CHAPTER 10
Business and Industrial History
NEWSPAPERS: The Gazette was the first newspaper published in El Paso. It contained only four pages, each ten by fourteen inches in size, and made its first appearance with an issue February 1, 1863. It was published every two weeks by Robert Cauch in an office above the Tompkins' Store on Front Street, about where Kil's Tavern is today. It was short lived, and the date it suspended is unknown.
The El Paso Journal, the only paper in Woodford County to be published continuously under the same name, was founded April 5, 1865, by John T. Harper. The first office was located on the site of V. C. Gordon's garage. Harper sold the Journal to J. W. Wolfe in November, 1865.
The El Paso True Patriot was published by Charles R. Fiske, beginning with its issue of July 8, 1865. The office was on East Front Street, about where John Berg's trucking garage stands now. The True Patriot carried at its masthead the slogans, "States rights," and "the Union as it was," and took barbed cuts at the El Paso Journal for being a "negro suffrage" paper. Fiske's support of the southern lost cause faded with his paper, which he sold to J. W. Wolfe in May, 1865, the latter apparently merging it into the Journal purchased by Wolfe six months later.
In 1868 we find the name of W. H. Addis & Bro. as the editors and publishers, but that same year Baldwin & Martin became the owners and they moved the plant to a second floor room in the Gibson building on East Front Street that November. Gersham Martin was the publisher in 1872, and E. F. Baldwin from 1872 to 1874, Baldwin probably taking over when the plant was moved October 10, 1872 to offices in the Eagle Block building.
Late in 1874 E. F. Baldwin and J. B. Barnes published the paper; and it was almost a police gazette without the pictures, and sold on trains. In 1877 they moved the plant to Peoria, where Baldwin founded the Peoria Journal. Irving Carrier was left in El Paso in charge of the local subscription list and an old hand press was again installed. From 1877 to 1879 Carrier and Coleman were publishers, Carrier selling to W. G. Randall on January 1, 1879, Randall selling his interest to A. L. Hereford May 30, 1881. Coleman retained his interest until
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