The Northfield News vs. the Northfield Independent

“When you’ve read the Independent, you’ve read the news.”  - early slogan for the Northfield Independent

Long before there were online news sites or local blogs, our newspapers had an older form of competition to contend with: other newspapers.  We primarily hear about two big-city papers vying for subscriptions in the same area, but this was also the case in our small town, where the Northfield News and the Northfield Independent operated simultaneously between 1887 and 1962.

The Northfield News: 1876 - Present

Amusingly, the Northfield News is not native to Northfield; Henry E. Lawrence originally established his newspaper in a neighboring village in the fall of 1876.  For three years, Lawrence’s “Dundas News” was published in Dundas, but in 1879 the paper was transferred to Northfield, where it was rechristened the “Northfield News” and eventually absorbed another community paper previously known as the Rice County Journal.

On April 7, 1884, James A. Minder and Joel P. Heatwole, a Minnesota politician, bought the News.  For twenty-two years (between 1888 and 1910), Heatwole was the sole owner and publisher of the paper and raised it to a new level of perfection.  By the time Bright’s disease claimed his life in 1910, the entire state of Minnesota seemed to know Joel Heatwole and his Northfield News.  Seventy-six Minnesota newspapers from Bird Island to Biwabik carried news of Heatwole’s death in their columns.  The Redwood Reveille noted in its pages that “probably no other paper in the State was so carefully conned and universally quoted as The Northfield News,” while the Princeton Union stated that Heatwole “enjoyed the proud distinction of publishing the model country newspaper of the State—The Northfield News. He was an able writer; his paper had a large general circulation and wielded a powerful influence throughout the State.”  Several other newspapers reported similar sentiments, attesting to the high regard the News garnered in the early 1900s.

Three months later, in July 1910, the Northfield News was able to procure a replacement owner/publisher.  Herman Roe was only two years out of college, but in time he, too, proved a valuable, talented asset to the News, devoting over fifty years of his life to the paper.  Upon the News’ sixtieth anniversary in 1936, an editor commented that the paper had been “used in schools of journalism thruout [sic] the United States as an example of effective country journalism” and was greatly respected by country publishers in general.  Apparently Roe had succeeded in upholding and furthering Heatwole’s standards of journalistic excellence.

The Northfield Independent: 1887 – 1962

On the surface, the Independent’s beginnings sound like the start of a joke: a banker, a professor, a lawyer and a minister form a corporation.  The Independent Publishing Company, however, was not a joke.  Composed of Carleton professor William Payne, Congregational church pastor Charles Wilcox, attorney William Pattee, and Citizens’ Bank employee Alfred Norton, the company began printing the Northfield Independent in  December 1887, intending to put forward a virtuous, unbiased newspaper whose goal would be “lifting the world to a higher ideal of life and a better living.”  Subscriptions were set at $1.50 per year, fifty cents more than an annual subscription to the News, and the Independent’s papers were produced every Thursday, two days before the News’ Saturday distribution.  In the early days of the Independent, Pr. Charles Wilcox served as the paper’s business manager and W.W.Norton (father of Alfred) acted as editor.  After Norton retired in 1889, a number of individuals briefly occupied the editor’s chair.  Some of these editors included F.R. Clow (from 1889-1890), John Lawson (1890-1895), and C.P. Carpenter (1895-1910).  Andrew A. Rowberg, occupying the position for the longest amount of time, was later remembered as an “incorruptible editor” who was at least partly responsible for the Independent’s respectable “modern” reputation.

In 1957, the Northfield News and the Northfield Independent were joined under one owner.  They were subsequently nicknamed “Northfield’s Twin Weeklies,” as the Independent was delivered on Thursday and the News on Saturday.  The existing team at the News (including editor Carl Weicht and Northfield's beloved Maggie Lee as managing editor) took on some of the writing responsibilities of the Independent, but the two newspapers retained the special features that were unique to them, at least for the next five years. 

It was decided in 1962 that the Northfield News would absorb the Independent under its title in order to serve as a truly united publication.  Handfuls of letters were directed to Carl Weicht, still the News’ editor, demanding to know why the Independent couldn’t act as the newspapers’ joint title. The reasons were promptly explained at the start of a lengthy editorial: “The combined Northfield newspaper could as well have been the ‘Northfield Independent’ as the ‘Northfield News,’ but there are reasons why the latter name seems the better, mainly because the word ‘news,’ for shortness and meaning, is just about as good a name as a newspaper could have. The Northfield News is also the older…and already continues [other papers]…Now it will continue the Northfield Independent as part of its impressive ‘family tree’…”  To further reassure distressed Independent patrons, the News informed readers that it planned to attach a brief line to its masthead memorializing its “twin”: “Continuing the Northfield Independent (1887 – 1962).”  (This line seems to have vanished in the intervening years; it no longer appears in the current editions of the Northfield News.)  Editors also stressed that the title would be the only difference in Thursday’s paper; the content of the former Independent would still include such favorite articles as “Reidar Reports” (written by Reidar Dittman), the Community Calendar, the Farmers’ Date Book, the Weather, the Business and Professional Directory, “Only Yesterday,” and the News Briefs.  In its final weeks as the Northfield Independent, the last few pages of the Thursday paper were liberally sprinkled with memorials, tributes, and optimistic hopes for the future of the fully-united papers. 

Since the unification, the Northfield News that we know today has been distributed twice a week (now on Wednesdays and Saturdays); not because that is its traditional method, but because it springs from two strong newspapers that survived in parallel for 76 years.

Extra(s)! Extra(s)!

Northfield has been served by more than eleven different newspapers in the past 150 years.  This is a sampling of a few dusty titles and the years that they were in production:

Sources

Curtiss-Wedge, Franklyn, ed.  The History of Rice & Steele Counties, Minnesota. Volume I.  Chicago: H.C.Cooper, Jr., & Co.  1910.  pg 540-541.

Issues of the Northfield Independent:  4/30/1962 2-3, 12/15/1887 1:1

“Notable Events” & “Do You Remember?” Scrapbook (located at the Northfield Public Library)