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by Dale Alison (Author)
No, The Hawk Eye, the newspaper based in Burlington, was not the state's first newspaper, but it IS the oldest. No other newspaper can draw a direct line as far back as it can to 1837 when James Clarke moved his paper, the Gazette, to the Wisconsin Territory's new, temporary capital in Burlington. The community gained a competitor the next year in James Edwards' Iowa Patriot - soon to be rechristened The Hawk-Eye. For the next 90-plus years, the two papers competed with one another as they saw other editors start newspapers then watch them wither until economic conditions in the Great Depression forced the pair to merge. But beyond its lineage, The Hawk Eye has had an outsized role in not only the region's history, but also the country's. For starters, it gave Iowa its nickname. One editor used guile to get a 24-hour scoop on Abraham Lincoln's nomination for president. A case can be made that another editor helped sway the nomination Lincoln's way, then, after the Illinois Republican was elected commander in chief, the same editor pushed Lincoln to a premature start to the Civil War. His likeness later was used to peddle a patent medicine nationwide. Other editors had close connections to Stephen A. Douglas, Horace Greeley, Mark Twain, and Henry Ward Beecher in the 19th century. The Washington Post March? Of course, credit John Philip Sousa, but a former Hawk Eye editor commissioned the March King. A 20th-century president called The Hawk Eye's editor the country's best, and so on. Take a look inside to see what made the paper's amazing personalities so influential. Open "Iowa's Oldest."
