In 1847, a young Lewiston doctor named Alonzo Garcelon hoped to advance his hometown by taking on what he called the “old fogeys” through the pages of a new newspaper, the Lewiston Falls Journal.
He let his co-founder and brother-in-law, William Waldron, do the work.
By 1857, Waldron and Garcelon sold the little weekly to an eager Bowdoin College graduate named Nelson Dingley Jr., who saw journalism as “a high and noble profession” that offered a chance to “exert influence wide and extended for weal or woe.”
Fortunately for Lewiston, Dingley, soon joined by a younger brother, Frank Dingley, used the paper to push a progressive Republican agenda that boosted both the city’s fortunes and their own.
Nelson Dingley went on to become governor and one of the most powerful members of the U.S. Congress while Frank turned the little weekly into an influential daily paper that President Theodore Roosevelt once cited as a must-read.
The Lewiston Daily Sun, a morning newspaper, emerged in the 1890s as a Democratic counterpart to the Journal, but it was never all that political. Indeed, in its first presidential race in 1896, the Sun refused to endorse the Democratic candidate.
By 1926, with the founding generation of Dingleys no longer around, the Costello family that owned the Sun managed to cut a deal to acquire the Journal, bringing the competing news staffs under one roof. Not until 1989 did the two dailies merge into a single paper, the Sun Journal.
The Costello family remained at the helm until 2017, when it sold the paper to Reade Brower, a Midcoast media executive and entrepreneur who already owned the Portland Press Herald, Morning Sentinel in Waterville, Kennebec Journal and more.
Brower’s decision to sell nearly all of his Maine newspapers to a nonprofit, the National Trust for Local News, marks just the fifth ownership change for the Journal in 176 years.
The one thing that has never changed since the first day Editor Francis Lane wrote the first issue as he gazed at the falls on the Androscoggin River is the paper’s commitment to local news.
May it ever be so.
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