The newspaper with three birthdays

1853 · 1854 · 1855 · THE ENTERPRISE'S FOUNDING

The conflict: Mishawaka's permanent paper cannot say what year it was born, and the record gives it three birthdays, each with its own carrier. The county histories say 1853: Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907) both begin the Free Press in that year, DeWitt Clinton Ireland founder, sold two years on to L. A. Elliott, who changed the name to the Enterprise. The contemporary documents say 1855, and they are the only papers in the set printed in the decade itself: the St. Joseph Valley Register announced the Mishawaka Free Press "to be commenced on the 7th of July," received its first number a fortnight later, and printed its first-year notice in 1856; Ireland's own later paper, the Daily Astorian, agreed in 1880 — the Free Press "was issued at Mishawaka, Indiana, in the year 1855." And the paper's own trade testimony says 1854: Howard's biography of Edward A. Jernegan, who bought the Enterprise in 1872, gives the paper as "established in 1854"; Ayer's newspaper annuals, printing the year the paper itself returned, give 1854 in 1920 and 1952, then drift to 1855 in 1962; the Goshen Weekly News noted in August 1894 that the Enterprise "has just begun its Fortieth year," arithmetic that fits 1854–55 and not 1853. No Free Press issue survives in the library file to settle it from a masthead. A town's paper of record, uncertain of its own first year by two years in either direction, is this section's purest error fact: the error is the paper's, about itself.

Sources: the Newspapers section of this history — Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907), "The Press," and De Kever for 1853; the St. Joseph Valley Register's notices of 1855–56 and the Daily Astorian of 28 August 1880, as quoted in Roger Thomas Tetlow's dissertation on Ireland (University of Oregon, 1972), for 1855; Howard's Jernegan biography and Ayer's American Newspaper Annual (1920, 1952, 1962) for 1854 and the drift; Goshen Weekly News, 17 August 1894.