In 1853 another temperance paper appeared in Port Jervis, when John Williams issued The Sentinel. It died in 1855. Mr. Williams was a pugnacious Englishman, and while his Sentinel was still on guard, he issued another temperance paper, in the fall of 1854, which he called The Precursor of Temperance.
With the demise of the latter publication and the Sentinel, in 1855, the starting of temperance papers in Port Jervis ceased entirely. Whether this was due to the complete and perpetual reclamation of the place by the army of temperance agitators that swooped down upon it in the fifties, or to the belief that the warfare was utterly hopeless, is not certain. Any way, the vanquished (or conquering?) John Williams shook the dust of the town from his heels and tarried long enough in Middletown to start the Hardwareman's Newspaper, later the Iron Age, in the office of the Whig Press.
In 1855 the Newburgh American was issued by R. P. L. Shafer. It had a life of only three or four weeks.
In 1855, at the office of the Whig Press in Middletown, John Williams, who had wrestled with the liquor question in Port Jervis for a few years, started out in a new line. He had Mr. and Mrs. Hasbrouck print for him a trade journal—one of the earliest ventures of this kind in the country. He called it the Hardwareman's Newspaper, and published it monthly. After three years its name was changed to the Iron Age, and it is published yet in New York by David Williams, son of its founder, and is one of the leading trade journals.
A monthly of forty-eight pages was started in Newburgh in 1855 by R. B. Denton. It was called the Literary Scrapbook. Its life was short.
If the temperance workers had abandoned the western end of the county as wholly reclaimed or as irreclaimable, they had an eye or two on the eastern end of the district, and in March, 1856, Royal B. Hancock, "as agent for an association of gentlemen," started in Newburgh a temperance paper which he called the Newburgh Times. It passed into the hands of R. Bloomer & Son, who sold it to Alexander Wilson, he to Charles Blanchard, and the latter, in 1867, turned it into the Newburgh Daily Democrat. The latter failed in a few months.
In 1856 in the Middletown Whig Press office Mr. and Mrs. Hasbrouck began the publication of The Sybil, a fortnightly quarto. It was edited by Mrs. Hasbrouck, and was a particularly bright, able, fearless publication. It was continued eight years.
An association of students in Domanski's school in Newburgh, in 1857 started The Acorn, a small but pretentious monthly of a literary character. It lived about one year.
In the early part of the winter of 1864 Eugene W. Gray began printing the Daily Union at Newburgh. It was really the Daily Telegraph, which had been suspended for a short time. In 1866 the title of both the weekly and daily was changed to the Press. In 1869 the title of Telegraph was restored, and in 1876 it became the Register, which continued until February 24, 1908, when it suspended under financial difficulties, and, as one paper expressed it, "Too much anti-Bryanism."
January 27, 1866, Elder Leonard Cox, a practical printer, began printing Warwick's second paper, which he called the Warwick Advertiser. It was a five or six-column folio, neatly printed, well edited and newsy. To-day it is one of the best edited weekly newspapers in the county. It is republican in politics—in fact, has practically always been so. January, 1869, Elder Cox sold the paper to John L. Servin, and moved to Virginia. April, 1874, it was purchased by Daniel F. Welling. He sold it to Stewart & Wilson (August 5, 1876), who sold it to Stewart & Demerest. The office was burned out January 24, 1879, after which it was published by Stewart & Co. Samuel J. Stewart was its editor until Hiram Tate came into possession of the property. Mr. Tate was a practical printer, and was fresh from the office of Mr. and Mrs. John W. Hasbrouck's Whig Press, and had good ideas of what a neat, live newspaper should be—as generally had the graduates of Mr. and Mrs. Hasbrouck's school of practical journalism. It is still in Mr. Tate's possession.