WILLOW CREEK — This week saw the publication of Volume 1, Number 1 of the Willow Creek Gazette, a four-page weekly newspaper that its young publisher, Harold Finch, hopes will become the voice and chronicle of this growing Aroostook County settlement.
The first edition, printed on a hand-fed Washington hand press that Finch transported from Bangor by wagon over roads the editor describes as barely worthy of the name, contains local news, timber prices, a sermon excerpt, and a notice that the Penobscot & Piscataqua stage line now passes through Willow Creek three times weekly.
The arrival of the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad in 1884 changed everything for this town, Finch writes in his inaugural editorial. Where once the Willow River carried the products of Thorne & Sons Shipworks to the Penobscot and thence to the world, now the iron horse does the work faster and more reliably. Thorne’s Bend, where Ezra Thorne launched his first vessel in 1803, lies quiet these days, the launching ways overgrown. But the depot at the north end of Main Street hums with activity. The Gazette intends to record both the old and the new.
The paper will be published every Friday at three cents per copy. Finch, who learned his trade at the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, has taken a five-year lease on the room above the General Store. His living quarters are in the same room, beside the press.