The recent resolution of our County Legislature to cut ties with the Catskill Daily Mail is a decision much lamented and hotly contested by the citizens of Greene County. Political divisiveness, speculations on the quality of the Daily Mail itself, and debates over the relative accessibility of materials published by the newspaper became fair game in the online discussion boards which are slowly becoming the unfortunate standard in interpersonal dialogue among neighbors. It is arguable that this moment was long in the making, and despite your feelings on it the year 2020 now marks the first time since 1792 that local residents won’t be able to get news of local government from their hometown paper.
We should get one thing clear right from the get-go. The Daily Mail has not been in business since 1792 as their masthead claims. That distinction instead belongs to a paper originally titled the Catskill Packet, which many of you had the pleasure of reading when it was last printed under the banner of the Greene County News - our final and now-defunct weekly paper. The Daily Mail is therefore something of a usurper to the legacy of the Packet, as the former was begun in the 1880s as a publication of a slightly more elevated quality than your typical gossip rag. The news the Daily Mail originally ran was of varying quality, and the pressure to print daily content meant that much material of little substance got printed to fill columns. The summer tourism industry here and the voracious appetite of the populace for news of all sorts meant the Daily Mail was guaranteed success in their gamble to edge in on the business of the big weekly papers, and as fortune would have it the Daily Mail ended up outlasting all the competition, claiming the distinction of having been published since 1792 primarily because there was no competitor left to challenge the ridiculous claim.
For most of Greene County’s history there has been more than one paper published in the County Seat at Catskill. When Mackay Croswell began printing the Packet in August of 1792 he did so as much to get a lead on the competition as he did to fill a need in the community. He experimented with the title of the Packet between 1792 and 1804, finally determining that the Recorder sounded like the most reputable banner to print his news under. At this early date the Recorder was not a political rag - Croswell published national news and local notices, and folks did their politicking at the tavern instead.
Notice of a meeting to form a society for the prevention of horse-theft at Catskill from an early edition of the Packet, c.1800. To my knowledge there have been no recent thefts of horses from Main Street in Catskill, which testifies to the efficacy of that Society.
The end of the war of 1812 commenced a period of great upheaval in American politics. As the last of the Founding Fathers retired and passed away in the 1820s a new generation of career politicians rose to take their place. These men, interpreters rather than framers of the Constitution, learned rapidly to utilize newspapers as political weapons which could polarize their constituents and win elections for their party. In Catskill, the Recorder met with an onslaught of competition beginning in the 1810s. Competition reached a fever pitch in the midst of Andrew Jackson’s Administration in 1831 when the Recorder’s bitter rival the Messenger first commenced printing. A perusal of a gazetteer from 1860 actually lists more than ten papers which were printed in Catskill during that fifty year span - an unbelievable notion when one considers that today the Daily Mail, our only “Catskill” paper, maintains neither offices nor print shop here.
I’ve listed the titles of some of those papers here just for your entertainment:
The Catskill Packet (Croswell)
The Catskill Recorder (Croswell)
The Catskill Recorder and Greene County Republican (Faxton, Elliot, Gates)
The Catskill Recorder and Democrat (Josebury)
The American Eagle (Elliot)
The Catskill Emendator (Unknown)
The Greene and Delaware Washingtonian (Kappel)
The Middle District Gazette (Stone)
The Greene County Republican (Hyer)
The Catskill Messenger (DuBois)
The Greene County Whig
The Catskill Examiner
The Catskill Democrat
The American Eagle/Banner of Industry (Baker/Van Gorden)
The Catskill Democratic Herald
The Recorder and the Messenger, the great rival papers of Catskill during the Jacksonian Period.
The Recorder and the Messenger’s editors hated one another, mainly because by the time the Messenger began printing in 1831 the Recorder had become a firmly Jacksonian newspaper. The editors unabashedly endorsed Jacksonian candidates for local, state, and Federal office, and the Messenger, in an attempt to balance the scales, quickly became the opposition paper allied with the rival Whig Party. Insults between the rival editors were published in every weekly issue, and considerable sums of money were offered in wagers on political contests by the papers themselves. It was a time of absolute chaos, and while I’m fairly certain the Recorder was the publication of record for the Greene County Board of Supervisors this would have mattered little to most citizens, as the Messenger and Recorder vied regularly to publish important news ahead of the other concerning elections and caucuses.
A typical editorial comment concerning the quality of the Recorder as published by the Messenger circa 1840.
In the years following the Civil War the Messenger changed its name to the Examiner, and the rivalry between it and the Recorder diminished in its public visibility considerably. In 1938 the two rival papers would combine to become the Examiner-Recorder, publishing quality content with a team of reporters and press photographers that brought the professionally of the paper to new heights. During this period the Enterprise and Daily Mail were also being published locally, making three major newspapers from which citizens could pick the content of their choice.
In 1962 the Examiner-Recorder merged with the Coxsackie Union-News (a similar weekly merger formed by two old rivals) and transformed into the Greene County News, which would finally fall victim to market pressures and the Daily Mail in the 2000s. A full review of the details of this late period in the history of Catskill’s papers is worthy of further study and subsequent write-ups, and the author will gladly accept any information from those with particular knowledge of the details that finally led to the demise of the venerable publication started by Mackay Croswell in 1792. We have come full circle now, and can no longer claim to have a paper in Catskill worthy of printing for the record on behalf of our local government. The immediate reasons for this are worthy of much speculation, and the repercussions are yet to be seen.
- Jonathan Palmer, Deputy Greene County Historian
Contact the author with questions and comments via email at: archivist@gchistory.org