the early 1990s and Cahill took over.
The rest of this story, as they say, is history. Marc plans to publish his research, when it is finished, in The Croton Historian, which is published by the Croton Historical Society, and possibly elsewhere as well. No doubt he will be giving talks on the subject at the Croton Library and elsewhere. The Chronicle will keep you posted.
The Croton press today: A proud tradition.
Update: Village Historian Marc Cheshire is very interested in talking to people who have collections of old newspapers they might want to donate to the Croton Historical Society. If that is you, please get in touch with him.
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A very interesting article on the history and importance of journalism in Croton on Hudson. I must get to one of Marc’s history walks or tours. Thank you!