The first commercial weekly newspaper to be regularly published and accessible to the residents of Norwich, CT was the Norwich Packet. The newspaper was established in 1773 by two brothers Alexander and James Robertson and their partner John Trumbull. In 1776, the Robertson brothers, both Loyalists to the English crown sought a safer political haven and moved to New York leaving Trumbull as sole proprietor of the newspaper.
Political tensions had been escalating for decades in the American colonies due to the financial hardships caused by economic policies dictated by the English crown and its despotic mercantile relationship with the American colonists. One of these policies restricted the production of paper within the colonies, forcing them to purchase most of their paper from English manufacturers. Fortunately for the owners of the Norwich Packet, paper was readily available from a local entrepreneur Christopher Leffingwell who had established one of the few paper mills in the colonies in 1766.
In 1790, Ebenezer Bushnell first published the Weekly Register, a newspaper that would become the initial antecedent in the long line of publications that would eventually become the Norwich Bulletin. Bushnell’s partner and son-in-law Thomas Hubbard purchased the newspaper in 1796 and changed its masthead to the Chelsea Courier. In 1805, the newspaper’s masthead changed once again when Hubbard’s son took the reins from his father renaming the newspaper the Norwich Courier. Decades passed until the purchase of the newspaper by business partners Homer Bliss and Isaac Bromley who renamed the newspaper the Norwich Morning Bulletin in 1858. Thirty-seven years later the newspaper was rechristened The Norwich Bulletin. New owners, partners William Hicks Oat and Charles Denison Noyes acquired the newspaper in 1898. These two men and their families would own and manage the Norwich Bulletin for the next eighty years.
In 1904 construction of the new building at 64-72 Franklin Street that would become the long term base of operations for the Norwich Bulletin. The spacious new facility featured a reporters’ work space that measured 720 square feet and a state-of-the-art telephone system that allowed optimum internal and external telephone reception. By 1910 the newspaper had the largest circulation of any newspaper in eastern Connecticut with a subscription base of 7,000 and readership in 49 towns and 165 postal districts. It was estimated that 40,000 persons read the newspaper each day. The newspaper was also a full and active member of the Associated Press organization.
The Norwich Bulletin defined its readership as falling into two basic constituencies. First, were the citizens who lived in the small rural agrarian towns in eastern Connecticut. The second constituency were the financial institutions, the owners and management of the textile mills and the firearms manufacturing industry that formed the economic base that had historically branded Norwich as a regional economic hub.
The Bulletin continued to thrive through the decades comprising two world wars and the Cold War during the 1950’s. In 1969 the newspaper’s facilities expanded again to over 53,000 square feet of space and the installation of two new cutting edge offset presses. The two decades that followed saw a slow but steady decline in circulation. The advent and rapid growth of the internet in the 1990’s offered a new method to deliver the news and this hastened the financial decline of many regional newspapers including the Norwich Bulletin.
Visit the Otis Library’s Flickr page to view images of the Norwich Bulletin offices from the 1980s, and explore the digitized microfilm collection, featuring archives that span from 1773 to 1925.