The Fairhaven Star, Fairhaven’s original weekly newspaper, has been digitized and is available online, thanks to a project by the Millicent Library.
To take a journey into Fairhaven’s past from 1879 to 1967, visit http://digital.olivesoftware.com/Olive/APA/MillicentLibrary/#panel=home
The Star is a wonderful source for local news and opinion. As Mabel Hoyle Knipe wrote in “Following ‘The Star,’” “letters motivated by avarice, political aspiration, sarcasm, patriotism, testiness, resentment and joy are spread all through the pages of THE STAR…and they provide an invaluable record of the thinking and the emotional convolutions of scores of Fairhavenites.”
Charles Dean Waldron (1856–1916) founded the Fairhaven Star in 1879 as a way to support himself and his family and to boost the town’s civic pride. He wrote the stories, solicited advertisements, and set the type. He took the finished printing forms across the bridge in a wheelbarrow to the offices of the New Bedford Mercury, where the four- page Star was printed.
It was only three columns wide and 8½ inches long, and Waldron gave the thousand copies he had printed away free. By June he named the paper officially the Fairhaven Star, enlarged it to four columns, 10 inches, and began charging a penny per issue. And by the end of the year he was able to buy his own press.
The paper outgrew Waldron’s home at 13 Oxford Street, and in August 1880 he set up shop at 43 Center Street. Three years later he moved to the corner of Center and Main and in 1900 to the corner of Main and Ferry. In 1902, he moved next door, where the offices remained until the paper closed in 1967.
The digital archive is made possible by the Community Preservation Act and the Millicent Library
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Click here to download the entire 2/15/18 issue: 02-15-18 BlizzardOf1978
