Edward A. Jernegan: the editor of forty-eight years, 1872–1920

1872–1920 · the Enterprise's long proprietorship

In 1872 Edward A. Jernegan purchased the Enterprise, and the paper's wandering proprietorship ended for half a century. Jernegan was print-born. His father, Thomas Jernegan of Edgartown, Massachusetts, was the newspaper man who had bought the Mishawaka Tocsin in 1845 and carried it to South Bend, La Porte and Michigan City; Edward was born at La Porte on January 27, 1846, schooled at Michigan City, and went to war as a drummer boy in Company K of the Seventy-third Indiana, then in the navy where his father was paymaster, then in Company D of the One Hundred and Thirty-eighth Indiana to 1864, finishing in the provost marshal's office. After the war his father resumed the newspaper business at Michigan City and Edward joined him as assistant editor. In 1872, aged twenty-six, he came to Mishawaka and bought the Enterprise — Howard's biography gives the paper's establishment in that sentence as 1854 — "which he has ever since conducted," the biography continues, in the present tense of 1907.

His first year nearly ended the paper. The Great Fire of September 5, 1872, swept the town months after his purchase; Chapman records that "the office was destroyed by fire in 1872," and the biography counts the fire among the young editor's great losses. The paper rose with the rebuilding — the library's film holds the issue of September 7, 1872, two days after the fire — and Jernegan's tenure ran on through everything the town became: he served a term in the state legislature in 1897, and four years as Mishawaka's postmaster during the Harrison administration. His family carried the trade into two more Mishawaka institutions: his son Ralph, "a promising young lawyer of this city" in the biography, stands as city attorney in the government record's 1921 roster; his eldest son, Mason Sherman Jernegan, was a Detroit Free Press newspaperman at his death in 1901. And the tenure's length is fixed by the trade itself: Ayer's directory for 1920 still prints "E. A. JERNEGAN, Editor and Publisher" over the Enterprise's entry — forty-eight years after the purchase, the same name on the masthead the directory had every reason to keep current, since it sold the paper's advertising. The end of the Jernegan era is not dated in the record reached; the succession between his masthead and the Enos proprietorship of the 1950s stands in the gap list, with the film's own mastheads named as the settling source.

Sources

1. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 2, the biography of Edward A. Jernegan, pp. 505–506, read first-hand.
2. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), the county press chapter, on the 1872 fire and the office, read first-hand.
3. N. W. Ayer & Son's American Newspaper Annual and Directory (1920), the Mishawaka entry, read first-hand.
4. Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library, newspaper holdings list, the Enterprise issue of September 7, 1872, in the run.